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Julea Ward, a graduate student in the counseling program at Eastern Michigan University, was expelled from the program. She had referred a homosexual client to another counselor since she would have been in the position of affirming the client’s sexual orientation as being morally acceptable, something that Ms. Ward did not accept due to her religious beliefs. Although the counseling program has a non-discriminatory policy on “sexual orientation,” there were procedures in place for a student to refer a client in case of values conflicts. Instead the university’s counseling program showed its intolerance for traditional Christian belief on the moral unacceptability of practicing homosexuality.
Ms. Ward sued, and the initial court ruling was in favor of the university. However, today a ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit reversed the lower court’s ruling. In his opinion, Circuit Court Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton made it clear that tolerance is not a one-way street, and that the university was punishing Ms. Ward for her religious beliefs.
This marks a significant victory for freedom of speech and freedom of religion in academia. Many academics are products of the mindset of the 1960s, with its transvaluation of values and its support of positions inimical to those of traditional Christianity. It is far to say that many academics hate traditional Christianity and traditional morality concerning sexual ethics. Such vitriolic hated expresses itself in intimidation and sometimes dismissal of students and faculty who disagree with the “New Puritanism” (as my late friend Marion Montgomery called it) in academia. Often, when people like Ms. Ward fight back, they win in court (though with the radicalism of Mr. Obama’s appointees this may change in the future). Traditionalists in academia, both among faculty and students, should, of course, pick their battles, but when it becomes time to fight, they should fight aggressively. There are organizations such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the National Association of Scholars (NAS) who lend support for academics unfairly treated due to dogmatic ideology in academia. These organizations give hope to faculty and students who face discrimination, and the Sixth Circuit Court ruling today is a breath of fresh air.
Gratiaetnatura's Blog 
Jan 28, 2012 @ 04:43:56
Actually, I regard this as a victory for Puritanism, since the Puritan is he who thinks judging another and uncharity is ethical.
This person as a professional is subject to what in law is called the “cab rank” rule: in a law firm, lawyers regarded as in a pool of available counsel cannot refuse a “fare”. British lawyer Geoffrey Robertson describes this in his book “The Tyrannicide Brief” on the hapless, but heroic, lawyer who was selected according to an early version of this law to prosecute Charles I and who was tortured and executed because of his heroic professionalism.
Most professionals are cab-ranked, but doctors can refuse to perform abortions…because performing an abortion is a different kind of act than nursing the patient who has had the abortion. If you believe abortion to be murder, then you’re clearly commanded by most forms of most major world religions to not perform the abortion nor assist. But if you’re a Christian, then the Sermon on the Mount would tell you you must care for the patient as a nurse before and after the operation.
As to this case, the counselor can be compared to an attorney who is assigned a murder defense when she believes the client to be guilty: she’s nonetheless responsible for the best defense possible up to and including getting her client found innocent.
The grad student, if she’s any good, could have helped the gay person. Counselors do not tell people what to do, they ask questions and help people understand matters of the heart. I believe that people who insist on the “right” to tell another “you’re not worthy of medical aid, legal counsel, or psychiatric assistance because you’re gay” are being uncharitable….and “if I speak with the tongues of men and angels and have not charity, I am but a sounding brass or tinkling cymbal”.
The Church itself, while excommunicating heretics, never to my knowledge refuses them the sacrament of Confession, although in special cases such as Henry, the Holy Roman Emperor, kneeling for days in front of the Pope’s home, or Tannhauser in the legend, extraordinary forms of confession were required. It’s not the graduate student’s job to hear a confession, but I find a rough analogy here.
Even as a “fallen-away Catholic” I say, leave this adolescent and associative morality, in which people confuse morality with a form of sanitation and not catching the Other’s disease through association, to the Puritans.
Jan 28, 2012 @ 06:10:22
At any time, Paul, let me know if I clutter this blog unduly.
The graduate student is not acting for a freedom of speech, but a license to refuse an assignment which is to me analogous to a doctor refusing to care for a homosexual patient.
My ancestors in Gernany were advised to serve their Prince by priests who spoke of a dual or double effect where the greater good (which, I suppose, might have been the seizure of Silesia by Prussia) cancels the lesser evil.
But in this case, although counseling is a good which Catholics (who do believe that homosexuality both is and causes character disorder) must admit, it has to give way to the “freedom” to be “pure”, rather as Isabella, in Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure, must preserve her chastity at the cost of her brother’s life. Apparently, the double effect does not apply.
I suggest that Fundamentalism, including its Catholic variants, is an artifact of modernization in which obsessive-compulsive disorders are mistaken for ethics. What my confessor called “over-scrupulousness” in me in 1962 is now referred to on Catholic Web sites as a form of OCD.
My theory is that the greater interconnectivity that’s a result of modernization creates anxiety about pollution and over transitivity, where the evil in A creates evil in B, and then in C: Tinker to Evers to Chance in a way that overwhelms an OCD Catholic, of which this counselor may be an example.
Whereas the example of the Saints such as Ignatius is that they were never afraid of the mire. Jehan de la Pucelle (Joan of Arc) went among French soldiers who, it is said, found themselves mysteriously relieved of their lust when around her…and that certainly was a miracle if true, they being French.
From the viewpoint, which is so seldom taken, of the gay man spotted like a dog with Aids begging for change on Union Square, one Judgement is enough. Suppose this counselor had been assigned the task of getting him off the street? Would she have refused this assignment?
