Thursday 27 September 2012

Homophobia: what does it really mean?

In discussing same-sex issues, let's scrap the labels and return to facts.

According to the United States Centre for Disease Control (CDC), as of 2009, men who have sex with men (MSM) accounted for approximately 2 percent of the US population, but 56 percent of people living with HIV. This same demographic suffered 61 percent of all new HIV infections that year.

The CDC uses the concept of MSM because actions speak louder than words: actual behaviour is a better predictor of disease risk than self-identification. But even though actions speak louder than words, words are much easier to interpret. In fact, words are too easy to interpret, and in our contemporary verbal glut we are at risk of losing touch with the meaning embodied in real actions and real objects.

Here’s the problem: the CDC uses the term “MSM”, and we discover to our surprise that we don’t really know how to interpret such a concept. If only they’d said “gay men”, we could all slide neatly into our prejudices. MSM is a fact; “homosexuality” is an idea, an interpretation, an ideology, a historical movement, and a rallying point in the culture war. Does MSM equal homosexuality? Some would answer “yes”, others “no”, and thus we are back in the realm of interpretation.

If we are going to be intellectually honest, we should try to capture the truth beneath mere interpretation and prejudice. But escaping from an established framework is hard work. Some people frame the debate over same-sex marriage as an attack on traditional values by a gay lobby intent on normalising and gaining public affirmation for their lifestyle choices. Other people frame the debate as a homophobic bulldozer of religious conviction crushing the basic human rights of a long-victimised minority.

How can we reach the truth? In part, by paying close attention to the words we use. The “traditional values” group rejects the word “homophobia”, or applies it only in the most narrow circumstances to instances of violent thuggery or of actual mental illness. In contrast the “victimised minority” group defines homophobia very broadly, arguing that since there are no rational grounds for negative appraisal of sexual orientations, any criticism of homosexuality must be derived from irrational prejudices or emotional responses.

Whether we equate MSM to homosexuality or not; whether we define homophobia narrowly or broadly; all too often we are dealing with judgements, interpretations, and labels, not reality. This is dangerous territory for serious thinkers, where everyday language is so loaded with advocacy and emotion we may be better off not using it at all.

How should we describe or interpret the savagery of people who physically, verbally, and psychologically abuse innocent people because of their sexual identity or orientation? Most people interpret such actions as homophobia. Yet the same label is pinned on a person who simply believes it is not good for men to have sex with men, or even to one who believes, despite his own sympathies, that marriage should not be redefined to include same-sex couples.

The power of that one word, homophobia, has been a significant feature of the same-sex marriage debate. Homophobia, the term, was invented in the 1960s by psychologist Dr George Weinberg to challenge the prevailing view that homosexuality was a psychological disorder. Weinberg effectively turned the tables on the prevailing view, alleging through his medically-inspired term that hostility to homosexuality was itself a psycho-social problem.

In a 1971 essay appropriately entitled “Words for the New Culture,” Weinbergdefined homophobia as: “the dread of being in close quarters with homosexuals—and in the case of homosexuals themselves, self-loathing.” Despite the “phobia” label suggestive of mental illness, Weinberg seemed to conflate the term with mere prejudice, thereby adding to the complexity of the homophobia concept:

“The phobia in operation is a prejudice, and this means we can widen our understanding by considering the phobia from the point of view of its being a prejudice and then uncovering its motives “

Tracing the history of “homophobia”, Professor Gregory Herek has argued that despite its limitations, the invention of the word was a “milestone” in the public debate. Herek’s analysis identifies two important functions for the term. On the one hand the term:

“stood a central assumption of heterosexual society on its head by locating the ‘problem’ of homosexuality not in homosexual people, but in heterosexuals who were intolerant of gay men and lesbians.”

but it also

“crystallized the experiences of rejection, hostility, and invisibility that homosexual men and women in mid-20th century North America had experienced throughout their lives.”

This one term has the power to represent the suffering of men and women with same-sex attraction, both to themselves as individuals and to the community at large. Putting a label on prejudice and ill-treatment empowers the victim to identify and speak out against such behaviour.

But is it really fair to apply the same term to people who merely have different beliefs about the nature and morality of homosexuality? The implication is that anyone who reaches a conclusion that conflicts with the established view of homosexuality may be guilty – even in the most remote degrees – of contributing to a climate in which prejudice, violence, hostility and rejection are encouraged.

Even to critique the use of the term homophobia is potentially homophobic, because it implicitly disempowers use of the homophobia label to describe and identify instances of prejudice and ill-treatment. Criticising homophobia may be likened to criticising the concepts of racism or sexism.

The broad sweep of the homophobia pejorative also makes it harder for ordinary people to distance themselves from the truly prejudiced. Wielding the term without nuance means that genuine cranks and violent thugs are lumped into the same category as people who simply believe, for example, that it is not good for men to have sex with men. Not only is the generalisation unfair to dispassionate people who would never dream of assaulting, ridiculing, or otherwise ill-treating another human being, but the implication that we must take-sides in this cultural battle risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. The presumption of ill-will prevents us separating legitimate ethical and philosophical questions from vicious attitudes and actions. Or, to put it in practical terms: as the public debate intensifies, there is an increased risk of dispassionate thinkers becoming unwittingly aligned with truly malicious people.

I’d like to propose a radical solution to this mess. Let’s scrap the labels. Let’s return the facts.

What is “homosexuality” after all, but a made-up word some hundred or so years old, created for the express purpose of making reality easier to talk about, easier to interpret, and easier to spin to one’s own advantage. Leave the term for the interested parties to fight over. It is only useful as an indicator of something real. When it distorts and confuses more than it conveys, there is nothing for a dispassionate thinker to gain from its use.

Let us take a hint from the CDC and use our words to match the realities we wish to describe. If we want to talk about men who have sex with men, we should prefer this clumsy accuracy over the convenient confusion of “homosexual”. If we want to talk about women who are sexually attracted to women, we should describe it in these terms. If we want to refer to the cruel, petty, malicious people who would taunt, abuse, and assault an innocent person for any excuse, then we can describe them in their full inglorious detail.

