Honesty about sex is difficult to achieve when the discussion takes place in a group.  People are too eager to score debating points and afraid to lose face.  My counterpart in a debate about same-sex attraction spoke about the hatred that he said had killed Matthew Shepherd.  I replied, “Surely you know I don’t hate you.  I love you.  I want to spend eternity with you in heaven.”  After the debate was over and the camera was off, he thanked me, saying that he could tell I did love him.  I was glad.  But he didn’t concede that on camera.

Perhaps the hardest part of conversation is giving a gentle and truthful answer to challenges that emerge from pain and anger.

A male friend who experiences same-sex attraction might say, “You reject me because I'm different from you.”  But he is not different; he is a man, like me, who suffers temptations, like me, even if somewhat different temptations than mine.  I affirm his manhood.  If I think he is able to hear me, I might mildly ask whether it is possible that he is the one who rejects the challenge of the Other – of the complementary sex.

He might say, “You are demeaning my dignity.”  I insist on his dignity.  Every person is an image of God.  But we are working from two different understandings of what upholding his dignity requires.  Though I want to lift it up, I think he is harming it.

He might say, “You don’t respect my love for my partner.”  I honor all love and friendship.  The issue is not whether two people of the same sex can be loving friends; the issue is whether sexual intercourse improves every kind of love.  Unthinkingly, we often speak as though it does; but would it improve the love of a teacher and student, a father and daughter, a brother and sister?  Of course not; it introduces an alien and distorting motive into such relationships.  In the same way, it introduces an alien and distorting motive into the friendship of two men or two women.

He may say that “Gay is just as natural for some people as straight is for others.”  But the meaning of natural inclination is not what I happen to desire.  It is what I am made to desire.  Each sex is made for its polar counterpart.

He may say “I was born this way.”  Certain behavioral predispositions really are latent from birth.  For example, it is well-established that some people suffer the misfortune of a genetic predisposition to the abuse of alcohol.   But this doesn’t make drunkenness naturally good for them; it merely means they will have to work harder than other people to resist the temptation.  Good friends will encourage them to do so.

This seven-part series on “Nature, For and Against,” adapted from my chapter in a book to be published by Ignatius Press, resumes on Tuesday.  Tomorrow:  On Refusing Childhood.

Acts have consequences, and some of these consequences are natural.  To put it differently, whatever we do has results, and some of them result from what we are.

Because of our physical nature, if we cut ourselves, we bleed.  Because of our social nature, if we betray our friends, we lose them.  Because of our intellectual nature, if we try to keep ourselves from thinking straight about some things, we will have difficulty thinking straight about a lot of other things too.  We reap what we sow.

This insight applies to our sexual nature as well.  For example, it isn't just physical consequences like bodily disease that make the hedonism of what is called the gay lifestyle like the merriment of a danse macabre.  A hundred notes of sorrow tell the tale.  For example, conscious of sterility in all its senses, desperate to find a way to make empty sex seem meaningful, some young male homosexuals deliberately seek out men with deadly infections as partners; this is called "bug chasing."

Unless one is a physician or counselor whose business it is to heal the sundry hurts of flesh or spirit, it is not usually helpful to say too much about such dreadful things, because the shock and horror of them is so great that in order to defend themselves against it, listeners tend to shoot the messenger.  Suffice it to say that the literature of the movements of disordered sexuality talks about them more frankly than I can here.

Despite public denial, people know quite a bit about the natural consequences of their acts, even if not the full range of them.  Consider the strangeness of the expression “safe sex,” an inadvertent confession of dangers from which one seeks protection.

Tomorrow:  Part 5.  This seven-part series is adapted from my chapter in a book to be published by Ignatius Press.

Our perception of meaning in the human person is manifold, for the entire fabric of our nature, extending through all its dimensions, chants to us of inbuilt purposes.  Sexuality is no exception.  Our bodies sing of the complementarity of the male and the female, and our spirits sing along in polyphony.

The psalmist says that in consideration of the heavens, he is moved to ask “What is man, that Thou art mindful of him?”   In consideration of the yeast and the amoebas, we might also ask “What is man, that Thou hast made him different?”  For yeast do not long for union with other yeast, nor amoebas for communion with amoebas.  Yet among us there are two polaric kinds, each of them unbalanced and incomplete.

The male is created with a potentiality for biological or spiritual fatherhood, the woman with a potentiality for biological or spiritual motherhood.  Certain soft chords in her nature resonate more powerfully in his nature; certain pale hues in his nature glow more luminously in hers.  Paradoxically, we are not less because of this incompleteness.  We are more.  There is more melody, more color, more laughter in the world because there are two kinds of us.

A husband and wife uniting in love in the hope of having children is a more splendid thing than meiosis or parthogenesis or budding, for it makes possible a kind of love that would otherwise not exist:  A life which gives rise to new life.

We do not all need to marry and enjoy sexual love, but we do all need to recognize that the pattern of sexual love is shaped by the polarity of the sexes and designed for that life-giving partnership.  A man and a woman are necessary not only to conceive the child but to bring him to birth, because the woman incubates him and the man protects both of them.  A man and a woman are necessary not only to bring him to birth but to raise him, because he needs a mom and a dad.  The procreative vocation of the two spouses continues even after they have passed the age of childbearing and their children are grown, for then they are needed as grandparents.

