Can Sarah and St. Elizibeth Fornicate Licitly?
Posted on 07 July 2010
Part of an Ongoing Conversation:
“If your argument is that it is immoral to father a child out of wedlock and leave that child and its mother to their own devices, I do not believe you will find anyone here to argue against that fact. However, what happens if I and my sweetie are both 80, well past child bearing age?
(Yes I’m aware that a man is theoretically virile until he dies. The woman, most definitely, is not) Or perhaps we are 20 and one or both of us have had our gonads removed because of some rare childhood cancer? Neither of these situations require the use of some 99% effective contraception, nor are they situations contrived by the participants simply to indulge in sex which will not result in a child.
“Certainly there are still arguments for waiting for marriage before sex, but in these situations there is no child involved. As such, putting forth the argument that it is wrong for the couple to have sex for the sake of said child is senseless. I’m curious as to what assertions you would make.”
Interesting question, but more interesting is the unspoken assumption behind it: that sex between the sterile can be differentiated in custom or law or morality from sex between the fertile.
The mere artificiality of the situations you propose militates against their being taken seriously: as if we were to argue that since it may be morally acceptable to eat a dead castaway in a lifeboat rather than starve, ergo cannibalism is acceptable, ergo murdering another human being to eat him is acceptable.
I propose to you that merely from a legal standpoint, if no other, treating marriage as sacred and inviolate minimizes the various social pathologies related to single-parent child-rearing.
For example, in real life the handyman who works on my mother’s house just killed himself. His fiancee left him, taking their child, now hers. He lost his job due to the economy, and our current laws allow for child support upon proof of paternity, with draconian punishments leveled against deadbeat Dads, including, in this case, him not being allowed to see his own son. In effect, because he ran into the “for poorer” times, she was legally allowed to deprive him of herself and his family, with no showing or allegation of fault on his part. It might have been for good cause, it might have been whim. However, a society that treats marriage as sacred and inviolate does not allow for either fornication during engagement nor for no-fault divorce nor for depriving fathers of their children arbitrarily.
For example, in real life, I spend a long hour talking with a Chinese friend of mine about how he had to get permission to marry and permission to have a child; and when the permission to have a child was denied, he was advised by the bureaucrat who controlled his life to send his wife home to her mother, so as to remove the temptation to have sexual relations with his wife. However, a society that treats marriage as sacred and inviolate would not allow such a tyranny to take place, especially if human life from conception to natural death were also treated as sacred and inviolate.
My sister in law divorced my brother, and to this day, he still does not know the reason. My father divorced my mother, and there was no allegation of fault, no cruelty, no adultery, no abandonment: he merely found her tiresome and difficult. He remarried a woman whose husband had left her in order to pursue his happiness with a male lover half his age. He abandoned his two young children for my father to raise in his stead. The event ended in suicide.
Again, However, a society that treats marriage as sacred and inviolate certainly has problems of its own, some of them horrific problems. But all taken in all, the problems of a society that treats marriage like a contract, or like a convenience, or like an obstacle, has far worse problems that ruins far more many lives.
I personally have known too many lives ruined by the modern sexually liberated culture to take seriously the claims of those who say the way my grandmother and grandfather lived with more fraught with injustice, or evil, or imprudence. I know three people who have died due merely to breeches of the laws of sexual continence: two suicides and one murder. Perhaps I know a darker strata of humanity than you do, due to my work in a law office or a newspaper office, but I do know them, and I cannot pretend I do not know them. I am under no obligation to invent excuses or spin out hypotheticals to place the blame somewhere else. The desecration of marriage is to blame.
Due to the way the human mind works and the way human institutions work, the problem of marriage cannot be severed into discrete aspects. While a science fiction writer can imagine a society that has one set of rules for post sexual adults and another set for fertile women, such a society cannot grow out of any society currently occupying the surface of the earth. For us, in the real world, the choice is whether to hold marriage sacred or to desecrate it.
Fornication desecrates marriage. That is simply a given, learned by hard experience. The theoretical problem you pose of sex between sterile partners still falls into the category of fornication. While a philosopher could make a distinction between sterile sex and sexual sex, in real life, the way the human mind works and human institutions work, particularly the way human envy works, the two are inseparable. It is a matter of take it or leave it. A society where sex between sterile partners out of wedlock was licit would be a society where marriage was not sacred, merely a contract or a convenience. It would not long remain a society where sex between fertile partners out of wedlock was illicit.
