The Unanswered Question: Natural Law And Same-Sex Attraction

Guest contributor: Pilgrim

A Study in Moral Discourse

My starting position is that Catholic moral theology proceeds by reason toward truth, not by sentiment toward consensus. Yet even among Catholics, the path of that reasoning can become obscured by philosophical confusion about what moral theology based on Revelation and Natural Law requires.

A recent exchange with a fellow Catholic, Todd Flowerday, brought this tension into sharp focus.

The Question We Both Agree On

The conversation began with a premise I share: if same-sex attraction is a stable, unchosen feature of human experience for a percentage of the population, Catholic moral theology cannot ignore that reality. Revelation and Natural Law reasoning must account for what exists in human nature.

This is basic Catholic realism. When my interlocutor suggested that biological realities matter to Natural Law, he was right. They do matter.

The real question is how they matter.

Where Our Methods Diverge

Natural Law does not just ask: “What exists in human experience?”

It also asks: “What is this ordered toward? What purpose does this faculty serve in human nature?”

This teleological dimension, the inquiry into ends and purposes, cannot be bypassed without collapsing the entire Catholic moral tradition.

In our exchange, my interlocutor suggested that if same-sex attraction is “hard-wired” or “God-given,” it should be “incorporated into a Natural Law framework.” But his argument, not stated directly, implied a move from empirical observation to a moral conclusion:

This orientation exists in nature
Therefore, it reflects a legitimate human telos

Catholic anthropology requires an intermediate step: the discernment of purpose in nature. Not everything that occurs in nature is morally ordered toward the good. Creation is good, but wounded; the Fall introduced disorder, not as a negation of nature, but as a distortion of it.

Just consider other innate inclinations: anger, possessiveness, violent impulses. These occur “in nature” and may have biological correlates. Their presence doesn’t establish their moral direction. What matters is whether the inclination serves the purpose for which the faculty exists.

The same principle applies to conditions we wouldn’t classify as moral failings at all. Blindness is a biological reality that occurs naturally in a percentage of the population, but sight remains the natural telos of the visual faculty. Infertility is a biological reality, but fertility remains the natural telos of reproductive faculties. The biological givenness of a condition, even one that involves no personal fault, tells us nothing about whether that condition represents human flourishing or a privation of the good.

This is why the language of “God-given” requires careful theological precision. Catholics distinguish between God’s perfect will (creation as intended) and God’s permissive will (what God allows in a fallen world). God permits many conditions He doesn’t intend as good – suffering, disease, death itself. To call something “God-given” in the sense of “God permits it to exist” is very different from calling it “ordered toward the good.” We really mustn’t confuse divine permission with divine intention.

My interlocutor wasn’t rejecting Natural Law wholesale. He was suggesting something more subtle: that our understanding of Natural Law might develop, that what we once failed to see might become clearer. That’s defensible in principle. The Church’s recognition of the equal dignity of women and the condemnation of slavery are examples of deepening perception, not changing truth.

But his suggestion, his “thought experiment”, leads directly to the actual critical question.

The Unanswered Question

If same-sex attraction is to be understood as fulfilling a legitimate human telos, then that telos must be articulated.

One has to ask:

What is the intrinsic purpose of same-sex sexual desire within human nature? What end does it serve?

In Catholic sexual ethics, the telos of sexuality has been consistently understood as twofold: the unitive good of the spouses and the procreative orientation of the marital act. These are purposes discerned from divine revelation and through reason from the nature of the act itself, its structure, its biological reality, and its personal meaning.

If someone believes that same-sex acts serve a particular and different natural end, then intellectual honesty requires naming that end and doing so with philosophical precision.

None was ever given in answer to my question. Several answers might have been proposed. Let’s look at some:

The purely unitive telos: Perhaps same-sex unions serve only the unitive dimension, with procreation understood as separable rather than intrinsic. But this requires demonstrating why procreative openness becomes optional for some acts while remaining essential to sexuality in general. If the unitive and procreative meanings can be separated for same-sex couples, why not for heterosexual couples using contraception?