This is surely the best way to avoid the tribal affiliations and interpretive milieus surrounding this issue, which have now taken on a life and an impetus of their own. The simple discipline of sticking to clear terms with clear meaning based on real things can save us from the confused and emotionally charged battle over other people’s interpretations of reality.

We have reached a point where terminology points more toward personal identities, socio-political agendas, and the manipulation of culture than to real actions and objects. It may be easier to start from scratch than to try to make overloaded concepts like homosexuality and homophobia fit into a sensible and nuanced worldview.

This isn’t just a trick to avoid getting into arguments with people – it’s a means of escaping a damaging and misleading set of interpretations that make a sound grasp of reality difficult to accomplish.

Kids hookup sexually, become headhunters

FR. ROBERT BARRON

October 1, 2012

I first came across the term "hookup culture" in Leonard Sax's thought provoking and disturbing 2005 book, Why Gender Matters. But the phenomenon itself I found beautifully depicted in a novel published a year earlier: Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons.

As Sax specifies, the hookup mentality – prevalent among even some very young people but especially among university students – dictates that casual sexual encounters involving absolutely no expectation of relationship, or even psychological engagement, are perfectly acceptable.

Sax, a psychiatrist specializing in family therapy, learned of the hookup world from the veritable army of young women suffering from depression and anxiety who were streaming to his office.

Through the figure of Charlotte Simmons – an innocent girl from North Carolina who utterly lost her way morally and psychologically at a prestigious university where casual sex and drugs were far more important than learning – Wolfe showed the debilitating effects of this self-absorbed and hedonistic culture.

Now it would seem self-evident that such permissiveness, though prevalent, is morally problematic and something to be decried rather than celebrated. But peruse an article titled "Boys on the Side" in the most recent edition of The Atlantic to find a dissenting opinion.

A GREAT 'BOON'

According to Hanna Rosin, the hookup mentality is, in point of fact, a great boon to women. She allows that lots of books and studies have pointed out the dark side of the hookup culture, the deep frustration and humiliation that can follow from transient sexual encounters, but she insists that steady questioning of typical young women today would reveal that none of them really wants a return to traditional morality.

She argues, "For most women, the hookup culture is like an island they visit, mostly during their college years and even then only when they are bored or experimenting or don't know any better. But it is not a place where they drown."

Why aren't they destroyed by this sexual licentiousness? Rosin explains, "The most patient and thorough research about the hookup culture shows that over the long run, women benefit greatly from living in a world where they can have sexual adventure without commitment or all that much shame, and where they can enter into temporary relationships that don't get in the way of future success."

One might think that prevalence of casual sex would produce women who are sexual victims, but Rosin contends that precisely the opposite is the case. Young women who choose a variety of sexual partners and who assiduously steer clear of pesky relationships are "managing their romantic lives like savvy headhunters."

Instead of being manipulated by powerful men, young ladies are happily becoming adept at manipulation. Here is Rosin's grand conclusion: "The hookup culture is too bound up with everything that's fabulous about being a young woman in 2012 – the freedom, the confidence, the knowledge that you can always depend on yourself."

Now I would like you to concentrate on that last statement. Notice how every virtue that Rosin cites – freedom, confidence, self-reliance – is a subjective disposition.

No one in his right mind would contend that those attitudes are anything but good, but they are good precisely in the measure that they order a person to some objective value that lies outside of his subjectivity.

POTENTIALLY DESTRUCTIVE

We savour freedom because it is the condition for the possibility of pursuing the good in a responsible way; we think that confidence and self-reliance are worthwhile, because they enable one to achieve the good easily and joyfully.

But if the question of the objectively valuable is bracketed, then those subjective dispositions lose their orientation and devolve, in point of fact, into something quite destructive.

What struck me throughout Rosin's article was the complete absence of a reference to the objectively valuable in regard to sexual behavior. The purpose of sex? The meaning of the sexual act? The proper ethical, or dare I say religious, setting for sexuality? Never mentioned – and apparently irrelevant.

All that seems to matter is that young people – especially young women – have the opportunity to define themselves sexually however they want, to "manage" their sexual activity "like savvy headhunters."

Can I suggest that that last phrase is telling indeed? When the realm of the objectively valuable is marginalized, the subject will inevitably fall back on herself, stewing in her own juices.

SELFISH SELVES

Let's be honest, left to our own devices, the vast majority of us will do what is most convenient and most selfish. (The Church, by the way, refers to this natural tendency toward self-absorption as the principle effect of "original sin.")

In the arena of sexuality, the one-sided stress on freedom and self-reliance will lead, in short order, to manipulation, domination and indifference to relationship. But when the sexual impulse is ordered according to the objective values of love, commitment, marriage and the call of God, then it is transfigured into something radiant and rare.

The hookup culture is all about sexual freedom. However, it would be wise to remember a line from Bob Dylan, "Freedom, just around the corner from you/ but with truth so far off, what good would it do?"

Sexual liberty without objective value produces a lot of savvy headhunters, but they will wind up in Dr. Sax's office suffering from a deep sadness of the heart.

Wednesday 26 September 2012

How Women Made Porn Fashionable

By Patrick Wanis

Published September 15, 2012

| FoxNews.com

Porn is becoming a new ideal and value for young girls. And women are responsible.

Women are consuming and endorsing porn such as ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ -- a book recognized as ‘mommy porn.’ Poorly written, it is not a how-to-manual and it’s not poetic erotica.

Pulp/romance novels transformed into a new genre embracing porn as literature - explicitly sexual scenes featuring bondage/discipline, dominance/submission and sadism/masochism.

More than 20 million copies have sold in the US (40 million worldwide), and it is yet another example of the way porn is becoming more than socially acceptable amongst women. Moreover, it is becoming an aspirational target for women.

Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian became famous and rich for making a sex tape, and they spun off empires of TV shows, fashion lines, perfumes and paid appearances. The message is: one leads to the other. But it is women who made Kardashian famous. And it is women who have become the fans and consumers of everything Kardashian and books such as Fifty Shades of Grey.

