The second step is more complicated, and more graphic. George argues that only vaginal intercourse ‚Äî “procreative-type” sex acts, as George puts it ‚Äî can consummate this “multilevel” mind-body union. Only in reproduction, unlike digestion, circulation, respiration or any other bodily function, do two individuals perform a single function and thus become, in effect, “one organism.” Each opposite-sex partner is incomplete for the task; yet together they create a “one-flesh union,” in the language of Scripture. “Their bodies become one (they are biologically united, and do not merely rub together) in coitus (and only in coitus), similarly to the way in which one’ heart, lungs and other organs form a unity by coordinating for the biological good of the whole,” George writes in a draft of his latest essay on the subject. Unloving sex between married partners does not perform the same multilevel function, he argues, nor does oral or anal sex ‚Äî even between loving spouses.
Oh, hi. I’m just sitting here reading this long profile from the New York Times Magazine of Robert George, author of the now-infamous bigot manifesto known as the “Manhattan Declaration,” and the largely behind-the-scenes brain* of the right-wing religious industrial complex. You might read the above quote and ask yourself, “What kind of pseudo-intellectual self-congratulatory wankfest is this? And shouldn’t a tenured professor at Princeton (how embarrassing for them) be able to see that he’s arguing that only couples with biological children are actually mar…”
Infertile couples, too, are performing this uniquely shared reproductive function, George says, even if they know their sperm and ovum cannot complete it. Marriage is designed in part for procreation in the way a baseball team is designed for winning games, he says, but “people who can practice baseball can be teammates without victories on the field.”
Oh, you have to be kidding me. Okay, so, infertile couples/olds who still do the dirty-dirty are still technically playing the World Series even if they know their balls, er, baseballs, don’t work? All you need is a team that’s willing to practice?
Well by that logic, even though my (nonexistent — taking applications) husband and I know that our parts aren’t extremely likely to create a baby, it’s the thought that counts, and as long as we practice a whole bunch, and we both love being on the team, then it’s just as valid as any other loving, committed marriage.**
Q.E.D., loser.
Read the whole thing if you have nothing better to do with your life than read the convoluted musings of a quasi-philosopher with far too much education for his intellect and a Mommy complex.
(h/t No More Mister Nice Blog)
*Words have lost all meaning.
**And don’t give me that arbitrary B.S. from the first quote about how it has to be a vagina. If you know it’s a reproductive dead-end, then it really doesn’t matter. That’s merely Church Lady Robert failing to grasp the epic fail of his 13th century thinking.
[...] TWO Commentary by Evan [...]
Robert George relies upon myths rather than reason for his imitation of intellectual discourse.
There is no material or rational basis for his assumption of a “unitive” function of sexuality, much less a “unitive” function that only works for fertile-heterosexual-couples-even-when-they’re-infertile-and-exgay-and-repelled-by-one-another.
There is no material or rational basis for his assumptions about “natural law.”
And there is no “right reason” — apart from the ignorant and factually selective political correctness of the Christian Right.
[...] TWO Commentary by Evan [...]
Good Christians ought to read their Bibles and start acting like good christians. God says marriage is honorable amongst ALL. ALL. ALL. Get it? ALL. Hebrews 13:4 says “the marriage bed is honorable among ALL and the bed undefiled…therefore no adultery or fornication.” If gays could marry, (hint the word ALL) then that would be one less sin for the Church to worry about.
By their own definition, not mine, Christians are creating a condition of “adultery and fornication” by gays because they deny gay people the act of marriage.
maurice you are reading into hebrews 13:4
what is not there. Paul was not referring to
gay couples is this passage, having already
condemned homosexual practice in romans 1
and making it clear that marriage is only for
1 man and 1 woman in ephesians 5 specifically
verse 31. Sorry, but no matter how hard you
try, you can not make the bible support gay
relationships
Actually in Romans 1 Paul condemns pagan prostitution, and suggests that it’s a result of rebellion from God.
In order to believe that, you actually have to lie about who gay people are, even if you’re only lying to yourself, and you have to logically believe that the 12 year old who comes out of the closet does so because he has previously abandoned God, hates God, and that God is punishing him with homosexuality.
In Ephesians 5, Paul is quoting Jesus, to draw a metaphor between the relationship between Christ and the church and human marriage. In order to twist that verse to condemn gay people, you have to insert words and thoughts that aren’t there. In fact, you have to lie, if only to yourself, about what’s there. To take such an interpretation, you’d have to believe that Paul, and Jesus, were saying that the ONLY appropriate course of action is for a man to marry a woman. But just a few chapters earlier, we have Paul extolling the virtues of remaining single, and in fact, according to orthodox myth, Jesus remained single. It would also seem that, if homosexuality were really such a giant sin, that would have been a good moment for Jesus to pipe up and say something. But he didn’t.
Soooo…you’re setting up a mighty contradiction that isn’t even there by pretending that the Ephesians passage in some remote way could possibly condemn gay people.
This demonstrates the fallacy of reading the Bible in English and interpreting it through your own lens of bigotry. It’s just not honest.
“Sorry, but no matter how hard you
try, you can not make the bible support gay
relationships”
Perhaps the real truth is that the Bible doesn’t take a stand either way on gay relationships.
Is this accurate Evan?
It could be.
