Author: Sister Margaret A. Farley
Title: “Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics”
Publication: New York: Continuum International, 2006. ISBN 978-0-8264-2924-7, 322 pages, paperback;
indexed; Preface and seven chapters.
Amazon link:
By now, many readers know that this book created a flap with
the Vatican denounced the book and apparently asked the author, Sister Margaret
Farley, to revise it. The New York Times has an account by Laura Goodstein and
Rachel Donadio here. Wikipedia gives more background here. As a result of the public controversy, the
book shot up to the top in sales, and I had to wait about three weeks for more
stock to get it from Amazon Prime. The
Vatican “never learns”.
Farley starts her account by discussing major philosophical
history, including especially Michael Foucault and his “The Historical
Constitution of Desire”. This work
emphasized that sexuality builds on other aspects of the human condition,
including culture and the need to feel important -- ego. She also discusses Sartre and existentialism.
There follows a history of the way civilizations have
implemented institutions of marriage and family, and the different purposes
that they ascribed to these. Some
cultures have recognized a place for homosexual interest among men,
particularly the ancient Greeks, when they saw men as referentially
“superior”. Others, such as some native
American cultures, have created priestly places for those who don’t fit neatly
into two opposite genders. But
generally, cultures have tended to see the family as a basic tool for political
and social control. Often, aided by
religious doctrines, they have seen the family and marriage as a way to engage
the individual in maintaining a connection to “the common good”. In some cultures there are elaborate rules
about extended family responsibilities that connect to the legal and political
system. Muslim culture, particularly,
evolved in a low-tech society of small isolated tribes – and “no one can
survive alone in the desert”. Therefore,
every person had to connect himself or herself to building local community. Of course, procreation and generation-raising
were viewed as responsibilities shared by everyone in tribes that needed
population to survive. In many
societies, polygyny (as a form of polygamy) developed, abetted by external or
environmental circumstances and then rationalized within religion, and tending
to create power battles for control.
Christianity was “different” at first with its preoccupation
with an afterlife, which was thought to be imminent. In time, Christianity added to the notion of
the family a bridge to the notion that responsibility exists to larger
community as well as to immediate and even extended family. I think this can be read into the Gospels
(there really was no possibility for individualism as we experience it today in
most ancient societies, and “altruism” (as in Wilson’s book about eusociality,
May 1 here) referred specifically to getting beyond immediate family
obligations. Much of the notion about extended altruism developed with the
Protestant Reformation. Christianity had been preoccupied by sexual desire as
inherently sinful and egotistical. On p. 258 she writes:
“Sex could not be ‘justified’ by procreation or anything else, but only
forgiven; and the context of forgiveness was heterosexual marriage. The cure
for unruly desire was to be its domestication, its taming through the burdens
of maintaining a household and the rearing of children.”
There is a bifurcation, then, even in socially conservative
thought. Is marriage an end in
itself? Is social altruism? This is certainly a critical question from
the viewpoint of a gay man like me who is “different” and monitors his world at
a distance. It appears that
Vatican-style social conservatism, or Santorum’s idea of common good, views
personality development as a self-generating cycle that needs momentum to work,
rather like a storm. You need some
interest in others as a child to develop the ability to have stable intimacy as
an adult, which further feeds altruism.
Some people never catch the train.
In the last chapters, she develops her own modern framework
for sexual ethics, which invoke notions like commitment, fruitfulness, and
particularly social justice. She tends
to become abstract and wordy. It was her
spelling this out on her own and contradicting literal Church teaching that
made the Vatican mad. Here ideas are a bit like those of Paul Rosenfels when it comes to ethics within a relationship, although she never mentions the concept of "polarity" specifically. (See April 12, 2006 on this blog for the Rosenfels book review).
Her ideas to incorporate the possibility of committed
same-sex relationships (she doesn’t get into the legalities of gay marriage but
does mention the end of the military gay ban and the dissolution of the idea
that social cohesion need be so delicate and vulnerable). Toward the end, she refers to John Boswell, “Christianity,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the
Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century” (University of
Chicago Press, 1980). She points out that the gay community's depending on "immutability" (perhaps genetically based) arguments is a somewhat intellectually unsatisfying strategy.
I can come at this debate from different directions. Why, earlier in my life, was so much made of
my homosexuality, resulting in a college expulsion, in 1961, when I wasn’t “harming
anyone”? Why was so much made of delving
into what made me tick?
Although this is not the history of all gay men, I grew up
with a lack of ability to compete well according to my gender. So I tended to develop the process of “upward
affiliation”, and the idea that another person was not worthy of my potential
intimate attention unless he “had it all”.
Personal merit (including attractiveness) became equated with intrinsic
moral virtue. This sort of reaction
happens in the heterosexual world too – how often have we heard the phrase (in
evaluation a man’s female date), “is she the best he can do?” She doesn’t get directly into the problem of
upward affiliation, as George Gilder did in his 1986 book “Men and Marriage”. (The antithesis is "aesthetic realism", a buzzword sometimes heard in the 70s.) But it’s
apparent (or at least plausible) that if the process is seen as acceptable, social deterioration can occur
and a society, under the guise of enforcing “personal responsibility”, can
start turning out its less fortunate or “weaker” citizens, perhaps tending
toward eventual fascism.
In fact, the “ego” issue – the desire earlier in life to
become a musician and composer – for which I do and did have some legitimate
talent – raised as deeper issue – of attracting attention (particularly in
public) without actually having a personal stake in (or responsibility for)
others – a concept that other social scientists call “generativity”. She does deal with this somewhat in her
discussion of “fruitfulness”, and her somewhat general analysis of the way
childless relationships (including homosexual ones) can contribute to future
social capital. It's important that people without children are often expected to contribute to family life in other ways, such as with eldercare (recently becoming a bigger issue with lower birth rates) and sometimes helping raise siblings' or other relatives' children. Family responsibility goes way beyond accountability for what happens "in the bedroom". The capacity to form and keep "real relationships" related to actual need and maybe complementarity becomes itself a moral matter, just as its occurrence helps give others areas in which they not remain "competitive" all the time.
Here is a YouTube video from Yale Divinity School of Farley’s
lecture “Desires, Loves and Reasons”.
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