Jan 28, 2012 @ 13:08:53
It sounds like Ms. Ward is unqualified for the profession for which she is training. On those grounds alone, the University was justified. This isn’t a question of free speech, which the University is clearly not denying her, but of professional standards and ethics, which are defined by other bodies within the profession, and licensing boards. Her behavior is abominable, whatever her rationale. The Constitution guarantees the right to believe whatever religion one chooses. It guarantees no right to education in a particular field of study. The values clash is not between the University and Ms. Ward personally. It’s between the ethical standards of her chosen profession, and her personal interpretation of Christian doctrine. Let her preach what she likes, in church, or a street corner. But if she won’t treat people in need of treatment, take away her license.
Jan 28, 2012 @ 21:20:01
Let’s see if I get this straight. The woman is a Christian and because her Christian beliefs she does not consider herself qualified to counsel someone living a anti/non-Christian lifestyle and you are saying she should be required “by law” to do this (the responders to the blog)??
Wow, so the homosexual crowd can have rights but the Christian cannot. It tickles me silly when I see the gays and the gay rights advocates be JUST as discriminatory and JUST as intolerant of others who refuse to accept their practices as normal or non-sinful.
So apparently the homosexual commenter above says to “take her license” if she does not “treat people in need of treatment”.
Interesting view. So, the straight crowd and the Christian community is to be FORCED by the 1-5% of the population (1% is actually pushing it if you look at real statistics and not those designed to make the homo-crowd look larger than it is) to “declare” and cater to those who are homosexual despite their moral and ethical and religious beliefs in the secular world. How interesting.
I think it would be equally interesting if all homosexuals were banned from Christian businesses (meaning if the owner of a business is Christian). What’s good for the goose is certainly good for the gander.
Do you even see the ridiculous hypocrisy you posted?
You are saying a woman shouldn’t be able to be a counselor because she has a moral and ethical objection to a tiny minority that hold nonsense behaviors as the norm, (when clearly they are not)?
Sounds like COMMUNISM to me. You sound no different than the Soviets who went in and destroyed the Church and where they couldn’t do that, they simply took them over by forcing those in the public churches that remained in existence to tow the secular lines of the communist government. It’s an absurd and stupid belief.
By doing so, you remove FREEDOM from this country and FORCE those beliefs (dogmas that could easily be equivocated to religion) on a woman who holds separate beliefs than yours.
What makes your beliefs better?
Secondly, Why is it that you have a right to say she cannot be a counselor at all when all she is asking is that she has the right to refer the disturbed individual to someone who WILL take care of that person!
Contemporary fool speak those kinds of comments all the time not realizing or caring that they are doing EXACTLY what people did to them just a few years ago.
Not that many years ago before the EEOC, one could not “come out” of the closet and we said it was our way or the high way. Now you are saying the same thing, yet declaring yourself to be “reasonable” and “ethically and morally superior” for having done the very thing that our forefathers did to you.
What an IGNORANT AND SHORT SIGHTED generation of FOOLS.
IN SAYING WHAT YOU HAVE SAID, YOU HAVE BECOME THAT WHICH YOU DESPISED SO MUCH.
The Christian showed her Christian love by saying, please go to someone else because I cannot help you if you hold that homosexual behavior is acceptable in the eyes of God.
She didn’t take him in and try to “convert” him. She didn’t Preach to him that he was wrong, she referred him.
Wow, it’s truly funny, human nature… the homo-crowd acting EXACTLY like the Bigots they always were but always claimed to hate. You are cut from the same cloth. You are two sides of the same coin, and Thank GOD at least one judge can see that you can be a Good Christian and also be a counselor or any other related job. Meanwhile, bigots and racists pop up and raise their ugly ugly heads from the other side of the fence.
You should look back at the films of homosexual persecution where NO ONE would hire based on their choices in behavior and then look at yourself and what you’re saying about not wanting to let a Christian have a job.
How very sad for you. I will pray that God opens your eyes.
Pax Christi,
Fr. Timothy
Jan 29, 2012 @ 05:05:01
Paul, I stopped reading this reply when he called me a homosexual. Whether I am or am not (I’m not), this mad monk is out of line and I request he be removed.
“Father Timothy”, what makes a view better than yours are two things: the truth of propositions and the validity of arguments.
Jan 29, 2012 @ 09:47:56
Laws and court decisions that enable or enforce tolerance will of course appear oppressive to the losing side, or, the losing side will play the victim card.
But this means that the courts cannot draw practical boundaries without an outcry about “freedom” from the Right, which, like mercenaries of the Thirty Years War, turns imaginary captured cannons on their former owners.
The problem here is that is what courts do. In the old days, as recently as 1960, even liberals felt that homosexuality was a character disorder and homosexual men who propositioned other men in the bar of the St Francis Hotel in San Francisco, today a gay mecca, could face prison time.
Today, Christians who are in my view not practicing, insofar as their case is concerned, that form of charity from which tolerance flows, want to claim a parallel freedom to that they fancy is now enjoyed by the Other.
The problem is that the Christian case fails JS Mill’s analysis of the foundational meaning of the term “liberty” defined as a complete liberty that does not at any time interfere with the liberty of another.
