Among the pieces of good commentary about Pope Benedict XVI's address to the Roman Curia is a recent post
by philosophy professor Joseph G. Trabbic, which takes on criticisms
made by three Italian "gay rights activists". Here is Trabbic's response
to the seond of the three:
We turn now to Aurelio Mancuso, the president of Equality Italia:
For some years now in the Vatican the question of gender theory
has been used to call into question the acquisition of civil rights by
homosexuals. To help the Curia to put things into perspective we could
say that the culture of gender is similar to the choice of celibacy (castitÀ), that is, they are moral and personal convictions that have nothing to do with what is given by nature (sono convinzioni morali e personali che non c’entrano con il dato naturale).
If we really want to debate each other with good will, we need to start
with the scientific and statistical findings that show two essential
facts: homosexuality is in no way linked to the diminishment of
heterosexual marriage; the societies that legally recognize all forms of
love increase the well-being of their citizens.
There is a touch either of silliness or sarcasm in these
comments; I can’t tell which. The distinction between what is by nature
and what is by choice is elementary in Catholic thought to the extent
that it draws (as it does quite heavily) on Aristotelianism and Thomism.
The Roman Curia surely do not need Mancuso’s instruction on this matter
he might as well pretend to teach geometers arithmetic.
From the Catholic perspective nature, that is, natural law,
ideally guides us in our choices. And, it goes without saying, the
proper application of natural law requires prudence. This is not to
suggest that we all in fact think of or understand what nature demands
when we act. Again, I am talking about the ideal. So, from the Catholic
perspective the distinction between nature and choice is assumed: the
question is whether the choice is in conformity with nature. Catholic
thought denies that homosexual acts are in conformity with nature. Does
Mancuso accept a natural law approach to morality? If so, what is his
argument in defense of homosexual acts being in conformity with natural
law? If he does not accept the natural law approach, what is his
complaint against it? These are the salient questions to be asked.
Mancuso also tells us that we need to consider scientific and
statistical findings about the relationship between homosexuality and
heterosexual marriage as well as the positive effect of legalization of
all forms of love on our well-being. First of all, is it too much to ask
for the numbers and the details of these studies? Like Grillini’s
employment of the hermeneutics of suspicion, the crucial weakness in
Mancuso’s appeal to science and statistics is the evidence. I do not
wish to imply that there is none. I only wish for it to be presented.
Secondly, when Mancuso says that there is no link between
homosexuality and the diminishment of heterosexual marriage, what does
he mean by “diminishment”? Are we talking about diminishment in numbers,
in respect for heterosexual marriage, in the quality of such marriages?
What exactly is at stake here? I can think of good reasons to doubt
Mancuso’s claim if any one of these three senses is in play. In any
society in which homosexual lifestyles were once discouraged but are now
broadly accepted and encouraged are we to believe that we would not
find any empirically verifiable diminishment in heterosexual marriage in
any of these three senses during the later time period? But I don’t
want to waste time on a hypothetical. Once Mancuso provides the evidence
to which he alludes we can continue that conversation.
Thirdly, is it really true that, as Mancuso asserts, “the
societies that legally recognize all forms of love increase the
well-being of their citizens”? Well, to have a fruitful discussion, we
would first need to know what Mancuso means by “love.” If he includes
here homosexual love, then there would be a basic disagreement with
Catholics, since, appealing to natural law and revelation, we would take
homosexual relationships to be disordered forms of “love.” As such,
they could not, in our view, contribute to anyone’s well-being. If
Mancuso thinks otherwise, he can go on claiming that they do or
he could formulate an argument against the Catholic view. I suppose we
would probably have to arrive at an understanding of what “well-being”
In the introduction to his responses, Trabbic notes the philosophical geneology of the gender theory that Benedict criticizes:
Featuring prominently in the address is
a discussion of an approach in contemporary gender theory that takes
human sexuality to be the product of our own creativity and choices. You
might call it the “Play-Doh” theory of sexuality. Borrowing from an essay
by the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, the pope indicates
Simone de Beauvoir as laying the foundation for this view. “[O]n ne naît
pas femme, on le devient,” de Beauvoir writes in Le Deuxième Sexe
(1949), that is, “one is not born a woman, one becomes one.” You could,
of course, point to kindred ideas in more recent thinkers, like the
later Foucault’s talk of life as a work of art, or trace a genealogy
back through Sartre’s thesis about existence preceding essence, which he
more or less gets from the Heidegger of Being and Time (1927),
whether or not Heidegger wishes to acknowledge it. And you could press
even further back to more remote causes: Nietzsche’s notion of
interpretation, for example. But I don’t care to do any of that here.
Let’s look further at what Benedict had to say to the Curia.
Read Trabbic's entire post.