Using sex for money and fame, women have found a new way to feel powerful and secure without a man or even necessarily a family – Octomom has openly become a porn actress and stripper.

Mothers, too, are now sexualizing their daughters and dressing them up as sexual candy for the world. Lindsay Jackson dressed her 5-year-old, Madisyn ‘Maddy’ Verst, in a sexy police uniform and a Dolly Parton outfit complete with padded breasts and padded backside for a TV reality show. And Jessica Simpson dressed her 4-month-old girl in bikinis.

Porn could never have become mainstream and socially acceptable without the support and endorsement by women. In human behavior, we call this ‘the law of frequency’ -- the more often two things are linked, the more powerful that association becomes until they become inseparable. And women and the media have linked consuming porn or behaving like a porn actress with instant money, fame, power, glamour, prestige, respectability and social acceptability. In other words, if you become a porn actress or behave like one, you will triumph with all of these things.

Accordingly, girls are more fascinated and driven by the desire to become famous than they are to become an engineer, doctor or scientist: Kim Kardashian has 14 million followers on Twitter.Thus, women are creating new values and morality promoting money, power and glamour as more important than intelligence, achievement, motherhood or contribution. Studies reveal that female college students are more narcissistic than males. And teenage girls are now also becoming fans of porn actors such as 26-year-old James Deen.

The paradox is that women are becoming more educated than men as women surpass men in attendance and graduation rates – for every two men who get a college degree, three women will do also. But, women are failing to realize the dangers of falling for porn or promoting porn as the new fashionable profession and path to fame, riches and glory. This is the antithesis of female empowerment as MTV, Kim Kardashian and Octomom are teaching young girls to gain power over men by using sex.

Women have now created false empty idols and have lost their real sense of self-worth, value and significance, replacing it with fleeting pseudo-power and artificial values and relationships, leaving them feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfied.

I appeal to women to beware of being deceived and betrayed into the world of porn and sexual objectification the same way that women were tricked into smoking cigarettes in the 1920s.

In April 1929, a PR expert, Edward Bernays, working for a US tobacco company, hired young models to march in the New York City parade and alerted the press that they were fighting for women’s rights by lighting "Torches of Freedom" as they lit up and smoked cigarettes. The media publicized the event and it helped to break the taboo against women smoking in public. In the same way, women today are using porn as a misguided attempt to gain power and freedom, and to become more powerful and independent. And they are only betraying and fooling themselves.

Pornography is much more than a moral or social issue.

Renowned physicist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Dr. Jeffrey Satinover says porn is “a form of heroin, hundred times more powerful than before.” Forensic psychologist, M. Douglas Reed and renowned pharmacologist Candace Pert reveal that pornography is like a drug that triggers the brain to release a psychopharmacological flood of “epinephrine, testosterone, endorphins (endogenous morphine), oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, and phenyethylamine,” which can lead to addiction and various other behavioral disorders.

Gail Dines, professor of sociology and women's studies and chairwoman of the American Studies Department at Wheelock College in Boston, has written about and researched the porn industry for over two decades. Professor Dines, author of “Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality,” believes porn is a public health issue with documented negative effects on young people, distorting "the way women and girls think about their bodies, their sexuality and their relationships."

Pornography is equally damaging to adult relationships and social bonds – men are struggling to develop close, intimate relationships with real women with some men now preferring porn to sex with an actual human being.

Bottom line: porn does not promote love or sex but rather cruelty and hatred to women, and so, while women continue to endorse and make porn fashionable or a new ideal, they are foolishly robbing themselves and undermining all of the positive strides and triumphs they have made in their quest for equality.

Tuesday 25 September 2012

The end of men - and women

If masculinity is doomed, so is femininity, as a new book demonstrates.

It would be easy to misunderstand the meaning of Hanna Rosin’s now celebratedtheme “the end of men”. The title of the American writer’s 2010 Atlantic magazine article, and now of a full-blown book, signifies not the total redundancy of men as sub-species of the human race (although a biology professor recently suggestedwe were near that point) but the end of masculinity as we have known it. What is in sight is the end of men as providers and protectors, as leaders and authorities -- roles based on their physical strength and capacity for fatherhood.

As I have noted before, this also means that what Rosin calls “the rise of women” (the subtitle of her book) is actually “the end of women” in the sense that femininity has no meaning once masculinity disappears.

Her prediction is based on long-term changes in the workforce which have now given women an edge over men in some respects, and resulting domestic changes. She assumes that this is a good thing, that we have arrived at a kind of evolutionary point from which women can lead men towards a new balance of power -- if only men will learn from women how to adapt to the new economic and social climate.

Is she right? It depends on what you mean by adaptation. Few lament the passing of the strict role segregation of the “patriarchal” era, or higher education for more women and their increasing role in professional life and public leadership. But the attempt to push this trend towards a strict equality that refuses to give any significance to sexual differences is a denial of reality that will have serious consequences for the family and the whole of society.

One can reject such assumptions, however, and still benefit from Rosin’s presentation of statistical trends and their impact on particular lives, since they are potentially revolutionary and we do have to contend with them.

The “mancession” and the house-husband

Men -- working class men anyway -- have been hard hit by the changing economy. The decline of manufacturing and the rise of the service and “knowledge” industries have made male strength and the skills based on it increasingly redundant and left large numbers of men unemployed. This process has been accelerated by recent recessions to the point where people talk of a “mancession”. Around one in five of men of prime working age today are not working.

Rosin observes that men who have lost their old jobs find it hard to accept the jobs that are available -- typically “women’s work” such as sales, teaching, accounting, nursing and child care. It is easy to appreciate that a man accustomed to using heavy machinery in a textile mill is not thrilled at the prospect of sitting in front of a computer in a call centre or looking after toddlers in daycare -- let alone collecting the meagre pay packet for such work.

Women, by contrast, have seized the opportunities of the new economy, and by early 2010 had become a small majority of the US workforce. While men start again at the bottom of the ladder in some new activity, women are climbing into managerial positions. They study part-time at community college and get new qualifications. At universities they outnumber men and outstrip them in completing degrees. Young women overall earn more money than young men, says Rosin.