A university as a nonprofit corporation has the right to set up a counseling office and staff it with graduate students in order to save money and provide clinical experience. Counselors are not, as counselors, in the business of approving or disapproving what people do, although they are under the obligation, which Catholic priests are not with respect to the Confessional, to report serious violations of the law.
A counselor, in the act of counseling, does NOT give her blanket approval to the behavior of the client. The fact that psychiatrists and other therapists do create a warm and emotionally supportive environment in most forms of therapy is not a statement to the effect that what you do is OK.
In fact, counselors often work with patients whose behaviors the counselors find quite reprehensible, including alcoholics and wife beaters. Think of that popular series The Sopranos. The psychiatrist does not approve of Tony’s behavior!
Counselors disapprove of alcoholism…yet they treat alcoholism.
Now, all analogies such as mine here fail at some point. Here, the point of failure is that the counselor probably cannot advise the patient to stop being a homo if he wants to feel good.
But…counselors, insofar as they ply their trade, do not even say “stop beating your wife” because this sort of minatory language is ineffectual as therapy in all forms of therapy except real stupid forms such as military therapy where the goal is to get the guy back to the front.
They do advise of consequences. Indeed, the therapist in the case Paul references could professionally take the opportunity to air her own views. She may be passing up an opportunity to say, “I respect your views but my personal view is that homosexuality creates problems. I say this as a person and not your therapist”.
Above all, cease these persecution fantasies or get help. Since you are so clearly not queer, should be no problem.
Teachers such as I do this all the time, being careful to separate their opinion from “what’s on the test”.
Given that many real Christians who don’t approve of homosexuality would regard the assignment as a chance to bear witness in this manner, added to the fact that to so deny therapy is an offense against Charity, court finds for the defense…and fines you one thousand bucks for callin’ me a homo.
Not that I mind. I think homos are perfectly charming people. The official policy of the Church is to welcome them as long as they behave, but it puts the same strictures upon heterosexuals outside of marriage. They keep their apartments spic and span, unlike me.
Jan 28, 2012 @ 21:48:33
I’d like to see this case go to the Supreme Court. My guess is that the SC will uphold the 6th Circuit Court’s ruling, which is an all-out tragedy and a testament to the activist judges now seated in the nation’s highest court.
I have a few issues with this post:
(1) Is tolerating intolerance a traditional Christian value? It strikes me that there are plenty of examples where Christians would not tolerate intolerance. Christians are morally forbidden from tolerating intolerance. So, Ms. Ward’s actions are morally unacceptable.
(2) Ms. Ward felt that treating a homosexual patient would be tantamount to accepting that homosexuality is morally permissible. Really? Here’s an analogous case: Mr. Smith’s eating meat is to accept that hunting is morally permissible. Eating meat doesn’t mean that you believe hunting is morally permissible. One could be a carnivore and believe hunting is morally objectionable because of the unfair advantage humans have over animal prey. Likewise, in the case of Ms. Ward, treating the homosexual patient would not mean that she accepts any other form of sexual orientation as morally permissible.
(3) I find it difficult to follow your argument in the last paragraph. How is it that we infer from “Ms. Ward’s intolerant behavior is Constitutional” to “This is freedom from the anti-Christian views of academics.” Admittedly, some academics are atheists. But that they are atheists doesn’t mean that they don’t accept moral principles consistent with traditional Christian values. Perhaps there’s more overlap between the atheist and the Christian than we might at first believe.
Ms. Ward’s actions are repulsive for the reasons NewAdams cites above. Her Christian faith doesn’t give her license to shirk her professional responsibilities.
Jan 29, 2012 @ 05:06:22
First of all, Joe, how is Ms. Ward being “intolerant”? I read the Sixth Circuit Court ruling–it was clear to me that Ms. Ward has no per se problem with counseling a homosexual client, but that she was told she had to approve of her client’s lifestyle as being morally correct. In that case, she has every right to exercise a conscience clause, as does a Christian gynecologist who refers a patient wanting an abortion to another doctor. As for intolerance, I’m sure you do not tolerate lots of actions–murder, theft, and re sexual ethics, bestiality or incest. As Peter Singer understood, without a natural law orientation there is no real argument against bestiality as long as the animal does not object. I would add that there is no adequate non-natural law argument against incest as long as the sexual partners are of age (say an adult brother and sister who have been “fixed” so they cannot have children but who desire a sexual relationship). I am “intolerant” toward incest–so is my own Christianity less?
On homosexuality, I accept fully the Catholic position that the orientation is unnatural (though not sinful) and acting on that orientation is sinful and a violation of the moral law. I also believe that premarital sex is wrong (though, like most people, I sinned in this area–that does not justify it). If I were a counselor, I would not want to counsel a homosexual if I were told by my superiors that I had to support homosexuality as morally right.
May I add to the “secularists” liberal theists of all stripes, Christian, Jewish, or other. My understanding is that the Roman Catholic Church holds that publicly disagreeing with its dogmas, including moral law, is a heretical (in the original sense of the word, “divisive”) act that precludes a person from partaking of the body and blood of Christ. They generally don’t enforce that. The bishops in my own church, the Anglican Catholic Church, do, and I am glad of that.
