1 We have no purely rational argument against gay
“marriage” because, as C. S. Lewis says, we have lost “the evidential character
of man.” The “evidential character of man” is the experience of man qua man, and it was lost 50 years ago in
terms of human sexuality with the introduction of the pill. This loss has been chronicled by Damon Linker in a recent
article in “The Week” entitled “How gay marriage’s fate was sealed more than 50
years ago.” It explains to those who are stunned by the rapid, pervasive and
ubiquitous appearance of a gay culture that it has been present for at least ½
a century but in gestation beneath the appearance of a heterosexual “normalcy.”
The epistemological heart of the matter consists in the loss of the experience
of self-giving in heterosexual-conjugal relations, and with it the
consciousness of the meaning of sex as male and female conjugally joined as
husband and wife. Gone that consciousness, homosexual pundit Andrew Sullivan
announced: “We Are All Sodomites Now.”[1]
2 The
epistemological discovery to be made here is the connection between experience
and consciousness which has been the central academic task of Benedict XVI from
the very beginning of his theological career, through his years as head of the
CDF with John Paul II, his 8 years as pope and, I suspect, what he will be
about as pope-emeritus in the wings.[2]
It is the “new evangelization.” It is
“the broadening of reason.” Its absence is the cause of our stammering in the
attempt to formulate the rationality of the perennial understanding of conjugal
sexuality as heterosexual. Its absence is also our stumbling over the meaning
of the Second Vatican Council and the hermeneutic of continuity with the sensus fidelium of the Church of always.
John Paul II as
Wojtyla-philosopher explained consciousness as knowledge of the self in the
experience of going out of oneself. In a word, the very notion of experience is the realism of
subjectivity that has consciousness as a necessary element, otherwise, it
wouldn’t be experience. When you
experience, you know something, in fact, someone: yourself. As he said in the
opening gambit of his “Acting Person:” “Man’s experience of anything
outside of himself is always associated
with the experience of himself, and he never experiences anything external
without having at the same time the experience of himself.”[3]
The topic of the contraceptive
pill has diminished the intentionality of the person as self-gift in the
conjugal act that has now ceased to be conjugal, and perhaps even to be truly
sexual. It has altered human anthropology and the consciousness thereof. If the percentages are true, the American
public has been contracepting for the past 50 years in what cannot be described
in terms other than mutual masturbation in which each is locked “self-referentially”[4]
into self. This ceases to be an experience of the human person as image of the
divine Persons whose very revelation has been rendered
theologically/philosophically as pure Relations. In a word, the contracepting
human person has lost the experience of being a self-in-relation, and in so
doing has lost the very consciousness and human meaning of male and female.
Given that the intelligibility of
sexuality is to be found on the level of consciousness as corollary and
concomitant with the experience of mutual self-giving of man and woman, and not
on the level of concepts, and therefore conceptual, reasoned argumentation, Damon
Linker in his “How Gay Marriage’s Fate Was Sealed More Than 50 Years Ago”[5]
dismisses the logic of Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, Robert P. George, “What
is Marriage?” Man and Woman: A Defense,” [6]
as irrelevant to disproving the case for gay “marriage.” What they have done,
he argues, is what no one else has done: “No critic of gay marriage has gone
further in claiming that reason alone can tell us to reject gay marriage – and
no critic has done more to demonstrate (inadvertently) how deeply confused the
case against gay marriage really is.” What they have done, he highlights, is
make an “argument against contraception, not gay marriage.” Why? Because these
authors identify rationality with
legality. And legal is what is recognized by the State. And the State is
what makes laws, the law as what they consider rational.The State recognizes
unions of persons that provided citizens that integrate society. To be
recognized by the State is to be rational
as generating citizenry and family life. To oppose it by way of legalizing
gay “marriage” is “irrational.”[7]
The conclusion is correct if we are
thinking in terms of morality or Catholic Magisterium, but the internal dynamic
of the reasoning is purely functional and material.
It is admirable that the authors
want to reach the greatest number of persons in a democracy pervaded by
religious freedom, and so want universal access by y reasoning alone, but the
greater problem would be to treat the question on the wrong epistemological
level. Since the truth of the sexual person must be found in the consciousness resulting
from the experience of self-transcendence, it is deeply confusing to attempt to
prove
what is not susceptible of proof and by pass the millennial experience of total
self-giving that is constitutively open to procreation. This coincides with
Catholic Christian doctrine, but not for that is it “religious.”
In 1990, Joseph Ratzinger
addressed the bishops of the U.S. on the topic of conscience in which he
explained that conscience is the consciousness of conforming to an ontological
tendency inherent in the human person as imaging God to go out of self toward
the divine. This consciousness is what we understand by “natural law” that
could be better named “the law of the person.” It is a natural tendency
creating a natural experience available to everyone yielding the concrete
perception, among other things, of being masculine and feminine that is equal,
different and complementary. An
ideologically based logic will not hold up here.
[1]
New Republic,” March, 2003.
[2]
This is not a new theme. It was announced by Hegel under the metaphor of the
owl of Minerva flying at dusk. That is, as the Enlightenment contradicts
reality conceptually, consciousness (the owl of Minerva) emerges (if we go forth out of self).
[3] K.
Wojtyla, “The Acting Person,” D. Reidel Publ. Co. (1979) 3 (From the
Introduction).
[4] I
take this from Pope Francis’ pre-Conclave remarks to the Cardinals.
[5]
“The Week,” op. cit.
[6] Sherif
Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, Robert P. George, “What is Marriage?” Man and Woman:
A Defense,” Encounter Books, 2012.
[7] Ibid.
9.
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