Noli Irritare Leones

Hugo has been wondering, “why did so many Americans vote to protect abortion rights, while simultaneously voting to deny marriage equality to gays and lesbians?” What moral perspective could justify disapproving of homosexuality more than abortion? Now he has found, and linked, an article by a colleague of his, totally on the opposite end of the spectrum from Hugo in his attitude toward homosexuality, who is wondering the same thing.

Hugo would have voted down both restrictions on abortion and attempts to ban same-sex marriage; Ed Feser would have done the reverse. But both find the combination of strong electoral resistance to any restrictions on abortion with similar electoral resistance to same-sex marriage puzzling. Ed offers three possible reasons for this result; to my mind, he offers them exactly in reverse order of their plausibility. His third reason, which Hugo quotes, is

Some heterosexuals who have at least a grudging respect for traditional sexual morality are more keen to see it respected by others than to practice it themselves…. Hence, while it costs such people little or nothing personally to vote against “same-sex marriage,” limitations on abortion might put a crimp on their own lifestyle should their less-than-conservative personal sexual behavior “punish them with a baby.”

Sounds plausible enough, both to Hugo and to me; I have, in fact, encountered no shortage of people who defend traditional sexual morality for somebody without making much effort to respect it themselves. Ed’s second reason is procedural. But when I get to his first proposed reason, I find it utterly bizarre and improbable.

Though every murder is a more grave offense against the natural law than is sodomy, sodomy is arguably more obviously contrary to the natural law than the specific kind of murder that occurs in most abortions. Hence, while centuries of bad moral theory and decades of marinating in a cultural cesspool have largely deadened most people’s intuitive sense that killing children in the womb is wicked, it has not quite entirely eliminated the intuitive sense that sodomy is contrary to nature, or at least that it would be indecent and impious to give to it the label “marriage.”

Come again? Are we living in the same country? Let me count the ways in which Ed Feser is wrong here.

First, he seems to want to have his cake and eat it, on his natural law argument. On the one hand, he argues that it is so intuitively obvious that sodomy is contrary to natural law that people in general still have an intuitive sense that he is right. On the other hand, he wants to reject the input of anyone who isn’t thoroughly schooled in natural law philosophy:

BTW, hostile readers ignorant of what classical natural law theory actually says are asked to spare me stupid remarks along the lines of “Isn’t wearing glasses ‘unnatural’ too?” “How come sterile people can marry?” “If it’s ‘natural,’ shouldn’t everybody already agree about it?” etc. etc. I’m not going to get into a long exchange over sexual morality and natural law here, sorry….

Just a minute, here. If you’re arguing that the intuitive understanding of the general population – who are nearly all utterly unschooled in classical natural law theory – supports sodomy being wrong (and, in fact, supports such a conclusion more strongly than the conclusion that abortion is wrong), then you have no call to reject out of hand the opinions of people unschooled in classical natural law theory, on whether your proposition is correct. It’s precisely the understanding of such unschooled (and even “deadened” in their “intuitive sense”) people that you purport to describe.

Second, I can think of no sensible natural law argument against sodomy that wouldn’t go double for abortion. Arguments can be found, sure, which condemn “sodomy” but not abortion. (Google just found me one, which I won’t deign to link, which argues that male homosexuality inherently spreads AIDS, while abortion is fine and dandy and serves a useful eugenic purpose.) But I’m hard pressed to see how such arguments comply in the least with classical natural law theory (a theory in which I am, I admit, not greatly schooled, but which I at least know well enough to know that it wouldn’t approve abortion on grounds that it serves a useful eugenic purpose).

Third, the evidence of actual current heterosexual behavior is that, not only are most straight folks just fine with “sodomy,” but they do, indeed, absolutely consider “sodomy” to be (to borrow Feser’s words about what “sodomy” isn’t), “the stuff of romance or tender wedding night fantasies.”

Here we get into the question of just what “sodomy” is. It’s definition turns out to be somewhat variable, depending on what authority is doing the defining. Andrew Sullivan, in his post “We Are All Sodomites Now,” argues that sodomy is “the technical term of non-procreative intercourse. That includes the use of condoms, the pill, oral sex and butt-fuckery. That was what the church meant when it invented the entire category.” The same definition is referenced in an article in The Stranger about Lawrence v. Texas.

But the true definition of sodomy is nothing more and nothing less than nonprocreative sex. Any sex act that cannot result in male sperm fertilizing a female ovum qualifies as sodomy. This includes married couples using birth control, infertile or postmenopausal women having sex with their husbands, and elderly men masturbating to Britney Spears’ Pepsi commercials. It also includes every sex act available to partners of the same sex, a fact that leads writer Andrew Sullivan to sum up sodomy laws as an attempt “to ban homosexuals from sexual dignity.”

This is actually an incorrect reading of Catholic teaching; the Catholic Church is OK with infertile or postmenopausal women having sex with their husbands. It is not OK with birth control, but whether birth control has actually been defined in church teaching as “sodomy,” I am not sure. What I do know is that certain inherently non-procreative acts between straight people – oral as well as anal sex – have routinely been defined as “sodomy,” in both certain lines of traditional moral reasoning about sex, and actual criminal law.

The live journal Thinking Out Loud reviews gay Catholic academic Mark Jordan’s The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. It’s an interesting survey of medieval reasoning about sex, which sometimes differs from modern reasoning in non-obvious ways.

arguing that a priest who has sex with someone he is hearing confessions from is a form of incest—the priest being spiritual father—is much more about very medieval concerns about incest, defined extremely broadly

(I note, here, that incest has been defined to include a transgression that we’d now describe as professional sexual exploitation.)

The definition of sodomy, here, can be broad:

We then move to a chapter on The Care of Sodomites, looking at medieval confession manuals, starting with Paul of Hungary’s Summa of Penance which gets a touch obsessive about the “sin against nature” (any ejaculation not into a womb), now labelled Sodomy—it takes up about half his text and is denounced in the most absolute terms—and plays games with quotes from Augustine to get the result clearly desired.

Similarly, in the various state legal codes in the US, “sodomy” sometimes meant anal intercourse regardless of the sexes, sometimes included oral sex as well, and sometimes was illegal for same-sex couples but not opposite-sex ones, sometimes for both. The Free Dictionary discusses the legal definition of sodomy as follows:

Anal or oral intercourse between human beings, or any sexual relations between a human being and an animal, the act of which may be punishable as a criminal offense.

The word sodomy acquired different meanings over time. Under the Common Law, sodomy consisted of anal intercourse. Traditionally courts and statutes referred to it as a “crime against nature” or as copulation “against the order of nature.” In the United States, the term eventually encompassed oral sex as well as anal sex. The crime of sodomy was classified as a felony.

Now, let us consider the question of just how firm is that intuition of the wrongness of sodomy, that Feser references. What percentage of straight people really confine their sexual activity to those acts which result in the man ejaculating in the woman’s womb? The CDC gives us an idea, in its Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures: Men and Women 15-44 Years of Age, United States, 2002.

Among adult males 25-44 years of age, 97 percent have had sexual contact with an opposite-sex partner in their lives; 97 percent have had vaginal intercourse, 90 percent have had oral sex with a female, and 40 percent, anal sex with a female. Among women, the proportions who have had sexual contact with an opposite-sex partner were similar.

Perhaps we aren’t, as Andrew Sullivan says, all sodomites now, but it appears that 90 percent of us are.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 8:26 am and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.