Why? Because women are “plastic” and willingly adapt themselves to the new conditions, and because the new jobs happen to value skills that come naturally to them: things like sitting still and concentrating, listening to people and communicating openly. Men need to learn from women’s flexibility and skills, Rosin suggests.

Becoming a house-husband while your wife spends all day (and perhaps half the night) at the office is one way to learn. Rosin paints a picture of wives becoming breadwinners and husbands looking after the kids and doing the housework and shopping -- while, perhaps, doing some freelance work or trying to start a new business. Just the way mothers at home have tended to do. College girls in Kansas tell Rosin they expect to be the breadwinners. One talks about men as “the new ball and chain”.

Rosin lays out this whole scenario from her vantage point as a married woman with a husband, who could well be one of the new-style plastic men (David Plotz is the editor of the Washington Post’s online magazine Slate and Rosin runs the site’s XX blog), and three children. The new work and domestic dispensation has worked for them, presumably.

Further down the social scale, however, the imbalance between men and women in education, skills and employability is wreaking havoc on the family. Women with jobs and prospects don’t want to marry down; they would rather, it seems, join the swelling ranks of single mothers. Nearly 60 percent of births to women with high school degrees or less now occur outside marriage, and while some of these women may be cohabiting with the father of their children, such relationships are notoriously unstable. Marriage is becoming a luxury of the educated elite.

It’s the family, not the economy, stupid

So much for trends. But what are we to make of them?

One can accept that working class men should be more adaptable. They should contribute more to childcare and domestic work -- as many already do. They should be happy to see women succeed in the workforce and, if they are unemployed with a family, they should be grateful that at least one parent is bringing in a wage. All this can be taken for granted.

What should not be taken for granted is that society is evolving to a point where gender based roles don’t count at all. What we should not accept is Rosin’s cheerful assumption that masculinity itself is doomed -- and with it, necessarily, femininity.

The distinctive masculine and feminine roles of the past have a sound basis: male and female biology and its orientation towards procreation and the family. And it is the needs of the family - in particular what is best for children -- that should shape the economy, not the other way round.

Since one of the parents must invest more heavily in nurturing young children, why not the mother, who has been favoured for it by nature? Why not let men play second fiddle at home and invest more heavily in providing for the family’s material needs? Why not look to the father as the protector, since his physical strength fits him for the role?

This is not to deny that women can combine motherhood and careers, or that at times mothers will have to be breadwinners and fathers play the domestic role, but all this can happen without the need to discard the norm of sexual complementarity altogether. Studies consistently show that mothers of young children typically prefer part-time work to full-time.

The pill, sexual culture, and the end of the human race

There is no evolutionary inevitability about current trends, as Rosin seems to suggest.

The current feminised form of the workforce is not the outcome of some inherent law of production and distribution. It is, to a large degree, an artefact of the contraceptive revolution and the abrupt end that brought to a more natural level of fertility and the domestic culture that went with it. As Rosin herself notes, women came flooding into the workforce in the 1970s, after the pill and legalised abortion became available.

Feminist ideology also played its part in this revolution with its insistence on equality -- a term that meant, in practice, sameness. And so we arrived at the notions of gender equity and the interchangeability of women and men in both the public and domestic spheres. Some of the consequences of this should alarm us.

In a revealing chapter of her book, published separately in the Atlantic under the heading “Boys on the Side”, Rosin describes the sexual customs of some (presumably typical) college women. Practically every serious-minded person who has commented on the trend of “hooking up” -- that is, casual sex on the agreed basis that there is no emotional investment or commitment at all -- regards it as harmful to young women. But Rosin reports that today’s ambitious college girls are appropriating the hook-up culture as a way to stay focused on their career track while getting their rightful share of sexual pleasure. (See “A dangerous dish” for further comment.)

From the point of view of human dignity, of course, this suggests the “fall of women” rather than their “rise” and yet, disturbingly, Rosin completely approves of it. “To put it crudely,” she says, feminist progress right now largely depends on the existence of the hook-up culture.”

It’s Rosin’s views on sex, ultimately, that undermine her judgement concerning the future of either men or women, but we are obliged to her for showing so clearly on what morally precarious foundations the rise of women now rests.

What is clear is that the end of men (masculinity) would also mean the end of women (femininity) and the reduction of both sexes to a state of plasticity that makes them perfect ciphers for “the economy” (the political and financial establishment). That way lies the end of the human race

itself.

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.

Tuesday 18 September 2012

Waiting till the wedding night – getting married the right way

By Steven Crowder

Published September 14, 2012

| FoxNews.com

As anyone who’s read my abstinence column here at Fox News Opinion could guess, my wedding is something that I’ve looked forward to for quite some time. After having tied the knot at the end of August, I can now say beyond all shadow of a doubt, that it was everything I’d hoped and prayed that it would be since childhood. (I’d also prayed to be bitten by a radioactive spider and develop sticky hands, but… I was an idiot.)

Let me preface this column by saying this: my wife (I have to get used to saying that) and I not only waited sexually in every way (no, we didn’t pull the Bill Clinton and technically avoid “sex” sex,) but we didn’t shack up as live-ins and most importantly, we courted each other in a way that was consistent with our publicly professed values.

We did it right.

Feeling judged? I couldn’t care less. You know why? Because my wife and I were judged all throughout our relationship. People laughed, scoffed and poked fun at the young, celibate, naive Christian couple.

We’d certainly never make it to the wedding without schtupping, and if we did, our “wedding night would be awkward and terrible,” they said.

Turns out that people couldn’t have been more wrong. Looking back, I think that the women saying those things felt like the floozies they ultimately were, and the men, with their fickle manhood tied to their pathetic sexual conquests, felt threatened.

I think it’s important to write this column not to gloat (though I’ll be glad to), but to speak up for all of the young couples that have also done things the right way. When people do marriage right, they don’t complain so much, and so their voices are silenced by the rabble of promiscuous charlatans, peddling their pathetic world view as “progressive.”