Here I do not mean ‘illegal’ — something is illicit when the consensus of opinion voluntarily upholds it as blameworthy, whereas licit means common opinion upholds it as praiseworthy. But a thousand unseen and unenforced acts of blame and praise, a society urges, cajoles, menaces, persuades, and grants incentives to certain behaviors of which it approves, and the opposite for those it disapproves. When laws make illegal what is no longer illicit, the laws are merely ignored, held to scorn, and enforcement of such laws is regarded as injustice.
Marriage is an organic whole. Parts of it cannot be sacred while other parts are desecrated. Desecrating part of it desecrates the whole: witness the rapid degeneration from legalizing no fault divorce to the Supreme Court holding that no bar on any sexual relation out of wedlock, not even sodomy, is properly within the power of the state to regulate. Whether this is a corruption, to be lamented, or an evolution, to be saluted, is not here the issue: the issue is merely that they are linked by the logic of the way the human mind works and human institutions. No fault divorce desecrates marriage. Once marriage is desecrated, fornication is licit, including those things the law has called unnatural acts since time immemorial.
May argument is rather straightforward, if you grant me my assumption that marriage is organic, not to be divided. If childrearing is sacred, then sex is sacred. If sex is sacred, marriage is sacred. If marriage is sacred, anything that desecrates marriage is illicit, including those things that have only a remote connection to child rearing.
The question is one of authority. The problem arises out of the nature of the attempt at “sanctifying marriage.” You said part of it yourself:
The root of the problem though, is the fact that one cannot “sanctify marriage” against the will of the participants, as you rightly point out. Such an attempt always involves an unwarranted, unjustified, and unsustainable assertion of arbitrary authority over the lives of others. You can lament all you want but the operation of law changed irrevocably with the death of aristocracy. In order to lord it over the intimate, personal lives of others, one must implicitly claim a status as more equal than those others.
It is the conservatives’ own belief in collectivism which millitates against their position. “Society” allows nothing. “Society” forbids nothing. You can now level your inevitable objection at me, that you really mean the collective invokation as a “shorthand” for a collection of social phenomenon but that misses the point. It is the conservative’s obsession with “society” and the behavior of his neighbor that has drawn the focus away from the individual and his responsibilities. To be fair, the conservatives are not alone; the liberals do it as well. In fact, they are much more forthright about their “social engineering” intentions and have produced their own nest of pathological problems which you ably and cogently document.
Look at how you frame the problem:
It is individual couples, and perhaps their immediate families, to a lesser extent, who desecrate or sanctify their own marriages; a practice, indulged by someone else does not. I don’t know how you can espouse something so utterly alien to the concept of personal, individual, responsibility as these words seem to imply and still claim to be a standard bearer for an individualist philosophy. The religion you profess does not allow the sinner to foist the guilt for his transgressions off onto “society.”
“Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.”
— Thomas Carlyle
It never ceases to amaze me how many political divorced conservatives spend so much time worrying about the motes in their neighbors’ eyes. You should be gratified to have made marriage work for yourself and your spouse. Attempting to engineer society to make everyone else’s marriage or sexual behavior “work” as you think it should is doomed to futility and unintended consequences.
This is again an example of an argument against an imaginary strawman. By this logic, all laws of any kind whatsoever, including laws against fraud and breeches of contract, are also an unwarranted intrusion that tacitly supports the idea of an unequal aristocracy forcing its will upon a quailing and servile conquered people.
I have heard your ruminations often enough to see the pattern now: there are only two things in your entire mental universe. The evil consists of repression from one’s own government, and from no other imaginable source: good consists of absence of government and nothing else. When something which cannot possibly be pigeonholed into this awkward Manichean world view pops up, you pigeonhole it into the awkward Manichean world view awkwardly, merely by declaring or decreeing that whatever the topic is (sex and chastity) is actually, really , secretly about the one topic on your mind (evil oppression from one’s own government).
So, for example, if I write and article saying, “NASA’s job is to shoot rockets into space, not to soothe and flatter paynims and Saracens” your response is “the evils we presently suffer are caused by our government oppressing us.” The idea that we might have enemies who wish us harm you dismiss.
