Bishops, Baptists Organizing Against Contraception
It’s precisely because of stances like this that it’s very hard to take the “abortion is murder” crowd seriously when they say abortion is murder. Their revealed behavior indicates that they don’t actually find abortion especially problematic, but just place it on a spectrum containing a general aversion to women controlling their own sexuality:
But more conservative religious groups working with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships say they would be forced to oppose such a plan—even though they support the abortion reduction part—because they oppose federal dollars for contraception and comprehensive sex education. This camp, which includes such formidable organizations as the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention, is pressuring the White House to decouple the two parts of the plan into separate bills. One bill would focus entirely on preventing unwanted pregnancy, while the other would focus on supporting pregnant women.
Atrios sees this as a reason to mock those who advocate seeking “common ground” with abortion proponents. I think we’re arguably seeing here the real fruits of seeking common ground in good faith—their real views are smoked out.
125 Responses to “Bishops, Baptists Organizing Against Contraception”
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June 30th, 2009 at 10:49 am
I suspect that neither the Council of Bishops or the Southern Baptist Convention will remain politically formidable for very long (at least on this issue) if this can be made clearly and widely understood. Even among the infamous 28 percenters, opposition to contraception is an extreme position.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:49 am
You are being upstaged on the frontpage by a local state senator that most in her own state could not identify by first and last name.
Why does anyone choose to post threads at TP? Since the election, it has become a festival of ignorance, ignoring virtually all the news and people that actually could create change.
Nothing progressive here, but then, folks on the backwash threads will be quick to proclaim that progressive movements have never actually existed and that the term stands for nothing.
Which gets back to my original question – why post here, matt?
June 30th, 2009 at 10:56 am
I think we’re arguably seeing here the real fruits of seeking common ground in good faith—their real views are smoked out.
Exactly!
I wonder how the Daddy Dobson and “I can go to the drugstore and say ‘Harry, I would like a con-dom, for I am a Protestant” crowds will feel about this?
June 30th, 2009 at 11:00 am
“Their revealed behavior indicates that they don’t actually find abortion especially problematic, but just place it on a spectrum containing a general aversion to women controlling their own sexuality”
Do you really believe this, or is this just rhetoric to discount the views of people who disagree with you? Do you really think people spend hundreds, even thousands of hours picketing in front of abortion clinics despite the fact that they don’t find abortion especially problematic?
Righteousness and moral outrage are strong emotions and motivators. There is no doubt in my mind that the vast majority of pro-lifers think abortion is very problematic. I’m sure many of them honestly think it is murder. The strong sense of outrage stemming from this belief makes these people extremely dangerous in terms of potential for violence.
The fact that most of them also oppose sex education and policies that they think will lead to more sexual promiscuity or that they think are too linked to tainted pro-abortion groups doesn’t detract from this fact. I think you should try to get outside of your own mindset and try to understand where other people are coming from a little bit better.
As for the issue itself, a good question to ask people who believe abortion is murder is: what is the basis for saying it is murder to stop a pregnancy 1 second after conception, but it is perfectly alright 1 second before conception? A start dividing line like this doesn’t make logical sense, outside of, perhaps, some kind of supernatural concept of “ensoulment”.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:02 am
We don’t negotiate with terrorists.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Matt, I basically agree with you and argued the same thing myself in Catholic school. But I know at least for the Catholic Bishops, the motivation is fairly straightforward and stems from theology not a hatred of women (even if the effect is to harm women). You and are I thinking in utilitarian terms, which I generally advocate for policy thinking. But they are saying abortion is wrong because it is murder, and contraception is wrong because it takes God and the possibility of conception out of sex. Now I think the latter position is pretty looney and so do most Catholics, but it is still a legitimate theological perspective, I think, if you believe that sex is sin outside of certain circumstances. In other words you have two wrongs that are seen as just that, two wrongs, both of which should be opposed. I see something at mininum that is harmless (and actually I would argue is a good), i.e. contraception, that could be used to ameliorate something Catholics and Baptists see as a bad, i.e. abortion. So it seems there should be common ground, but there isn’t, if we are talking about people who hold those two views I mentioned. However, quite a few people only believe that abortion is bad but contraception is fine. For them I think there is common ground. I think a better approach to finding common ground with the Catholic Bishops is on economic issues, immigration, war and the death penalty.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:08 am
The hell it doesn’t. It shows that their REAL problem is with women controlling their own sexuality and reproduction. Which has been obvious all along, so Matt’s “smoking out” is also bullshit. Atrios is 100% correct.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:12 am
just dropping in to second castorp here. I profoundly disagree with the bishops on the contraception thing, but there is an actually honest to god theologically coherent reason why they oppose it. (When it comes to women priests, they’re just suffering from a terminal inability to empathize–there are so many ways in which the hierarchy is weird about women, but in different cases they’re coming from different places.)
The Baptists, as far as I know, have no corresponding position on the theological inappropriateness of contraception; they just think federal funding for it will lead to sex outside marriage.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:13 am
The Council of Bishops and the Southern Baptist Convention jointly own a coat hanger factory. Just sayin’…….
June 30th, 2009 at 11:15 am
I think we’re arguably seeing here the real fruits of seeking common ground in good faith—their real views are smoked out.
And if it works, maybe Saletan will finally realize there’s no one over there to talk to.
I can dream, can’t I?
June 30th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Atrios sees this as a reason to mock those who advocate seeking “common ground” with abortion proponents.
That should be “opponents”, I believe.
Is there a word for a typo that completely reverses the meaning of a sentence?
June 30th, 2009 at 11:18 am
I think Castorp is too easy on the Catholic bishops on two grounds.
1) The decisive turn toward acceptance of abortion among the educated classes in this country took place roughly 1955 – 1970, thus antedating, and to some extent explaining Roe v. Wade. Our dear bishops kept their mouths closed on the issue as long as the beneficiaries were, shall we say, upper class male college students who didn’t want anchors around their careers. However, with the emergence of the women’s movement and pro-choice rhetoric, suddenly abortion became the question of the hour. Right when it was framed as a women’s rights issue. And, not coincidentally, right when the bishops were looking to gain the ground lost — not least among the priests who were out doing the real work in the church — by their cowardice after Humanae Vitae.
2) The pontifical commission on contraception pretty clearly established that there was no legitimate theological position against contraception. There was, however, a great fear that by seeming to reverse position the hierarchy would lose prestige, and a fear among scum like Karol Wojtyla that it would be disastrous if somebody like Patty Crowley were to have more influence working in the open than he had as a bishop pulling strings behind the scenes. Hence the document that Montini, Wojtyla, and their toadies have imposed on those in the Catholic world who listen to them, and, perhaps more significantly, have imposed on the non-religious as an example of how whacked Catholics are.
Two further related points — there is a great deal of revisionism now on this subject trying to maintain that Montini was a far sighted figure who was trying to head off the dehumanizing aspects of the sexual revolution. I’ve even seen it in the TLS. It’s bunk. Humanae Vitae is a slap at married couples, not a perceptive analysis of the Playboy philosophy. And let it be noted that all four of the things that Montini reserved for himself (contraception, priestly celibacy, the synod of bishops, and the reform of the curia) were done very badly, and the church, its victims, and the general culture it has lost the ability to speak to have all paid for it for forty years.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Steve,
I think you are being naive about human nature. I agree that the prolife movement was probably originally motivated by the desire for sexual purity, especially in women. However, the abortion issue dovetails with this issue in such a way that prolifers can now see themselves as crusaders for saving millions of lives of the most innocent among us. How can belief in such a cause not be extremely motivating?
I think it is absurd to think that, instead, most prolifers are cynically using the “abortion is murder” talk as a front in order to achive their real agenda of sexual purity. It is much more believable to think that they actually believe in it.
As for the idea that it is looney-fringe to believe contraception is immoral, but relatively mainstream to believe that abortion is wrong: the Catholics seem to me the most consistent, in that they believe it is wrong to deprive life regardless of the means. Why should aborting a fetus a few days after conception be any worse than using contraception to prevent the conception in the first place?
June 30th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Salatan is over there. What you’re seeing is an optical illusion.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Hope spot check billy is right, but my guess a lot of the 28% think ‘contraception for me good, for you bad’.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:20 am
And if it works, maybe Saletan will finally realize there’s no one over there to talk to.
There is nobody to talk to at the Conference of Catholic Bishops, but there are lots of individual Catholics who might vote democratic and who do not strictly believe all the precepts of the Church. Moreover, there are liberal Catholic publications such as Commonweal where some common ground discussion could be useful. Let’s not be fanatics here.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:21 am
they just think federal funding for it will lead to sex outside marriage.
Reminds me of an old joke:
Why don’t Baptists (alt., frum Jews) have sex standing up?
Because it would lead to (mixed sex) dancing.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Castorp says: But they are saying abortion is wrong because it is murder, and contraception is wrong because it takes God and the possibility of conception out of sex.
I’m sure the Catholic bishops’ stance is sincerely held, and even if it isn’t, it’s the Roman Catholic Church’s official stance, so it’s not like they have much wiggle room.
But that doesn’t mean the Bishops can’t recognize the difference in moral consequence between the sin of murder and the sin of contraception.
Nobody’s making them cease saying contraception is immoral; what they’re being asked to do is acknowledge that it is much more important to reduce the number of instances of what they regard as murder than to block government expansion of access to contraceptives, and on that basis, opt for inaction here.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:24 am
Where’s Hector or has he given up on the Calvin Klein-clad hipsters?
June 30th, 2009 at 11:26 am
DAS beat me to it.
bastard.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Gene O’Grady:
You make some good points. I’m not saying we shouldn’t oppose the Bishops or even that there aren’t good Catholic arguments against their views (I think there are), but I do think it is a little simplistic and harmful of Matt to say, oh they hate women no common ground is possible. Well, maybe, but lets be careful about who we are talking about and also allow for the possibility that these views can be held in good faith. Plenty of Catholic women hold these views, and while I agree that objectively these views are harmful to women, I am not sure that they are always motivated by a hatred of women. I am comfortable taking the motives of my adversaries as well-intentioned but wrong (at least sometimes) and to argue on the policy merits as to how certain policies will affect people in the real world.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:26 am
“is pressuring the White House to decouple the two parts of the plan into separate bills. One bill would focus entirely on preventing unwanted pregnancy, while the other would focus on supporting pregnant women.”