To spinoza, as far as traditional morality being “adolescent,” I was reminded of a friend of mine in seminary who for a time became an atheist. He’d tell my my view that there is life after death was immature and a denial of the reality of death fit for a coward and not a true man. Such emotive words do not affect me–I spent a year in the ultra-liberal graduate department of religion at Vanderbilt University, and have heard every insulting term imaginable toward both theological and political conservatives. Some of the faculty were very intolerant toward theological and moral conservatism to the point of punishing students who did not tow the line. I have never felt so smothered intellectually in any school than I did there. If tolerance is not a two way street, then all that is left is Nietzche’s will to power (and Nietzsche deserves credit for pointing this out). In that case the world may yet end as T. S. Eliot said it would end, “with people shooting each other in the streets.” God forbid that things should degenerate to that point.
Jan 29, 2012 @ 10:31:35
She had to approve of the lifestyle as being “morally correct” as a demi-physician who operates first even on a Charles Manson or Hitler to save his life and does not, acting as a physician, take it upon himself to be a judge (“judge not lest ye be judged”).
The modern professions of law and of medicine evolved from priestcraft at the same time as the liberal state….which HAS to be “liberal” BECAUSE it is multi-confessional. We CANNOT at this juncture sort ourselves out into regions or *kraals* under cuius regio eius religio (each region its religion) without ethnic cleansing which in natural law is clearly worse than living in a multi confessional state.
Liberalism evolved not as some plot against Simple Goddish Folk but organically as countries like the United States and Germany unified and found themselves to have different people with different religions.
The primitive response on the side of the State in Bismarck’s Germany was the *KulturKampf* a low-level war against Catholic institutions of civil society primarily in the Catholic regions of Bavaria….which caused some of my ancestors to come to Amerika.
On the side of the Church we have Pope Leo XIII’s definition of “Americanism” as an heresy in his 1898 Papal Letter, *Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae*. By “Americanism” the Pope meant the “heresy” of American Catholics including Cardinal Gibbons to the effect that Catholics should, in the final analysis, tolerate living in a society with other faiths as contrast to Italy or Spain.
In Pope Leo’s thinking, that was tantamount to the therapist’s being willing to treat the gay person.
But the only practical effect of this rarefied theological difference was that part of our prayers in the 1950s was not only the conversion of Russia (not only away from Communism but also to reconciliation of the Eastern Orthodox with Rome, a tall order) but of our own country.
We muttered intolerant nonsense but it took a non-Catholic and an agnostic to get the theory right, and that happens to be the late John Rawls.
For Rawls, a liberal state is not based on a complete theory with a “metaphysic” that implies all its action. It is based on a minimal theory that shares the common features of world religions which happen to be something that seems to horrify people with serious personality disorders, and that is a beautiful loving kindness and tolerance and absence of spiritual pride.
Now, the professions of law and medicine and psychiatry are an integral part of the liberal state-society. It licenses them. It gives them specific, bankable privileges it doesn’t give other people.
And just as a liberal state is no longer liberal when like Franco in Spain of the 1930s or Tudjman in Catholic Croatia it starts persecuting and ethnic cleansing non-Catholics, to the ignorant cheers of many Catholics, just as it collapses back to one level of fear, a “professional” doctor is no longer a doctor when a gay man bleeds to death outside the emergency room, when some drunken bum of a public defender is no longer a lawyer when he lets his innocent client get the death penalty, and a dizzy little grad student with Catholic OCD is NOT a therapist if she wounds a gay man like this, and should be fired.
My father, the late Dr. Richard G. Nilges, never read Rawls, but he lived Rawls. He tolerated his sons’ and daughters’ diverse viewpoints. He cared for the wretched. He at one time approved of abortion in certain circumstances.
But when he saw a REAL injustice he fought it. Old people being terminated was one, and unlike the fetus in the first trimester, the Terminator was the GREED of hospital administrators and insurance companies.
In so acting he was in the zone. That is: the liberal state cannot tolerate real cases of murder because murder is intolerance.
But up to that point he was a highly tolerant man from whom I learned.
Being a professional is not a right. In fact, a truly traditional Catholic spiritual adviser of the 1950s would ask this dizzy dame what she’s DOING as a therapist in a non-Catholic institution. It seems to me that I recall that “psychiatry” was NOT considered a licit occupation for Catholics as recently as the 1950s.
This is in fact why my Grandfather told my Dad that my brother and I had to be sent to Catholic high school. The hierarchy of that time knew that doctrines would be taught at Princeton that would threaten faith, so they wanted Catholics, as much as possible, to attend Notre Dame.
Right now, there is an alliance between Fundamentalism and Catholicism on the matter of abortion, which is strange, since within my memory, many Protestants were not “pro-life”. The alliance developed because being anti-choice is a great way for white males to reassert power over reproduction, in my opinion. And while the modern Catholic magisterium is profoundly dishonest (a Catholic church that preached infant damnation in the 17th century for unbaptized infants is not pro-baby at all) at least the teaching itself has always been consistent.
And certainly, both Catholicism and Protestantism have always been consistent about homosexuality. Just like Hitler, Franco killed queers. But there are at least two problems with this.
The first is that religious law emerges historically from primitive Tabu. Before Abraham went up the mountain with Isaac, his Law included human sacrifice. As they went down it did not. As a result many people confuse common decency with sexual Tabu. There is a considerable overlap but OCD purity is not virtue.
The second is priestly sex abuse. Catholicism has never psychologically reconciled with the transgressive nature of sex. Period.
I rest my case.