So, here. The idea that a man, in order to be a man, should act with a certain degree of dignity and self-control toward women, and neither play the sap nor be an exploiter, and that his motive might be a certain regard for his own honor and chastity, well — that can never enter the equation. It does not fit the Manichean world view.
You bore me. Find another tune to play. Back when I was a Libertarian, I at least knew how to vary the arguments according to circumstances.
“Attempting to engineer society to make everyone else’s marriage or sexual behavior “work” as you think it should is doomed to futility and unintended consequences.”
You unintended consequences like the three people I mentioned who are dead might still be alive?
As I was reading recently, it’s probably because your examples are outside his monkeysphere.
Of course, once upon a time, America was a country of federalism, where if you wanted a society where fornication was licit, you could move there while those of us who wanted a society where marriage is sacred could move to where we would be happy.
The problem with that solution is that the children can’t move to those regions where it’s sacred, and drag their parents along. They have to suffer the consequences of their parents’ disordered lives, and the disordered lives of all those who have commited scandal influencing their parents toward disorder.
A legitimate point but the question then also becomes, how much should law “lock” on parents? Should parents be banned from drinking or smoking because of their kids? Should parents be restricted on where they can move to because that place could be bad for the kids?
I believe it was Dawkins who said that raising a child in religion is akin to child abuse. If he (or his ilk) were in charge, would they be warranted in banning parents from practicing religion?
They are not entirely rhetorical, I am asking honestly. Of course, these are evergreen challenges because of mankind’s fallen nature.
“A real problem only occurs when there are admittedly disadvantages to all courses that can be pursued. If it is discovered just before a fashionable wedding that the bishop is locked up in the coal-cellar that is not a problem. It is obvious to anyone but an extreme anti-clerical or practical joker that the bishop must be let out of the coal-cellar. But suppose the bishop has been locked up in the wine-cellar, and from the obscure noises, sounds as of song and dance, etc., it is guessed that he has indiscreetly tested the vintages round him; then, indeed, we may properly say that there has arisen a problem; for, upon the one hand, it is awkward to keep the wedding waiting, while, upon the other, any hasty opening of the door might mean an episcopal rush and scenes of the most unforeseen description.”
G. K. Chesterton
“neither play the sap”
Define sap. If you mean whiny, crybaby then we are in agreement. However, if you mean a young man prone to quoting Shakespearian sonnets, then…
I mean be naively exploited by a dame who cons you. Such things happen outside of Film Noir movies: the murderer I know was conned, merely tricked, by a woman he loved into killing her boyfriend. She merely pretended that he was beating her — the trial brought the truth out, but by then it was too late.
Fair enough. I hadn’t considered that.
If you and your sweetie are both 80, why don’t you simply get married? If people don’t want to get married under those circumstances – if they don’t want the love and companionship which marriage provides – then they are treating sex just like a meal in a restaurant: a temporary pleasure to be savoured before you move on. Quite apart from questions of morality, this is plain stupid. Love and companionship make sex special.
Also, human instincts are designed such that sexual intercourse tends to produce an emotional bond. Those who treat it otherwise tend to do so at their own peril – as well as that of their partner in sin.
I’ve not been in the situation myself (being in my mid 20s) but I’ve heard that casual sex tends to be quite rampant in nursing homes. That apparently tends to happen when a disproportionately large number of your population are female (women have, on average, longer life expectancies than men). I suppose some people don’t feel the need or desire to go through with a wedding when they know that they’ll likely only have a few years to live. Dementia may also play a role at that age. This was the situation to which I was obliquely referring.
The 20 year olds with cancer was purely hypothetical.
I would be open to the argument that respect for our elders, which is a principle at least as august as the principle of chastity, should allow us to turn a blind eye toward the sexual antics of demented octogenarians. There is no principle in morality so absolute that some argument based on a contrary principle cannot be made against it.
However, even a demented granny who regards sex as important will not bestow her favors on her elderly but sincere swain lightly. If you love the man, why not marry him? If you don’t love him, why the hell are you demeaning yourself and him, by making sex into something no more meaningful than masturbation? What, if you don’t have much time left, you should turn all the most important things in life into past-times?
If you are going to die soon anyway, why not get married? You are less likely to be left alone on your deathbed.
