Recently in Sexuality Category

You may be surprised to learn that horny college students who have no sense of propriety or personal boundaries are at the vanguard of a revolution against the pervasive sexual repression on college campuses. I read about it in The Nation, so it must be true:

At its core, the sex column phenomenon is a radical progressive movement in the sense of pushing against traditional silence and the status quo, which is a source of concern for many administrators, parents and even students. Challenges to the columns stem from a conservative mindset--whether that be political, religious or cultural. Given that the Republican Party has become increasingly dominated by the religious right and the issues of the conservative culture wars, with sex smack at the forefront, these columns become politicized in a way the columnists themselves don't necessarily intend. With abortion, abstinence programs and same-sex marriage making up three of the right's key issues, the statement that "sex is OK" becomes even more politically charged when the sex in question is generally unmarried and occasionally queer.

Amazingly, many on the cultural left really seem to believe that young people don't think about sex often enough, and that to think about sex, and to write incessantly about it, is an act of liberation. Next thing you know, they'll claim that flashers are patriots. I'm convinced that for more than a few educated liberals, they'd be fine with economic policy completely run by the right, just so long as they retained the right to have their orgasms without restriction, and to talk endlessly about their orgasms, as well as their abortions. Seriously, are sex columns really an important front on which progressives should be advancing their principles? Really? This is so utterly bourgeois and juvenile. If we had an Old Left still, it would call this sort of thing decadent, from a political point of view.

[Nota bene: I took down the post that was here. I put it up in a "same planet, different worlds" spirit, but on re-reading it, the thing is just too vile to enjoy, however ironically. Sorry. -- RD]

The Catholic writer and scholar Tony Esolen has some wise and astonishingly un-p.c. words about sexuality, the abuse scandal, and masculinity (thanks to reader John for sending them along). Excerpts:

To burn a man's house is to sin against his property, perhaps his posterity. To burn his house out of hatred is to sin against his person. But to seduce a boy, to corrupt his manhood while it is yet in the bud, is to sin against his nature, his essential created being.

We have ignored the boys. And we ignored them, as we have been ignoring them, these many years. Governments and foundations shovel money into programs to teach math and science specifically to girls, but not a penny, not for any subject, devoted specifically to boys. Why is that? Nowadays in some places a boy growing up with a father is as rare as an orphan used to be. These boys need more than ever the male discipline of sports -- so what do we do about it? We cut their rosters. Sometimes, against common sense, against plain decency and charity, we force the boys to play on the same teams with girls, even when there are girls' teams available. Why that happy cruelty? We know that these same boys -- often fatherless -- are less likely to go to church than are their sisters. That's all right by us; we set up committees to study women's participation in the Church. We stock up on female lectors and female directors of religious education. We showcase our altar girls. Why?

Young men are strong enough and aggressive enough to commit -- but also vulnerable enough to suffer -- the bulk of violent crime in our country. Everyone knows the former; does anyone care to consider the latter? One in ten black men aged 20 to 30 is currently in prison. Do we sponsor any initiatives to reach the boys before they fall into that abyss? Boys are now far outnumbered by girls in college. Exactly how this state of affairs is to be a boon to the civilization, the country, the family, and the Church, no one has bothered to examine. I think it heralds the onset of catastrophe. But is there a single program anywhere designed to address the issue? Boys find school detestable -- I found it so, and I have met few young men, even those I teach in college, and most especially the brightest, who say that they loved high school, and few young women who say they hated it. Does anyone care?

Esolen goes on to argue that the Church, like society, is failing to give boys what they need. He concludes in part:

What we need now are men like St. John Bosco, who won the attention of the homeless boys of Turin by impressing them with boyish tricks and athletics, and who then taught them chastity and temperance and courage and the unalterable truths of the Faith. We are not likely to see such men. If we speak about St. John Bosco, we say that he had a ministry to children. No such thing! His ministry, the peculiar grace he was given to preach the Word of God, was to boys. Now of all times, when fatherhood itself is under siege from no-fault divorce, from feminism, from a sneeringly misandrist educational system, from popular culture, and from our chase of the almighty dollar at the cost of sanity and order at home, in short from the manifold sins of men and women, now of all times we need a St. John Bosco. We need a man to slap a boy's back and say, "Son, your name is Smoke, because that's what you're throwing." We need it, and barring an extraordinary gift of grace, the need will not be met.