Our wedding was perfect. Our wedding night was nothing short of amazing. I write this on a plane heading into a tropical paradise with the most beautiful woman to have walked the planet earth. I know everybody says that their bride was the “most beautiful in the world.” They’re wrong. I win.

I’d like to tell you a story of our morning after, however. One that transpired into one of the most glaring epiphanies I’d ever had.

As my wife (again, still not used to that) and I ate breakfast at a local inn, we discussed how excited we were to start the rest of our lives together, how scary it was that everything was now so different. At the same time, we overheard the table next to us discussing their very own wedding from the night prior. What a coincidence!

“The thing is, nothing’s really changed,” the bride said.

Puzzled, my wife asked, “Did you get married last night too? So did we!”

“Congratulations!” the other dame said. “Yeah we did, just last night.”

“Where’s the groom?” my wife innocently… scratch that, naively asked.

“Oh, he’s sleeping. There was no way he was coming out with me this morning!” She paused and smirked. “Let’s just say that he’s got a lingering headache from a really good time last night.”

My heart sank. Firstly, that poor schmuck's “good time” was simply getting snookered. Not enjoying the company of close family and long-lost friends with a clear head and clean conscience, not staring in awe at his beautiful new wife, wanting to soak in every glimmer of her eyes as she shot him heart-racing looks from across the dance floor, not taking all of the cheesy pictures as they cut the cake, not even carrying her across that suite threshold as they nervously anticipated their “nightcap.” He probably won’t remember any of it. Instead, he got smashed. He was “that guy”… at his own freaking wedding.

Then I realized something. Our wedding was truly a once in a lifetime event. It was a God’s-honest celebration of two completely separate lives now becoming one. Physically, emotionally, financially and spiritually, everything that made us who we were individually was becoming what bonded us together. Our family traveled from far and wide to celebrate the decision of two young people to truly commit themselves to each other, and selflessly give themselves to one another in a way that they never had before that very night.

The people next to us that morning? Well, theirs was just one big party. And the morning after? Just another hangover. Our “weddings” were the same event in name only. They know it, and we know it.

Do yours the right way. If you’re young and wondering whether you should wait, whether you should just give in, become a live-in harlot/mimbo and do it the world’s way. If you’re wondering whether all of the mocking, the ridicule, the incredible difficulty of saving yourself for your spouse is worth it, let me tell you without a doubt that it is. Your wedding

can be the most memorable day and night of your life… or just another party.

Oops. Did I just make a “judgment?” You’re darn right I did.

Sunday 16 September 2012

Why Abortion is Morally Untenable

16SEP

Until a few months ago I was firmly pro-choice, to the extent that I believed even 3rd trimester foetuses lack a right to life. During this time I found it simply intuitive that the foetus’s life is only secondary to the mother’s choice. However, my sudden about-face came after reading Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics chapter on abortion. What changed was that I came to the realise that I could not advocate abortion without also advocating infanticide. I will summarize the pro-choice arguments and show how they all fail at drawing a morally significant distinction between the foetus and newborn. It’s worth adding at this point that I concede that abortion is a very difficult choice for all women and I don’t claim that the morality of the issue is anything but murky. However, it seems to me that the woman’s choice to abort involves not just one life but two. For this reason, it is important to maintain a healthy, respectful discourse on this topic.

From the outset I will make it clear that none of what I say pertains to the woman’s right to abort after rape or if her life is in danger. I am a lot less clear on the morality of such cases and am sympathetic to the mother’s choice in these circumstances. What I say here deals only with the vast majority of abortions that take place because of the mother’s financial situation, preference…etc.

The foetus is not a human

This is perhaps one of the most widely used arguments by the pro-choice camp to justify abortion. It can take many forms, but the general idea is that the foetus, until a certain stage of development–sometimes intentionally undefined–does not fulfil the criteria for humanhood. So it is lack of membership to the species Homo Sapiens that precludes defining the killing of the foetus as murder. But it is unclear that there is any point between the continuum of development between zygote and newborn at which we can say the organism has ascended to the status of Homo Sapiens. If we lack a morally significant dividing line between zygote and newborn, then we should either elevate the rights of the foetus to match those of the newborn, or lower the rights of the newborn. However some pro-choice advocates may argue that there are significant dividing lines between zygote and newborn. Peter Singer rightly categorizes these arguments, in his book, into three categories: birth, viability, and the onset of conciousness. Each of these fails as a morally significant dividing line.

Birth

Birth as a dividing line relies on little more than a geographical distinction. There is little reason to grant the offspring greater moral value just because it is now located outside the mother’s body. In fact any intuition based on birth as a dividing line likely results from the fact that we can see the newborn before our eyes, whereas the foetus is out of sight. This is not too dissimilar to the instinct we have to do everything within our power to help an emaciated child starving on the street in front of us, but the lack of such an instinct, in many of us, to do a great deal to help children starving in 3rd world countries. This is a well-documented psychological phenomenon and should not form the basis of our moral judgement of the foetus. Does the newborn differ physiologically or developmentally from the foetus? It seems not. A pre-term foetus differs from the newborn only insofar as it has a slightly different circulation, and relies on the mother’s gas exchange surface to survive. Here, some advocates of abortion will employ violinist type arguments; which I will deal with later. Arguing from stages of development here also bears little fruit. A 28-week foetus is more developed than a 26-week premature newborn. Therefore it seems that birth as a moral dividing line is too ad hoc and does not reflect any significant changes between the foetus and the newborn.

Viability

Perhaps we can draw a line at the first point at which the foetus could survive outside the body. The first problem for this kind of argument is that it is not quite clear why a viable foetus should have a higher moral status than a non-viable foetus. Furthermore, we cannot know what point, if any, represents a stage before which the foetus could never survive outside the body. For this is exactly the kind of point we would need to find if we are to make viability the cut-off for abortion. It is no good choosing a point at which there is 5% chance that the foetus would survive.

