If Contraception, Why Not Gay Marriage?

Crisis Magazine ^ | Howard Kainz

[Brian Kopp DPM]

July 7, 2011

If Contraception, Why Not Gay Marriage?

by Howard Kainz

In his book Heretics, G. K. Chesterton writes,

There are some people — and I am one of them — who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether in the long run, anything else affects them.

Chesterton is making the point that one’s general system of values is an all-important factor in the choices he makes. For example, someone who subscribes to Ayn Rand’s “philosophy of selfishness,” or to Peter Singer’s judgment that infanticide is permissible because of utilitarian values, or to Christopher Hitchens’s view that religion is the most dangerous thing on earth, or to theologian Rev. Richard McBrien’s claim that popes have no authority in morals, can be expected to act in certain ways and take certain positions when confronted with choices. If we know their world view, we do not have 100 percent certainty about particular choices they might make under particular circumstances — but we do have high probability.

The Catholic analytic philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe (1919-2001), whose 1958 article “Modern Moral Philosophy” instigated new movements in “virtue ethics” and renewed interest in natural law, astonished her academic colleagues at Cambridge University in 1979 by publishing Contraception and Chastity, a defense of the Catholic Church’s position on contraception. Anscombe’s influence is still being felt in the United States via the Anscombe Society at Princeton University.

Analytic philosophy is famous for investigating logical connections, even in ethics, and Anscombe draws out the inescapable deductions that can be made from a value system accepting contraception:

If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery, when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? … But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example. I am not saying: if you think contraception all right you will do these other things; not at all. The habit of respectability persists and old prejudices die hard. But I am saying: you will have no solid reason against these things. You will have no answer to someone who proclaims as many do that they are good too. You cannot point to the known fact that Christianity drew people out of the pagan world, always saying no to these things. Because, if you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition…. For in contraceptive intercourse you intend to perform a sexual act which, if it has a chance of being fertile, you render infertile. Qua your intentional action, then, what you do is something intrinsically unapt for generation (emphasis added).

In other words, Anscombe is saying that, if you believe you have a right to non-procreative sexual intercourse, you have no right to criticize non-procreative sex by others — for example, by a gay couple. You may justify your personal practices on the basis of your genuine mutual love and commitment to lifelong fidelity. But homosexuals may be even more intensely in love with each other and even more firmly committed to mutual fidelity. They may even be more open to procreation than you are, through adoption or through in vitro fertilization. To want to have sex without the possibility of offspring, and condemn others for similarly non-procreative sex, would be blatantly inconsistent.

According to polls, more than 80 percent of Catholic married couples are using various kinds of contraceptives in order to prevent or separate births. But there is no necessary connection between control of births and contraception. Natural family planning (NFP), which is approved by the Church and often used by couples who want to identify a woman’s fertile periods in order to have children, can also be used to space out births without contraceptives. NFP has been shown in various studies to be just as effective as the contraceptive pill. Systematic development and improvement of the Billings method of NFP over the years has been carried out at Creighton University. The Pope Paul VI institute at Creighton has a good history of assisting married and unmarried women with irregular cycles and other problems.

A variety of objections to gay marriage have been offered. Some oppose it because it arbitrarily redefines marriage, or because it is not suitable for children to have gay parents, or because it will involve greater taxpayer burdens for Medicare and Social Security down the line, and so forth. But if we are part of that 80 percent of Catholics who are also involved in non-procreative sex, we cannot take the “high road” and be opposed to gay marriage because of “immorality.” At the very least, Catholics who choose artificial contraceptive methods, in the interests of consistency, should modify their opposition to gay marriage. If and when they follow the Church’s teaching on contraception, which has not changed over two thousand years and was reiterated by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae, they will have a more secure moral justification for their opposition.

[DesertRhino]

That’s one sick article. That a married couple using birth control, is the same as homosexual sodomy. Sick minded logic.

[2ndDivisionVet]

[Brian Kopp DPM]

According to Natural Law, deliberately non procreative sex is non procreative sex, whether its between Adam and Eve or Adam and Steve. Martin Luther called marital contraceptive sex "marital sodomy."

[Viennacon]

“But homosexuals may be even more intensely in love with each other and even more firmly committed to mutual fidelity.”

The statistics make that EXTREMELY unlikely.