Yes, it’s all about “a general aversion to women controlling their own sexuality.” Keep telling yourself that.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:28 am
David Says:
June 30th, 2009 at 11:26 am
is me Castorp. I’ve decided the last few days to change my name because there are other davids that comment here with whom I disagree.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Nobody’s making them cease saying contraception is immoral; what they’re being asked to do is acknowledge that it is much more important to reduce the number of instances of what they regard as murder than to block government expansion of access to contraceptives, and on that basis, opt for inaction here.
An excellent point, and one I have argued, for example, should be applied to AIDs in Africa. They could certainly deempahsize that aspect of their theology, and that is perhaps something that dialogue with scientists and activists and other people could do some good. I know that there are individual priests and bishops who do exactly what you say.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Randall Terry once said that Operation Rescue wasn’t going to stop at Roe, they were going to go all the way to Griswald. I think that’s important to know. Some people, especially non-activist types, believe abortion is murder and leave it at that. But certain anti-abortion activists, evangelicals and the Roman Cathloic Church would like to curtail the freedom women, which they blame as the root of all evil in the world.
Nothing strikes fear in the heart of certain men quite like the sexual freedom of women. The mullah’s in the Middle East, the Bishops in Rome, James Dobson, Ross Douthat, a few commenter on MY’s blog . . .
June 30th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Honestly, I’m not that interested in the theological integrity of the Church’s position; I’m not Catholic and am in no way bound by their requirements anyway, so the ‘why’ doesn’t matter nearly as much as the ‘what.’ What I am interested in is (as Matt noted) the tacit admission by the RCC (and Southern Baptists, et al) in their voluntary role as political actors that they are less interested in lowering abortion rates than in governing sexual activity. It’s stupid not to force this out into the open, because we’ve allowed sentimentality and assumptions of good [political] faith obscure their real priorities for way too long, and for once we have an electorate ready to listen to facts.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:42 am
Just to clarify for some who apparently don’t get it – these people are not supporting a bill which they admit will reduce murder rates (i.e., abortion rates) because it contains… money for sex education. Hmmm, I guess this means that in their minds sex education is worse than murder. Or maybe, just maybe, they use the word “murder” but don’t really mean it when they use it in reference to abortion. This is why few believe that their position is sincerely held – the position in question being that abortion == murder, not that abortion is “bad”, which it’s pretty obvious they do believe.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:57 am
low-tech cyclist Says:
“I think we’re arguably seeing here the real fruits of seeking common ground in good faith—their real views are smoked out.
And if it works, maybe Saletan will finally realize there’s no one over there to talk to.
I can dream, can’t I?”
Saletan is a pseudo-liberal who toadies up to the right; he’ll admit he’s been wrong only when it hits him in a way which causes actual pain. Perhaps getting his paycheck cut would do it, but he might just toady harder.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
John,
Prolifers see themselves as modern-day abolitionists. If you asked many of the abolitionists back in the 1850s to support a bill that would involve cooperating with Southern slaveowners, and would tacitly accept their right to hold slaves, but would also reduce the actual rate of slavery, do you think many of them might have opposed it on principled grounds?
Prolifers also often compare abortions to the Holocaust. Can you imagine a proposal back in the early 1940s that would have involved allowing Hitler to send 30% of the Jews under his control to safety, but would tacitly accept his right to kill the remainder? That would have reduced the number of people killed in the Holocaust, but I’m sure many would find it morally objectionable to agree to it.
If either scenario had occured, I’m sure there would have been some thickheaded people who concluded that these people didn’t really oppose slavery or the Holocaust for the obvious reasons.
It boils down to the fact that people are not logical utilitarian calculators. Moral reasoning is a much more emotional subject where issues of being tainted by cooperating with “evil” are significant factors.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Not all anti-abortion people are the same. Several, especially at the grass roots level support contraception, but are opposed to abortion. This is where common ground is going to be found. Not with the entrenched interests, but with ordinary people who tend to have very conflicted feelings about abortion. Several prominent pro-life conservatives have joined with pro-choicers and signed on to promoting contraception and comprehensive sex education as a way to reduce the need for abortion. You might never get the Bishops or the Southern Baptists to sign off on contraception, but I have a feeling that’s not the target audience of all this anyway.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
um, “their real views are smoked out”???
did anyone not know any of this already? because, the opposition of these groups to birth control is quite widely know, you know. this doesn’t lead to some great public expose’ of the extreme beliefs of religious fanatics, it leads to legislative compromise with ignorant Jesus-freaks.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Yeah, I want a child-rape cover group–USCCB–to tell me how to fuck.
Good plan.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
@Jim w.
Because when given an opportunity to prevent a portion of what they see as murders they don’t in order to avoid compromise on points that they believe lesser moral transgressions.
Condoning of what you believe is murder in order to remain pure on matter not of life and death would be vile indeed.
As for your other point of,
As for the idea that it is looney-fringe to believe contraception is immoral, but relatively mainstream to believe that abortion is wrong: the Catholics seem to me the most consistent, in that they believe it is wrong to deprive life regardless of the means. Why should aborting a fetus a few days after conception be any worse than using contraception to prevent the conception in the first place?
With that philosophy killing a 40 year old would be depriving life, as would every menstruation that lets slip away an unique yet unfertilized egg. and both would be equally worse.
You fail to understand that there is a different between potential and realization.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
I don’t honestly see any reason to legitimize the Roman Catholic Church on matters of sexuality. The Church has spoken loudly and clearly about sex in its treatment of predators in its midst. The RC Church cares about one thing and one thing only: power. Most American adherents to the RC church ignore the bishops on matters of sex and sexuality; they are Catholic for other reasons (usually tradition).
As for the Southern Baptist Convention, it literally holds zero authority. The Baptist church is completely decentralized. If the SBC suddenly embraced gay marriage it would not change the position advocated in a single Baptist church (though it might carry some weight at the seminaries in Nashville and Louisville).
June 30th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
I’m beginning to think that Yglesias’ intermittent astonishment and moral outrage directed to pro-lifers on this blog, whose beliefs he ludicrously claims to be grounded in an “aversion to women controlling their own sexuality,” is an easy cover for the deeper anti-feminism that more than one commentator has discerned here.
You might find Catholic arguments for the immorality of contraception to be unconvincing, but to characterize them in the way Yglesias consistently does belies an anxiety on his part that is not provoked by any other issue.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Prolifers see themselves as modern-day abolitionists. If you asked many of the abolitionists back in the 1850s to support a bill that would involve cooperating with Southern slaveowners, and would tacitly accept their right to hold slaves, but would also reduce the actual rate of slavery, do you think many of them might have opposed it on principled grounds?
Actually, we know for a fact that many abolitionists supported the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln even though he promised to preserve slavery and simply bar it in the territories thus reducing its expansion.
The reality is that it is really convenient for someone to claim that they never have to compromise, because that allows them to retreat into the purity of their position. But people who do that are unserious– not because ALL compromises are worthwhile (they aren’t) but because things can often be worthwhile despite being compromises.
And indeeed, pro-lifers do compromise. They compromise on rape and incest exceptions. They compromise on overturning Roe vs. banning abortion nationwide. They compromise in all sorts of ways. They just refuse to compromise on contraception. And as Matt says, that reveals their actual preferences– preventing women from having free and enjoyable sex lives without fear of pregnancy is just as important to them as what they allege to be murder.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
@22 How is it not about that? They want the bill split into 2 bills so they can vote against the one and for the other.
One bill would focus entirely on preventing unwanted pregnancy which is the bill in which the parts that will grants women more control over their own sexuality & pregnancy are…
and which part those asking to split it up will vote against.
the other would focus on supporting pregnant women. Which is the part that they will vote for, but only deals coping with an already established outcome and gives woman no control at all.
So please explain how it is not about preventing women from having control?
June 30th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
You might find Catholic arguments for the immorality of contraception to be unconvincing, but to characterize them in the way Yglesias consistently does belies an anxiety on his part that is not provoked by any other issue.
When an intelligent makes a deliberately and obviously intellectually bankrupt argument, it’s worth it to get into motives.
The Catholic Church’s position is that an invisible man in the sky is obsessed with where and under what circumstances men ejaculate, to the point where we must all follow the carefully set out rules or he will make us burn in an eternal fire.
Since no intelligent person actually believes that, I think it’s quite proper for Matt to get into what the actual motives are.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
I agree that the position of the Catholic bishops on contraception is extreme, especially if it’s applied to public policy. But I’m somewhat doubtful that MY really thinks that the bishops don’t care about abortion, only about “women controlling their own sexuality”. Once again, the pro-choice movement is desperate not to have a conversation about human dignity of the unborn. A small minority of Americans (”these people”!), along with some religious leaders, don’t like condoms, therefore we’re all relived from having to worry about icky things like abortion. What a relief.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Incidentally, for those on this blog who are interested in arguments rather than posturing, the Bishops’ opposition to contraception is grounded in their belief–one that is supported by a fair amount of empirical evidence–that providing contraception does little to prevent unwanted pregnancies and may, in the long term, actually increase the number of abortions among a given population:
* David Paton, author of four major studies in this area, has found “no evidence” that “the provision of family planning reduces either underage conception or abortion rates.”
* K. Edgardh found that despite free abortions, free contraceptive counseling, low cost condoms and oral contraceptives, and over-the-counter emergency contraception (EC), Swedish teen abortion rates rose to 22.5 per thousand from 17 per thousand between 1995 and 2001.
* Douglas Kirby concluded: “Most studies that have been conducted during the past 20 years have indicated that improving access to contraception did not significantly increase contraceptive use or decrease teen pregnancy.”
* Peter Arcidiacono found that among teens, “increasing access to contraception may actually increase long run pregnancy rates even though short run pregnancy rates fall. On the other hand, policies that decrease access to contraception, and hence sexual activity, are likely to lower pregnancy rates in the long run.”