Same-sex intercourse misses the point of all this.  Not only is it intrinsically non-procreative, incapable of forming new life, but for all the talk of activists about fulfilling relationships, it is also intrinsically non-unitive.  Two men, or two women, cannot balance each other in the utterly distinctive way that a woman and a man do.

Friendship between two persons of the same sex is a gift -- but sexualizing such friendship subverts it.  The joining of a man’s and a woman’s sexuality can bring them into equilibrium; the joining of the sexuality of two men or two women pushes them out of equilibrium.  This explains many things.  Consider for example the explosive promiscuity of the male homosexual world, and the fact that in general, males in stable male partnerships don’t stop cruising but only cruise less.

We see then that to sing against the harmonies of our creational design is to produce discord in ourselves.  Even if our aim is to reduce interior discord by warbling in the key of our desires, we cannot succeed, because we are still out of key with our design; the reality of being male and female is something that we are, not just something that we want.  A man who is sexually attracted to other men is a man who suffers appetites that cut across the grain of what he truly is.  A woman who is sexually attracted to other women is a woman whose longings are out of alignment with what she truly is.

These facts subsist at a level deeper than ideology, deeper than choice, deeper than desire.  Our desires may overwrite them, but they can never be erased.

Tomorrow:  Part 4.  This seven-part series is adapted from my chapter in a book to be published by Ignatius Press.

Natural law inescapably concerns human nature.  Not only do the heavens proclaim the glory of God; so do our own minds and bodies.  We are fearfully and wonderfully made, creatures of pattern, design, and inbuilt meaning.

A corollary of the designedness of things is that every desire in us is for something.  Thirst is directed toward drink; hunger is directed toward nourishment; sexual attraction is directed toward turning the wheel of the generations.  Of course these things are also pleasurable, but there is a proper context for every pleasure, otherwise we would all think it good to be gluttons.  The proper context for sexual pleasure is the union of the procreative partners.

We will return to specifically sexual longing tomorrow.  For now, let me consider something odd about longing in general.

Each of the desires I have mentioned is satisfied by something in the created order.  Drink satisfies the desire for drink, food satisfies the desire for food, intercourse satisfies the desire for intercourse.  Yet we have one longing – it has no name, but most people feel it obscurely – which cannot be satisfied by anything in the created order whatsoever.  C.S. Lewis calls it “That unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World's End, the opening lines of ‘Kubla Khan,’ the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”

If it is really true that “nature makes nothing in vain,” then this longing too must be for something.  But if it is not directed to anything in the created order, then its purpose must be to direct us beyond, to the Creator.  Nature points beyond herself.  She has a face, and it looks up.

If we refuse to look where she is pointing, then we may lavish on her all the loving looks that she wants us to bestow somewhere else.  We give to created things the worship that is due to the Creator.  Created things like what?  Like sexuality.  Perhaps this is because erotic longing stirs up that other wild-ducks longing more strongly than most longings do.

One would think that at least the idolatry of sex would always be an idolatry of love in sex.  Amazingly, no.  It is even possible to make an idol of the absence of love in sex.  David Loovis’s description of anonymous intercourse is unmistakably religious:  "an irresistible experience of beauty in the person of the stranger ...  one of the most mysterious and awe-inspiring in the entire homosexual galaxy of experience."

Idolatry is so tiring.  Even the idolater must sometimes rest from the toil of denial.  His friends must stand ready for the moment when he relaxes the awful tension of his mental censors.

Tomorrow:  Part 3.  This seven-part series is adapted from my chapter in a book to be published by Ignatius Press.

For new readers:

Introduction to the blog (2013)

I would rather write about what sexuality is meant to be than about what can go wrong with it.  But it isn’t always possible to make resolutions of one’s preferences.  Sometimes one has to pause to blow away the smoke, or no one can see anything at all.

Perhaps this is one of those times.  Important questions about law and disordered sexuality are about to come before the Supreme Court.  Not coincidentally, editorialists and bloggers are getting into the act.  An item in one of the New York newspaper blogs even asserts the paradoxical opinion that properly understood, natural law supports unnatural sexual acts.

Reduced to a near-syllogism, the argument runs like this:

1.  Some homosexual writers say homosexual behavior fulfills them.

2.  Therefore homosexual behavior fulfills them.

3.  Natural law supports fulfillment.

4.  Therefore natural law supports homosexual behavior.

Some people who suffer same-sex attractions disagree with what the activists say in their name, but let us not turn this into a you-say, I-say brawl.  The greater problem is that fulfillment is not whatever someone says it is.

Some heterosexual men claim infidelity fulfills them; some even say bringing a third person into the bedroom deepens their intimacy with their wives.  Would the author agree with them too?

Like everything else about us, genuine fulfillment has a pattern, one we defy at our peril.  This pattern is embedded in our nature, in the kind of being that humans are.  Yet the author -- a philosopher who ought to know better -- has nothing to say about our nature. 

Let us leave his essay aside.  Beginning tomorrow I will offer a few reflections about the broader topic.

This seven-part series is adapted from my chapter in a book to be published by Ignatius Press.