“They may even be more open to procreation than you are, through adoption”

This is possibly the most re7arded thing I’ve read this year so far. That’s like saying “they may even be more open to cooking than you are, through ordering takeout”

This article is also a little narrow. It’s true that most Catholics do not follow the church’s teaching on contraception, but this is simply not the case in every religious community that opposes sodomy as a sin. The Amish for example, follow these laws to the letter.
And when you say “80% of Catholics use contraception” that’s including a whole lot of people who are not Catholic by any measure, like Nazi Piglosi. There is a litmus test for practicing members of a faith. Dianne Feinstein can say she’s a practicing Jew, but she really isn’t.

[ResponseAbility]

****At the very least, Catholics who choose artificial contraceptive methods, in the interests of consistency, should modify their opposition to gay marriage. If and when they follow the Church’s teaching on contraception, which has not changed over two thousand years and was reiterated by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae, they will have a more secure moral justification for their opposition.****

So if one sin is OK two is better? If one believes it is a sin to use contraceptives but uses them anyway, telling them to add more sins against God is the precise opposite direction one should counsel. True consistency is to oppose homosexual “marriage”, and repent of the use of contraceptives as well.

[JPX2011]

Not at all. It’s two sides of the same coin. After all what is contraception but the denial of a human beings full masculinity or femininity. It’s a rejection. Deep down it’s hateful. “I love you honey, but not all the way. I accept you, only as so far as we reject your procreative abilities.” Just as homosexual sodomy is a rejection of that which was intended.

[Pikachu_Dad]

If sodomy, then why not polygamy?

if polygamy, then any not zoo gamy?

if zoo gamy, then why not pedophilia?

[Brian Kopp DPM]

Breaking Silence: Catholics, Contraception, and Same-Sex Marriage

Mary Rice Hasson | 07-08-AD2013 | [44]

As the dust settles on the Supreme Court’s marriage rulings, Catholics and other defenders of traditional marriage have stepped forward with new energy and comprehensive strategies to preserve marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

On Redstate.com, Ryan T. Anderson sees the dissenting opinions of Supreme Court Justices Alito, Roberts, and Scalia in the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) ruling as “flares signaling the path that marriage proponents must take from here.”

From those dissents, Anderson sketches his own vision for strengthening marriage. We need “to start living out the truth about marriage…to insist that the government respect those who continue to stand for marriage as the union of a man and a woman…[and] to redouble our efforts at explaining what marriage is, why marriage matters and what the consequences are of redefining marriage…We should frame our message, strengthen coalitions, devise strategies and bear witness. We must develop and multiply our artistic, pastoral and reasoned defenses of the conjugal view as the truth about marriage, and to make ever plainer our policy reasons for enacting it.”

A huge task, to be sure, but a cogent vision nonetheless.

Let me offer a few thoughts on one part of that task, the challenge of bringing the marriage message home to Catholics.

Anderson highlights Justice Alito’s view that the marriage debate is a contest between two ideas, “the conjugal view of marriage: a ‘comprehensive, exclusive, permanent union that is intrinsically ordered to producing children,’” and “the consent-based idea that marriage is a commitment marked by emotional union.”

These dueling ideas square off in Supreme Court briefs, intellectual spaces like Public Discourse or First Things, and in the ‘New Conversation about Marriage’ at the Institute for American Values. 

But for many ordinary Americans—already conditioned by the sexual revolution to separate babies from sex and sex from marriage—Justice Alito’s ‘contest of ideas’ over marriage is all but invisible. (And in this respect, Catholics are no different from their fellow Americans.)

Sundering Sex and Procreation 

Heterosexual marriage has been functioning for decades now as a commitment based on love. Children? Optional. It’s a mindset primed to accept homosexual coupling and same-sex marriage.

Back in 2005, liberal historian Stephanie Coontz observed that the deconstruction of traditional marriage (and the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage) was a predictable consequence of the separation of sex and procreation.

Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution. Heterosexuals were the ones who made procreation voluntary, so that some couples could choose childlessness, and who adopted assisted reproduction so that even couples who could not conceive could become parents. And heterosexuals subverted the long-standing rule that every marriage had to have a husband who played one role in the family and a wife who played a completely different one. Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.