Now, you can disagree with these findings, or argue for their irrelevance, but to dismiss them as a cover for controlling female sexuality–which Yglesias constantly mentions again and again whenever he treats this topic–instead of a consistent approach to what the Bishops perceive as the protection of the weakest among us, is immature and irresponsible.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:46 pm
I think you are making a mistake in assuming that because two religious organizations would oppose finding a middle ground in ending abortion through contraceptives and education that all Christians (or all pro-lifers) would likewise have a problem with it.
I am an evangelical Christian and if it mitigated and reduced abortions, I would be more than willing to support increased access to contraception to the poor (even to the point of subsidizing it) and education in its use.
It’s not a great or perfect solution to the problem, but it would be a step in the right direction.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Dilan Esper,
“The Catholic Church’s position is that an invisible man in the sky is obsessed with where and under what circumstances men ejaculate, to the point where we must all follow the carefully set out rules or he will make us burn in an eternal fire.”
Yes, that’s exactly the argument against contraception as articulated in several dense and sophisticated essays by Elizabeth Anscombe, giant of moral philosophy in the twentieth century.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
What is obvious even in this comment thread is that some people will never see their real views. That’s one of the benefits of theological adherence–it gives you automatic absolution for your injurious behaviors.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
“What is obvious even in this comment thread is that some people will never see their real views.”
Well, I agree with this.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
@Jim w. I’d not only like to add my voice to Dilan Esper @37 but also make an observation.
In both your analogies you say would tacitly accept this is spurious nonsense, nobody has asked the pro-life movement to “tacitly accept” abortion.
They just have to decide which they find more important right at this moment, decreasing abortion or keeping it harder for women to have access to contraceptives. And when they have done that they are free to continue to fight for their believes and against abortion and contraception.
I’m so tired of analogies that try to turn people into nazi collaborators if they disagree with the person making the argument. So please don’t Godwin next time, it’s annoying.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Actually, we had that conversation a long time ago. Too bad you missed it because it really was a good one. To sum up:
1. Human dignity of the unborn does not supersede the human dignity of the born.
2. Really, this isn’t rocket science.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Incidentally, for those on this blog who are interested in arguments rather than posturing, the Bishops’ opposition to contraception is grounded in their belief–one that is supported by a fair amount of empirical evidence–that providing contraception does little to prevent unwanted pregnancies and may, in the long term, actually increase the number of abortions among a given population:
And of course, that “belief” happens to be really ideologically convenient to the religious right.
Look, I know no religious right wacko is ever going to say “I give up, I hate women”. But the reality is that you either think women should be able to pursue sex without jeopardizing their lives with an unplanned pregnancy, or you don’t. And they don’t– all that flim-flam about the “sacredness” of sexuality comes down to the fact that they want any woman who decides to have sex to face a pregnancy. That’s what they want, and that’s fundamentally incompatible with gender equality.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Slag,
You need to be more careful in your claims:
1. Human dignity of the unborn does not supersede the human dignity of the born.
This claim is not inconsistent with being anti-abortion, and is, as it stands, consistent with the reformulation:
1′. Human dignity of the born does not supersede the human dignity of the unborn.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Yes, that’s exactly the argument against contraception as articulated in several dense and sophisticated essays by Elizabeth Anscombe, giant of moral philosophy in the twentieth century.
I stated the Catholic position on contraception accurately. Do they not believe in an invisible man in the sky? Do they not believe said invisible man prohibits men from masturbating to ejaculation? From ejaculating outside of a vagina? From ejaculating in a vagina of a woman that is not either the man’s first wife or a remarriage after a first wife’s death? And do they not believe that any such improper ejaculation will be punished by burning in an eternal fire?
What part did I get wrong?
I mean, gosh, I have to be bowled over. Such beautiful, pristine, MORAL philosophy. I mean, no wonder these guys ran a criminal conspiracy to deliberately sexually abuse tens of thousands of children entrusted to them for decades. It’s not like they could possibly have any stupid beliefs about sex, right?
June 30th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
I meant Dilan Esper @36
And Colatina @39 I fail to see how you can claim that the pro-choice movement is desperate not to have a conversation about human dignity of the unborn as the bill under discussion decreases abortion and thus does exactly that is not opposed by the pro-choice movement but by the pro-life movement. The dignity of the unborn apparently is of little concern to them compared to the dignity of the unconceived. So spare us your scorn to direct it to those instead.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
blahblahlblah
Atrios sees this as a reason to mock those who advocate seeking “common ground” with abortion proponents. I think we’re arguably seeing here the real fruits of seeking common ground in good faith—their real views are smoked out.
1. Obama and company say they would like to negotiate with those hostile to their agenda.
2. Those hostile to Obama’s agenda cannot claim that they are not being taken seriously and are revealed to be generally uninterested in engagement.
3. Somewhat more cooperative people (but still independent of the Center for American Progress dream) challenge those stubborn authorities.
4. Does it work out?
This is what has happened in Iran. The first two parts of this are linked to these debates on birth-control (although religious organizations, in this role, are there more for moral guidance than for making or enforcing policy). This, however, would be even more complicated with domestic religious groups (largely because religious pluralism is a basic American ideal [or at least should be]). If a group of Baptist or especially Catholic clerics organize independently of their hierarchies in this political context, I bet there would be many allegations of “establishment of religion” made against Obama and even comparisons of the dissenting clerics to the Constituional Clergy of Revolutionary France and the Patriotic Clergy of Community China.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
This is uncharacteristically sloppy as some people have been saying. The administration is playing some smart politics (politics that I completely support) manoeuvring folks into making compromises.
It is only natural and perfectly legitimate that the targets should try to resist such attempts, while maintaining a deep-seated and entirely logical opposition to abortion. (I am pro-choice, by the way, but would like to see far fewer abortions.)
June 30th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Dilan Esper,
“And of course, that “belief” happens to be really ideologically convenient to the religious right.”
Well, is the belief supported by empirical evidence or not? If it is, then irrespective of its “ideological convenience,” it makes sense; if it is not supported by empirical evidence, then it does not, and the Bishops are wrong.
I just want to point out, again, that instead of responding to arguments, you continue to assess motives. But even if it *were* the case–which it is not–that pro-lifers are interested in punishing women for enjoying sex, this motivation would have no bearing on the actual force of their arguments. You *do* see this, do you not?
June 30th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
My sentence construction was based solely on the claim made in the original argument. I’ll be happy to rephrase it:
1. The human dignity of the born supercedes the human dignity of the unborn.
2. Who wants cake?
June 30th, 2009 at 1:19 pm
“Do they not believe in an invisible man in the sky?”
If they did, they would be pretty stupid. But they don’t, despite what Richard Dawkins et al. would have you believe.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Ernst,
I am not comparing abortionists to Nazis. I am saying that this is how many pro-lifers see them. I think it is important to understand how people see things, even people I disagree with.
I support abortion rights, in fact even more expansive rights than what we have right now.
Still, I think the conclusions that Matt and Atrios reach about the “real” motivations of pro-lifers are so absurd that I have trouble believing that they are actually making these arguments in good faith.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Slag,
But now (1) is much less self-evident. On what grounds does Born-dignity supersede Unborn-dignity, and can we articulate these grounds without presupposing what we are trying to prove?
It is in any case a difficult question, though not, I grant, perhaps as difficult as rocket science.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Finally, I’ll just add that I think Dilian Esper @36 made some good counterarguments against something I had said earlier.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Except their real views never needed to be smoked out, they were always obvious but mainstream politicians refuse to admit it. Said politicians, like the Pres., will continue to deny that the anti-abortion movement is really about a medieval view of sex. Instead he will continue to treat them as if they were rational people, and as a result their most extreme views will be effectively endorsed, by this President and other “moderate” Democrats, as reasonable.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
There’s evidence that oral contraceptives act as an aborteffacient. It had been assumed that The Pill simply prevented ovulation, but with contrary evidence, an abortion opponent would have to oppose oral contraceptives.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
It’s a little like Obama telling the gays yesterday that he intends to take action on gay rights issues, but in a way that doesn’t exacerbate the old divides.
Wha? When the other side wants the elimination of your rights (the right to contraception for women, the right to exist for gays), there’s no middle ground. It is impossible to give gays anything without ruffling the feathers of the morality scolds. And it is impossible to compromise on women’s reproductive rights when the other side sees women as men’s property.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
“I think the conclusions that Matt and Atrios reach about the “real” motivations of pro-lifers are so absurd that I have trouble believing that they are actually making these arguments in good faith.”
The reason for the absurdity (on Yglesias’ part at least) is plain to see. Insecure about his own feminist bona fides–concerning which he has several times been criticized on this very blog–Yglesias uses pro-lifers as easy scapegoats against which he emerges as a righteous champion of women everywhere. This is why you find a virulence in his posts on this topic that–I think regular readers would all agree–is really a departure from his regular approach to controversial issues. (I mean, could any portrayal of pro-life motives be more stridently *anti-intellectual* than Yglesias’ on this blog? And is this not inconsistent with his usual, admirable, way of assessing positions that differ from his own?)
June 30th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
It’s a tired point (because people conveniently ignore it, it seems), but I’ll throw it out there anyway…
When the Catholic Church and other religious institutions approach the death penalty, unjust wars, and environmental justice with the same ardor and advocacy they do the “abortion question”, then maybe I’ll believe they’re not just interested in controlling sexuality in a cynical attempt to maintain political power and relevance.
Tepid statements of opposition do not evince a firm moral stance. When the CC starts denying Communion or excommunicating politicians who allow a prisoner to be killed by the state, perhaps they might have a justifiable stand for doing the same with other politicians who support legal and safe access to abortion. When the Southern Baptists tell their congregations it is incompatible with their faith to support warmongers and people who poison the very water people drink, perhaps I’d give them a bit more credit for sincerity when they oppose politicians who support contraception.*
Until then, arguing that these religious groups are occupying a theological or moral position valuing life that is ideologically sincere is ludicrous, and people need to realize just how idiotic asserting that is.
*And yes, yes, some individuals and individual congregations do oppose the taking of life in these situations, so responding with “but not every Christian is like that” is not even worth it. We’re talking institutions here.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
“the other side sees women as men’s property.”
Does not the argument for abortion encourage us to view the baby as the “property” of the woman, who may dispose of it how she wishes? Or is it merely an extension of her own body? How does this not replicate precisely the injustice against the weak that is the hallmark of patriarchy?
June 30th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
I appreciate where this question is coming from, but we’re discussing an argument based on a construction as squishy as “human dignity”. I’m pretty sure we left “self-evident” in the dust long ago. These issues are far more cultural and less philosophical/theological than many would like us to believe. At least Matt/Atrios are taking stabs to get at the cultural side of them since that’s where the meat is.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
“When the Catholic Church and other religious institutions approach the death penalty, unjust wars, and environmental justice with the same ardor and advocacy they do the “abortion question”, then maybe I’ll believe they’re not just interested in controlling sexuality in a cynical attempt to maintain political power and relevance.”
If the Catholic Church’s aims really could be reduced to “a cynical attempt to maintain political power and relevance,” then it seems to me it would adopt exactly the *opposite* position it does. It would cease yammering on about contraception (which is practiced anyway by the majority of its own members) and abortion (which is not going anywhere in our society), and would commit itself to the less controversial positions of environmental stewardship and the abolition of the death penalty. (Incidentally, Archbishop Chaput *was* instrumental in Colorado’s legislature passing a bill that would put a moratorium on capital punishment.)
June 30th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
I think Moral Panicker’s right about the politics– and for all the silly navel-gazing and theological posturing, this is a political question– and we’ll have to wait and see how it pans out, although I never underestimate the likelihood of religious groups trying to codify in law what they regularly fail at enforcing even among their own adherents.
The human dignity of the born supercedes the human dignity of the unborn.
This is true, but ‘human dignity’ is a moving goalpost, especially when dealing with conservatives and/or the religious. They think it’s a big, broad, sweeping declaration of the Essence of Life Itself, while for people like me it’s about, well, actual human people walking among us and trying to live their own lives without constantly being badgered by fanatics.
And that’s the problem with this debate, really– the appeal of moralizing about issues that really cannot adequately be addressed by laws and policies (at least not without controlling and demeaning the people already here) is a win-win for the controllers precisely because they can use more intellectual-sounding rhetoric and focus their moral microscopes on others instead of themselves. It’s hard to resist the prospect of heavenly brownie points without painful self-examination, and damned near impossible to avoid political posturing that costs them so little and others so much.
For the record, I am wholly unconcerned with conceptions that will– for whatever reason– not result in live births except insofar as women’s collective reproductive health is involved. I do not mourn miscarriages as losses of people, only of hopes and even then only out of empathy for those who were invested in those hopes. I do not enjoy fretting about women not keeping their knees together and somehow rejecting the supposedly heightened-to-outright-divine humanity of being a reproductive vessel, because as a feminist I want women to be people, however flawed, rather than symbols of others’ anxiety and rage. That so many people assume that their beliefs deserve special treatment under laws that by definition will degrade women’s equality, autonomy, and health is a symptom of a horribly narcissistic, hopelessly irrational culture.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Slag,
I agree that “dignity” presumes too much–for me, it assumes as its base a notion of the person as created in the image and likeness of God, and I don’t think you can get at the concept in any other way. I find Matt/Atrios cultural analysis to be not as impressive as you do, as it seems to discount a priori that there could be a progressive who is worried about the question of abortion primarily in terms of defending the weak and unrepresented and not out of a hostility to women. Actually, that latter characterization strikes me as a straw man, intended to deflect attention from the *actual* difficulty of the issue.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:52 pm
Murder is a mortal sin. Sex outside of marriage is a mortal sin. On Catholic principles, it seems both lead to the identical, infinitely and therefore incomparably bad consequence: eternity in hell. So how could the Bishops prioritize either over the other?
For Southern Baptists it’s even starker. They don’t recognize a distinction between mortal and venial sin. Every form of disobedience to God is an infinite wrong; therefore there’s no point whatsoever in weighing one against another.
In practice, of course, individuals of both stripes are a good deal more prone to draw distinctions. Still, theological consistency forbids both from drawing them. (When distinctions are informally drawn, the visceral reaction to illicit sex often appears stronger than the reaction to murder: it takes a lot of violent mayhem to make a movie as objectionable to the religious gatekeepers as exposure of a nipple. But they might say in their defense that since more viewers will be tempted by sex than by violence, that’s where the line needs to be drawn more firmly.)
June 30th, 2009 at 1:55 pm
WJ @40: In the interwebs, your authorities -and the links to them, appear as convincing
as those of Jorge Luis Borges’s footnotes.
You wrote:
“K. Edgardh found that despite free abortions, free contraceptive counseling, low cost condoms and oral contraceptives, and over-the-counter emergency contraception (EC), Swedish teen abortion rates rose to 22.5 per thousand from 17 per thousand between 1995 and 2001.”
Here is what Edgardh also wrote:
(http://sti.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/78/5/352):
“However, sexual and reproductive health problems are on the increase among young people. During the 1990s, a period of economic stagnation in Sweden, schools have suffered budget cut backs. Sex education is taught less. Social segregation, school non-attendance, smoking, and drug use have increased. Teenage abortion rates have gone up, from 17/1000 in 1995
to 22.5/1000 in 2001.”
Golly, make sex education WORSE and abortion rates go up.
That really supports your argument. Never mind that that
22 is about the same as the lowest rate seen in the US for teens in the past 30 years.
I wonder what I would find if I looked up your other ’sources of authority’?
June 30th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
“But they might say in their defense that since more viewers will be tempted by sex than by violence, that’s where the line needs to be drawn more firmly.”
That’s more or less Aquinas’ view. Representations of sex are *in themselves* more pleasurable than representations of violence. But Aquinas would no doubt find our culture, and the religious right in particular, to be too hypocritical to be worth taking seriously.
June 30th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
@Wj: It appears we have a fundamental disconnect in our views of the role of religion in America. Or at least, I’ll assume that, though your later statements lead me to believe quite the opposite.
Your view: People are acting politically in good faith, albeit imperfectly, because of their religious beliefs. They have a worldview that demands certain things of them, and feel they are called to advocate for that worldview.
My view: A minority of religious people are cynically exploiting a larger number of people acting in good faith, selectively discarding inconvenient issues in order to impose their religious beliefs on my life by engendering panic about a loss of religious identity and traditional practices. It’s a very well observed phenomenon, as many people above have pointed out, not limited to Christianity, and the similarities in hierarchical religious groups across faiths and national boundaries are striking. Again, go reread excellent commenters above; I see no point in repeating their words. Well, maybe just one thing: subjugation of women and sexuality is essential and intrinsic in their religious assertions.
At this point, you’re either incredibly naive or simply arguing from a position of bad faith. Do you really think that the death penalty and environmental stewardship are not controversial? These are just issues that everybody knows are problematic and we just haven’t gotten around to hem yet? Seriously? I’m at a loss for words. Literally speechless on that subject.
As to the decision to politicize this issue at the expense of others, I highly recommend you reread Gene O’Grady’s excellent post at #12.
You didn’t even bother to read my addendum, did you? The one that specifically said there were individuals working on these issues, but the institutions at large apparently have no interest?
Gah, why do I even bother commenting on threads. Lesson relearned, have fun, y’all!
June 30th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
I may be impressed because it corresponds with my own observations. Or I may be impressed because I’m always happy when someone tries to dig a peephole into a theological wall. Either way, I agree that their arguments don’t get at the “injustice against the weak” problem. A problem which moves right along with anyone who casts a shadow. But beyond “human dignity”, I fail to see where the boundaries of this argument truly can be found. Animal rights? Insect rights? Plant rights? Why do we consistently disregard those issues in favor of fetal rights? The seeming arbitrariness of these conversations makes it hard not to see the subjugation of women as one ancillary benefit to this supposed moralism. Especially given our cultural attitudes toward women.
June 30th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
catclub,
That abstract is ambiguous–I’m going to go back and read the full article before I respond to your point, though–just to make sure I don’t misrepresent its findings. Thanks for the pointer to that.
June 30th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Doh! Wrong Blockquote. Amended:
I may be impressed because it corresponds with my own observations. Or I may be impressed because I’m always happy when someone tries to dig a peephole into a theological wall. Either way, I agree that their arguments don’t get at the “injustice against the weak” problem. A problem which moves right along with anyone who casts a shadow. But beyond “human dignity”, I fail to see where the boundaries of this argument truly can be found. Animal rights? Insect rights? Plant rights? Why do we consistently disregard those issues in favor of fetal rights? The seeming arbitrariness of these conversations makes it hard not to see the subjugation of women as one ancillary benefit to this supposed moralism. Especially given our cultural attitudes toward women.
June 30th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
slag:
I fail to see where the boundaries of this argument truly can be found. Animal rights? Insect rights? Plant rights? Why do we consistently disregard those issues in favor of fetal rights? The seeming arbitrariness of these conversations makes it hard not to see the subjugation of women as one ancillary benefit to this supposed moralism. Especially given our cultural attitudes toward women.
This is a very good point–one that is not taken seriously enough by Christians. One good reason for protecting fetal life (I want to move away from “rights talk” if you don’t mind) is simply that we *can*, much more easily, than we can protect the life of all animals and insects and plants that happen across our path. Another has to do with the old dictum that “charity begins at home”: we can only rationally expect one day to extend protection outward if we do a good job of it among our own species–which we are far from doing a good job of, not only with regards to women, the poor, and minorities, but, on my view, the unborn.
I readily grant that it is harder to see the *imperative* of protecting fetal life over, say, the life of a puppy if one does not begin from a theological vantage point. Here I basically agree with Peter Singer as to the non-uniqueness of the human in the absence of a theology of creation. (The difference is that I believe in such a theology while he doesn’t–but we are both being consistent.)
I *do* believe it would be possible for us to protect both the flourishing of women and the unborn. But I am the first to acknowledge that in our society this option does not have a lot of political will behind it. So I respect the view that abortion is an evil but, all things considered, is a necessary evil, given the historical position of women in the patriarchy. My concern is that this simply moves the problem of power relations one step back, and transforms women into the servants of the patriarchy they would subvert, making them its unwitting accomplices. Anyway, I have to go read that study on Swedish sexual behavior that catcall cited. Take care
June 30th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Sorry about that, the above post is from WJ, not slag.
June 30th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Catcall,
I have now read Edgarth’s article, “Adolescent Sexual Health in Sweden,” and so am in a position to address your concerns.
I have cut and pasted what seemed to me the most relevant passages of the article below. It *does* seem to be Edgarth’s opinion that one *possible* factor for the increase of abortion and STD’s through the later 90s in Sweden was the result of an economic downturn, with correspondingly lower levels of sex education. However, the data seems to suggest that unwanted pregnancies and STDs were increasing already in the 1980s, and that a larger, long-term cause for this is the change in sexual practice in Sweden; the cultural script has gone from associating sex with love to sex as fun, and with this changing script has come a greater differential in what sexologists call KAB, which stands for “knowledge,” “attitude,” and “behavior.” Apparently teens in Sweden have both an immense amount of knowledge regarding contraception and an attitude that predisposes them to use it, but nonetheless their sexual behavior has deviated from what would expect, given both their knowledge and attitude.
What we see in this article is what Peter Arcidiacono refers to as the short-term versus long-term effect of birth control on sexual behavior: in the short-term, contraception does work to lessen the number of unwanted pregnancies; in the long-term, however, it encourages a change in cultural behavior that actually increases risky behavior and thus the number of unwanted pregnancies. I suppose we would then have to look at Arcidiaconon’s study in some detail. But his theorization at least explains some of the ambiguities in Edgarth’s account.
In any case, I take your point that I should have noted from the outset that Edgarth notes a *possible* correlation between sex ed and unwanted pregnancies–but I don’t think that this hypothesis on his part is inconsistent with an interpretation of his data that suggests a changing cultural sex script is as or more determinative of risky behavior as is education. (Indeed, he himself does not take a stand here).
I hope this helps.
Over the years, the teenage abortion rate has fluctuated. An
increase occurred in the late 1980s. A changing pattern of
contraceptive use was discussed as a contributing factor,—for
example, less use of oral contraceptives due to fear of adverse effects. Since then, subsidies for oral contraceptives have emerged, and emergency hormonal contraception has become easily available.28 In spite of this, teenage abortion rates are increasing, from 17/1000 in 1995 to 22.5/1000 in 2001. A total of 5665 abortions were performed among teenage girls in 2001.
With this background of increasing abortions and STIs, a
question of major concern is whether and how adolescent
sexual behaviour has shifted towards more risky practices
during the last decade. A generalised increased risk taking is possible, in accordance with the reported increased smoking, and use of alcohol and other drugs.
Sexual coercion, peer abuse, and rape have recently been
given extensive coverage in the Swedish mass media, as has
the potential negative impact of easily available pornography. Little research has been published on these issues in Sweden, but the field is well covered by Forsberg.6 A national sex survey from 1996 reported that 12% of adult Swedish women had been forced into sex, most of them when in their upper teens. However, no official age specific statistics are available on the number of rape cases after age 15, the age of legal consent.
1) Despite the Swedish tradition of a liberal and supportive
approach towards adolescent sexual relations, and a network
of youth health clinics, teenage abortion rates, and
chlamydial infections are rising steeply in Sweden.
(2) During a period of economic stagnation in the 1990s,
schools suffered budget cut backs, sex eduction has been
taught less, and the group of school non-attenders has
increased. Health hazardous risk taking has become more
common, with increased smoking and use of alcohol and illicit
drugs, indicating a shift towards more risky sexual behaviour
as well.
(3) Young attitudes towards sex may be changing, from the
“love script” into a “sex for fun” script.
(4) National longitudinal surveys are required to follow the
shifts in sexual knowledge, attitudes, and behaviour among
teenagers, with special focus on school dropouts.
June 30th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Yes, but we’re talking about making abortion illegal, not impossible. That’s a hugely important distinction and supports Matt’s point that the anti-choice crowd isn’t necessarily as concerned with the protection of women. Nonetheless, if someone could prove to me that making abortion illegal tomorrow would put us a day closer to having every child born in this country be loved, wanted, and cared for, I’d say, “Hellz yeah! Sign me up!”. But that’s not reality.
Here’s reality: Our infant mortality rate is appalling. We’ve got more people in prison than we know what to do with. We’re dropping bombs on people all over the world, often for no apparent reason. And poverty and disease…let’s not even go there. Forgive some of us if we look at this debate over fetal rights (and, whether we like it or not, “rights” is what this issue is about) as a luxury we can little afford.
I don’t see abortion as an evil. I see it as a scientific benefit to women and to everyone else. I see its legalization as a mark of progress. But another step in the right direction would be to make sure that women, men, and children have all the tools they need to make the best choices for the best futures. And that means putting our efforts toward improving our healthcare, education, and environment. And until the moralists want to get over themselves and put more of their hefty weight behind those major issues, issues which truly do undermine our national quality of life, they’re not getting the benefit of the doubt from me. Because, now, they’re just pissing me off.
June 30th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
I just want to point out, again, that instead of responding to arguments, you continue to assess motives.
Again, if someone tells me that an invisible man in the sky is going to burn me in the hottest fires for all eternity because I ejaculate onto my chest rather than into a vagina, I think it is perfectly legitimate to assess motives, because intelligent people don’t believe this.
June 30th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
If you review the preceding posts, you will be able to see how much of all the arguments are based on an aborticentric framing of the issue. Many of the terms are used exactly as the so-called “pro-lifers” intend them to be used. If you know anything about aborticentrism, you know how important it is to them psychologically to have the debate on their terms. Ernest Becker started toward a career in philosophy wondering why the victims in the concentration camp he helped liberate struggled to continue living. He discovered that the fear of death is a much more powerful force than the miseries of a brutal life, and in his late career, he wrote how people will sometimes try to transcend the nothingness of death by becoming heroes to be remembered.
When you look at how attentive the so-called “pro-life” movement is to fetal life, how it mythologizes and fantasizes it, yet how inattentive (relative to fetal life) they are toward human life, you recognize the aborticentric dysfunction that masks deep psychological need: They want to be heroes.
Yet, given their lack of sufficient personal resources and psychic energy, they cannot risk addressing their needs directly, nor can they submit to the risky business of fulfilling society’s definition of heroism. So they have created their own fable of heroism to sell to society– and we’ve by and large bought into it.
Their inability to risk self-examination, their lack of resources to address society’s real needs, has caused them to be a dysfunctional self-help group, whose primary characteristic is aborticentrism– a focus on prenatal life so great as to exclude concern for human life.
Aborticentrism: The closer life gets, the less sacred it becomes.
June 30th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
I doubt that the basic motivation for the “abortion is murder crowd” is a desire to control female sexuality. But even if this is right as a sociological matter, the question of whether and when abortion is morally permissible is OBVIOUSLY a VERY difficult one. Exposing a newborn infant is reprehensible. The difference that the being is still in the womb obviously doesn’t turn that reprehensible act into a morally permissible one. So when does it become less than reprehensible to kill that life? To me it’s clear that it is permissible to terminate a pregnancy within a couple days, when the being is a microscopic organization of cells. But it’s very difficult to say much more than that with any confidence. Being pro-life is not a stupid position. Pro-choice people too often under-emphasize the tragedy of abortion, not just for the mother, but for the growing child.
June 30th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
If I can make a more general point in response to the people defending the Catholic Church in this thread, there’s a big difference between a LOGICALLY CONSISTENT philosophy and a CORRECT philosophy.
Logical consistency isn’t totally unimportant, but it also isn’t the only important goal of a philosophical system either. Peter Singer, one of the Church’s antagonists, tries to be so logically consistent that he ends up advocating infanticide.
Well, the Church tries to be so logically consistent that they end up saying that all masturbation, oral sex to completion, anal sex, sex by gay males, vaginal sex between unmarried couples, or married couples where one or both partners is previously divorced, vaginal sex with a condom, etc., are punishable by burning in hell for eternity.
What smart people do when they run up against silly implications of their theories is back off a bit. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with masturbation, homosexuality, a second marriage, using a condom, or a blowjob. So, if your theory leads you to conclude that those are all among the worst acts that a person can engage in, it’s time to revise your theory.
In other words, be a little less logically consistent and a little more aware that these things are for the most part harmless and a part of life.
So, when the Church insists on logical consistency, and then insists that everyone else has to respect its beautiful, seemless moral reasoning, you can excuse the rest of us, the members of the reality-based community, when we tell the Church that we don’t give a crap what it thinks.
Seriously, the price of admission to discussions of morality is that you have to join the 21st century. The Church espouses stupid beliefs on sexuality that are completely false, and which would, if enacted, do gross and unremediable harm to billions of people, and that sort of bars its hierarchy from participation in the conversation on sexuality and morality.
June 30th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
Great discussion, and unlike most, sheds real light on the complete breakdown of communication on this issue. The pro-abortion folks seem to be arguing that the fetus is simply a bag of flesh to be disposed of however the mother wants, whereas the anti-abortionists tell us that a blastocyst is a “baby”. Personally I can sympathize much more with the pro-abortion side; I don’t think we want laws that are going to force a mother to carry to term a child that is going to die immediately upon birth, and the idea that an embryo is somehow more “important” than an oyster just because it has human dna is simply a product of certain people’s religion. Which is really the biggest issue for me: many if not most of them have in my view latched onto this as the new “wedge issue” which has the power to force everyone else to kowtow to their religion. Just as formerly heretics were burned, movies had to pass a code, etc.; metaphysical truth apparently cannot prosper without being established via the legal system, so that everyone is seen to be moved by the same gods. The anti-sex business is perfectly consistent.
June 30th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Maybe we can use the Christians’ rigid views here to our advantage. If a blastocyst is a human being, then a miscarriage results in the death of a human being. Miscarriages are often the result of environmental pollution, especially from heavy metals. We can argue that environmental pollution results in the real deaths of human beings and therefore must be heavily regulated. So we can redefine excessive miscarriages from pollution as forced abortions and the conservatives will now have to go along with EPA regulations. If they want to go down the slippery slope of calling blastocysts human beings, let them. They won’t like the results.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
At the turn of the last century, philosopher/mathematician Bertrand Russell said everything that can be said or will be said about anti-abortionists. His views can be summarized in two words: “They’re crazy”. They are not driven by ethics.
In his day they called it “infanticide”.
Nothing new under the sun.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
For six years I’ve volunteered as an escort at a Planned Parenthood clinic. In that capacity I’ve viewed and “met” many, many anti-abortion (mislabeled “pro-life”) zealots. Their opposition to abortion gets the press, but their most often used rhetoric says something different. They direct their real opposition to the licentiousness of loose women, enabled by easy access to contraception and abortion. Patients at Planned Parenthood are “loose” women or sluts (and those words are used to their faces). They strongly believe that abortion is casually used as an easy means of contraception. They also believe that women should have no control over their bodies and that women—and this even voiced by women protesters—should submit to decisions about having and birthing children to the male. Women are empty vessels for God and men to fill, vessels over which women should have no control. Opposition to abortion, no matter how loudly voiced, is decidedly secondary.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Disingenuous. He said that they find female sexual autonomy problematic, which is compatible with standing in front of a woman’s clinic and screaming hatred at women who you suspect have been fucking.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
— Jones, Rachel K., Jacqueline E. Darroch, and Stanley K. Henshaw. “Contraceptive Use among U.S. Women Having Abortions in 2000-2001.” Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health Vol. 34, No. 6 (Nov-Dec 2002): 294-303.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Dilan,
Why is it obvious that ‘there is nothing wrong with’ masturbation, or using a condom? It’s not obvious to me at all. I used to think there was nothing wrong, but I’ve come to change my mind.
While I think specific Catholic teachings can be challenged from within the natural-law framework, that basic framework is the only good one I’ve seen for trying to derive a sexual morality. There is, actually, considerable space within the natural law tradition for challenging specific Catholic teachings- homosexuality is a good example. Aquinas was informed by the best science of his time but we know some things he didn’t know, so it isn’t hard to construct arguments as to why, for some individuals, building a romantic life together with a person of the same sex is _natural_ in a way that an opposite sex pairing wouldn’t be. One can do that while accepting the basic Hellenic / Christian natural law framework (as a number of Anglican and Catholic theologicans have in fact done). I think one can make similar arguments about some forms of birth control (the pill, for example, relies on mimicking the kind of hormonal changes that occur naturally in a woman’s body during pregnancy), and about some kinds of premarital as opposed to homosexual relations.
I think it’s important to maintain the basic understanding of sex as something that is intended to serve certain goods, and not just a human attribute that we can make of whatever we please. In that light, I don’t think one can make a good case that whacking off is perfectly OK in God’s sight. A venial vice, and a near universal one, but a vice nonetheless. I have similar objections to condoms, and while I think divorce is sometimes a necessary evil it is still an evil, inasmuch as it’s the breaking of a divinely ordained structure.
None of that is to say that I oppose sex education or contraception promotion, with certain caveats, as an alternative to abortion. I don’t approve of condoms, but I don’t demand that everyone share my views, and I certainly would advocate that they are a better alternative then abortion. (They are really not a very good method of birth control anyway- the Pill is much better). In terms of legal minors (i.e. high school students) I would encourage abstinence but I think people should be made aware of different types of birth control are out there.
In short, I think the Catholic church is wrong on this one, but I don’t think their viewpoint is blazingly silly or ill intentioned- it’s just wrong. They don’t share, unlike Yglesias, a consequentialist view of the world, and they hold (correctly I think, in most cases) that we may not do evil that good may come of it.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Let’s be more blunt about it. This isn’t about “women controlling their sexuality” to which the anti-education/anti-contraception people object.
They want “whores” to suffer for having sex, especially outside of hetero marriage.
The abortion thing is just the self-righteous peg on which they hang their hat.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
And to further debunk the framing that even general pro-choicers have adopted: abortion is not a tragedy. “Rare” should not be the objective. Those who have no idea what they are talking about (men or those opposed to abortion) have assumed that a decrease in abortions should be our common goal. Abortion saves lives! No medical procedure is gone into lightly. Women don’t run to clinics for abortions with eagerness. They do so because our society gives them no choice.
Tragedy is facing lines of picketers when you are in the physical and emotional throes of a life-changing decision. Tragedy is being told that you are a whore for having sex. Tragedy is doctors using aliases so as not to be easily harrassed or killed. Tragedy is thousands of teenage girls being condemned to early motherhood, kept from college or independence.
Let’s focus on caring for our young women as best we can. Then let’s worry about rare.
June 30th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
By the way, someone implied further up this thread that the Pill (or the morning after medication) can cause abortions. Um, no. This is a pretty subtle and compelling argument, but it’s also entirely speculative. There’s no evidence for it, and considerable evidence against.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
@Y:
I see this attitude far too often, from both conservatives and progressives, and I despise it. Why do you assume it’s a “tragedy” for the woman? Having had an abortion, I can assure you there was nothing tragic about it other than what it cost. It was a simple medical procedure, far less painful and debilitating than my gallbladder surgery. Your comment echoes the paternalistic mindset that women can’t be trusted to make decisions and live with the result of those decisions.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
How’s about this one? All the feminist absolutists agree to campaign to eliminate men’s financial responsibility for unwanted pregnancies.
I, in return, I will concede womsn’s sole ownership of their reproductive rights.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
MC: I have no idea what a “feminist absolutist” is but a figment of your and the media’s imagination.
If you look at statistics, I bet you will find that the women who most need reproductive rights/access/education are already picking up the tab, thank you very much.
This sort of clap-trap only distracts from the facts on the ground and perpetuates an ignorant mentality of men against women. I would assume you want your wives and daughters to have equal rights, no? I would assume you see the benefits to a society that fosters self-direction in all citizens, no? Lay off the gender war stuff, it serves no one.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
It’s always illuminating to read these discussions, as you get to see the pro-choicers like Miss Marcotte display a contempt for human life that would make the late and unlamented Nathan Bedford Forrest blush. As the estimable Daniel Larison would say, a touch of the demonic.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Marcotte, contempt for human life? Quite a low and ill-informed comment, but I bet that makes you feel good, like you have an upper hand on “Miss” Marcotte and all the other free-lovin’ hussies. Demonic, indeed.
Now back to the topic of restricting the sex lives of women, shall we?
June 30th, 2009 at 6:49 pm
While I think specific Catholic teachings can be challenged from within the natural-law framework, that basic framework is the only good one I’ve seen for trying to derive a sexual morality.
Hector, your comment is quite thoughtful (and I know you have your disagreements with Catholic sexual morality), but your problem (and the Church’s) is that you see “trying to derive a sexual morality”, i.e., a consistent set of rules that can be applied to any situation, as a crucial project. It isn’t.
Now, there are certainly moral issues to worry about with respect to sex. And in fact, abortion is one of them; even though I think pro-lifers are profoundly wrong, I do think that as the fetus develops into something closer and closer to a born baby, there are significant moral issues that take shape. Rape is another one of them. Bestiality. Adultery.
But you don’t need an all encompassing theory of what the purpose of every sex act is to resolve these issues. In fact, it gets in the way, because rather than, say, looking at masturbation, realizing it’s harmless, and moving on, the sexual morality theorist is constantly looking at this or that 3rd order reason why saying masturbation is OK might lead to justifying some other horrible and unjustifiable activity.
Sex raises some discrete moral issues, some of which are very important and upon which reasonable people disagree. But there’s nothing about sex that requires a closed, logically consistent ethical system, any more than doing business or having a family or entering a partnership or fighting in a war requires a closed, logically consistent ethical system. You can deal with the problems on an ad hoc basis, and that has the benefit of not putting someone in the position that the Catholic Church is in of offering ritualistic condemnations of clearly harmless activities.
June 30th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
“I think it’s important to maintain the basic understanding of sex as something that is intended to serve certain goods, and not just a human attribute that we can make of whatever we please.”
It’s good to see Hector here. And as usual, he has some very thoughtful comments with which I completely disagree. Whatever “certain goods” sex might produce, making of it what we please is the greatest good. The production of more human beings is really just a side effect. Now, if we were in a situation where the production of new human beings was a necessity, I’d change my opinion. But currently, the production of fewer human beings is what we need. So we really need to reframe sex as something that’s fun as long as it doesn’t produce kids. This idea that sex must result in children will only put a huge strain on our planet. People will have kids simply as a way to have sex. And that’s not good. But it’s not really a big deal for me. I’ll be checking out in ten years and the rest of you will live with the results of our policies. Good luck with that.
June 30th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Dilan,
Oddly enough, you state the grounds for our disagreement in your own comment, when you say that wh*cking off is harmless. Well, maynbe, in a sense. But I don’t think assessing harm is the essential criterion of defining morality- I’m not a Benthamite liberal in other words. I think that wh*cking off is wrong because it separates the physical aspect of the sex act from its relational, interpersonal aspect. It obviates not merely the procreative but also the unitive. Again, I am not claiming innocence here, as it is said, “There is no man righteous, not one”.
You can try convincing me otherwise, but the fact is that I’ve gotten more concervative in my views about masturbation even as I’ve gotten more liberal in my views about homosexuality, so I don’t think you’ll have much luck. And I certainly do think that morality can be applied to economics (hence my cooperativist, agrarian socialism) and to foreign policy (just war theory, and theings like that) as well.
June 30th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
Fostert,
You don’t have to check out in ten years. Put down the bong and you might get another 40 or 50 (and I say that with best of intentions). As a point of information, Catholic countries today (except in Africa) don’t have particularly high birth rates. The countries with high birth rates today are all in Africa or (parts of) the Middle East, and it has less to do with religion and more with education, poverty, and the status of women.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
But I don’t think assessing harm is the essential criterion of defining morality- I’m not a Benthamite liberal in other words. I think that wh*cking off is wrong because it separates the physical aspect of the sex act from its relational, interpersonal aspect.
A couple of points:
1. Even if you don’t claim to be a Benthamite liberal, I doubt you believe that the concept of harm is irrelevant. Suppose we took a non-sexual subject, say, scratching your ass. (Yes, I know it’s a little vulgar. But that’s kind of the point.) Obviously, you shouldn’t scratch your ass in public. But absent some particular moral or sanitary concern about it, I suspect you would say that scratching your ass raises no moral issues because it is harmless, right?
In other words, what makes you say that masturbation could be immoral even if it is harmless is that there is something specific about sexual activity that exempts it from a normal moral calculus about harmlessness and the innocuousness of an activity.
2. And that’s the nub of our disagreement. You are assuming your conclusion– that separating physical and emotional aspects of sex is immoral. Why, other than the fact that you’ve defined it that way?
The problem with these theories of sexual morality is once you get away from familiar concepts of harm, consent, the public / private distinction, age-appropriateness, competing interests, and the like, and instead appeal to some abstract criterion, you end up condemning a lot of perfectly innocuous activity simply because it is innocuous sexual activity rather than some other sort of innocuous activity. And there’s no reason to single out sex for that type of treatment.
In other words, there really isn’t a purpose for having a specific sexual morality, and doing so almost always leads to bad, absurd results. Whereas if you just apply general, common-sense, established moral principles to sex, you tend to get the right answers on the easy questions (i.e., rape is wrong), while identifying the tough ones on which there are reasonable grounds for people to disagree (i.e., the morality of abortion turns on how important you think the fetus’ and woman’s relative interests are).
As a result, the quest for a specific “sexual morality” is doomed to failure.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Dilan, I have a dim memory of being scornful about a couple of your comments in the distant past—I have no idea what we were even arguing about—but you’re posting like an all-star, here. Keep it up.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
“Put down the bong and you might get another 40 or 50 (and I say that with best of intentions).”
Not a chance. I have genetic defects that guarantee my early demise. Add my radiation exposure to that, and there’s really no hope. As for the bong, I’m picking it up right now. So hold on a minute. As for the Catholics, did I even mention them? It seems you’re the stoned one. Catholic countries do not have higher birth rates for a simple reason: Catholics don’t listen to their Church when it comes to sexuality. The have the same rates of contraception, teen pregnancy, and abortion as any other girls. But they do have the best weddings. A completely insane sermon combined with lots of drunken debauchery. It’s even better if it’s a mob wedding. Those guys can party, and they know how to look good in a suit.
June 30th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
[...] the Southern Baptist Convention to federal funding (not the legality, mind you) for contraception (his words here): Their revealed behavior indicates that they don’t actually find abortion especially [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
I’m not sure you had to ’smoke out’ the real views of the Catholic Bishops on this topic, did you?
I mean you don’t have to trick the sun into revealing what color it is, just look at it.
Nice conspiratorial tone to your post though. Bravo!
June 30th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
I just finished a long and kind of nasty conversation with a bunch of friends online about this issue; educating the general populace on how insanely awful the pro-life groups actually are is a useful way to spend time. Most folks seriously just don’t know.
The ultimate video for understanding the pro-coathanger crowd:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk6t_tdOkwo
June 30th, 2009 at 9:57 pm
I think any religion that delves into people’s personal and sexual lives is creepy. Whether people use birth control is no one’s business. What age do we live in? These people are the lunatic fringe…..As for abstinence, go talk to Grandma Palin!
June 30th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Oh lawdy, the Catholic opinion? Fuck them. Their idea of contraception appears to be “fuck a kid”.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:49 pm
Dilan,
But see, this is the problem. You say I should apply _general_ morality to sex instead of trying to derive a specifically sexual morality. Okay. But your _general_ morality is still a harm-based, consequentialist one! Perhaps this is because this seems like plain common sense to you- but I assure you it doesn’t to me. I don’t take a harm-based, Benthamite approach to issues of economics, war, or the environment, so why would I take one with regard to sex?
For example, in terms of economics I oppose capitalism as it’s generally understood (i.e. the control of the means of production by a fairly small group of private individuals, who employ everyone else). This isn’t simply because I think such a system is _harmful_ or _unjust_ but also because I think it’s in a sense _unnatural_. It’s wrong to separate labor from its fruits, or to separate property from the social functions it is intended to serve, for similar reasons as it’s wrong to separate the different aspects of the sexual act. If you think these arguments are reminsicent of Scholasticism, you’re correct; the Scholastics opposed the foundational principles of capitalism when they were just a gleam in the eyes of the Florentine merchants.
Sex, like labor, is an integrated whole (not least because, in both, we can participate in the divine energy of creation). Liberals are often very perceptive at understanding the importance of maintaining the integrity of nature in other contexts- when we talk about protecting natural ecosystems, or about ending factory farming. Great, I agree with them. It would be nice if we could all realize, as Pope Benedict pointed out last Christmas, that there is such a thing as a human ecology and a human nature as well.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:54 pm
ANd actually, Dilan, I disagree with you about trying to weigh harms to the mother and the child. I’m sympathetic to Daniel Larison’s comments on this matter: it may be a mistake for our movement to go on about the rights of the unborn child, and to (in other words) argue on the rights-based, harm-based turf of the Benthamites. Because Christianity isn’t compatible with a harm-based ethics, and it’s very dubious whether it’s compatible with a rights-based one. Simone Weil argued the very notion of rights was un-Christian, and she may have been onto something here. Larison argues that the case for the pro-life side can best be grounded in a anthropology based not on liberal, Jeffersonian premises but on the premises that none of us is an autonomous individual, that we can only be fully human in relationship with others, and that as the most fundamental of all relationships, that of mother and child should never be broken other than in the most extreme circumstances.
June 30th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Hector:
1. Harm is not irrelevant. Plenty of people are non-utilitarians, but I suspect if I asked you “is eating a strawberry immoral”, you’d laugh at me and say it’s harmless. Harm may not be the end-all and be-all of morality, but it’s a relevant consideration.
2. You really haven’t answered my point that attempts to create systems of sexual morality always end up with someone considering some sort of 3rd order reason why an innocuous activity is immoral. That’s a serious problem with this whole enterprise.
3. You think the concept of “natural” can do way more than it can. Even if we assume “naturalness” is relevant to morality, something I find rather questionable (is it immoral for me to sweeten my drink with aspartame rather than sugar?), when used to describe sex acts, “natural” seems to stop meaning “natural”.
Masturbation is “natural”. Homosexuality is “natural”. Anal and oral sex are “natural”. That is, all of them occur frequently in nature. Much of what Catholic tradition calls “unnatural” isn’t unnatural at all– it’s simply not approved of by the Church hierarchy. But that use of “unnatural” provides no objective standard– I can just as soon assert that something is “natural” that someone else thinks is “unnatural”.
At best, you could say that vaginal sex divorced from procreation is unnatural. That is certainly a product of human technology and does not generally occur in nature (except in cases of sterility). But that standard doesn’t produce much of a sexual morality, when one can do all sorts of things that DO occur in nature, such as pulling out or switching holes, to avoid conception.
4. Meanwhile, as noted above, the application of famliar general moral principles such as consent, equality, bodily integrity, honesty and fidelity to one’s promises, and avoiding infliction of harm or suffering on others, produces a perfectly workable sexual morality where we don’t have to sit around wondering what’s “natural” or not.
So this way works, and your way doesn’t.
July 1st, 2009 at 6:25 am
Rde: Do they not believe in an invisible man in the sky?
No. God is not a flesh and blood human being being in Catholic theology (you have them confused with the Mormons there) and he does not reside in the sky, but is imminent everywhere.
July 1st, 2009 at 9:10 am
Dilan,
“Natural” in the sense of moral reasoning does not mean ‘occurs in nature’. All sorts of wrong and bad things happen in nature. We live in a fallen world and corruption is in all of us- human, animal, and (in some part) angelic. Natural means being in accordance with the final end of a thing, and achieving the goods that we can see that thing achieve at its best.
Simply put, I think the association of sex with love makes more sense than to see it as a harmless recreation. And the two viewpoints are incompatible- if one is true the other must be false. How do we know which one is true (or which one is more true), and which is deficient? We can tell because it’s possible to derive the deficient from the true, but not possible to derive the true from the deficient. A view of sex that sees it as an expression of love, of mutual self-giving, as a carnal figure of a spiritual reality, is simply more comprehenseive and explains more of human behavior than seeing it as pleasant recreation. It achieves the goods that the recreational view does, but also achieves other goods beside.
And you’re again, assuming that wh*cking off is ‘innocuous’ without giving me any reason to believe it. It seems to me to be fairly obvious that it’s immoral.
July 1st, 2009 at 10:22 am
Hey- all of you should watch Maafa21. Before you call for Common Ground – ask yourself if you think Planned Parenthood will want any common ground? See why here: http://www.maafa21.com
July 1st, 2009 at 10:34 am
“Simply put, I think the association of sex with love makes more sense than to see it as a harmless recreation. And the two viewpoints are incompatible- if one is true the other must be false.”
Not at all. You might as well say that working on your deck for pleasure, or gardening for pleasure, is morally incompatible with building a house or farming out of necessity. Everything doesn’t have but one teleology; there are all sorts of activities which are merely fun when practiced in some ways or under some circumstances, but which are gravely important, even sacred, practiced in other ways or under other circumstances.
“And you’re again, assuming that wh*cking off is ‘innocuous’ without giving me any reason to believe it. It seems to me to be fairly obvious that it’s immoral.”
Dilan clearly means “innocuous” to mean “harmless,” which you’ve essentially admitted that it is. The only way you can get to “masturbation is immoral” is through a tautology: “Masturbation is immoral because separating sex from a loving partner is wrong.”
July 1st, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Simply put, I think the association of sex with love makes more sense than to see it as a harmless recreation. And the two viewpoints are incompatible- if one is true the other must be false. How do we know which one is true (or which one is more true), and which is deficient? We can tell because it’s possible to derive the deficient from the true, but not possible to derive the true from the deficient. A view of sex that sees it as an expression of love, of mutual self-giving, as a carnal figure of a spiritual reality, is simply more comprehenseive and explains more of human behavior than seeing it as pleasant recreation.