Jan 29, 2012 @ 10:45:13
The people that start shooting are typically thugs who loudly “return to Christianity” (or Islam). Serbian Chetniks who were lager louts in the 1980s. Croatian neo-Ustashe. Romanian Iron Guards. Spanish idiots who after hundreds of years of denial still thought Spain could be an Empire in the 1930s if only its youth would die muttering prayers on battlefields.
US Southern Fundamentalists (who really hate Catholics, by the way).
Guys whose parents owned property in Palestine before 1948 and whose parents’ Islam was tolerant to a fault, but who have been brutalized ever since!
I created network policies for simple courtesy at Princeton and I didn’t need a gun.
If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. Apply to Notre Dame. Lovely place.
TS Eliot also said, we cannot follow an antique drum, in the Four Quartets. Fascism is the illusion we can. Fascism is Dostoevsky’s Beast in Karamazov who weeps tears of blood.
There is no such thing as “liberal orthodoxy”. It is an oxymoron. The very origin of the word is from Spain of the 1820s in which the *liberales* asked Britain to support a multi-cultural and multi-confessional, constitutional monarchy in return for the thousands of Spaniards who’d died allied with Britain in the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon.
The Brits mocked them and restored the traditional monarchy and then abandoned Spain as no longer useful as we abandoned Afghanistan after 1989.
The student in question got in the newspaper because you have to spread a little hate these days to get noticed. If you’re a truly tolerant and loving individual, you get ignored if you’re lucky, stepped on if not. The student galvanized false consciousness of false victimization.
Feb 06, 2012 @ 18:13:04
Oh, OK. I haven’t read the circuit court’s opinion.
Each commentator has raised some interesting points. But I’d like to spend some time on gratiaetnatura’s response to my comment.
First, “conscience” is a tricky concept. I don’t believe any “conscience clause” adequately captures what we mean by it. So, your citing a conscience clause and your employing the notion of conscience (and spinoza1111’s discussion of duty) has sent me back to read Broad on conscience and conscientious action; FYI – he was no fan of conscientious objectors. Anyway, thanks for the motivation.
Next, there’s something odd about saying that Mrs. Ward “had to accept” or “had to approve of” the morality of her client’s sexual preferences. How does one approve of or accept another’s preferences? Look, here’s a toy example. I know that you like hot peppers (the hotter, the better). I, too, happen to like hot peppers (the hotter, the better). I don’t like hot peppers because you like them, and (I’m certain) you don’t like them because I like them. Even if I don’t like hot peppers, my disapproval of hot peppers doesn’t persuade me to approve of or disapprove of your liking hot peppers. I will continue to interact with you, have meetings with you, treat you respectfully, etc. To think otherwise would be silly. So, if we don’t know what it is to approve or accept another’s gustatory preferences, then we certainly cannot speak of the approval or acceptance (or failure thereof) of another’s moral preferences.
Then, you suggest that we can infer form my comment that because we do not tolerate other actions, such as murder, theft, bestiality, or incest, we are less Christian or no Christian at all. I didn’t mean for one to take that away from my previous comment. Let me try to get a little clearer. There are plenty of reasons to believe that murder, theft, and bestiality ought not to be tolerated. Both would, even if not done to me, infringe upon my (include here my property too) right to live free from obstruction. I don’t want to worry about my cat wandering onto my neighbor’s yard and he having his way with it. Incest, as you correctly note, like homosexuality, is distinct. As long as brother and sister are adults, consent to the activity, and no unpalatable consequence follows from the two engaging in intercourse, there is no natural law against it. I take it that we could say it is not morally forbidden. Your intolerance of incest doesn’t make you any less a Christian, it makes you intolerant of incest. The original post, however, had seemed to include a stronger position. Christians should not only be intolerant of incest but also intolerant of those who tolerate incest. That seems to be the un-Christian part, especially since I am very confused by the move from accepting that x is the case to accepting that x is morally permissible.
Finally, I’m curious to hear more about what’s so unnatural about homosexuality. Anyone who says that unnatural sexual acts ought to be morally forbidden treads on very thin ice. If by unnatural the person means sex not had with the intention of procreating (which I believe is the Roman Catholic definition), then there are lots of examples of sex between a man and a woman that fail to meet this criterion: (a) elderly couples (yes, they have sex too), (b) sex had between a man and a woman where at least one of the two persons is infertile, or (c) sex had with the use of some contraceptive device. Perhaps you might think that sex between a man and a woman would suffice for natural sex. That too is difficult to define: what if the sex act includes heavy petting, vaginal intercourse, fellatio, or sodomy? Would these, too, be morally forbidden. Defining the “natural” (as opposed to “unnatural”) sex act is difficult to do.
Jan 29, 2012 @ 05:11:34
Spinoza, Father Timothy was out of line in calling you a homosexual; I would say that you find no moral objection to homosexual practice (Joe’s post also agrees with your position) –there are, of course, heterosexuals on both sides of the debate over homosexuality. It is easy to assume too much about a person rather than focus on a person’s position. But his basic point on tolerance going two ways is something which which I agree. Being a tolerant chap myself, I will not remove him from the blog.
Jan 29, 2012 @ 07:44:22
But that is to equate my post with his. With all due respect, I feel that if a line can be drawn by the Church between homosexual orientation and practice *contra naturam* I will maintain that a line can be drawn against the invalid inference from the defense of homosexual practice to the sexual orientation of the defensor.