I would not, however, be open to an argument that old folks should take up gambling, cocaine, opium, puking in the street, or stupefying levels of alcohol consumption: the argument that someone who is soon to die can disregard the consequences of vice is persuasive if and only if you believe there is no other root to morality aside from prudence. No prudential argument can sway a man who is soon to die, because he lives not long enough to see consequences, good or bad.
If our moral calculus also takes into account the nature of the act and the nature of the intent, we cannot grant a “get out of jail free card” to any act of vice or wrongdoing merely on the grounds that the actor will not outlive the consequences.
Ah, from the metaphysical to the practical. I think that everything hinges on this:
“But all taken in all, the problems of a society that treats marriage like a contract, or like a convenience, or like an obstacle, has far worse problems that ruins far more many lives.”
Specifically the word worse. This value judgment is the crux of the matter. It may ruin more lives, but minimizing ruined lives is not the only possible standard for a good society. In any case we do not have a society that treats marriage as a convenience, we have society in which marriage is a little bit a state function, a little bit religious, a little bit sexual, and which some like yourself call sacred. We have many different value judgments of marriage.
You have a blanket blame on all non-marital sexuality. The questioner is trying to carve out a niche where non-marital sexuality is praiseworthy by determining your criteria for praise. You are declaring it to be an impossible task. We could go to extremes asking the question (if the Bomb is going to drop in a half hour, is promiscuous copulation licit then?), but that sheds no light on the subject.
By my values, in my judgment, it is better for my life to have a society that praises promiscuity than one that blames it. I can certainly understand how circumstances and values can lead you to a different conclusion. But to say that my conclusion is so beyond the pale that trying to find situations to apply it is futile is a dehumanization far worse than that of a lothario to his doxy. Fornication may be inimical to a well-run society, but overuse of authority is its anathema.
Fornication may be inimical to a well-run society, but overuse of authority is its anathema.
“Overuse” is at least as much a value judgment as “worse” is.
This takes us to principles much more foundational than sex: it takes us to principles of the human person as a moral agent. Is a person ever able to judge accurately in matters of morality? Is there any morality that is universal, that applies to all people and in all situations?
My answer, and I would guess John’s as well, is: Yes, there is.
But it is not the rule-law-duty notion of morality that has been stuck in the Western consciousness since Kant (or even since Ockham).
Rather, morality is based in the fulfillment of human nature. “Good” and “bad” are based in what makes us more or less human. So “good” things include exercise, art, and friendship. “Bad” things include murder, theft, and betrayal. Life being complicated, there are situations in which the good and bad are mixed up or distorted so that it is difficult to judge with certainty.
This is where law steps in. Law is a guide, a teacher, a support to seeking the good and resolving the bad. Law does not determine what is good and evil; rather, law makes explicit and applies good and evil.
So the question is not, “Do I want society to blame or praise my promiscuous behavior?” but rather, “Is my promiscuous behavior actually human and humane behavior?” and then subsequently, “How can our community support more human and humane behavior, and protect us from committing inhuman and inhumane acts?”
Well said, sir. It’s why we say, “This food is -bad- for you.”
And we might add that human nature [stated in terms of final cause] is to be a rational animal, promiscuity — the triumph of the will over the intellect, or the indulgence of mere appetite — has as its ultimate effect the dulling of the rational powers, making the promiscuous less fully human.
Robert, OFloinn – slam dunk.
Why is the quality of your life the guiding moral principle for everyone?
One notes that a great many people who believed themselves certainly sterile have had little bundles of joy arrive nine months later.
True, but so far as I know, menopause tends to be permanent.
That’s just what St Elizabeth thought.
I think John correctly points out that, while procreation is one indispensable aspect of human sexuality, it is not the only indispensable aspect. Almost all of the problems of sexuality in our culture arise from the illusion that we can somehow separate the “pleasure” from the “relationship” from the “reproduction”. It just is not so.
While serving the practical purpose of providing a better chance of stability for children, marriage also provides a context in which both partners always are called to take one another seriously as persons rather than objects of physical or emotional pleasure.
This is the root of why the Catholic faith (and every other religion and cultural tradition that I’m aware of) considers marriage to be sacred: the human person is sacred, and this relationship between man and woman is the sacred foundation of all other human relationships and actions.
