ALL HONORING NATURE–UNTIL I ARRIVED: A few postscripts to my pissed-off post about that Commonweal James Alison piece.

1. First of all, I’ve never read Alison, and people I really respect are into him. So I completely assume that while I can’t stand the excerpts in that Commonweal encomium, that doesn’t necessarily reflect the context and fullness of his argument.

2. I’ve said before that I don’t get natural law arguments, at all, ever. And so to the extent that Alison is arguing from the basis of peacefulness and natural law, I’m pretty much… against peace with oneself and against nature, as everyone who knows me will attest. As a friend of mine once said, “I hate the happy medium!”

3. On the other hand… I can’t judge Alison’s full argument. But I can judge the excerpt in the Commonweal article. And that was just bad. If “natural law” can be stretched like Silly Putty to cover any actions flowing from any involuntary, deep, existential inclination, then natural law is stupid.

4. An anonyreader writes:

…I will say that one’s bad loves are so closely kith and kin to one’s good loves that they might as well be identical twins. Almost. But there is a mutation, or a difference of some kind, that allows one to distinguish the “good” from the “bad.”

So, yes, I think the bad loves can seem central, because they grow out of the good, but take a detour somewhere along the line.

I totally agree with this; more so, I try to emphasize, with gay stuff, how our desires can be made truly sublime. I try to write about how being gay in this culture can be a Christian vocation–a call to transform, without denying or ignoring or suppressing, our desires in the service of Christ.

So apparently my irritation with this one quoted, out-of-context paragraph of James Alison’s has made me sound much more negative toward gay desire than I really am! Good grief.

I guess the main thing I want to say–and the reason behind the Mary Gauthier thing–is just that “nature” isn’t obvious. Cultures define what is natural, and those definitions need not match up at all well with your own morality, whether or not you’re an orthodox Catholic. So when you rely on “nature” arguments, you need to be fierce, be careful, and be anything other than complacent; and–my old hobbyhorse–maybe you’d be better off just leaving the “natural” category alone, and making your arguments on other grounds. Because frankly, I could make better gay-heresy arguments than the natural-law one, and it’s not my actual job.

But yeah–that post wasn’t about Alison’s arguments, but about the part of his argument which the Commonweal author saw fit to quote; and it wasn’t really about gay stuff, but about natural-law arguments and their limits.