A Book Review . . . Affirming Church Teaching Against The Sexual Revolution

By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN

Living the Truth in Love: Pastoral Approaches to Same Sex Attraction. By Janet E. Smith and Father Paul Check, eds. Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2015; 355 pp. $24.95. Available from www.ignatius.
com or 1-800-651-1531.

A collection of scholarly essays and personal testimonies that deal with some aspect of same-sex attraction, this volume also defends and affirms the teaching of the Church on many aspects of the sexual revolution that have deconstructed the family, redefined marriage, legalized divorce for any reason, and victimized children by policies that violate their most basic needs and subject them to harms casually ignored by adults who place their own individual agendas or desires above the emotional, psychological, and physical well being of the young.
The consensus of the essays argues that same-sex attraction, while problematic and in need of pastoral compassion, remains “disordered,” unnatural, and inhuman, violating the personhood of men and women whose bodies and human natures identify their sexual identity, not their “consciousness” or state of mind detached from the body — a problem especially well explained in Deborah Savage’s “At the Heart of the Matter: Lived Experience in St. John Paul II’s Integral Account of the Person.”
With lucid precision Dr. Savage distinguishes between the Church’s traditional teaching about “the radical unity of the person,” the indissoluble oneness of body and soul called by philosophers the “hylomorphic union” and Descartes’ view of man as “a thinking thing” (res cogitans) attached to a body as a mere appendage or “extended thing” (res extensa). She exposes the false categories fabricated to reinvent sexual identity as distinct from bodily reality, arguing cogently that “there really is no such thing as a ‘transgender’ person or a ‘homosexual’ person or, for that matter, a ‘heterosexual’ person.”
Rather there are human persons whose sexual “behavior” should not be confused with their “actual sexual identity.” Sexual desires do not determine a human being’s identity. Same-sex attraction never suffices to define the totality of a person. These misleading classifications, she explains, only entered the common vocabulary in the 1930’s: “Prior to that time, such categories had never been used; before then, pretty much no one who had ever lived had any kind of ‘sexual identity’ per se.” This radical separation of the body from a person’s nature and essence undermines the self-evident truths known by the five senses. The deadly effect of this rupture of body and soul especially imposes psychological confusion on the child and disorientation in perception: “It is an attempt to force our children to live in a world in which they cannot believe the evidence of their senses; it is to ask them to live in a world that doesn’t make sense.”
Jennifer Roback Morse’s incisive “Understanding the Sexual Revolution” identifies the cumulative effect of the sexual revolution as a cruel, unjust attack of the young, the primary victims of this ideology. The seminal ideas of the revolution — the separation of sexuality from procreation and the new “genderless” marriage that removes children from the conjugal union of husband and wife have removed children from the context of love, marriage, and the family. The essay explains that the new laws that govern no-fault divorce (“Any person can get a divorce for any reason or no reason and never have to offer an account of themselves”) bring untold harm to children for whom “each of the parents will be irreplaceable to the child; the identity of the parents is an irreducible fact of a person’s life.” Adultery no longer carries any penalty or stigma under the law. The upshot of “unilateral” divorce fashions a new social norm — the unnatural situation where children are sacrificed for the pleasure of the parents rather than fathers and mothers dedicating themselves to the best interests of their children.
Peter Herbeck’s “Our Prophetic Moment” illuminates the elaborately organized, generously financed propaganda campaign that initiated the battle of ideas culminating in the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision — a form of psychological conditioning and Thought Control that recall the techniques used in Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. The strategy depended on desensitizing the public to the entire topic of homosexuality by an inundation of the media with news, advertising, and shows that suddenly made the subject commonplace “in order to begin to break down peoples’ discomfort and to soften the immediate ‘physiological reasons’ for their resistance to the lifestyle, and ultimately to create feelings and attitudes of indifference.”
In addition to the spate of propaganda circulated by the media, the technique called “jamming” (labeling opponents mean, hateful, and bigoted to jam them into silence and submission). This silence, then, gives the impression of acceptance because “the silence communicates a lack of conviction and nerve on the part of leadership . . . . After all, if Father thought it was a big deal, he would say something, right?” The fear of men intimidates all opponents of same-sex marriage who cower at the thought of social rejection rather than fear the Lord and proclaim the truth: “The redefinition of marriage, the denial of sexual complementarity and the procreative and nuptial meaning of the body, is a lie.”
Rachel Lu’s “Eros Divided: Is There Such a Thing as Healthy Homoerotic Love?” refers to all the false information the young receive from a politically correct popular culture that deluges same-sex attracted individuals with lies and suppresses from them the truth that “homerotic desire especially should be seen as intrinsically disordered, and not something to encourage, foster, or celebrate.” She affirms that all erotic desires always pose the dangers of lust in its many forms and that these desires, when unchecked and undisciplined by conjugal love ordered toward procreation, always bring tragic consequences as the tragic love stories of Paola and Francesca, Tristan and Iseult, and Eloise and Abelard all verify. Like many of the writers in this collection, Lu acknowledges that the desires for love and friendship are normal, but the means and objects chosen to fulfill these longings are immoral: “Eve is correct to recognize that the fruit is good. Her error lies in her decision to eat it.”
J. Budziszewski’s “Finding the Water in the Desert: The Conversational Use of Natural Law in the Context of Same-Sex Attraction” advocates conversation that begins with the self-evident truths all people acknowledge rather than citations from Scripture or philosophical terminology, what he calls the “general revelation” known to all people from various religious backgrounds, also identified as the natural law, the truths a person “can’t not know.” He urges conversation on the basis of common sense rather than in the language of natural law philosophy or theology by an appeal to three compelling witnesses. This more universal language transcending time and space provides a more normative meaning to man, woman, marriage, and sexuality.
He appeals to “the witness of deep conscience” (the moral law “written on their hearts” cited by St. Paul in reference to the pagans who have no knowledge of the Ten Commandments); “the witness of the Designedness of Things” (the principle that “nature makes nothing in vain” and that there is an “inbuilt” purpose in the design of men’s and women’s bodies); and “The Witness of the Details of the Design” — the fact that “There is more melody, more color, more laughter in the world because there are two kinds of us. A man and a woman uniting in love in the hope of having children is a more splendid thing than meiosis or parthenogenesis . . . .” This type of conversation can lead a person to discover that a true wish for happiness “is not what I happen to desire; it is what I am made to desire.”
From these essays one gleans the honest truths and knowledge of reality that dispel the propaganda that undermines human wisdom and Catholic teaching about love, marriage, and sexuality: first, the wishful thinking that sexuality and procreation have no logical relationship and that “sex is normally and normatively a childless activity”(Dr. Morse’s words); second, the attempt to disconnect truth from love and reduce it only to the subjective feelings of individuals rather than respect “the objective truth about the meaning and purpose of sexual love” to quote Peter Herbeck.
Third, the rejection of common sense that disconnects mental illness, substance abuse, suicidal tendencies, and sexually transmitted diseases with homosexual promiscuity that Dr. Timothy P. Flanigan documents: “Overall, the very high risks of HIV and sexually transmitted infections, including hepatitis viruses, as well as the higher rates of anxiety, depression, poly-substance abuse, and violence among gay and bisexual men, is daunting and of grave concern.” Fourth, the fact that the demand for population control, abortion on demand, the reinvention of marriage, and contraceptive technology originate not from the middle or lower classes but from what Dr. Morse calls “a handful of wealthy people and foundations” who imagine themselves as the social engineers of the world — far-fetched ideas that have no basis in history, tradition, experience, reality, or common sense.
These essays provide armor, weapons, and inspiration for the spiritual warfare of our times in defense of marriage, family, and children.