That is, defense of Church laws which were put into place as part of ethnic cleansing of European pagans is to me less important than defending the validity of inference.
I’m afraid that Scholasticism was an after the fact effort to justify Constantine’s takeover in which harmless practices were defined as *contra naturam* and I’m afraid that Scholasticism’s intellectual license to prohibit creates obsessive compulsive behavior in the individual and ethnic cleansing in the large,
We can know when he fail to love one another whereas following a catechism uses memory and is far easier for normal and wealthy people.
What are the ethics of the fallen? What I mean is, the homosexual who comes to either a church or counseling center is often a person who seeks to act right. If you turn them away you are uncharitable.
As a religious counselor, Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker socialist, never hid her view that abortion is wrong from unmarried mothers to be. But I cannot imagine her turning an unmarried mother away based on her pre-existing choices.
Jan 30, 2012 @ 20:46:01
Wow, it’s really amazing that Spinoza takes so much offense at my post when I referred to him as a homosexual.
I thought there was nothing wrong with a homosexual viewpoint and that it should be forced on all those in certain programs at their institutions of learning as something that MUST be “tolerated”. For someone who says there much be toleration and says homosexuality is a thing that those people must accept, you act insulted, personally that I referred to you as a homosexual since you took a perspective of a homosexual in such things. You act insulted. If there’s nothing wrong with it, how is it an insult? LOL
You also say if they can’t handle the heat then get out of the kitchen. I’d normally agree except for the fact that up until a few years ago the kitchen was a normal kitchen and not one that has been twisted and half destroyed due to neo-morality and pressing this fabricated neo-morality on others. But of course it’s not a lack of morality, it’s the “new morality” (woe unto those that call evil good and good evil). The new morality says that the old morality was opposite of what real morality is.
Uncharitable to turn a homosexual away? I would not turn a homosexual away IF they came to the conclusion that it is sinful and against God’s wishes and therefore wrong. If they sought to improve their life by turning away from sin. However, just like any sin, I would turn them away if they were not penitent.
Now as far as the woman turning a person away because they are homosexual. Sexuality in general, plays a large part of a person’s “psychic makeup” so to speak. Having normal sexuality is a basis for counseling through many types of issues. The relationships between men and women, the relationships between mother and son or mother and daughter and so on and on and on…
The point is that if a person who feels comfortable counseling a normal person (a straight person) then that does not necessarily mean they FEEL qualified enough to do it. And what if the conclusion of that counselor is that all the patient’s problems stem from his sexual perversions. How big of a lawsuit would that be?
You can’t have it both ways and in the end it’s about the FREEDOM of an individual vs. the ever changing morality of “institutions”. She has the Right to turn down anyone for any reason. To rule against her because she feels unqualified to counsel a sexual pervert (a homosexual) is a right she has. To FORCE her to do so against her beliefs is against the Constitution of the United States and thank God, even though we are no longer a nation Under God, at least, we still have the FREEDOM to not deny God.
As for “joe U” saying she doesn’t have the right to “skirk her responsiblities”… … as a matter of FACT Joe U. It DOES give her the right to do that very thing. Her “professional responsiblities” END where her Personal Liberties are trespassed against. Thankfully we live in what is still for the most part a FREE Country.
Forcefeeding their own fabricated morality at a college and preaching tolerance while you do it is a bucket of flaming, stinking and stupid hypocrisy mixed with a bit of communist/marxist govt.
It’s funny above what Joe U says… He doesn’t get it at all! LOL – He preaches that she MUST do this and She shouldn’t have the RIght to do that, but then he says SHE is the one that needs to be tolerant. Where is your tolerance that you just preached. Ignorance and foolishness. something about a pot and a kettle that’s politically incorrect to say anymore applies there.
Oh and by the way
Jan 31, 2012 @ 07:57:24
I stopped reading this after the first sentence, Paul. Courtesy of conservative politics many “men”, unlike you or my father, have regressed to the moral stature of 14 year old boys, for whom the moral panic is a form of energy.
That is, men are objectively made less than men by jobs or lack thereof, and the independence of women as enabled by technology. They then fetishize not-caring and not-seeing this and as here start adolescent teasing but at the age, probably in “Father Timothy’s” case, of 50 which is where the behavior most manifests itself on the Web.
They are then equated in a false spirit of fairness with people like myself or my Dad. Their very personal qualities militate against them for it’s considered somehow unfair to recognize a qualitative difference, all differences being considered reducible to the quantitative by way of the ideology of academic grades and parallel mechanisms. If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich.
Although I will not dignify Fr. Tim with a close reading, it seems wearily familiar. Many conservative men become conservative because it’s hard to feel anything. He appears to be one of those tiresome individuals who claims to have replaced feeling with “logic” and “faith”.
I request he be removed.
Jan 31, 2012 @ 08:15:28
“I would not turn them away if they were penitent” did catch my eye. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, as a fallen away Catholic I may have learned more theology at St Viator than modern practicing Catholics.
The Catholic position is that sinners can only be turned away from receiving the Sacraments other than Confession if they are public major sinners like the Emperor Henry in the Middle Ages.
They cannot be barred from attending Mass, and certainly cannot be barred from receiving charity, although I suppose that as a practical rule in cases of scarcity, an individual Catholic Charity may focus first, but not exclusively, on Catholics.
