Other people’s judgments

Articles copied from Fortunate Families Newsletter October 2009 -www.fortunatefamilies.com
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by John Corvino. Aug. 28, 2009

“You don’t just want us to tolerate what you gay people do,” my skeptical questioner announced, “you want us to think that it’s RIGHT.” Whenever I hear this point–and it’s pretty often–I always think to myself, “Duh.” Of course I want people to think homosexuality is “right.” Why would anyone think I wouldn’t?

Actually, the latter question is not entirely rhetorical. Even my fellow gays ask me why we should care about other people’s moral approval. Beyond the obvious pragmatic advantages – for example, more moral approval means more favorable voting attitudes means more legal rights means an easier life - why should we give a damn what other people think? And while we’re on the subject, why should THEY care? Why are our lives any of their business?

There’s a myth circulating among well-meaning people that “morality is a private matter,” and that therefore “we shouldn’t judge other people.” This is nonsense of the highest order. Morality is about how we treat one another. It’s about fairness and justice. It’s about what we as a society are willing to tolerate, what we positively encourage, and what we absolutely forbid. It is the furthest thing from a private matter.

There’s a story I always tell in my introductory ethics classes about a freshman who wrote a paper defending moral relativism. His paper was laden with references to what’s “true for you” versus what’s “true for me,” what’s “right for you” versus what’s “right for me” and so on. I gave the paper an F. Surprised and angry, the student came to my office demanding a justification. “Well,” I carefully explained, “I graded your paper the way I grade all papers. I stood at the top of a staircase and threw a batch of papers down the stairs. Those that landed on the first few stairs got A’s…then B’s, C’s and so on. You wrote a long, heavy paper. It went to the bottom of the stairs. It got an F.”

“That’s not right!” he blurted out. “You mean, that’s not right…FOR YOU,” I responded, grinning. The moral of the story (aside from, tenured professors do the darndest things) is this: despite all of our talk of “right for you,” deep down we believe in public moral standards. We may disagree about what those are, and about what actions fall under their purview - but we still believe that right and wrong aren’t entirely relative. (For the record, the grading story is entirely fictional.)

One might object that grading affects other, non-consenting people, whereas relationships affect only the people involved. There are two problems with this objection.

The main one is that the latter point is just false. Unless one endorses a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” secrecy, relationships have a public presence and thus public consequences. Gays aren’t waging the marriage battle just so we can all go back in the closet. Like most people, we want to stand up before family and friends, proclaim our love, have it celebrated for the beautiful thing that it is. (At least, that’s what many of us want.)

We want to send the message to young gays and lesbians that there’s nothing wrong with them; that they, too, deserve to love and be loved, and that there’s nothing sinful or wrong about that. We want to be treated equally in the eyes of the law. All of these aims affect other people in various ways.

Second, the objection invites the response, “Says who?” Who decides that only actions affecting other people are appropriate targets of moral scrutiny? Who decides that that’s the right way to look at morality? And there’s no way to answer such questions without engaging in a bit of moralizing. Value judgments are inescapable that way. Those who claim that they’re not taking any moral stances about other people’s lives are, by that very claim, taking a moral stance about other people’s lives – a “tolerant’ one, though not necessarily a very admirable one.

Sometimes, other people’s behavior really sucks, and we should say so. “Saying so” is part of the confusion here. There’s a difference between MAKING moral judgments and OFFERING them, not to mention a difference between offering them respectfully and wagging your finger in people’s faces. The latter is not just self-righteous; it’s generally counterproductive. I suspect when people say that “we shouldn’t judge other people,” it’s really the latter, pompous kind of moralizing they’re concerned to avoid. But we shouldn’t confuse the rejection of bad moralizing with the rejection of moralizing altogether.

In short, we should care what other people think, and do, because the moral fabric touches us all.

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John Corvino, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. His column “The Gay Moralist” appears Fridays on 365gay.com.

For more about John Corvino, or to see clips from his “What’s Morally Wrong with Homosexuality?” DVD, visit www.johncorvino.com.

Always and everywhere?

By John Corvino,
Sept. 4, 2009

Marriage equality opponents frequently claim that marriage has been heterosexual since…well, since FOREVER, and that it is arrogant and foolish to tinker with such a pervasive human institution.

Whatever its logical shortcomings, the “always and everywhere” argument is rhetorically effective. Even gay-rights advocates concede that marriage equality seemed unthinkable just a decade or two ago. Imagine how novel it appears to those who, unlike us, have no direct stake in the issue. It’s tempting to respond that lots of things that seemed unthinkable a few decades ago - iPhones, Facebook, Sarah Palin–are, for better or worse, now familiar. But the reluctance to tinker with marriage is deep-seated. The “always and everywhere” argument demands a response that is not only logically sound but also rhetorically compelling. Several responses are worth pondering. I’ve given them each names for convenience:

(1) False premise: The claim that marriage has always been exclusively heterosexual suffers from what should be a fatal flaw: it is simply not true. Same-sex marriages have been documented in a number of cultures, notably some African and Pacific Island cultures. Marriage-equality opponents retort that these marriages are not quite the same as modern same-sex marriages, since they typically involve a kind of gender transformation of one of the partners. But this response is a red herring. Sure, homosexual marriages in these cultures look different from ours in various respects - but so do their heterosexual marriages.