The companionship telos: Perhaps the purpose is mutual support, companionship, and the alleviation of loneliness. Here we must ask: how are these goods intrinsic to the sexual faculty rather than achievable through non-sexual intimacy? Deep friendship serves these purposes without requiring genital expression.

The identity-fulfilment telos: Perhaps the purpose is authentic self-expression or psychological integration. But this shifts the ground from the nature of the act to the felt needs of the person. It’s a move away from Natural Law toward modern sexual ethics based on personal authenticity and desire.

Each of these would require a rigorous philosophical defense showing how they arise from the nature of sexuality itself, not from what we wish sexuality could accommodate.

This is what a Natural Law methodology demands.

And in the conversation, none were offered, and my questions were left unanswered.

In effect, the conversation stalled at its most critical methodological point. The central question, identifying an intrinsic telos of same-sex sexual acts, was simply avoided.

When Teleology Gives Way to Tone

Instead, the conversation shifted at this point toward my motives.

My interlocutor had written: “The human perception of Natural Law has shifted over the centuries. It might well be that a human minority such as same-sex orientation has a place in the human telos.”

The inference was clear.

I asked for clarification: “What do you mean when you say Natural Law ‘shifts’?” He objected that he hadn’t used the word “shifts”.

He was right to note the difference. There is a distinction between saying “Natural Law shifts” (implying moral truth itself changes) and “human perception of Natural Law has shifted” (allowing for a deepening understanding of unchanging truth). Perhaps my phrasing could have been more careful.

Nevertheless, it was precisely this distinction I was asking him to clarify. His statement raised rather than resolved the central question: If our perception has shifted such that what was once considered intrinsically disordered is now considered ordered toward a legitimate human end, what accounts for that shift?

One of two things must be true:

Our earlier perception was wrong. We failed to see a telos that was always present. If so, the burden is to demonstrate what that telos is and why previous generations of theologians missed it.

Moral truth itself has changed. What was genuinely contrary to human nature in one era has become compatible with it in another. If so, we’re no longer discussing Natural Law; we’re discussing cultural evolution dressed in theological language.

Instead of answering, he accused me of “falsehood” and withdrew from the conversation.

When teleology disappears from the argument, disagreement has nowhere to go but personal. The argument collapses because the framework for reasoning has been bypassed.

What Natural Law Actually Requires

For Natural Law reasoning to function, several steps are non-negotiable.

Acknowledge reality as it is

If same-sex attraction is a stable feature of some people’s experience, that must be taken seriously. Pastoral care depends on it. Compassion requires it.

Discern the purpose proper to each human faculty

Not every desire reveals its own purpose simply by existing. Hunger points toward nourishment, but compulsive eating does not. Sexual desire exists, but its moral meaning must be discovered by asking what the sexual faculty is for.

The Catholic tradition has consistently taught that human sexuality is ordered toward two inseparable goods: the union of spouses and openness to procreation.

Distinguish between disordered inclinations and intrinsically disordered acts

This distinction is crucial and often misunderstood.

Catholic teaching recognizes that all human sexuality after the Fall involves concupiscence, a disordered desire that may affect even married couples. The husband and wife can experience sexual desire coloured by selfishness, by objectification, by the wounds of original sin. But their sexual acts, when open to life and genuinely unitive, remain ordered toward their proper end even when the subjective experience might be imperfect – or even sinful.

The disorder in marital sexuality is in the mode and intensity of desire, not in its object and structure. The acts themselves retain their essential orientation toward the goods of marriage. This is a quantitative disorder, too much or too little of something that is itself good, like eating too much food or experiencing anger disproportionate to the offence.

This is why the Church describes same-sex acts differently: as intrinsically disordered acts. The disorder is not merely in how the inclination is felt, but in what it is directed toward. This is a qualitative disorder, the direction of a faculty toward something that cannot, by its nature, fulfil its purpose.

Same-sex acts, by their very nature, cannot be ordered toward procreation. They are closed off to the life-giving dimension that is inseparable from the unitive meaning.

This is about whether the act itself, in its structure, its object, its inherent orientation, can fulfil the purpose of the sexual faculty.

An act is intrinsically disordered when it contradicts the purpose of the faculty through which it is performed, because it directs a human capacity away from its natural end in a way that cannot be rectified by good intention or subjective experience.

So, if someone proposes that same-sex acts fulfil a different telos, that telos must be named, defended, and shown to be intrinsic to the nature of sexuality itself, not simply a personal or cultural reinterpretation.

The Pastoral Difficulty We Must Acknowledge

Catholic teaching on same-sex attraction is existentially and pastorally difficult.

A person with a heterosexual orientation who experiences disordered desire still has a path toward the proper ordering of that desire in marriage. A person with an exclusive same-sex orientation means that their deepest experiences of romantic love and sexual desire have no ordered expression, that their orientation points toward no recognized vocation, and that the path for them is lifelong celibacy.

There is asymmetry here. The Church doesn’t tell heterosexual persons that their sexual desires can never be rightly ordered, only that they must be ordered within marriage. But for those with exclusive same-sex attraction, the teaching forecloses any possibility of sexual expression aligned with the good.

This is hard. It raises profound questions about divine providence, about why God would permit an orientation that seems to have no fulfilment within the moral order that the Church teaches.

I don’t claim to have answers to these questions. What I claim is that acknowledging this difficulty doesn’t exempt us from the methodological requirements of Natural Law reasoning. The difficulty of the teaching doesn’t make the teleological question disappear.

What We Both Owe Each Other

My interlocutor is a fellow Catholic navigating the tension between doctrinal fidelity and pastoral sensitivity in a time of profound cultural change.

If we are to reason together, rather than simply assert competing conclusions, we owe each other precision, honesty, and intellectual courage.

Precision about terms: When we say “Natural Law,” do we mean a method of reasoning from human nature toward moral truth? Or a general affirmation that morality is not arbitrary? These are not the same.

Honesty about premises: If someone believes that empirical realities establish moral permission, that premise should be stated openly so it can be examined.

Willingness to follow the argument where it leads: Not every question has an easy answer. But every serious inquiry requires that we pursue it honestly, even when the conclusion may challenge our assumptions.

Recognition of what we do not yet know: I don’t claim to understand every dimension of human sexuality or that traditional formulations answer every pastoral question. But we cannot abandon teleology and still claim to be reasoning from Natural Law.

The Path Forward

Despite repeated prompts, Todd Flowerday never addressed the central teleological question that Natural Law demands:

What is the intrinsic purpose of same-sex sexual acts within human nature?

This omission is not a conversational lapse or a semantic quibble. It’s a fundamental failure of method.

Natural Law reasoning cannot skip from empirical observation to moral conclusion. It requires the intermediate discernment of purpose. By refusing to articulate or defend a telos, the discussion collapsed into tone and motive, leaving no shared ground for evaluating the moral status of the acts in question.

The question at the heart of my exchange remains unanswered:

If same-sex sexual acts fulfil a legitimate human telos, what is that telos?

Not: Are people with same-sex attraction deserving of dignity? (Yes, always.)

Not: Should the Church accompany them with compassion? (Yes, always.)

But:

What is the intrinsic purpose of same-sex sexual desire within the structure of human nature as created?

That question isn’t mean-spirited. It isn’t a refusal of pastoral care. It isn’t a denial of the suffering that the teaching can cause. Finally, it isn’t an obsession with sexual ethics. it was raised by my interlocutor as a test case for Natural Law reasoning, and I simply followed where that led.

Truth is not ours to own, but we honor it by reasoning faithfully toward the ends God has built into human nature—ends that give both our questions and our answers their weight.