For how can it be met? The boys are invisible, and now that our Church has caved in ever so slightly but ever so noticeably on the issue of homosexuality, it has helped ensure that men with vocations to work with boys will not be able to fulfill them. Did it never occur to our soft-minded leaders that one of the reasons why we cordon off male homosexuality as unnatural is to give boys the breathing room to develop such friendships as Jesus Himself enjoyed? In poisoned air the most salutary meal will smell sour.

And the poison lingers. The original evil was perpetrated by a few of our priests, allowed by some of our bishops, and unwittingly encouraged by all of us Catholics who have found it a bit too comfortable to condone the kissing cousins of androgyny and sexual license. But that evil has not ended with the corrupted youths of the boys who were abused. Because of that abuse, now when ministry to boys is needed most, ministry to boys is all but unthinkable. What man now dare play the part of John Bosco? When in some places you cannot utter the word "mankind" without being scolded, who would even think it worth his time to propose to the bishop a new effort to help boys see what true manliness and true Christianity look like?

Tony hits on something that to me, was one of the most astonishing mysteries about the whole foul business: why almost nobody, when learning what molester priests were doing to boys, acted like a real man, and stopped it. Not bishops, not brother priests (for the most part), and not laymen. You may hate me for saying this, but if some men of the parish had taken Father Pederast out back and beat the hell out of him, and run him out of the parish, a lot of this evil wouldn't have happened. But rightful Church authority was deployed to neuter healthy masculine instincts at every level. And now look.

Paging Leon Podles! Excerpt:

In our country, half of all marriages end in divorce. Most children grow up for at least part of their lives in single-parent households, that is, in homes headed by mothers. In huge sections of our cities fathers are simply not to be seen. Crime and violence are the inevitable result. The same thing is happening in South America because men do not take religion or the family very seriously.

There are far worse things that can happen and that have happened because of this alienation of men from Christianity. Men need religion as much as women. If they do not find it in Christianity, they may well look elsewhere. The totalitarian ideologies of our century, especially fascism and nazism, provided a male religion. The Italian Futurists trumpeted their disdain for Christianity, women and peace, and sang of the glories of war and adventure. The Futurist Manifesto proclaimed, "We will glorify war--the world's only hygiene--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women." The Futurists became fascists. The Nazis organized Germany as a Männerbund, a society that understood men's inner life and provided for it. Hitler and the rituals of the Nazi party provided a substitute for the generation of fathers that had been lost in the First World War.

I'm not sure why, but every Orthodox parish I've been to, especially the one I'm involved in, has men involved with church life to a far greater extent than I've seen elsewhere. And Orthodoxy, at least as I've seen it practiced, manages to pull this off without marginalizing women.

UPDATE: Sorry, I forgot to put the link to the entire Esolen piece in my original posting. Here it is.

One of the Templeton fellows today gave a presentation about transgender Christians and the church. During the Q&A, someone in our group put forth a question that hadn't occurred to me, concerning this issue. If we accept that people who claim that they need to have sex reassignment surgery to make their bodies conform to who they believe they truly are, then on what basis do we deny people who claim that they need to have one or more limbs amputated to feel whole their moral and/or legal right to the desired surgery?

The presenter said that someone who goes in for transgender surgery first has to go through a long process of evaluation and living as someone of the opposite sex before having the operation. But that's not really an answer to the question, is it? We as a society have decided that someone who believes himself in need of amputation to feel whole is in some real sense mentally disturbed. But we do not believe -- or at least more or less unanimously believe -- that someone who believes they will not be whole unless they have surgery to remove or rearrange their genitalia is mentally disturbed.

