IS ANDREW RIGHT? Maggie Gallagher

Andrew is so prolific that the question of what he is or is not right about is constantly changing. I am referring here to his recent piece in the NYT agonizing over whether or not he will remain a Roman Catholic (you can find pretty much everything Andrew writes on his website.)

This is pretty much a digression from our topic of marriage as a legal and social institution (which I view primarily from the standpoint of the interests of the state, not the church), so forgive me. The number of people who sent me Andrew's NYT column makes me think our readers might be interested.

Andrew is something of the Rousseau of our times (or perhaps the Montaigne?), attempting to throw light on vast questions by revealing in minute detail the state of his own emotions. It is a method that tempts one to ridicule. Andrew, "enabling" the Catholic Church by attending Mass? Really Andrew, I agree you are a pretty important fellow, but don't you think that is a tad, well, self-absorbed?

But it also occurs to me that Andrew has spent his career, both in print and personally, running around attempting to convert others. But almost no-one extends to him the intellectual or moral courtesy of attempting to convert him. His dialogue has been a one-sided monologue from the beginning. Not perhaps his fault.

Of course you are right about many things, Andrew, including the moral inappropriateness of creating a special category of exclusion for people who (in the Catholic vernacular you and I share ) are tempted to commit this particular sexual sin, as opposed to all the rest of us with illicit sexual desires.

Fornication and adultery are far more obviously and immediate threats to children than sodomy, so why by what moral calculus should homosexual acts or desires be the unforgiveable sin? God does not see it that way.

As one Catholic to another Andrew, let me say this to you: The teachings of this Pope and this Church are not based on "hostility." The idea of that people have persistent and not apparently self-willed desires to commit a variety of non-marital sexual acts is hardly a new one. (In forty years of sexual liberation we have not yet plumbed the depths that Roman elites reached. Yet.). Your inability to describe the Church's disagreement with you as other than an emotional one, reveals how one-sided your dialogue has been.

You have faith in your own moral infallibility on this question, the Church of Andrew Sullivan. The essence of your teaching to the Church is that a persistent sexual desire is its own justification.

The only compassionate or reasonable response to an inerradicable sexual desire is to find a means to sanction it. When you come down to it Andrew, that is your position.

Of course you find a lot of sympathetic support for this point of view in our current culture, among the many adults who accept this as their standard of personal behavior (gay and straight). You began many years ago by making a conservative case for gay marriage but have ended up making common cause with the sexual revolution in order to advance your cause (see, for example, "We are All Sodomites Now.")

The costs of this point of view are increasingly evident and in my opinion, ill-disguised by your rhetoric of the "conservativeness" of your position. Increasingly your conservativenss consists of calling for government to make emotional pets of gay people by developing "programs" and "social policies" towards "integrating" them, poor dears. Apparently freedom, democracy, the rule of law, citizenship, are deemed nothing without a 12 step government program towards emotional affirmation. Does this strike anyone but me as more condescending than compassionate?

I hope you stay in the Church, Andrew. I hope you begin an actual dialogue with its 2000-year- old unbroken teaching on sexual matters. From which you might be able to glimpse the possibility of something other than hostility at work.

posted by maggie at 10:24 AM VOTE

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