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“Pax” or “Pox”?
I found the James Alison article (“Yes, but is it true...?”) intriguing and well-reasoned, with an original perspective. I too worry that all the fur flying about "gay marriage" has derailed our thinking. The whole notion of same-sex marriage wasn't something the gay community was ever of one mind about; but now so many of the arguments proposed against it are either so specious or so vicious that we find ourselves arguing back, without any clear idea of what we are arguing ‘for.’ Worse, maybe, is that the way the discussion has developed (or exploded) threatens to confound entirely the issues of civil same-sex unions and same-sex marriage sanctioned by a church (any church). To my mind, the two questions are or ought to be distinct, in meaning, in desirability, in achievability. And the strategies and arguments for attaining one may not be especially relevant to the other. Our president, for instance, should only need to be shown the Constitution to remind him he has no standing and no authority to talk about sanctity or sinners.
I'm not sure, though, that I buy Alison's premise -- that the Church doesn't recognize homosexual persons as a class, save as a class of defective heterosexuals. Certainly I understand the point and his formulation of it. But it seems to me the Church has put itself in a bind exactly ‘because’ it does occasionally acknowledge the existence of the homosexual man or woman (though not of transgender persons). The basic argument of "Always Our Children," the American bishops' letter of a few years back, was basically: They can't help the way they are, so we must be nice to them and keep them from having sex till their dying day.
Perhaps the difference is only semantic, in the way Alison and I hear the "can't help themselves" logic. Myself, I hear it as a libel against God. Yes, people are born with terrible deformities, armless or legless or conjoined, but I know of no other instance in which the Church declares a person's inner being is deformed and was created that way. In this it seems to me the Church paints itself into a corner. (Never mind the "natural law" arguments, which proceed from a 12th-century understanding of Nature.)
Too (and I mean no disrespect to Alison for trying), I hope the notion of calling a religious gay or lesbian union a "pax" will die a quiet death. A new term would be useful, but let's keep looking. A word that in the US will call to mind a preachy "family values" channel, a word that will instantly become "pox" in the mouths of a thousand British and American politicians -- and in a thousand transatlantic headlines -- is probably not what we want.
---Patrick
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