What's the difference? Isn't this moral distinction really just a political one? If you are a hard-core libertarian, you will say that personal autonomy trumps all, and that we have no real reason to deny the wannabe amputee his desire. But I don't think most people would be comfortable granting an ethical imprimatur to the putative amputee. So how do you deny the amputee his request for surgery, even as you accept that it's at least ethically possible to sign off on the requested operation of the aspiring transsexual?

I'm not asking to start a fight; I really want to know what people think. The crux of the moral issue is the extent to which personal autonomy should govern bioethical decisions like this. Let's talk about this like grown-ups, shall we? I expect that Celtic Dragon Critter, one of our transsexual readers, will have a lot to say about this.

The other day I spoke on the phone to an Orthodox monk in connection with my Templeton project. We got to talking about martial arts, and he said he didn't think it was appropriate for Orthodox Christians to engage in them, because to the extent they involve fighting, they call up the passions, which Orthodoxy teaches we are supposed to overcome on the way to holiness.

This is a vexing point to me. It makes no sense to me that we are supposed to drain ourselves of all anger, under every circumstance. What was Jesus doing when he overturned the moneychangers' booths in the temple? He was angry, and he was expressing anger. But he did so when confronted with evil. This evidence from the Gospel indicates that anger is not always a disordered emotion, and in fact it is quite natural and appropriate under certain circumstances. That emotion can be used for good or for evil; that it is such a powerful emotion, so easily turned to destruction, should be a warning for us. But is anger always and everywhere bad for Christians? I cannot think so.

My Catholic friend Leon Podles writes in the new Touchstone about anger as an aid to virtue. Here he speaks to something that drove me to despair as a Catholic:

Any institution tends to preserve itself by avoiding conflict, whether external or internal. In addition to this universal tendency, many Christians have a false understanding of the nature and role of anger. It is seen as something negative, something that a Christian should not feel.

In the sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church, those who dealt with the bishops have consistently remarked that the bishops never expressed outrage or righteous anger, even at the most horrendous cases of abuse and sacrilege. Bishops seem to think that anger at sin is un-Christian. Gilbert Kilman, a child psychiatrist, commented, "What amazes me is the lack of outrage the church feels when its good work is being harmed. So, if there is anything the church needs to know, it needs to know how to be outraged."

Mark Serrano confronted Bishop Frank Rodimer, asking why he had let his priest-friend Peter Osinski sleep with boys at Rodimer's beach house while Rodimer was in the next bedroom: "Where is your moral indignation?"

Rodimer's answer was, "Then I don't get it. What do you want?" What Serrano wanted Rodimer to do was to behave like a man with a heart, a heart that is outraged by evil. But Rodimer couldn't; his inability to feel outrage was a quality that had helped make him a bishop. He would never get into fights, never rock the boat, never "divide" but only "unify." Rodimer could not understand why he should feel deep anger at evil, at the violation of the innocent, at the oppression of the weak.

Emotional Deformation

The emotions that are now suppressed are hatred and anger. Christians think that they ought not to feel these emotions, that it is un-Christian to feel them. They secretly suspect that Jesus was being un-Christian in his attitude to the scribes and Pharisees when he was angry at them, that he was un-Christian when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple or declared that millstones (not vacations in treatment centers) were the way to treat child abusers.

Conrad Baars noticed this emotional deformation in the clergy in the mid-twentieth century. He recognized that there had been distortions in "traditional" Catholic spirituality. It had become too focused upon individual acts rather than on growth in virtue; it had emphasized sheer naked strength of will. In forgetting that growth in virtue was the goal of the Christian's moral life, it forgot that the emotions, all emotions, including anger and hate, are part of human nature and must be integrated into a virtuous life.

Baars had been imprisoned by the Nazis. He knew iniquity firsthand and that there was something wrong with those who did not hate it:

A little reflection will make it clear that there is a big difference between the person who knows solely that something is evil and ought to be opposed, and the one who in addition also feels hate for that evil, is angry that it is corrupting or harming his fellow-men, and feels aroused to combat it courageously and vigorously.

