{"id":44,"date":"2012-05-09T15:17:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-09T21:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/05\/the-heartburn-of-sex\/"},"modified":"2016-05-02T11:33:32","modified_gmt":"2016-05-02T17:33:32","slug":"the-heartburn-of-sex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/egregioustwaddle\/2012\/05\/the-heartburn-of-sex.html","title":{"rendered":"The Heartburn of Sex"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
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When Max Lindenman sent me a link to this story<\/a><\/b> last night, I got heartburn. I knew I was going to have to post on it, and that whatever I said would be taken as heresy by people I care about. I gave it a sleepless night, hoping somebody else would beat me to it, but although there are many posts and comments out there this morning\u2013a few of them even adding light, not more heat\u2013my heart still burns. So here goes.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve said before that the Church\u2019s hard teaching on sexuality (by which I mean the whole range of human sexuality, not the marked sense of the term that makes people hear only homo<\/i>sexuality) is the thorn in the flesh of my reversion. Put simply\u2013and the teaching is very, very simple, though putting it into practice is not\u2013Catholic teaching upholds lifelong marriage between a man and a woman, fully open to the gift of children, as normative (in the sense that it is both the ideal and the rule, not in the sense that other states of life are abnormal). Because the Church teaches that the only legitimate use of physical sexual expression occurs within such marriage, those in all other states of life\u2013single people, whatever their sexual orientation; ordained clergy; vowed religious; the widowed, the divorced\u2013are bound to abstain from physical sexual expression, alone or with others. It\u2019s not the legal privileges of domestic partnership or gay marriage that the Church opposes, but the inherent approval of the extra-heterosexual-marriage relationships to which they are granted. In every age, not just our highly sexualized era, that message is as countercultural as you can get, and these days it can sound (I\u2019m with you here, which is a big part of my struggle) downright crazy.<\/p>\n

What it isn\u2019t<\/i> is discrimination. The expectation of sexual abstinence outside of heterosexual marriage applies to everyone, gay or straight, male or female, whatever your age, race, ethnicity, or political preference. And as with the Church\u2019s prohibitions of contraception and abortion, which flow from the same teaching, no Catholic\u2019s legal rights are being violated. That the Church forbids to its members practices that are legal in the wider society is a moot point. No matter how the Constitution is now or will be interpreted in the future, the Church does not consider having sex a basic human right. And no matter how you or I or the world may argue it, Kat Fernandez is absolutely right when she notes<\/a><\/b> that you don\u2019t die from not having sex. Finally, the argument that Everybody Does It is as irrational in this arena as it was when your mother said If everybody jumped off a cliff, would that make it right for me to let you jump off a cliff?<\/i><\/p>\n

Not that sex is jumping off a cliff, though God knows it can be that dangerous and that exhilarating. And not that sex is bad, nasty, evil. That\u2019s my biggest beef with us as Church, that we can\u2019t seem to find a way to present our teaching positively, mostly because, I suspect, a lot of our teachers and leaders harbor a secret or not-so-secret belief that sex is<\/i> bad, nasty, and evil, and some sex is even badder, nastier, and more evil than that.<\/p>\n

Long prelude and wandering tangents aside, the decision by Bishop Amos of Davenport not to allow a representative of the Eychaner Foundation to present Keaton Fuller with its Matthew Shepard Scholarship at the Prince of Peace graduation ceremonies is correct, within the bishop\u2019s rights, and completely nondiscriminatory. The Eychaner Foundation advocates for gay rights, among which are engaging in homosexual relationships and gay marriage. This advocacy runs counter to Catholic teaching, so for a Catholic school to provide the Eychaner Foundation with a bully pulpit (and I use that phrase deliberately) at Prince of Peace\u2019s graduation ceremonies would be inappropriate. Bishop Amos rightly congratulates Mr Fuller on his accomplishments and has no problem with the scholarship being announced by a school official\u2013as, by the way, every scholarship I\u2019ve ever seen or read about being awarded is handled, as I am certain all other scholarships being awarded to members of Mr Fuller\u2019s graduating class will be handled. That is not discrimination or, as Salon<\/i> puts it, \u201can anti-gay snub.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here are some of the facts going unnoticed in the heat and smoke:<\/p>\n