In Catholicism, also, my understanding is that judgement is ultimately reserved to God at the Last Judgement, and secondarily to the hierarchy and the priest in Confession…who cannot, interestingly, be monitored by the hierarchy by secret tape-recording, or a “confessor review” form filled out by the penitent on the model of a faculty evaluation.
So…when Catholics take it upon themselves to use the public sphere, such as the courts, to transmit their lay judgements about others, or as here to give others the freedom to change a non-Catholic institution in civil society, they are adopting the Lutheran and Islamic belief of “the priesthood of all believers” in which adult males, traditionally, can claim to be authorities on others’ conduct.
When Catholics in New York City decided that Andres Serrano’s artistic installation “Piss Christ” was disrespectful to them (when in fact it was an evolution of Mexican baroque, which portrayed the sufferings of Christ vividly) they were saying that their reaction should have a priestly authority over the public sphere.
“Father Timothy” who may not be a priest (and if not is very, very guilty, in traditional Catholicism, of simony) is saying under what circumstances he’d “forgive” a homo.
But that’s the point. If the virtue of charity is “lexically prior” to the other virtues then perhaps Confession evolved so that Catholic laypeople wouldn’t act like men in Calvin’s Geneva of the 16th century, who would go about rebuking each other based on their various readings of Scripture in such a fashion that Geneva soon became a police state, with effectively not a “priesthood of all believers” but a “priesthood” of rich, property owning males who may have rather resembled Newt Gingrich.
Feb 06, 2012 @ 23:37:19
We may live in a free country, Father Timothy, but the laws that protect our “personal” liberties don’t protect us in professional situations.
Let’s think of the simplest case: the rights guaranteed to persons under the First Amendment, freedom from abridging free speech. Like it or not, if an employer finds an employee posting illicit photos on Facebook or publicly berating the company for which he works, the employee can be fired. The employee would have no legitimate case for saying that his personal liberties had been violated. The business has rules. The employee broke those rules (sometimes called “breach in contract”). So, the employee is subject to some kind of punishment that fits violating the rules of the business.
Of course, Miss Ward is free to exercise her free speech. And she can do so without a job. I agree with you that her ability to sue a company successfully for having abridged her “so-called” personal liberties is bordering on some kind of totalitarian regime.
If the employee doesn’t like the rules of the business, don’t work for that business. If she can’t find a job elsewhere, oh well. That’s capitalism at its finest.
Feb 07, 2012 @ 01:24:53
It wasn’t a business. She was in a program in a college. Her personal rights ARE guaranteed in many situations, especially moral perspectives.
All this woman did was to refer the person to another person who could more adequately meet the needs of the person desiring counseling. She was kicked out of a school because of this. What utter nonsense! A large quantity of Americans still view homosexuality morally unacceptable. Go back 50 years you are saying it was just as fine to “cure” the homosexuals in secular culture.
It’s funny how “campaigners” like yourself can’t have it both ways but you use the same arguments that the people on the opposite side of the argument use. Just like Spinoza.
Go back to the 50’s and look at the people persecute the homosexuals and the universities and doctors “curing” the homosexuals back then. Because that’s what was “IN” at the moment, that’s the same arguments you two are using now.
You are saying that anyone that disagrees with the status quo of what is “trending” should be kicked out even if all they do is refer someone to a different counselor.
You are Nazis. You are just too obtuse to even see how simple it is. It would be funny if it were’nt just sad.
Even asking me to be kicked off of here for pointing out the ridiculous idiotic hypocrisy! LOL ROFLMAO. WOW. You can dish it but not take it!!! HOw funny. The pot calling the kettle black etc… ad infinitum….
Jan 31, 2012 @ 21:50:56
Actually, spinoza (interesting name–Benedict Spinoza was viewed both as the least religious and the most religious person in the world, depending on how one viewed his pantheism), if you got beyond Fr. Timothy’s initial expressions of emotion, he offers some interesting arguments. He is actually ordained in the Western Rite of the Orthodox Church., so simony is not an issue in this case. As for Rome, I think you’re right that in general, using the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares, the RC Church supports the idea of letting God sort people out. This was not the policy of the Church in the past; the church softened its stance after Constantine the Great, and especially after Theodosius declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire–thousands of half-converted pagans became part of the church. There was some leeway, even in the Middle Ages, on some doctrinal matters–John Scotus Erigena, for example, was not formally declared a heretic (although I think that, unlike Meister Eckhart, that Scotus Erigena really was a pantheist, not a panentheist). The Church has always understood human weakness on moral matters–I am practically the same way, knowing my own faults. I cannot, however, agree with agreeing with what the great tradition of Catholicism, both East and West, has considered to be sin, including sexual sin (and as Dante noted, is much less serious than hatred, wrath, or betrayal)–at least sexual sin can be committed out of love and is not always due to mere lust. A “couple” once visited my church and came quite a few Sundays. We did not forbid them from coming, we accepted them as persons–if they said something like “We know we’re doing wrong, and hopefully one day we will be celibate, but right now it’s too difficult in this fallen world”–I would not problem with them being members of my church as long as they did not publicly parade their relationship. But if they said, “Your church’s views on sexual ethics are wrong and outdated,” then there would be a problem. W. H. Auden did not justify his sexual behavior; he admitted his weakness, just as Allen Tate admitted his faults regarding women to whom he was not married. As far as excommunication, I do believe it should be practiced more often with publicly heretical theologians (John Dominick Crosson should have been excommunicated a long time ago because of his denial of the resurrection of Christ)..We will have to disagree on some of these points, I’m afraid, and that’s not a problem–I’m rather outnumbered in academia and am used to disagreement.