More important, it is doubtful that opponents would abandon their objection to contemporary samesex marriages as long as one partner agreed to be the “wife” and the other the “husband.” The real problem with the “false premise” response is rhetorical:

The response depends on anthropological data unfamiliar to most people, and it appeals to “exotic” cultures whose practices most Americans find irrelevant.

(2) Heteronormativity: Rhetorical considerations would also weigh against using words like “heteronormativity” when responding to people’s basic fears about marriage. But it’s nonetheless true that the “always and everywhere” argument begs the question against those who argue - quite rightly - that the heterosexual majority tends to oppress the homosexual minority always and everywhere. Because of that oppression, recorded history often ignores or erases our lives and commitments.

Keep in mind that just a few decades ago, gays and lesbians were still considered mentally ill in much of the West; even today, gays are stoned to death in parts of the world. Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising that same-sex marriage seems new fangled. The marriage-equality movement owes as much to an improved understanding of sexuality as it does to changing views about marriage.

(3) Not Mandatory: Even granting the (false) premise that marriage has been heterosexual “always and everywhere,” so what? No one is proposing that same-sex marriage be made mandatory. Heterosexual marriage will continue to exist “always and everywhere” for those who seek it, even while society recognizes that it’s not appropriate for everyone. The opponents’ argument seems to play on the irrational notion that giving marriage to gays somehow means taking it away from straights.

(4) Non-Sequitur: Let’s concede to marriage-equality opponents that history and tradition are important, and that we should be cautious about changes to major social institutions. Yet even if (contrary to fact) marriage were heterosexual “always and everywhere,” it does not follow that marriage cannot expand and evolve. One should never confuse a reasonable caution with a stubborn complacency.

Increasingly, that complacency is more than stubborn–it’s unconscionable. Marriage-equality opponents can no longer ignore the fact that we fall in love, just like they do; that our relationships have positive effects in our lives and the lives of those around us, and that we reasonably seek to protect and nurture these relationships. If not marriage for us, then what? Ultimately, the problem with the “always and everywhere” argument is that each new samesex marriage is a living counterexample to it. Whatever happened in the past, we have marriage equality now–in a small but growing number of places. These same-sex marriages are by and large bearing good fruit.

If ignoring tradition is “arrogant and foolish,” ignoring the evidence unfolding before us is exponentially so.

The Good News according to Alison

The Fulcrum of Discovery or:
how the “gay thing” is good news for the Catholic Church

Reinvent the Church

Reinvent the Church

Homily For The 27th Sunday, Year B - October 4th 2009 Fr. Philip Endean SJ

Genesis 2:18-24; Hebrews 2:9-11; Mark 10:2-16

‘A man must leave his father and mother and join himself to his wife.’ The relationship between today’s scripture and the lived experience of this congregation is … well, interesting. I am not going to duck the challenge of addressing that issue, but I am going to start somewhere else.

‘Let the little children come to me’ ‘Anyone who does not welcome the Kingdom of God as a little child will not enter it at all.’ In passing, it’s worth noting that the image of Jesus putting his arms round children is as jarring with contemporary sensibilities as anything Jesus says about divorce; even with a CRB check you can’t do that sort of thing any more. And however necessary the precautions, they indicate a tragedy—life is the poorer for them.

But to the point: this image of the child, the non-person, receiving the Kingdom of God as a gift. It’s an image associated with St Thérèse of Lisieux, whose feast the Church celebrated this week, and whose relics are currently on a triumphant tour through the land. I happened to be talking this week with someone from the Portsmouth diocese where she had made her first stop. He did not strike me as one of nature’s devotees to the Little Flower, but he had clearly been impressed. ‘It shows you what the Church is really about: not discipline, not teaching, not organization, but people in need finding something very simple in their religion, something that gives them hope, something that helps them struggle on.’ Quite simply, they find love. He might have been echoing Thérèse’s own phrase: ‘love at the heart of the Church’.

Thérèse, for me as an academic interested in spirituality, is a quite fascinating figure. I don’t think we can just ignore the critical, even cynical, comments that have been made about her cult. But one cannot deny its power. Her autobiographical manuscripts—suitably or unsuitably sanitised by her bossy big sister—appeared in the first decade of the last century. If you go to her sanctuary at Lisieux, what is just obvious from the votive stones is how this story of a psychologically damaged child facing an early painful death, and undergoing powerful experiences of abandonment and loss of faith—this story somehow helped French soldiers who had to struggle with the horror of World War I; more generally, she seems to have touched into the experiences of poor Catholics in the workforce of an industrial society of Northern Europe that could often be brutal and insecure. Thérèse’s centenary in 1997 came a month after the death of Princess Diana; and maybe the Diana phenomenon helps us understand Thérèse. Both are vulnerable young women, making lots of mistakes, dying young and tragically—both tap into realities normally hidden within our collective psyche, and provoke it into expression. This expression takes forms that are sometimes disconcerting, sometimes conflicting—the symbols of Thérèse and Diana are used by different people promoting different sets of agenda. In both cults, flowers figure large; there are elements of kitsch, vulgarity, tastelessness. But something important is happening when Thérèse and Diana are evoked. Realities often buried and overlooked, and which because they are unacknowledged are often doing us damage—these come to the surface, in however distorted a form. And we are better off because we have been allowed, however temporarily, however incompletely, to access them.