Continued advances in medical sciences mean that the earliest point at which the foetus is viable, is constantly being challenged. Decades ago it was unheard of for a 2 month premature foetus to survive, however, today it is not uncommon for foetuses that are 3 months premature to survive. Even today, how do we know how premature a foetus we can keep alive? Perhaps with a sufficiently large sample size we will find that in some exceptional circumstances we can keep even more premature foetuses alive. In principle though there is no reason to believe that there ever will be an objective point during foetal development before which the foetus cannot be viable. After all most, of the developmental processes appear to be self-contained within the foetus in the form of genetic programs and signalling cascades that cause the cells and tissues to develop, with only nutrient support provided by the mother. There is no reason why a laboratory cannot replace the role of the mother some time in the future.

Viability as a moral dividing line leads to some absurd conclusions that anyone should wish to avoid. For example, was it moral for women to abort 26-week foetuses 30 years ago but immoral for women today? What about a pregnant woman in Uganda where premature foetuses are unlikely to survive, is it moral for her to abort foetuses later than it is for a woman living in the United States? What about an American woman on holiday in Uganda with no possibility of flying back to USA, does it become moral for her to abort her foetus in Uganda later than she would have in USA because the foetus is non-viable in Uganda? No, it seems that viability just isn’t feasible as a morally significant dividing line.

Perhaps one could argue that as long as the foetus is dependent upon the mother, the mother’s choice takes precedence over the foetus’s life. But this is clearly wrong as a moral principle. We would not agree that an elderly person dependent upon their son/daughter is at the mercy of the son/daughter’s right to choose whether they live or not. We would also not argue that a baby dependent on its mother for practically everything takes less of a priority than the mother’s preference.

Conciousness

At first glance, the onset of conciousness would appear to be a sensible dividing line. Any number of other characteristics can be used in its place, such as perception of pain (linked with conciousness), self-awareness (also linked with conciousness)…etc. But the science here is highly sketchy and in fact leads us to some unwelcome conclusions.

The cerebral cortex is responsible for conciousness and awareness of ourselves and our surroundings as well as our perception of sensory stimuli. Some argue that thalamocortical connections at 25 weeks are the point at which conciousness arises and therefore it is this point that should represent a morally significant dividing line. However these connections are likely to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for conciousness. There is evidence that suggests the foetus remains in a dormant concious state until around 30 weeks. Furthermore, even in newborns there is weak evidence for a very basic kind of conciousness, far less than the average rabbit, or dog, or cow. The newborn has no concept of self and there is no good evidence that any of its behaviour, including response to pain, is associated with an actual perception of pain rather than merely a stereotyped innate response. Psychologically speaking, the newborn scores lower than many animals in terms of conciousness. More importantly, the crucial thalamocortical connections are still not yet fully established even weeks into the newborns life, and take time to develop and form any sophisticated kind of conciousness in the baby.

There is a more serious point to be made. In principle, using conciousness as a dividing line implies that we can kill newborn infants. What would be the moral status of a pre-30-week, or even pre-25-week newborn? If it is not concious, is infanticide okay? And what about levels of conciousness? Should we make a sliding scale of human conciousness whereby a fully grown, fully concious adult has more rights than a 1 or even 2 year old who scores lower on conciousness? As medical advances continue, we will be able to provide support to even more premature infants, for which conciousness is but a distant prospect. What will be the moral status of these newborns?

Making abortion illegal does more harm than good

This argument more or less states that any move to make abortion illegal will not actually reduce the number of abortions, but will put the woman’s life at risk because she will be forced to seek the medical procedure from a back-alley clinic; thus increasing her chance of being harmed or even killed. There are two main problems with this argument. First of all, it is an argument that pertains to abortion law, but says nothing about the moral status of abortion. It seems that the pro-choice advocate is willing to bite the bullet here and admit that abortion is wrong but is in fact the lesser of two evils. But it is perfectly consistent for one to argue that X is wrong without having to argue that X should be made illegal. The second problem with this argument is that the pro-life proponent can easily reject it. They can say that a third alternative is to enforce the law better, to try to crackdown on back-alley abortions. Furthermore, if the pro-choice advocate has failed to show why the moral status of a foetus is different to that of a newborn or even an adult; legalising abortion becomes little more than state-sponsored mass murder. Obviously no one would be willing to swallow such a bitter pill, and therefore, I think, the legal argument fails for the two reasons outlined above.

Violinist

The violinist argument expounded by Judith Jarvis Thompson is a rather contrived but clever analogy that attempts to show why the mother is not morally obliged to host another person in her body for 9 months. Here is the argument in Thompson’s own words:

I propose, then, that we grant that the fetus is a person from the moment of conception. How does the argument go from here? Something like this, I take it. Every person has a right to life. So the fetus has a right to life. No doubt the mother has a right to decide what shall happen in and to her body; everyone would grant that. But surely a person’s right to life is stronger and more stringent than the mother’s right to decide what happens in and to her body, and so outweighs it. So the fetus may not be killed; an abortion may not be performed.
It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you—we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist now is plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.
Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says, “Tough luck, I agree, but you’ve now got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.” I imagine you would regard this as outrageous,which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.

This analogizes pregnancy after rape, since the woman had no choice in the matter. However the argument can easily be altered to include instances where the woman becomes pregnant perhaps by chance or through carelessness. Suppose the woman enters a hospital elevator and accidentally chooses to go to the 3rd floor rather than the 2nd. On the 3rd floor the doctors are expecting the ‘body donor’ and upon seeing the woman jab her with an anaesthetic needle and place her onto the bed. The argument would state that although it was perhaps the woman’s own carelessness that led to her being hooked up to the violinist, she still has no moral obligation to remain hooked up for another 9 months.

The reasons why this argument fails are two-fold. Firstly it is important to note that Thompson grants the foetus personhood and a right to life. The argument boils down to whether one is morally obliged to have another person use their body to survive while at the same time extremely limiting one’s own quality of life.