If Coontz, Co-Chair of the Council on Contemporary Families and a supporter of same-sex marriage, could name the problem (the separation of sex from procreation) back then, why couldn’t we? More precisely, why didn’t we?

Our priests didn’t preach and our teachers didn’t teach because contraception was the unmentionable sin-that-wasn’t. Why risk alienating parishioners (and donors) by condemning The Pill and other sundry methods? Makes things a tad awkward over coffee and donuts later in the cafeteria. Besides, no one wants to be “that guy,” the rube at a Manhattan cocktail party, bumbling, ridiculous, and very uncool.

So our congregations sat comfortably in their pews, undisturbed by truth. Let’s own this fact: Silence paved the way for Catholics’ ‘progressive’ march from yesterday’s contraception to today’s same-sex marriage.

Perhaps that’s an impolitic thing to say.

But until we name the problem correctly, we can’t fix it. At least in Catholic circles, if we hope to defend “the conjugal view as the truth about marriage,” we’ve got to teach anew the truth about sex. Why? Because the truth about sexuality is the basis for the truth about marriage.

Successful arguments in the public square may or may not begin in the same place.

But within our own families, parishes, and Catholic communities, Catholics need to hear that gender matters–that sexual complementarity, designed by God, tells us something about the sexual act, its purpose, and the moral norms that govern it. Catholics need to reconnect sex and reproduction, to realize that all ‘kinds’ of sex aren’t “equal” (some, in fact, are immoral), and to understand marriage in relation to these truths.

Catholics need to hear the big picture, to see the coherence of the entire truth. They need to know that the Church’s teaching against contraception is not an outlier among Catholic teachings, an outdated asterisk with little relevance to modern sexuality. (Nor is it some patriarchal plot to ensure that Catholic women produce lots of little Catholics.) On the contrary, the Church’s teaching on contraception flows from an integrated view of the human person, human dignity and sexuality—and that same truth provides the reason why marriage can only be the union of one man and one woman.

According to the Catholic women I’ve been interviewing over the past year, few Catholics hear much of anything from the pulpit about the Church’s teachings on sexuality and contraception. Although an increasing number hear the Church’s message that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, many aren’t buying it. The latest Barna Group polling shows that only 50% of practicing Catholics define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. (Barna defined “practicing Catholics” as those who attend Church at least once a month and consider their faith very important in their lives.)

We’ve got to understand why these Catholics don’t accept the truth about marriage: it’s because they don’t accept the truth about sex. And that’s the underlying problem we must address.

Today’s Catholics, especially younger Catholics, are by and large the products of public schools and a sexually corrupt culture. They’ve been taught (without hearing any countervailing voices in their parish) that gender is fluid and sex is only about pleasure. Every kind of sexual activity—anal, oral, vaginal, twosomes, threesomes, etc. —becomes an equally valid choice for consenting adults. (Newly released Gallup data shows that 68% of Catholics overall say that gay and lesbian sexual relations are morally acceptable, while just 29% believes those relations are morally wrong. Even among weekly church-goers, almost one-third believes homosexual sex is moral.)

Today’s Catholics also have learned—often from Catholic voices—that reproduction is a deliberate add-on to the sexual relationship, not an intrinsic aspect of sexual love, and indeed might be accomplished best in a petri dish miles away from the marriage bed.

It doesn’t take much, then, for Catholics to see marriage through minimalist eyes, as society’s validation of a couple’s commitment status and, not incidentally, as a vehicle that confer benefits. From that perspective, restricting marriage to one man and one woman seems little more than a hoary tradition—the vestige of a less enlightened era—that becomes hurtful and discriminatory to those excluded from it. And that’s where a huge percentage of Catholics are today.

Defending marriage is a vast and vital task. We need to work on all fronts, as Ryan Anderson argued so persuasively. But in our outreach to the larger society, let’s not overlook the extensive “in-house” work that needs to be done with our fellow Catholics.

If silence paved the way for Catholics’ ‘progressive’ march from yesterday’s contraception to today’s same-sex marriage, then it’s not hard to see the remedy. Catholics, be not afraid to teach, preach, and live the truth—especially the truth about sex and contraception.

[Brian Kopp DPM]

Contraception Leads Logically to Same-Sex 'Marriage'

By Father Brian W. Harrison, O.S., M.A., S.T.D.
It has taken less than a century for the Anglicans' chickens to come home to roost.