I can never make up my mind whether Thérèse is a genuine theologian or the fabrication of a successful piety industry, but I am prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt—after all, she has been proclaimed a Doctor of the Church. The problem with her writing is that its doctrinal ideas have been so successful and influential within twentieth-century Christianity that we no longer recognise that they were once new and surprising. In the middle of the century, our mainstream church understanding of grace changed, so that what Thérèse was on about no longer seems a big deal. My current research on Gerard Manley Hopkins has led me to think about what Catholic spiritual life was like in the nineteenth century. The dangers of caricature are considerable; but you cannot avoid the impression that at very deep levels the religious enterprise was set up so that you could only fail at it; and the religious apparatus available to the average Catholic was largely concerned with the negotiation of guilt. In this world, Thérèse saw something new. You can leave all the concerns with rules aside. You can just let God be with you in your weakness and failure, and love you; you can just let that love supply for all your needs. She advocates the so-called Little Way. There are paths to heaven that involve steep climbs; but then there’s this new route which just gets you there in a flash—like these strange new machines called elevators that they have in New York and about which we’ve read newspaper articles even here in dozy Lisieux. The way of love: love at the heart of the Church; love available to all, no matter what the failures they are having to live with, no matter what the burdens they are carrying.

Which brings me, at last, to Jesus’s teaching on marriage and divorce, and the incongruity of such heterosexist talk with the experience of a congregation such as this. And the move I am going to make is an obvious one. Jesus states some rules, but then something else happens: the children come, the bossy disciples want to shoo them away, but Jesus overrules them, takes the children, the non-persons, into his arms and blesses them. The rules of the Church are there, ultimately, because we care about the value of each human being. They are necessary; they have their place. But, for all their divine warrant, they are human creations as well, articulated in corrupt and fallible human language. They cannot fit everyone. You have to read them for what they are trying to do, not for what they actually do to people already hurt—for the good that they are seeking to promote, however imperfectly, rather than the problems they create. At the heart of the Church is not the strict rule, the exceptionless moral norm, but love: love that we only receive in our weakness, in our unpersonhood, as a gift.

Now, it’s important that we not get too complacent here. Catholicism—perhaps unlike Protestantism—has spiritual safety-valves built into its symbolic structures, and this is part of its genius. The figure of Mary meets some of our need for a female element in our imaging of God and salvation; and the figure of Thérèse in early twentieth-century Catholic spirituality relieved the rigorism of a more official, more theological Catholicism all too reflective of the harsh economic conditions under which poor believers struggled. And safety valves are a mixed blessing. They’re like painkillers; they remove the immediate indicator of dysfunction, and perhaps they are a necessary precondition for any serious healing to be attempted. But the danger is that we just stop there, and leave the underlying problem unaddressed.

Marian piety is no substitute for serious work on the structural sexisms of our Church and society; and a pilgrimage to Thérèse’s bones is far short of the Kingdom of God for which we long, for the ultimate transformation of the oppression that Thérèse shared with so many. There is a danger that religion becomes just a painkiller. There are powerful criticisms of Christianity and Catholicism to this effect, and they are not to be written off. But suspicion need not, must not be our only attitude. We can, we should, also be prepared to think positively. The Thérèses and the Dianas of our symbolic world can serve as an inspiration really to change things, or rather to let them be changed. The heart of the Church lies not in its rules or its theologies or its structures, but in openness to love and to being loved, the openness of the child: openness to a love that raises the lowly, taking them up the elevator in a trice. It’s that subversive power that is at the heart of the Church: the power of the leader who, Hebrews said, became through suffering like his sisters and brothers in every respect, dying a death of ritual impurity, under a curse—and who from that condition invites to come to him outside the camp in order that from there we might share his resurrection.

Much remains to be done and suffered. The Kingdom of God is not yet here. But as we hear the gospel rules that we cannot even begin to keep, we are also given the gospel symbol of the poor child, the unperson, embraced by Jesus. Even now this symbol puts the rules in their proper place, and assures us that in the end the fullness of love, the kingdom of God, will truly become a reality. And perhaps we can use our spiritual imaginations when we hear Thérèse. ‘After my death, I will let fall a shower of roses’, she is supposed to have said. Her images may be tacky and girlish, but she was saying something important about a hope will not deceive. For God has called us, and God is faithful.

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