The most serious objection to Thompson’s argument is that it is a disanalogy. With any analogy, if it is not sufficiently similar to the scenario being analogized then the logical reasoning used in the analogy breaks down when applied to the scenario in question. The crucial omission in Thompson’s analogy is the cause of the violinist’s ailment in the first place. The woman engaged in an act that is ‘designed’ (evolutionarily speaking) to give rise to pregnancy. Whether she intended for the pregnancy to occur or not is beside the point, since we must add this crucial point to the analogy. A better analogy, then, would be to suppose the woman decided to go driving and accidentally hit the violinist, causing his ailment. Suppose the woman had a fair bit to drink then decided to go for a cruise (analogous to sex without contraception), she has a relatively high chance of hitting the violinist. Upon hitting the violinist he is rushed to hospital and it is found that the woman is the only person in the world with the correct blood type/antigens to hook up to him and keep him alive. Even if the woman went for a cruise sober (analogous to sex with contraception) and had a much lower chance of hitting the violinist, she may still hit him and we would have the same situation. In this analogy, it is far more difficult to accept that the woman has no moral obligation to keep the violinist alive, since it was her action–even though unintentional–that put the violinist in this position. Perhaps she can be forgiven for deciding to unplug, but it still cannot be said that her actions are not immoral. In fact driving is still disanalogous, since, as we said before, the woman was specifically engaging in an act ‘designed’ to cause pregnancy. So we can replace this analogy with one where the woman engages in activity X, where X is designed to give the violinist liver failure if the woman is careless, and less likely to give the violinist liver failure, if she is more careful.

The second reason this argument fails is because it assumes that the woman’s duty of care to a stranger is equivalent to her duty of care to her own offspring. This is quite clearly not the case and is reflected by the legislation in most civilised countries. A mother who leaves her child to starve for example will be prosecuted for neglect, manslaughter…etc. whereas she has no such obligation under law to care for a stranger. If we change this analogy so that the woman is hooked up to her own child rather than to the violinist, what would we then say about her obligations? What would we think of her if she decided to unplug herself from her child? The kind of language used by some pro-choice advocates is sometimes frightening. The foetus is described as a parasite and a foreign body, which perhaps is biologically correct. However would we conclude that if a newborn or a 2-year old is sufficiently burdensome the mother should be allowed to kill it?

Other objections to this argument exist. For example some ethicists make the distinction between negative and positive rights; the act of abortion involves actively killing the foetus whereas the violinist dies because help is withdrawn. I will leave the reader to explore the discourse in more detail.

The arguments above are extremely brief summaries and I would suggest that anyone reading this should delve further into the literature and make their own mind up. This article was intended to outline the reasons I have decided that I can no longer defend the woman’s right to choose to abort the foetus. It seems any attempt at drawing a morally significant dividing line between zygote and newborn is either ad hoc or inadvertently implies that infanticide should also be permissible. While Peter Singer accepts the conclusion that killing newborns is morally justified, I simply cannot share his view. I therefore see his argument as a strong reductio ad absurdum against abortion.

Turned Away, He Turned to the Bible

By Douglas Quenqua

ONE year after Matthew Vines was forced to leave the Wichita, Kan., church he had attended since birth — not because he is gay, but because he tried to convince people there was nothing wrong with that — he was sitting facing a crowd of 235 Christians, most of them gay or lesbian, at the Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Throughout the evening, various guests called him an inspiration and a messenger. One woman suggested he is an angel.

“Last year I felt like the only gay Christian,” Mr. Vines told the crowd last month, his hands noticeably shaking. “Now I feel like all Christians are gay. I suddenly have hundreds of Facebook friends who are gay Christians. So all right, we’re doing great!”

It was a rare moment of levity from a serious young man. At 22, Mr. Vines has emerged as an unlikely advocate (and lightning rod) for those straddling one of the most volatile fault lines in America’s culture war: homosexual Christians. As the country rushed to take sides over Chick-fil-A, J. C. Penney, the Boy Scouts and Michele Bachmann, Mr. Vines took a leave of absence from Harvard, where he was studying philosophy, to offer a lesson on the Bible and same-sex relations.

“It is simply a fact that the Bible does not discuss or condemn loving, gay relationships,” said Mr. Vines, eating an omelet at Tom’s Restaurant in Brooklyn the day after his church appearance. “The point is that these texts have a meaning, and the traditional reading of them is wrong. It is incorrect — biblically, historically, linguistically.”

The medium for Mr. Vines’s message is a lecture that he delivered, videotaped and posted to YouTube in March. In it, Mr. Vines tackles the traditional interpretations of all six Bible passages that refer to homosexual acts, arguing that they don’t actually condemn, or even address, the modern understanding of homosexuality.

It is a dense and scholarly presentation, drawing from history, theology, hermeneutics and ancient Greek. It is also suffused with emotion, particularly when Mr. Vines pleads with viewers to consider the plight of the modern gay Christian, who is effectively forced into celibacy.

“Falling in love is one of the worst things that could happen to a gay person,” Mr. Vines says early in the video, “because you will necessarily be heartbroken, you will have to run away, and that will happen every single time that you come to care about someone else too much.”

In the six months it has been on YouTube, “The Gay Debate: The Bible and Homosexuality” has been viewed 350,000 times and generated nearly 7,000 comments — not bad given its 67-minute run time and lack of music, humor or even a second camera angle. It has been translated into six different languages, including French, German and Spanish, with Japanese, Korean and Arabic versions in the works. Churches as far away as Australia and South Africa have held public screenings of the video, and Mr. Vines has been invited to speak at churches from Washington, D.C., to Washington state.

“I had basically become a closeted Christian,” said Jim Augustine, 32, a member of Marble Collegiate Church who was instrumental in bringing Mr. Vines there to speak in August. “When I came into sexuality, I came out of Christianity. Matthew gave me the intellectual tools to get past that cognitive dissonance.”

FOR the devoutly religious Mr. Vines — who is small-framed and pale with dark, narrow eyes — convincing people that there is no contradiction in being gay and Christian has deep, personal roots.

In late 2009, just weeks after accepting that he was, in fact, homosexual, Mr. Vines decided to take a semester off from college so he could come out to his family and friends in Wichita. Knowing that his father would have trouble reconciling his sexual orientation with Scripture, Mr. Vines decided to arm himself with all available scholarship on the Bible and homosexuality.