Feb 01, 2012 @ 07:55:37
The Church’s moral views evolve, and devolve. It is unlikely that excommunication will be used against CEOs of predatory corporations, although the idea of the modern corporation dates from the 19th century, and while the magisterium has approved of labor unionization it has not spoken clearly on whether the corporation is a licit form of organization.
On the face of it, a “legal person” without morals commanded to maximize profit by all legal means would seem to be far more morally doubtful than a couple living in sin. It sounds like a sort of demon. And given the record of corporations in Latin America alone, a record protested by liberation theologists but not the hierarchy, the Church should probably start speaking out.
Instead it prefers to accuse desperate young women of murder.
No support can be found in the Gospels for excluding women and gay people from a church or even the sacraments. Quite the opposite: Christ rebuked the apostles for trying to exclude Mary Magdalene and Christ rebuked the Pharisees for wanting to kill the woman taken in adultery.
In fact, if a Catholic views her homosexual or unmarried relationship as licit, the dictates of her individual conscience can (according to some but by no means all Catholic theologians) trump the views of the hierarchy. This is because the views of the hierarchy are secular and they change.
Usury was a mortal sin for Antonio in Shakespeare’s play the Merchant of Venice because within Shakespeare’s own memory, under Queen Mary, Catholicism banned usury: Shylock is the money-lender because Christians of the 16th century could not loan money at interest. Today, they can.
And when Mike Moore asked his bishop and parish priest whether “capitalism” was licit as such, they said it was not. The Church has always taught that pure capitalism (including, today, high and usurious levels of interest on “payday loans” extended to the poor) is evil, same as pure Communism.
So ultimately, despite the very real virtue of obedience to the magisterium (which avoids sectarian wars that result from Protestant and Islamic notions of the “priesthood of all believers”: “Catholic terrorists” are rare), this obedience itself is a moral choice based on free will which the Catholic is responsible for. He may as Galileo or St Ignatius choose to disobey (the Jesuits in particular were always getting in trouble).
Christ provided a decision procedure for the Catholic in this form of fear and trembling, and that was LOVE, which reduces all moral questions to the question of harm to the Other, or Creation.
If a couple living in “sin” or a gay man goes to the Communion rail the priest (and not the congregation) can decide to skip them. He has to realize that they’ve decided that they’re free of mortal sin and that if he’s wrong, he’s violated the commandment to love.
But since Catholicism is not a priesthood of all believers, it is not, in my view as a non-practising Catholic that this is not the lay communicants’ business.
I was privileged, I guess, to live as a kid the transition from a Catholicism of fear to that of the Berrigans, the Jesuit priests who burned draft records because this was to me one of love. This “Catholicism”, if that’s what it was, had ethical expectations, as did my father’s…he wasn’t faithful about going to Mass but he spoke truth to power concerning brain death.
For this reason, I find the Catholicism of Tony Blair or Newt Gingrich unrecognizable. William F Buckley’s, not so unrecognizable.
If the Church can change its magisterium (from one that allowed married clergy before the tenth century, that forbid usury prior to the 18th) then it’s high time it does so with regard to gay people.
Feb 01, 2012 @ 08:16:48
As to sexual sin in particular. Norman Mailer pointed out that until very recently, a woman risked her life through having sex for prior to the discovery of the germ theory of disease, and the Pill, she couldn’t control pregnancy and many died in childbirth.
Perverted sex was an excellent way even before AIDs to transmit fearsome diseases such as a pandemic of syphilis which appears to have broken out in Shakespeare’s time and which oppresses the lowlife in his play Measure for Measure.
Shakespeare and Mailer saw that the wrong of sex was its potential to harm the weak: women, and modern babies born with AIDs:
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
(Shakespeare Sonnet #129)
Marriage tries (without complete success given the widespread fact of abuse) to civilize this but note that Catholics and Protestants of Shakespeare’s time regarded the moment of marriage not the time of the priest’s or minister’s blessing but the moment at which two people in solitude plighted troth. Romeo and Juliet WAIT until Friar Lawrence marries them to have sex but the “balcony scene” is where they recognize their love.
So for me anyway, the potential for evil in sex is JUST harm to Creation. Gay people and couples who don’t harm Creation are better people than abusive husbands married in the Church.
Feminism, again to me, is a source of a usable sexual morality. I work with Hong Kong women who define illicit sex as any sex not involving “the enthusiastic consent of both parties”. That may ignore the rights of potential life…but I see no harm in sex in which potential life is not an issue.
CS Lewis, after the Pill was introduced in 1960, and before his death in 1963, said that the Pill had removed the issue of harm to another in sex. This was probably under the healing and humanistic influence of Joy Davidman, the former Communist he married.
I saw a young man spotted like a dog with Kaposi’s Sarcoma begging for change in Union Square. I think that life is composed of chains of DNA which interact like computer code and that at one point, in Africa in the early 20th century, a virus evolved that attacked the immune system. I don’t think the young man was being punished and I think people need to bring him offerings and see Christ in him. I think we live in a dangerous world that forces us to evolve a morality of decency for survival. It’s dangerous because it “wants” us to be fully human.