Ethics: Sexual Morals: Do refWrite and Canadian Steele share a kernel of truth in common?

Canadian Steele's Errors: a Syllabus [#1]

I wrote a rip-snorter in reply to Tommy Steele's what-I-thawt-was-his-wrap-up on the Gmarriage debate (generic-marriage as a business deal) - July 5, "Victors of battle proceed with ideological mop-up [Canadian Steele]; diehards battle on [Colbert's Comments]. And there I led off with a barrage in Tommy's direction, in my own intended wrap-up fulminating against his blog entry (also I played for the first time with the semiotics of punctuation signs as cuss-outs, as in the old comic books).

But Tommy posted a comment, saying that I hadn't answered his blog entry, claiming that I hadn't even addressed his long rhetorical journey to his bottom line - posted comments?, something I'm unaccustomed to, and was not Johnny on the spot in replying, as tho I have to reply to every Tom, Dick and Hari who may comment. I got an email pertaining thereto, and tried to reply to the address given, but Blogger doesn't work that way. It didn't even dawn on me that there's a little envelop colophon next to the "Comment" tag, and that perhaps that would suffice to email Tommy. So, being heavily invested in other concerns, I let the matter slip by, after all Tommy doesn't set my agenda for writing or even attention, as perhaps he would like. But still I notice today that my original blog entry was, again, something of a rip-snorter. So if I can ever get up the energy and interest in the subject matter, which left me quite exhausted by the time the vote in the House of Commons was over (and has proceeded at least to Second Reading in that gaggle of Liberal appointees farcically called a "Senate"). The legislation is passed, and those who have tried to articulate some sense while the debate was on, need no longer tilt at windmills against the Gmarriage Machine.

Those of us who had and continue to have philosophical objections are no longer forced to marshall arguments off-the-cuff. Still, my reply to Tommy was too heavily-toned to satisfy me now. On the other hand, I'm also not yet ready to work at the philosophical argumentation behind the wrap-up piece, an argument I had gone over many times online here and there.

In lieu of that fuller address to the complex of issues (many of which I have dealth with elsewhere), I pick out one item from Tommy's discourse that rather interested me as I passed by. It includes a telltale detail, containing what for me has a kernel of truth where he and I just may have a pinpoint of agreement. I quote Tommy:

"To deny such to a certain group, one that has historically been denied equality and continues to be denied is to marginalize that group while promoting immorality."

The gist here is that the state promotes "immorality" among homos when it denies them (please, let's not use the term "marriage" here, but) recognition of (please, let's not use the term "same-sex" here, but) either 2women intimate unions or 2men intimate unions.

What speaks to me out of this morass of misconceptualization offered by Tommy, is not the State's alleged promotion of immorality; but, relevant to my case and life-story, the Christian community's past promotion of only two options for homos: celibacy (when people were not called to it - contra, eg, Roman Catholicism's false encouragement of monastic callings among children too young to know their own sexuality and the strength of their own libidos when in good health, as they grew up); and second, if one lapses, one at least has not planned a life-time union with the intention of permanence and to the exclusion of all but the one partner, which planning to sin would be the greater sin. That's how that "moral teaching" was presented. And it was what I picked up from my very narrow conservative Presbyterian milieu. Planning for the embedding of sexual expression within a long-term and intendedly-permanent homo male intimate union, to the exclusion of all others, was the very worst thing one could do. The very best one could do was to remain a male virgin forever, no matter what libidic energies one had (thus, masturbation would be the only outlet, and is understood even by RC confessors as not as bad as actual sex with a partner ... by the way, the distinction between celibacy and chastity is common in the sinology of such theological sexual ethics).

Which is a long way, it may seem to Tommy, from my effort toward an actual appreciation of a kernel of truth in his allegation that the State promotes immorality by not providing for 2women or 2men state solemnizations of intimate unions (again, please, can we dispense with the misnomer "civil union" by noting that the union is between the couple; the state can only give state-recognition to it and its two members, generically as is now the case in Canada - or in its specificity as a particular kind of intimate union - not the case now, nor ever has been in Canada). Returning to "immorality" in our search for a hidden kernel of truth in Tommy's concept; his assertion, on the face of it, is a point with which I disagree: it isn't immorality that the State would foster in this lack of recognition, if it would be fostering anything at all. And it isn't the State with which we should be primarily concerned here. The Canadian State has not visited the bedrooms of the nation since Trudeau's day.

But I do agree with a kernel I find in Tommy's verbiage that points to the the foreclosure of options for singles (I won't speak of female singles here but only male singles) by the Christian community (again, I won't speak of other religious communities than the ones which tried to foreclose it in my regard and those of my friends and acqaintances), so that sexually-expressive intimate unions are verboten. This misbegotten moral guidance would lock the single guy into a straitjacket where he must live with either enforced virginity / celibacy with no time horizon of hope for either a marriage to a woman or a solemnized intimate union with another man (I'm talking of vows before witnesses, not churches or state, in the first instance when I use the term "solemnized).. This kind of guidance seems to me to promote actually a series of episodic lapses, akin to the sexual pattern of stray dogs almost, which becomes over a long time a pattern in itself and fosters an inability to make a commitment to one person with an intention of permanence and to the exclusion of all others.