He studied scholars like Martti Nissinen, professor of Old Testament studies at the University of Helsinki; Dale Martin, a professor of religious studies at Yale; and John Boswell, author of the seminal book on the topic, “Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality.” Eventually, at the request of a classmate, Mr. Vines compiled the information into a six-page research paper.

Some of the arguments were well known (Leviticus does not apply to Christians, for example); others less so, like the more plausible translations for the Greek term malakos, long interpreted as “effeminate” in the Corinthians passage listing those who won’t inherit the kingdom of God.

But key for Mr. Vines was the realization that every instance of homosexuality in the Bible represented excess lust, gang rape or “unnatural” acts committed by heterosexual men. Portrayals — much less condemnations — of naturally gay men, for whom opposite-sex relationships are not an option, simply never appear.

“That’s huge, that argument,” he said. “It’s key. It’s being made, but it needs to be made more, and more often.”

In 2011, Mr. Vines began using his knowledge to seek acceptance from his childhood church. One by one, he took parishioners to dinner and made his case. His father even helped him distribute his now eight-page paper to the church’s governing board.

“It was not well received,” Mr. Vines said. “So then I added six more pages to address some of their concerns and criticisms.” But it made no difference, and the Vineses eventually severed their relationship with the church they had attended for decades, a devastating move for the conservative Christian family.

Sad but not defeated, Mr. Vines resolved to take his message to a larger stage. He said he would turn his paper into “a resource that every gay Christian anywhere in the world who is struggling with this can access and can learn from.”

Within a few months, Mr. Vines had written a presentation, practiced it in front of his family, found a church that would let him speak and paid a local production company $500 to tape it. Once uploaded to YouTube, “The Gay Debate” quickly found an audience, admiring and otherwise.

In March, Dan Savage posted it on his blog and called it “brilliant.” Leonard Pitts Jr., syndicated columnist with The Miami Herald, called it “a masterwork of scriptural exegesis” in a column in May. In July, Mark Sandlin, a founder of The Christian Left, called it “the final nail in the ‘you’re being homophobic coffin’ ” in an article for The Huffington Post.

Less admiringly, James White, director of the Alpha and Omega Ministries in Phoenix, dedicated five hourlong podcasts to refuting, and sometimes belittling, Mr. Vines’s arguments. Matt Moore, a Christian blogger from Louisiana and self-described reformed homosexual, published a blistering 1,700-word rebuttal. Several YouTube commenters compared Mr. Vines to Satan.

Such responses are not surprising, said Terry Todd, associate professor of American religious studies at Drew University in Madison, N.J. While Mr. Vines’s arguments are based in solid religious scholarship, they have been argued before, and rarely to much effect.

“I think Matt’s arguments are unlikely to change many minds, especially among the leadership in the conservative Christian communities to which they are addressed,” Mr. Todd, who otherwise praises Mr. Vines’s bravery, wrote in an e-mail. “These same arguments, largely taken from a generation of biblical scholarship from mainstream academics, have circulated for decades in those communities.”

It is a criticism Mr. Vines has heard before, and one he does not entirely refute. “I’m not making new arguments,” he said, “and I would hope not to be, because you want them to be well substantiated scholarly.”

Novel or not, Mr. Vines’s arguments have made a difference to many young gay Christians struggling with issues of sexual identity. James Gooch, 21, from Princeton, W.Va., had just given up trying to “pray away the gay,” as he put it, and was struggling with depression when he came upon Mr. Vines’s video on Facebook two months ago.

“I was just compelled to tears,” he said in an interview. “I found my faith all over again in that video.” Mr. Gooch showed it to his parents as well, and says “it’s made all the difference for our family.” He has since come out to the rest of his family and friends, largely to “positive feedback.”

Beth Buchanan, a lesbian Christian in Miami, Okla., recently showed the video to her mother. “My mom cried at the end,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Since then she has been comfortable talking about homosexuality.”

Some heterosexual Christians say it has changed their minds, as well. Betsy Burns Johnson, 51, of Ottawa wrote a note on her Facebook page in May saying she was no longer so sure the Bible condemned homosexuality.

“Does it make me nervous to take such a radical stand against such a long standing belief in favour of that of a 21 year old gay boy from Kansas? YOU BET IT DOES,” she wrote. But “lets face it, many Biblical stands we take on issues are based very much on how these scriptures have been interpreted over the centuries by people other than ourselves.”

As long as Mr. Vines keeps hearing reactions like these (he said he has received thousands of e-mails, Twitter messages and Facebook friend requests), it is hard for him to imagine returning to Harvard anytime soon. For now, his plan is to continue promoting the video, be it through talk shows (supporters have been tweeting his video to Ellen DeGeneres), DVD sales or church appearances. “We need to get these arguments into the hands of people who need them,” he said.

But he is not yet comfortable in the spotlight, either. At a reception after his appearance at Marble Collegiate Church, Mr. Vines looked overwhelmed as he stood shaking hands with a line of well-wishers that stretched out the door.

“One woman asked me how to convince her parents that being gay wasn’t a choice,” Mr. Vines said the next day. “I wish I had time to answer a question like that.” He admits he has given up trying to answer all his e-mail.

For a sensitive and soft-spoken young man who spends most of his free time with his parents and said he had never had a boyfriend, such admiration poses a challenge of its own.

“I find it extremely fulfilling, but it’s not like I’m having a fun time,” Mr. Vines said. “I don’t want this to be a decades-long undertaking.”

In what could be as much a sign of his youth as his determination, Mr. Vines doesn’t think it needs to be.

“The base line for this issue should be no one in the world anywhere should be homophobic at all,” he said. “Once we get there, we can move on to other things.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 14, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the month when Dan Savage posted “The Gay Debate” to his blog. It was March, not May. And an earlier picture caption misidentified one of the people pictured at Marble Collegiate Church. Ross Murray is on the left, not Patrick Bertschy.

The One-Hour Video Lecture: