Roman Catholic Church

Sex

Fig. 1. Saint Bernard’s Roman Catholic Church, with the rectory in the foreground, in Mount Lebanon, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The electronic sign says, “Chastity: The way to human flourishing,” suggesting the website pghpure.org. The text on this side of the sign isn’t much more legible in person (it’s a little better on the other side). Photograph by author, August 27, 2023.

Fig. 2. “Lust, from the ‘Seven Deadly Sins.’” Etching by Léon Davent, circa 1550-1555, via the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Yet both sides in the debate [over contraception] agree that what is at stake isn’t merely a particular prohibition but the [Roman Catholic] church’s wider approach to sexual and medical ethics. One side stresses the objective morality or immorality of specific acts; the other seeks to give greater emphasis to a person’s intentions and the particular circumstances in which he or she acts.

Conservatives warn that lifting the categorical ban on artificial birth control would open a Pandora’s box by contradicting the reasoning behind other prohibitions. Janet Smith, a retired professor of ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, told the conference in Rome that contraception leads to the acceptance of promiscuity, gay relationships, assisted reproductive technology and transgenderism.^[1]

What remains here is an adamance that all sex must be for, among other things, procreation against a nuance of moral discernment.^[2] Which is probably more words than you need for, don’t hold your breath for Roman Catholic hierarchy sanity anytime soon.

On the “strict father” (conservative, in opposition to socially liberal “nurturant parent”) side of his moral political binary, George Lakoff observed an essentialization of women as childbearers.^[3] What I see in the Roman Catholic arguments against any form of birth control, and therefore any non-procreative sexuality or gender identification,^[4] is an assumed essentialization, generally embraced by social and traditionalist conservatives,^[5] who are now united with nearly all conservatives as white Christian nationalists,^[6] of sex as procreative. This essentialization of sex at least parallels and likely undergirds the essentialization of women.

Yes, babies may result from sex. But they don’t always, and not merely because of birth control. The essentialization of sex as procreative ignores instances where fertilization does not occur, miscarriages, and sex when any partners, for any of numerous reasons, are not fertile, just as it arbitrarily excludes people of non-procreative sexualities and gender identities. Yet the traditionalist and social conservative arguments against any form of birth control and against against any non-procreative sexuality or gender identification all ultimately and in various guises assume this essentialization.

I hesitate to categorize this essentialization of sex as procreative as foundational, but, among white Christian nationalists and among many of their illiberal compatriots around the world, it certainly appears beyond challenge.

If the god of Abraham indeed created sex for procreation, he also created the persuasions among some people that they are not heterosexual and that their genders do not conform to their body parts. Whatever we think of these persuasions, the conservative essentialization assigns a reality to the physical that it does not extend to the psychological.^[7] And yet, if we exclude the psychological from our ontology, how can we possibly include the spiritual?

Irregular Bullshit

Roman Catholic Church · Sex

Roman Catholic Church

Sex

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