We have recently heard the news that the Episcopalian Church, as of 2013, will be carrying out ceremonies for same-sex "marriages," which were recently established legally in the District of Columbia. And this will take place in Washington's National Cathedral, no less – a prestigious symbol of American civil religion. But if human attitudes, behavior and legislation changed in as short a time as it takes to deduce on paper a logical conclusion from its premises, this might well have happened a long time ago: in 1930, to be precise.

That's when the Lambeth Conference – the nearest thing the world-wide Anglican Communion has to an ecumenical council – gave its approval to some instances of conjugal contraception. In doing so, it became the first significant religious body in Western civilization to contradict three thousand years of Judeo-Christian teaching, dating back to the Book of Genesis, that it is gravely immoral to deliberately deprive one's genital acts of their God-given procreative power. (For a rebuttal of the currently fashionable claim that the Bible does not condemn contraception as such, see my article "The Sin of Onan Revisited" at www.rtforum.org/lt/lt67.html.)

This logical connection between the 1930 and 2013 decisions is worth explaining a little more fully. In fact, it has had a profound impact on my own life. Right at the chronological mid-point between those two dates, in 1971-1972, the debates then raging over both contraception and homosexuality became a key factor in my own conversion to the Catholic faith. The prominence of those debates in the media and the wider culture at that time was to a large extent fallout from Humanae Vitae (1968) and the new "gay liberation" movement that had been rapidly gathering force since the Stonewall confrontation of 1969.

I reached adulthood in the mid-sixties, when The Pill was making a lot of news. Like most folks of that era brought up as non-Catholics (I was a practicing Presbyterian), I could see nothing much wrong with contraception, and considered opposition to it on moral grounds as being just one more of those strange Roman Catholic ideas I had been taught to regard as irrational and unbiblical. (Or perhaps not so irrational, in this case. For wise mentors would tell me knowingly that of course "RC" opposition to contraceptives was basically an instance of astute priestcraft: the hierarchy wanted to see "lots of little Catholics" in order to promote by stealth the Church's ultimate goal of reconquering the West. You know: demography as warfare by other means.)

What prompted me to radically rethink my laissez-faire approach to contraception was precisely the kind of argumentation then being employed by the militant homosexuals. This was a time when the average person in our society, religious or otherwise, still retained enough culturally inherited sense of the philosophia perennis to recognize that human nature grounds and imposes certainly rationally recognizable norms of morally upright behavior. So the great majority of people forty years ago disapproved of homosexual acts; and, if asked why, most would have responded that such acts were clearly "against nature," or "unnatural."

But the gay militants were challenging this position with a highly effective ad hominem retort. It held good for just about all Westerners except Pope Paul VI and his orthodox Catholic followers. "Hey, you folks can't trot out that argument against our lifestyle! What's the big deal about something being 'unnatural'? Using condoms, diaphragms and pills to block conception isn't 'natural' sex either! But you already stopped calling these things immoral at least a generation ago; and now contraceptives even have the U.S. Supreme Court's stamp of approval since it struck down the Victorian-era Comstock Laws that prohibited their sale and distribution."

Touché.

Little by little, Western public opinion, and with it cultural and legislative norms, have been catching up with the laws of logic. The two horns of the dilemma required that something had to give here: If acceptance of contraception implied acceptance of sodomy, then it was a case of either "So much the worse for contraceptives," or "So much the worse for the whole traditional Christian concept of chastity." I chose the former alternative, reasoning that any ethical judgment which logically flashed a green-light go-ahead signal for practices so grossly and obviously impure as oral and anal sex just had to be wrong.

St. Thomas Aquinas alludes to such practices as "monstrous and bestial forms of copulation" (Summa Theologiae, IIa IIae, Q. 154, art. 11). Indeed, in his wisdom, Aquinas here groups together all those types of act "from which generation cannot follow" as different varieties of "the sin against nature." That is, he sees them all as belonging to the same "family," so to speak, of unnatural mortal sins, even though they differ in gravity. (For St. Thomas, masturbation is the least objectionable and bestiality the worst of all.)

I came to realize that if we approve any one of these intrinsically sterile types of sexual act, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to find any conclusive argument for completely ruling out any of the others. This realization – that the indignant critics of Humanae Vitae were, consciously or unconsciously, pulling the plug on the whole Christian ethic of purity and chastity – in turn expedited my entry into the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil Mass of 1972.