It is in actuality, not a fostering of immorality because it leaves no path open sufficiently for another option to such single men. Rather, it makes promiscuity a moral option for them - in the teaching I oppose, they have no chance for a solomnized vowed life as a partner with the intention of permanence to one other man, to the exclusion of all others. I for one, as a lay ethical thinker (ethics as a science of morals) can't label promiscuity in itself for such persons "immoral." I see three valid options for persons brawt up within the conservative Protestant and Roman Catholic options for male sexual morality: celibacy, intimate union (the three kinds of which are marriage of 1woman1man, intimate union of 2women, intimate union of 2men), and promiscuity.

The most serious sin is not a single promiscuous event or a developing pattern of such lapses into a fully promiscuous pattern. The most serious sin of sexual expression is, on the one hand, witholding affection and sexual expression from a vowed partner to an intimate union; and, on the other, adultery against anyone's intimate union.

So, if Tommy can sense on this one point that turns on his attempt to allege the State's responsiblity for immorality, the fine point (hidden away within his far-reaching philosophical assumptions) with which I can neverthrless concur would be a point of agreement around a kernel matter that arises from the insites of a very different set of philosophical assumptions in regard to ethics and the subject matters of morals upon which ethics reflects: in that case, we would share a little something in common.

Where the Christian community changes its moral teachings to permit intimate unions of 2women, as well as those of 2men, along with the already special-status ascribed to 1woman1man marriage according to the traditional definition, then the community (at least a sector of the Christian community) itself benefits from a more morally-sound guideline in fulfilling its task. It does so by making space for another option, and thereby gradually obviating the recourse of many of its homo people to the option of promiscuity that that the Christian community presently fosters, willy-nilly, among them.

I tried in the foregoing not to appropriate the voice of women, nor Christian women in particular; as well I tried not to appropriate the voice of other religious communities beyond those I am closely acquainted with; likewise, I did not speak for atheists, secular humanists, or other secularists. So far, Tommy has not disclosed his ultimate values as they may influence his deployment of the term "immorality." Why he implicates the State in a question of "immorality" on any of these issues, is quite beyond me.

As to the entirety of his sentence prior to its final word in the quote, it all assumes a background in victimology, with many dubious terms jammed together. I still find it nauseating, but to attempt to be a bit more analytical I shall intersperse within brackets my various responses to Tommy's rhetoric in the passage that leads up to "immorality":

"Officially recognizing gay marriage [no such thing] is a move to uphold the basic rights and freedoms [false, marriage is not a business-deal generic but a 1woman1man specific kind of intimate union] guaranteed to us as Canadians [it's not inscribed in the Charter of Rights, but has been overlayed onto the actual text a distorting gloss imposed by misguided activist Courts relying on a specious philosophy of jurisprudence dominant for some time in Canada's law schools, legal profession, and appointments to judgeships], and as human beings [this is an unprovable assumption so ultimate in its reference that it is religious in character, and points to the irreducible difference in religious presuppositions that obtain between Tommy and myself]. To deny such to a certain group [mark you, marriage is not denied to homos, many homos are married in the traditional and only valid sense of the word, many homos in 1woman1man relations keep their vows with the intention of permanence and to the exclusion of all others - these people Tommy just wipes out because they do not fit with his ideology], one that has historically been denied equality [this is using the term as an incantation, with no specificity, so that we can not judge in precisely what regard "a certain group" has been unequal; it's obvious that the male group is unequal in average income, as the group has a higher average income than almost any other group in Canada] and continues to be denied [it's been a long time since homos have been denied much of anything as a group or as individuals - actually, in many places the Gay ideologists are privileged, whereas the exGays are marginalized (I am not an exGay, I am a homo; Tommy's gambit here is to saddle "the group" with the distinguishing feature of a victimology only] is to marginalize that group [the rhetoric of marginalization holds only as you procede down the income-level of the demographic in question; Tommy doesn't make distinctions within the "group" because its internal differences are more significant than its similarities] while promoting immorality [so, by the time we get to this word, we are pulling so much of Tommy's presumptuous verbiage along with us, that a full engagement with a moment of contact across our two different religio-philosophical value-ultimates and frameworks therefrom, is difficult to make ... but I have tried above]. Canada has taken a historic step, one that we should be proud of [not! - It's about to be the law of the land; we may even assume it is the law of the land because of the character of the Yes Man chamber that the Liberals hold as their own party-fiefdom; but the law itself is conceptually-poor legislation in extremis. I intend to accomodate myself to the new status quo, but never to accede to the philosophical point that marriage is between 1woman1man, and that there are other kinds of intimate unions of 2women and of 2men, and that the new bad law does not explicitly recognize any of them in their differences, nor provide for them legally in the unqueness of each, in their differences and different needs and different responsiblities perhaps.]

My main argument, which doesn't appear here, is not around religio-philosophical ultimate values, but about the evidence from women's medicine and anthroplogy. Tommy seems to know nothing of this data and theory, while he seems to think that the social science is "inconclusive" (am I conflating someone else's remark to this effect?), in any case a point on which I am agnostic and wonder how one would know this. But that's another argument.