Honest scholars have differing opinions on that. But the strongest cases to be made are that either the Bible is silent on the idea of gay relationships as we know them, and that the best we can do is to infer using the great overarching teachings of the text (passages like the Pauline text that says that the sum of the law is love, and that whatever commandments there may be, if you are loving, you are fulfilling the law are helpful in that context), or that indeed, using said overarching themes (thousands of verses about love and justice vs. six usually mistranslated/culturally misunderstood passages used to condemn gays), a strong case can be made supporting gay people.
The weakest case, though, if you study languages, culture, and context, and it’s REALLY weak, is the idea that gay people are somehow condemned.
I’m open to the idea that the Bible is silent on the issue — i.e. it doesn’t bother me — because I’m not a Christian, or a theist of any kind, so I don’t expect the Bible to have much to say about most things, any more than I expect to find the meaning of life in Moby Dick.
But that’s just me.
I’ve been hearing this “natural law” rhetoric being used against gay people ever since I got my first internet account back in the 1990s. It’s nothing but a bunch of a priori postulates, usually religious in nature, dressed up with a highfalutin label.
The problem with the sort of deductive logic people like George spin their webs with is it manipulates a false premise as easily as a true one. So they say the penis was designed for procreation and therefor that is its only proper use. But who is this designer and on what basis can you assert that every part of our bodies only has a specific function as opposed to a number of uses?
What is the function of the mouth? To eat? To speak? If the nose is for breathing and the mouth isn’t, then is the moral course of action to let yourself suffocate when your nose is stuffed up by a head cold? And let’s never mind, that nature has given every human male who ever walked this good earth a prostate gland which when massaged, which is what happens during a certain kind of male-to-male sex, will bring him to a right dandy orgasm.
In point of fact, yeah, the anus was designed for a penis. At least the human male’s is, whether or not any particular male has any use for that at all. But if you just neatly assert a priori, that the penis was designed for heterosexual reproduction, then you don’t have to notice that.
You could write it all off as hokum except that George works hard to provide an intellectual justification for making gay people legally outcasts in the eyes of the law. He argued for Colorado’s Amemendment 2 which prevented gay people from even seeking anti-discrimination laws. He wrote of the Supreme Court decision that overturned it that it was “The Supreme Court’s Assault on Popular Sovereignty”. There is a straight line from there to the Manhattan Declaration where he argues not only that same-sex couples be denied the right to marry, but that bigots should defy the laws if they Are allowed to marry.
The poet Rabindranath Tagore said that bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it. Robert George is a living example of this.
Of course homosexuality is contrary to Natural Law. It’ bound to be, since the expression “Natural Law”, when used in this context, is simply a nice, snappy, pithy way of saying “the way things would be if the universe had been drawn up to my specifications”.
I hear this phrase “natural law” quite a bit – what’s it supposed to mean? They’re not talking about natutal as in the law of physics or some such thing it seesm, they’re not talking about nature as it exists it seems because they talk about gayness being against natural law yet gayness exists in most animal species. There’s no such thing as a system of laws in nature like we have laws in society, so is this just a nonsense statement or is there some concept behind the phrase that I’m just missing?
evan,
in romans 1 paul uses the words “natural use
of the woman” wich clearly means he is
condemning the very act of sex between people
of the sem sex. you are right about epesians
5 being a metaphor comparing the husband wife
relationship to the relationship between christ
and the church, whitch makes it clear that
gay relationships are couterfiet and
a violation of God’s intended order in that
neither 2 women or 2 men could be represenitive
of christ’s relationship to the church
Your interpretation of Ephesians 5 only works if you’re also condemning singleness.
Sorry.
You can’t insert words that aren’t there. Indeed, you would also have to condemn non-Christians getting married, because they wouldn’t be a reflection of that, either.
And again, in Romans 1, he’s talking about homosexual behavior of some sort being the result of God’s punishment, and he seems to be talking about straight people, who for some reason ABANDONED heterosexual relations and started screwing everything that walks. The passage ONLY makes sense if you understand the culture he was writing to, and it makes NO sense if you try to make it fit with a modern understanding of sexuality, which Paul didn’t have.
So, in summary, FAIL and FAIL.
Brad said “natural use
of the woman”. What a disgusting attitude that represents. Women aren’t objects to be used as one pleases.
But Priya, women ARE merely objects in that worldview.
That’s why these people also are simultaneously perpetually pout-raged by reproductive rights.
Amanda Marcotte put it this way in a blog post several months back, and I grabbed the quote for my Facebook page, because it was SO spot-on:
“[T]hese two fights—for reproductive rights and gay rights—are the same fight. It’ about the right of people who aren’t straight men to have a sexuality without punishment or shame. We’re the ones who deserve the label ‘pro-life’, because we support the right for gays and women to survive and to thrive—to live. And make no mistake, we’re all up against a patriarchal right that is sadistic and violent.”
Exactly.
Women are still useless chattel in their world. They can only do it to a certain degree in civilized countries (sort of like how they can only take their hatred of gays to a certain level in civilized countries), because they are constricted by modernity and enlightenment, but left to their own devices? Please. These are people who fought kicking and screaming against the criminalization of marital rape.
They’re knuckle-dragging fools.
Oops. That Amanda Marcotte link is here:
http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/austin_candlelight_vigil_for_dr_tiller/
I like that Amanda Marcotte link, Evan – so true. That, as you say, these people fought kicking and screaming against the criminalization of marital rape really sums up their barbaric attitudes.