The Anglican Communion, at Lambeth four decades earlier, had already implicitly opted for the second horn of the above dilemma: "So much the worse for the whole traditional Christian concept of chastity." So its new decision in 2013 to "go with the flow" and start blessing same-sex "marriages" can be seen as an explicit, harmonious and consistent working out of the revolutionary principle it had already endorsed in 1930, to wit, that the intrinsic sterility of a given type of genital act does not necessarily render it immoral.

We can see at work here a kind of perverse parallel to what in Catholic theology has been known since Blessed J. H. Newman's time as "the development of doctrine." Fortunately, the intrinsic and grave immorality of all such sterile genital acts has long been set in stone by the Catholic Church: this is a clear instance of the infallibility of her ordinary and universal magisterium (cf. Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, #25). The current furious attacks on her "homophobia" will no doubt continue, and seduce even many within the Church's own ranks. But ultimately the assailants will realize that trying to batter down the Rock of Peter is a fruitless exercise.

(Remnant editor Michael J. Matt's note: This article was submitted to us by its author, having originally appeared in Inside the Vatican: February 2013, p. 47)

[Salamander]

Logical fallacy.

No birth control is 100% guaranteed effective against pregnancy.

All homo sex is.

[Ransomed]

There’s no group out there that accepts homosexual actions but doesn’t accept birth control within marriage, as far as I have ever heard of anyhow. You would think there would be a few if there was absolutely no connection there.

Freegards

[ifinnegan]

This is not very logical, nor premised well.

Doesn’t make much sense.

[JPX2011]

It’s all part of the same package. The narcissistic deification of self. I alone am the master of my destiny. Devoid of any consideration for natural law. It’s no wonder the homosexual community can often be found present at pro-abortion rallies and vice versa.

Comrades in arms in the sexual heresy.

[ctdonath2]

Because despite contraceptives, which require active deliberate use, hetero couples still manage to procreate. Homo couples don’t, ever.

[JouleZ]

That a married couple using birth control, is the same as homosexual sodomy. Sick minded logic.

**********

Yes it is. I know one thing that is true. Jesus drank wine but he never did that. Some sins are not okay. Deal with it, Homos.

[JPX2011]

I don’t know if we can say that because hetero couples manage to “get the job done” despite contraceptives that we can separate homo sex under the same rubric. I suppose one could if they were looking at it strictly as a pragmatic/biological consideration.

[oblomov]

So where did Jesus denounce contraception?

[daniel1212]

In other words, Anscombe is saying that, if you believe you have a right to non-procreative sexual intercourse, you have no right to criticize non-procreative sex by others — for example, by a gay couple.

That sexual relations are only sanctioned for procreative purposes is heresy, while equating preventing conception with sodomy on that basis is perverse.

Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love. (Proverbs 5:18-19)

And Song of Solomon in part glorifies eros in marriage outside any context of child bearing.

[BlatherNaut]

Contraceptive References in the Bible

In explaining the Church's teaching about contraception, many people mistakenly think that this teaching is relatively new, something which occurred with Humanae Vitae in 1968.

Other people, from a more fundamentalist bent, want to know if there is any basis in Sacred Scripture for these teachings. In reviewing both Sacred Scripture as well as the history of our Church's teaching in this area, one finds a very positive and solid foundation, as has been presented to date.

Concerning "What does the Bible have to say?" the very positive presentation concerning creation, marital love, and covenant emerges from the texts of Sacred Scripture. However, we also discover references to any violation of the unitive-procreative dimensions of marital love and to the divine consequences which followed. In Genesis, we find the story of Onan, the second son of Judah, who married Tamar, the widow of his older brother Er. (The Levirate law of Judaism prescribed that if the oldest brother died, the next oldest, single brother would marry his widow to preserve the family line.) The Bible reads, "Onan, however, knew that the descendants would not be counted as his; so whenever he had relations with his brother's widow, he wasted his seed on the ground, to avoid contributing offspring for his brother. What he did greatly offended the Lord, and the Lord took his life." (Cf. Genesis 38:1ff). Here is a basic form of contraception � withdrawal, and clearly a sin in the eyes of God....

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/religion/re0663.html