I wrote this short essay  as a contribution to the long standing polemic, at Notre Dame, resulting from a paradox or inconsistency in Roman Catholic teaching concerning sexual morality.  This teaching combines the fundamental religious imperative of love for all humanity with ecclesiastical documents stating that homosexuality is an "objective disorder."  These ecclesiastical documents have, to American ears, an inappropriately clinical tone.   It is as if someone highly placed in the Roman Catholic hierarchy were suggesting that Christian love for homosexuals must be like Christian love for alcoholics, as if Catholics should encourage homosexuals to seek help in an appropriately structured twelve step program.

But the term "objective disorder," uttered by highly placed leaders of a world religion, also has a completely non-clinical tone,  a tone strongly suggesting moral condemnation.  Subtleties of translation and mistranslation aside, it is impossible to read such documents and not come away with the impression that although Catholics are directed to treat homosexual persons with Christian love, they are also directed to continue the social stigmatization of homosexuality.

The specific trigger for this essay was the invited visit of Joseph Nicolosi, an advocate and practitioner of reparative therapy, to Notre Dame about two years ago.   The audience to which this piece was initially directed was local and  parochial.  A wider audience may notice that my knowledge  of the "religious right " as a national social phenomenon, is less detailed than my knowledge of right-wing Roman Catholicism.
 

I would complement Nagel's thesis with some dicta concerning "genuine intimacy" as necessary for "good sex."  Genuine intimacy builds on friendship; it is a reciprocal relation built on mutual compassion, sharing, criticism and love. Genuine intimacy must be generative, i.e., it must be directed to the genuine good, the continued growth, development and maturation of the intimate other and the intimate relationship. Its secondary and tertiary priorities (more or less necessary conditions) include commitments to the common good, and to the general welfare of present, previous, and future generations.

Such intimacy is equally compatible with a celibate life and with monogamous sexual relationships, homosexual or heterosexual.

Monogamous, fecund, sanctified heterosexual marriage may be totally perverse, while monogamous, generative, genital but childless, homosexual unions may exemplify morally heroic  forms of friendship and love.

Some forms of sexuality explicitly renounce the goal of genuine intimacy.   Such relationships,  if consensual, are little more quasi-contractual relations for the reciprocal exchange of erotic satisfaction. Inability to move beyond such (implicit) contractual relationships to real friendship is a distinctive perversion of modern life.

Neither biology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics, jurisprudence nor politics sustain a valid argument that genuine intimacy requires genital activity of a preferred sort, or any sort. The relevance of genital activity to the formation of a mature personal identity is highly variable among individual human beings. Prima facie, genuine intimacy is incompatible only with those forms of genital activity which use others as instruments to the achievement of one's own goals, even within contractual relations, if each party thinks of the relationship or the activity as nothing but a "fair exchange" or a "good deal."
 

For primitive, uncivilized or semi-civilized peoples, "scapegoating" was the ultimate weapon of social control. Its vestiges are currently apparent in practices of exorcism, "driving out devils". The scapegoat or devil, like an adolescent primate (chimpanzee or vervet monkey) at the bottom of a dominance hierarchy, is driven into the wilderness or cast into chaos, an arena where no behavior in the species' repertoire succeeds, where death comes early and often violently.

Scapegoating survives as an element of nearly all dysfunctional forms of the family romance. The practice enables the dysfunctional family, society or church to localize the source of all its pain in one or a small number of its members, deferring or completely avoiding accurate diagnosis of its own plight and escaping meaningful reform or therapy.  Such contemporary forms of stigmatization or scape-goating intensify the tragic inhumanity of its earlier forms.  In forms that are painfully familiar in the domestic, ecclesiastical and political circumstances of modern life, the scapegoat is not stoned or beaten and driven into the wilderness, but "loved" and left, twisting painfully in the wind.

The stigmatization of vice is an ineffective, often counter-productive means of teaching virtue. Stigmatization is a form of social control a civilized society will use rarely, and only with the greatest care.  In domestic and ecclesiastical situations it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that resort to stigmatization, as distinct from outright expulsion, is itself pathological or that, at least, that it calls into grave doubt the moral authority of those who impose such pain.
 

Classic Greek philosophical thought privileged lists of polarized dichotomies: good/evil, light/dark, rational/irrational, unity/chaos, male/ female, sacred/profane, limited/unlimited, unmoved mover/moved mover, and so on. These classic lists were cultural constructs. In their terms, the unlimited or infinite is conceptually linked with evil darkness, the irrational, and the perverse.

In classic Greek thought the notion of an infinitely perfect creator God is nonsense.  

One translates Greek thought into the Christian philosophy at some peril. The classic Greek cultural structures are powerful, particularly in the philosophical expression they receive in the later dialogues of Plato and in Aristotle, where dichotomies are overcome through the union of opposed (or complementary) metaphysical forces.

How could we to make sense of such talk in the world we live in today?

For the younger Plato, the moral ideal was the philosopher/king; for Aristotle there were two moral ideals, the speculative wisdom of one called to unify all knowledge, and the practical wisdom of one called to lead the state or, at least, play a significant role in the public life of the state.

While classic medieval thought did not escape the mythic polarities of more primitive times; it did elaborate notions of the salience of human generativity and of intergenerational responsibilities. Medieval moral ideals developed in complex and changing cultural contexts:
 

1. The multiplication of religious vocations within monastic life (preaching, begging, contemplation, manual labor);
2. The unavoidable cultural constant of primogeniture (unavoidably dividing vocations of land owning, military service, law, clergy);
3. Reiterated scriptural and liturgical metaphors stressing monogamous, fecund, sanctified heterosexual love as symbolic of God's creative acts and of
4. Christ's sacrificial love for humanity,

That teaching valorized two forms of sexuality: celibacy and monogamous heterosexual sacramental marriage and attendant parent-child relationships. It is for social historians to comment on the realities of intimacy and genital activity in the lives of medieval clergy and laity.

In modern times, the young Freud (before WW I) mirrored Greek and medieval sexual polarities, valorizing a masculinized pattern of psychosexual development. This early perspective did not survive Freud's tragic maturation as father and citizen during WW I. It is notorious that Freud's early view was phallocentric and inapplicable to the significant pre-Oedipal experiences of infancy and early (before school age) childhood (without regard to sex or gender). Pace Joseph Nicolosi.

Freud's early view that homosexuality was essentially indicative of failure to resolve male Oedipal tensions vaporized in the flames of WW I. It has been patchily revived by isolated sects within psychoanalysis. It has no support in the psychoanalytic community at large. It is even more strongly and officially rejected by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association.

One of Freud's lasting legacies, however, is that successful maturation and adaptive ego strength entail capacities for flourishing in the realms of work and love. In a hedonistic culture, lacking any clear distinction of public and private, this has filtered into popular consciousness as if "having it all" just means having a great career and achieving stable, erotically satisfying relationships, with or without children. As a culture, we're "hung up" on genital activity.

Chaotic combinations of these traditions obliterate possibilities for rational discussion of real perversion and real obscenity as moral categories in the public sector modern life.

Who wants to know anything of the private sexual activities of others? Why? "We have no need to speak of that of which we know nothing."

All well and good.  Perhaps this is a debate with no foreseeable resolution in our pluralistic culture.

Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that persons of good will can not agree that primitive processes of stigmatization and scapegoating must be put in the same category as interrogation by torture to which they bear such strong analogies.

Also see A virtual left jab, computer age essays on science and politics

Ed Manier