That’s completely circular. A swinger (whose activities you would find grossly immoral) might very well say that for him or her, based on his or her extensive experiences with sex, the “mere recreation” theory explains sex better. And that swinger could describe (probably with more detail than you would like to hear!) activities and events that evidence that proposition.
In the end, unless you have a pipeline to God, you can’t know the purpose of sex. And the only evidence that we have in NATURE is that sex can be both things– it can be pleasurable and it can be procreative. We also have evidence in nature that it is not always either of those things– there is plenty of unpleasurable sex and plenty of nonprocreative sex.
So nature doesn’t answer that question. You are welcome to fill in your own answer– but if you decide to do so, you are misusing the word “natural” to call that “natural”. Rather, you are saying that of two (or more) alternative, plausible explanations of what is going on, you choose one of them that is more consistent with your ideology. That’s a choice that rational, reasonable human beings can make– but it’s a choice that has left the realm of nature.
But as I said, and you keep ignoring, the practical problem with making that move is that you then end up with a theory that condems a lot of innocuous activities. Not just masturbation, but also, sex with your longtime girlfriend. Oral sex. Anal sex. Using a condom. Pulling out to avoid getting your girlfriend pregnant (or just because she finds it hot if you pull out and ejaculate on her). Homosexual conduct. Surely, even if you think that masturbation is harmful, you don’t believe that ALL those things are harmful, right?
And then you have only two choices– condemning a bunch of activities that aren’t worthy of condemnation, or making a bunch of workarounds and adjustments to your theory to avoid condemning them.
Whereas, as I keep saying, if you stop the quixotic quest to try and divine the “natural” and just apply familiar moral concepts to sex, you tend to get right answers.
July 1st, 2009 at 3:49 pm
“In the end, unless you have a pipeline to God, you can’t know the purpose of sex.”
I presume that Hector thinks that he does have one, as does everyone: the Bible. Which is why this argument is probably not going to result in any changed minds.
July 1st, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Re: In the end, unless you have a pipeline to God, you can’t know the purpose of sex.
But we DO have such a pipeline. Our pipeline to God is the Man in whom the Second Person of God chose to incarnate Himself: Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh: “equal to the Father as touching His Godhood, inferior to the Father as touching His manhood”, as the great St. Athanasius tells us; he who experienced torture and death to win us salvation.
Re: A swinger (whose activities you would find grossly immoral) might very well say that for him or her, based on his or her extensive experiences with sex, the “mere recreation” theory explains sex better. And that swinger could describe (probably with more detail than you would like to hear!) activities and events that evidence that proposition.
Missing the point, Dilan. You’re a liberal, right? You should go by what your buddy Mill said about Socrates and the pig. Socrates can experience the pleasures of the pig, and the higher pleasures, and choose between them. The pig knows only his own pleasures, and he can’t account for the pleasures of Socrates. Therefore it’s better to be an unhappy Socrates than a happy pig.
July 1st, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Hector, you think you have a pipeline. Others don’t think that piepline is real. And nobody can prove one way or the other.
At some point you are going to have to grow up about the issue of religious pluralism. People believe different, conflicting things about the supernatural / spiritual world. They have different holy texts, different holy sites, different teachings as to what God thinks is important or unimportant. And unless God suddenly shows up in an unambiguous fashion (note the importance of that word unambiguous– what may or may not have happened 2000 years ago in the Middle East is NOT unambiguous), people are going to have those arguments for the foreseeable future.
So when someone says, “it’s natural because I have a pipeline to God and this is what She wants”, that’s an argument that by its very nature can’t be binding on nonbelievers and believers in different faiths (and even different interpretations of your faith).
If you appeal to what your version of God says, you are not making an argument that anyone else is bound to accept. Absent either (a) simple tyranny by a religious group or (b) a truly homogenous population with shared religious beliefs, we cannot enact public policies based on what God wants because people believe God wants different things.
Mature religious believers understand this. It doesn’t weaken their faith– they simply understand that if God imposes a law, it is up to God to enforce it.
More importantly, though, mature religious believers understand how unreasonable it is to expect nonbelievers to comply with their beliefs. Put the shoe on the other foot, Hector. How would you like to live under Shariah? You would immediately say that those rules shouldn’t bound you, because you do not believe they are the word of God. And you would be correct to say that. But there’s no basis for a government to determine that Islam is incorrect and Christianity is correct. Millions of intelligent people believe in each.
Look, you are just going to have to grow up about the at least 80 percent or so of the human population who thinks your religious beliefs are wrong. You can’t compel them to live under your rules. It’s wrong to try. And if you want to generate rules that they might be willing to obey, you need to be able to generate them without having to simply rely on your claimed pipeline to God, which they would all say you don’t actually have.
This is what mature religious believers do. For some reason, you seem to think that because Jesus somehow touched your life, that gives you the right to impose what you see as God’s will on everyone else. It doesn’t.
You should go by what your buddy Mill said about Socrates and the pig. Socrates can experience the pleasures of the pig, and the higher pleasures, and choose between them. The pig knows only his own pleasures, and he can’t account for the pleasures of Socrates.
This is a totally circular argument. Socrates has no idea what it is like to be a pig. To bring it back to the swingers example, for all you know, those swingers are deriving a pleasure from their sexuality that is totally unknown to the practitioners of Christian chastity. You can’t know otherwise. You don’t know their world any more than they know yours, Hector. You can’t. You can guess, but you can’t know. And not knowing, you can’t assume that your life is more pleasurable. You literally do not know what you might be missing.
That doesn’t make them right– it just means that you rely on a bunch of silly philosophical hypotheticals and circular arguments to avoid confronting the fact that there really isn’t any proof for the claims you make about sexuality.
And one last thing– for the seventh time, I will repeat this, because it really is the main point. I’ll even do it in capital letters so you don’t ignore it this time. YOUR WAY LEADS TO BAD RESULTS– YOU EITHER HAVE TO DEFINE A BUNCH OF INNOCUOUS ACTIVITIES, SUCH AS SEX WITH A CONDOM, MASTURBATION, HOMOSEXUALITY, ORAL SEX, PULLING OUT BEFORE EJACULATION, ETC., AS BAD OR YOU HAVE TO GO THROUGH A BUNCH OF WEIRD MENTAL GYMNASTICS TO SAY WHY THEY ARE JUSTIFIED WHEN THEY DON’T FIT YOUR THEORY. MEANWHILE, PEOPLE WHO DON’T TRY TO GENERATE SOME SPECIAL “SEXUAL MORALITY” GET THE RIGHT ANSWERS WITHOUT HAVING TO DO THIS. THIS IS BASICALLY PROOF THAT THEY ARE RIGHT AND YOU ARE WRONG.
July 1st, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Rde: Do they not believe in an invisible man in the sky? No. God is not a flesh and blood human being being in Catholic theology (you have them confused with the Mormons there) and he does not reside in the sky, but is imminent everywhere.
I forgot to get back to this. Originally, God was in the sky. At some point, Catholic theologians came up with ever more picayune and weird explanations as to where this substanceless substance, this non-material material substance, this non-flesh, non-blood, non-human being who was once a flesh and blood human being is or was or will be. This is the sort of discussion that gets correctly ridiculed as “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”.
In other words, if you decide to believe something completely implausible, you can’t save that belief by inventing a bunch of equally implausible superstructures on top of it. In the end, it’s still an invisible man in the sky, even if its now an invisible incorporeal life form in the somewhere we know not where.
And in the end, according to the Catholics, this invisible man in the sky spends his time worrying not about the fate of the universe, not about whether we are going to be swallowed by a black hole, not about ultimate questions of justice, but, yes, whether your penis was safely inside your wife’s vagina with no rubber on when you ejaculated. Yeah, that’s plausible.
July 2nd, 2009 at 3:29 am
Just gotta say–really enjoyed reading your stuff, Dilan.
July 7th, 2009 at 12:28 am
Honestly, I don’t understand what the point of understanding why some religious groups want to legislate government control of human bodies against the will of the persons inhabiting those bodies is. Do you honestly think that if you could just figure them out, they would change their views and abandon their convictions?
Either it’s fine for the government to control the bodies of its citizens without their consent, or it’s not. Requiring all pregnancies to be carried to term, forced sterilization, mandatory organ donation, torture, involuntary microchipping – if you’ve granted the government the authority to legally enforce one of these, you’ve implicitly granted it the authority to do so with all the rest.
So the issue of what one group does or does not believe with regards to this is a red herring. If you, yourself, think such government control is fine, then religious justifications in support of it simply reinforce your beliefs, and arguments against it are something you’ll ignore or dismiss. Conversely, if you think such control is a threat to human rights, it doesn’t matter why people think it’s okay, because it isn’t okay, regardless of they think.
Just because one group believes it’s okay to give up their rights to bodily autonomy doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to listen to them. In fact, I would argue that any group who proposes restricting the rights of others against their wishes, on the basis of their own particular beliefs, is not a group that is worth listening to.
By paying attention to their arguments, and granting them legitimacy, you’ve already accepted their underlying premise: that government control of citizens against their will is acceptable. You may disagree with their particular logic, but you’ve made it clear that although their arguments may be unpersuasive, you’re willing to consider arguments that this control is okay – instead of being repelled by the violation of basic human rights that such arguments represent.
The “pro-life” people at least have the courage of their convictions – they’re not waffling around trying to “understand” how the pro-choice side justifies its position, because, honestly, it’s not relevant to them. They know that they are right, and therefore see little point in trying to figure out why someone might disagree with them, because it’s not going to change their views in the slightest.
I have to say, it’s damn discouraging (and embarrassing) that so many of you on the pro-choice side can’t seem to manage a similar degree of conviction.
July 7th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
[...] given up on the Sisyphean task of explaining why the Washington Wizards ever will be any good. But this, alas, is unicorn-shopping at its most gullible. While I have no doubt that it is remotely possible [...]