Ultimately, a culture that denies the honor and respect due to marriage will deny the honor and respect due to the individual human person as well – starting with the weakest. And this is exactly what we see happening in our own culture.
I have encountered several variations of your first story. It seems to be a theme of the age. It makes my head hurt that you can say “Men are Pigs”, when you see stuff like that. Men are not pigs, People are Pigs. It’s particularly painful to watch the “wife” break up the marriage and see the husband still take the blame, initial, and ongoing, for “not doing more”. If he does “do more” he can, of course, be arrested for stalking……
It’s of a piece of your belief that women can and should slap men when they are being “vulgar”. There have been times where that would be correct and a useful corrective, but an era where we have coed high school wrestling is not that time. You were the one to write about that. I can’t see how you square that circle.
“It makes my head hurt that you can say “Men are Pigs”, when you see stuff like that. ”
In all fairness, when I see stuff like that, I also say, “woman are sows.” Marriage, when it is sacrosanct, protects both parties.
Like I’ve said before, I have seen a lot more men abandoning, misusing and abusing women than I have the other way around: but I do admit, and I grant you, that I have under-emphasized and under-stated the terrific damage women can do to men in a society where we both have no-fault divorce, and draconian child support laws. Basically, a woman at any time can break up a marriage, take half her hubby’s worldly goods, and deprive him of their children, or even get him (if he cannot make his payments) tossed in jail.
So I retract my earlier comments. Eve and her daughters have also sinned.
Well, thank you. Yes, it has never been my contention that men were without sin (or a lot of it for that matter) in this moment/event. I think it comes back to the Sons Of Mary/ Sons of Martha divide. You and yours have sown your oats, often, too often, with all the pain that can bring. Me and mine have sown no oats at all, for there seems an unwillingness on the other side to accept commitment. So we avoid the fairer sex. A life missing some context to be sure, but that seems a small price to pay to avoid what happened to your poor handyman. Lectures on how irresponsible we are being are not going to bring us closer to the Altar. Marriage is the foundation of Civilization, and it needs to work, whether or not one is religious. It’s why I can’t leave this issue alone. The response of the Age has been to call men pigs and demand they “Grow up and get Married!”. I think that approach is doomed to fail. Clinton and his ilk make a lot of noise, making it easy to overestimate how many men are “getting lucky”. I think he (and they) are far outnumbered by the men who have, with little fuss or noise, stopped playing at all. Think about that frame of reference. What would you write differently to get the Responsible to be a little reckless? For Marriage is an act of Divine Madness coupled to years in the harness. Forcing men to be wise too soon seems to leave us unable to put the harness on them…..
Me? I have not sown any oats at all, except in my own field. I was a virgin until I met my wife. (Not through lack of trying on my part, mind you, through lack of sex appeal). So quite by accident, I lived up to the Christian standards of modesty and chastity.
A friend of mine and a neighbor was just raped by her ex, who broke into her house. Say what you will about women, I have never heard of a member of the fairer sex doing that.
The solution to the problem cannot be found in any secular approach. The problem is supernatural and therefore the solution must be supernatural. A democracy, like ours, firmly committed to the Christian religion and its principles can survive and live in peace: a secular democracy cannot — it will be driven by its own internal contradictions toward either egalitarianism, anarchy, or totalitarianism.
A Christian nation can tolerate and welcome Jews and Buddhists and Hindoos, and even a Witch or two. A secular nation cannot tolerate Christianity, and must sooner or later bend its powers to drive the Christian religion into the margins of life, or denounce it as a positive evil. The relationship between Pilot and Christ has not and cannot change.
Ah, sorry. Your previous posts on this topic and your sins implied a more “exciting” past.
As to your friend, no, I have never heard of the fairer sex doing that. On the other hand, I have seen the fairer sex say “You should be nicer to this child, it could be yours” to the man who was her fiance before her faithlessness was discovered. Now, rape of the body is illegal, correctly so. But I see “rapes of the soul”, and they are completely legal. He couldn’t even find out if he was the father of a child, for she was not asking for support, yet. She seemed to take some perverse pleasure in having the two gentlemen in question compete. Didn’t stop her from using his parents as day care (and why wouldn’t they? He might be their grandchild….). All completely licit and legal. It is the nastiest thing I have ever seen a human being do. I know we do worse, but this was in public, unashamed. Something wrong with that…..