The Politics of the Family and the Lies Our Culture Tells
By Professor Matthew J. Franck,
July 15
This essay was adapted from remarks delivered on June 30, 2011, at a fundraiser for the Love and Fidelity Network and Grupo Solido, an Argentine project supporting marriage, chastity, and fidelity.
Fifteen messages that young people get today, from the colleges they attend, the media culture they swim about in, and even from the laws of the land and the words and deeds of high public officials.
No. 1 is \”Sexual desire is something that can and should be gratified, not restrained. This gratification is known as “health.”
. . . The intersection of the family and politics is a major theme of Plato’s Republic. In Book V, Socrates introduces his young companions to the most revolutionary idea proposed in the dialogue: That in order to achieve their shared goal of designing (in theory anyway) the perfectly just political order, they must treat men and women as exact equals, denying that there is any meaningful difference between men and women.
With relentless irony, Socrates goes so far as to say that there is no more significant difference between a man and a woman than between a hairy man and a bald man. He calmly proposes that in the training of the city’s defenders, the young men and women should exercise on the same field together, clothed only in the virtue that the city’s educational program gives them. This is grimly comical, and is intended to open our eyes to the absurdity of all uncompromising attempts to mold the rough clay of human nature into some perfect shape according to a single principle.
The comedy turns in a tragic direction when Socrates goes on to prescribe complete political control of reproduction and child-rearing. The family as his companions have known it—as we know it—must be destroyed, swept aside in favor of a politically directed breeding program. No man and woman can join in a lifelong union; their sexual couplings are ordered for eugenic purposes. Mother and child are separated at birth, and parents and children are deliberately made strangers to each other, as special nurseries take over the raising of the next generation of devoted citizens.
A second book I want to mention is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Huxley’s book presents us with a future world—going Plato one better— in which sexuality is completely severed from reproduction. Children are both conceived and gestated in vitro, have no parents, and are raised by “professionals” in common nurseries. All citizens are assigned to one of several fixed social classes, their roles and functions in society eugenically predetermined.
Unlike Plato’s city, whose eugenic project must rely on procreation accomplished the old-fashioned way, Huxley’s World State has no need to harness sexual desire for its breeding program. But the sexual passion still exists. What then to do with it? The World State’s answer is to liberate it, indeed to require promiscuity. Men and women are expected to have many sexual partners, while undue attachment to one partner above others is severely frowned upon—and the State makes sure to prevent this by various social, psychological, and pharmaceutical measures.
Although Plato’s city looks draconian and severe and Huxley’s World State looks hedonistic and easy, what they have in common is their assault on nature in the name of some abstract notion of justice. Each in its own way is heedless of human embodiment—of the fact that the human person is this body, and that one, and that other one. Both political orders treat their denizens as denatured souls abstracted from their bodies, as creatures whose lives can be rationally planned for them without regard to the longings of their hearts for union with one another, and for families.
In these dystopian societies, everything about human sexuality, the complementarity of men and women, and the generation of offspring is broken to the yoke of the city, and made subservient to a single-minded politics of regimentation and control of human choice. And it all happens because a single political principle is pushed without limit until human nature itself is mowed down in its path.
But what has all this to do with us, and our situation?
Consider the messages that young people get today, from the colleges they attend, the media culture they swim about in, and even from the laws of the land and the words and deeds of high public officials. Here are fifteen such messages:
1. Sexual desire is something that can and should be gratified, not restrained. This gratification is known as “health.”
2. One’s sexual “orientation” or “identity”—even one’s “gender”—is a variable thing. Maybe genetics has something to do with it, maybe it comes down to freedom to choose—maybe a little of both. But wherever you wind up, it’s all good. Until you wind up somewhere else, and that’s good too.
3. Everyone is entitled to marry the person he loves (at this particular moment). Coming soon—marriage to the multiple persons one loves!
4. There is no significant difference between men and women with respect to any sexual matter. “Gender” and “identity” are “social constructs,” which we can accept or reject at will.
5. The differentiation of male and female roles is a species of oppression. (Even if you choose the role? What happened to the freedom to choose your identity? Never mind, don’t ask such questions!)
6. “Hooking up” for casual sexual encounters without commitment is just what young people do if left to their own devices. And it is good so to leave them, as these serial relationships are normal and healthy.
7. “Safe sex”—that is, the use of contraception and disease-preventive measures—and consent are the only moral strictures that universally apply to sexual matters.
8. Virginity past one’s late teen years is, well, freakish.
9. Cohabitation before marriage is downright expected, and is a healthy trial run of a relationship.
10. Marriage is optional and certainly not permanent, nor need it be characterized by sexual exclusivity. “Until a loss of interest do us part.” Why should it be work?
11. Out-of-wedlock childbearing is normal and has no adverse consequences, anyway not for you.
12. Abortion is always available, always will be, and has no adverse consequences, anyway not for you. “It’s a woman’s right to choose.”
13. “A family” is whatever we say one is. Who are you to say different?
14. Where children are wanted and nature does not supply, science can make up the deficit at no moral or social cost (albeit considerable financial expense) by sperm donation, egg donation, surrogacy, in vitro fertilization, etc.
15. Any child can have mommies and/or daddies in any number and combination, by blood, marriage, or adoption. There is no harm in any of these possibilities, for children are blank slates, fully adaptable to all adult choices.
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Challenging the Vatican on Female Priests
More than 150 Roman Catholic priests in the United States have signed a statement in support of a fellow cleric who faces dismissal for participating in a ceremony that purported to ordain a woman as a priest, in defiance of church teaching.
The Rev. Roy Bourgeois has received letters from the Vatican threatening dismissal for his role in a ceremony that purported to ordain Janice Sevre-Duszynska, far right, as a priest.
The American priests’ action follows closely on the heels of a “Call to Disobedience” issued in Austria last month by more than 300 priests and deacons. They stunned their bishops with a seven-point pledge that includes actively promoting priesthood for women and married men, and reciting a public prayer for “church reform” in every Mass.
And in Australia, the National Council of Priests recently released a ringing defense of the bishop of Toowoomba, who had issued a pastoral letter saying that, facing a severe priest shortage, he would ordain women and married men “if Rome would allow it.” After an investigation, the Vatican forced him to resign.
While these disparate acts hardly amount to a clerical uprising and are unlikely to result in change, church scholars note that for the first time in years, groups of priests in several countries are standing with those who are challenging the church to rethink the all-male celibate priesthood.
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