HOW NOW, SWORN VOW?: (sorry….) Round four of the grand discussion of reviving vowed friendship! For round one you can check out my Inside Catholic column, “Romoeroticism” (and my review of Alan Bray’s groundbreaking, beautiful book, The Friend); for round two, my comments here and here (the latter post is not specifically about friendship, but about other aspects of reactions to my IC piece); for round three, a series of posts and reader emails starting here; and now you get three more reader emails, posted without comment but all very much worth your time.

Thanks so much to everyone who has written, and I very much still welcome your comments on all of this! I have a couple of critical links I need to truffle up, and a bit more to post about godparents and godsisters, but not tonight.

These are posted in reverse chronological order, earliest last.

reader #1:

I do not know what to think of your idea, but it is quite intriguing. I do agree that our modern idea of kinship is overly narrow – – if we can create legal fictions to account for adoption of children by parents, then surely we can create all sorts of legal fictions to accomodate realities that do not exactly correspond to the biological or natural family. Could [same-sex marriage] or domestic partnerhip laws be characterized as legal fictions? Perhaps that is one way to look at them, though I am sure that both Andrew Sullivan and the Family Research Council would scream bloody murder at the idea for very different reasons.

As for your commenter, Mr 8 or 9, I was struck by how his view that [same-sex attraction] is so radically disordered that it taints everything that it touches is very similar to Martin Luther’s view of human nature being incurvatus in se – – even if one does good things, such acts not only corrupt and not only of no value, but such acts only increase one’s blameworthiness the more good acts one does! Compound that with an Augustinian slant on eternal salvation, one can see how a person with SSA – – especially a young man with SSA with an overactive libido and an overwhelming emotional desire to be love and to love – – could be driven to despair if confronted by a Mr. 8 or 9 in a position of moral authority. Surely, then, such a person would conclude that he was damned, given the way that sexual orientation colors a significant amount of human interaction with the world. If he’s effective in for penny as much as for a pound, he might as well go for the whole pound while he is at it. . . . Southern Decadence here he comes! This is an example of the damage that zealous “defenders of the magisterium” and “defenders of the family” can wreak on people who find themselves with SSA and little or no OSA of no fault of their own. Thinking of C.S. Lewis’s famous comparison of the prig and the prostitute, surely that irritiating mediocrity Bishop Gene Robinson is a better role model for SSAs than a counselor who thinks like Mr. 8 or 9.