As Lee avers, there is something morally deformed about bishops, and anyone else, who sees the sexual abuse of children, who has the capacity to stop it, or at least fight it, and who does nothing. Further, there is something morally insane about calling this cowardice virtue. Lee goes on to explain why meekness is not the same thing as passivity.

Anger is a difficult thing. As I've written many times before, I became undone by my anger over the sexual abuse scandal, because I didn't know how to handle it. Yet I do not regret my anger; it was the only sane response to this degrading evil perpetuated by churchmen, with the passive support of other churchmen. Still, there had to have been a better way to handle it. Lee, who remains a Roman Catholic, wrote "Sacrilege," a scathing, sulfuric book about the scandal, one that does not pull punches in discussing in detail what abusive priests did to their victims. I have not been able to read the whole thing, because it's too raw for me. I mean to say, the facts Lee reports, and the narratives he uncovered, call up old demons of wrath, ones I know I cannot control and channel productively, and which will consume me. Remember that scene in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, when Pippin looked into the Palantir, and it nearly fried his mind? At the risk of sounding melodramatic, that's what "Sacrilege" was like for me, given my experience. But that is my problem. "Sacrilege" is so powerful -- overwhelmingly so -- because it offers "too much reality."

Prof. Dan Cere wrote in a review of "Sacrilege":

I have encountered a number of devout and orthodox Catholics who have struggled with Sacrilege. They find it deeply disturbing. They are tempted to turn their eyes from it.

Sacrilege is a book that goes beyond description, beyond narrative, beyond theory. Just as Gibson's Passion was an icon of the malignant brutality of sin crucifying innocence, Sacrilege is another "stomach-turning" revelation of the vicious malignancy of sin. Sacrilege stirs the same response. Shock, horror, a desire to turn away. And most of us have, in various ways, turned our faces away from this malignancy ... some of us have fled.

In some ways Sacrilege hits closer to home than Gibson's Passion. The innocent victims were children in our midst. Those who have brutally crucified them were trusted leaders, "our" shepherds. The authorities who dutifully washed their hands were our bishops. The complacent and approving crowd was the laity ... the crowd was us.

And Sacrilege does reveal a malaise within the laity. The laity should be the first line of protection for children. But, we have not been the moral gatekeepers for our children, we have not been protecting them. We have been the crowd, standing aside, retreating, not wanting to see, refusing to intervene.

In the end, I don't think I can fully trust a Christian -- clergy, monastic of lay -- who categorically rejects anger. I understand the impulse, and if one wishes to embrace radical nonviolence, to the point of suffering and dying rather than permit anger of any sort to take hold in one's soul, then I can respect that, if not approve of or understand it. But when you have responsibility for others, especially children, to excise the ability to feel anger within oneself is to leave oneself dangerously disarmed -- and to put those for whom you are spiritually and otherwise responsible at unjust risk.

Learning how to deal with anger as a Christian is an extremely difficult task. How does one love the sinner but hate the sin, when doing so requires not just rearranging one's emotions and subjective thoughts, but action against the evil? How can you muster the wherewithal to resist evil effectively if you have not first experience anger in its face? Even the nonviolent resisters to evil (e.g., the King-led civil rights protesters) have to have felt initial anger at the evils of segregation before choosing to respond to it peaceably, and to absorb for a higher goal the hatred and violence turned on them. They didn't passively accept the evil in their society; they acted against it, but in a non-violent way. That's genius, and indeed holy. But had they been taught to accept without protest the evil in their society, and told it was Christian virtue, how would evil ever have been resisted? It seems to me that saying it must always and everywhere be refused at the (as distinct from transformed) is not the answer, and in fact opens the door to more evil. Being free from the passion of anger, properly understood, means not refusing it, but rather ordering it rightly, and not being mastered by it.

Your thoughts?

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