Zippy...

...has a couple of provocative (as usual) posts up here and here. One compares what he calls 'fornicationships' with hookups, and the other examines whether the lies employed by pro-life stings at PP clinics pass the "moral theology of scandal" test. Whatever you think, "Kicking Them While They are Down for Jesus" is a great title.

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Comments:

9 Responses to Zippy…
Lydia says:
May 30, 2013 at 6:22 pm (Edit)
Re. the long-term live-in relationship, one question would be exactly where the confusion is coming in that is preventing marriage. Depending on where the sticking point is, conversion and catechesis might result in a good marriage. Though I would add that the couple shd. be required as part of premarital counseling to stop living together or having sexual relations for at least x period of time in order to indicate that they really have accepted Christian teaching on these matters. I don’t think a pastor or priest should be involved usually in simply hastily regularizing a live-in relationship. But there is enough actual human relationship there between the man and the woman that marriage isn’t out of the question.

Obviously, marriage isn’t anywhere detectable on the radar within 500 miles when we’re just talking about some stranger that a person had sex with for one night.

So that’s a relevant difference. Also, St. Paul says that if a man has intercourse with a harlot they are “one flesh” and that he would not want them to become “one flesh” with a harlot. The entire Pauline teaching in that passage seems to me to indicate that promiscuity with multiple partners involves a particular kind of debasing of the sexual relationship–going around becoming “one flesh” with all these different people–that simply can’t be paralleled to anything in the long-term live-in relationship.

The very fact that one is at greater risk of disease in the case of promiscuity might be a kind of clue that one is “breaking the machine” that God designed to be used in a particular way–namely, in a heterosxual, monogamous union.

Now, I suppose one could argue that the two are strictly incommensurable. That is, that there are ways in which A is worse than B and other ways in which B is worse than A–for example, that the long-term live-in relationship creates more confusion about the nature and importance of marriage, both in the individuals involved and in society as a whole. To say that neither can be declared to be better or worse than the other in all respects, apples and oranges, etc., would seem to me to be a much more defensible position than the claim that the long-term unmarried relationship is unequivocally worse than sleeping around.

Lydia says:
May 30, 2013 at 9:09 pm (Edit)
Another point is this: Promiscuity makes it more difficult to “bond” to a single sexual partner, and there appear to be physiological reasons for that. Hence, the man who is being promiscuous is harming himself and the women he sleeps with in *that* respect more than the man who has a long-term unmarried relationship. St. Paul also says that sexual sin is a sin against one’s own body. This matter of bonding seems to fit in there.

William Luse says:
May 31, 2013 at 9:42 am (Edit)
Appreciate the comments. Will respond tomorrow (later today). Other duties call.

William Luse says:
June 1, 2013 at 8:32 pm (Edit)
I agree, as far as I can tell, with your observations.

the long-term live-in relationship creates more confusion about the nature and importance of marriage

That’s what he’s getting at, I suppose. The corruption of marriage leads to the respectability of live-in relationships leads to the hookup culture. Since the one leads to the other, I guess a case can be made that the live-ins do more damage, but then I could also make the case that what passes for marriage these days does more damage than either. I’m most concerned about damage to the individual, and promiscuity is blatantly more debased than a live-in relationship. The word “slut,” which ought also to have its male equivalent (“cad” doesn’t carry the necessary sense of debauchery), bears moral opprobrium for a very good reason. The hookup culture is at the bottom of the barrel. Asserting that people in live-in relationships, fornicationships, are treating each other “as a toilet” might be the kind of scatological hyperbole that is fun to write but it’s also blithely inhumane. I could put up with it if we were describing what a john does to a whore. It’s possible to say all this and still despise the shack-up culture, and to hate the sin that it has in common with many marriages. Since he won’t be showing up here to defend himself, that’s all I want to say about it.

Lydia says:
June 2, 2013 at 12:38 pm (Edit)
“Since the one leads to the other, I guess a case can be made that the live-ins do more damage”

But I (and I imagine you as well) would only acknowledge “do more damage in that one way.” There’s a whole trail of broken lives and hearts and bodies and the utter debasing of sex to lay to the blame of the hook-up culture, and that for reasons that are _specific_ to the hook-up culture.

Another thing occurred to me that I’m sure you’ll agree with: In a live-in relationship, one member, either the man or the woman, may want to get married while the other is unwilling. The one who wants to get married may be (usually in vain) hoping that the shacking up arrangement will lead to marriage. That doesn’t make it “not sin,” but it does make a difference to the nature of that particular person’s intention and stance toward marriage.

Lydia says:
June 2, 2013 at 12:41 pm (Edit)
Sorry, I just realize that I wasn’t thinking very clearly on and didn’t address the “live-in leads to hook-up,” the idea being that all the evils of the hook-up culture can be laid to the door of the live-in culture.

The “leads to” relationship is rather tenuous there. I think myself that there have to be other things involved to take us down to the level of mere hooking up. It’s undeniable that the acceptance of shacking up was part of it, but it doesn’t seem to me to have been a sufficient condition by itself. Hence the fact that it took a few decades, for example.

William Luse says:
June 2, 2013 at 8:54 pm (Edit)
Proving cultural cause and effect is difficult, I acknowledge, in a “this leads to that” sort of way. But it’s my long-held position that the legitimization of lust via contraception, the separation of sex from its true, one flesh context, has led to the acceptance of sterile sex. The lack of shame in the hookup culture comes from somewhere. I can’t prove it, of course (though there are plenty of slippery-slope statistics to back me up), but if sex is a thing unto itself, there’s no reason why anyone should not enjoy it under the circumstances of his choosing. Leaving aside prostitution or any form of sex trafficking, I perhaps should have said that gay marriage is the bottom of the hookup culture barrel. It’s the ultimate in sterile sex, and we can’t get to an acceptance of homosexual marriage until we first accept their sexual habits (which isn’t really sex at all). Maybe a lot of people don’t think much about gay sex and simply focus on the fact that “they’re in loooove.” But it comes to the same thing: the separation of sex from love.

“A few decades,” btw, is a very short time in the life of a society. At least it ought to be.

Lydia says:
June 3, 2013 at 4:53 pm (Edit)
One thing is that “leads to” only tells us _something_ about what did the leading, and that something can be rather limited. For example, suppose that (in an alternative universe) people started talking more and more negatively about Muslim immigration, partly inspired by the kinds of completely true things that I and others have written about the dangers thereof. And suppose that after a while some kind of anti-Muslim group got started that used our material but that was violent and that this group burned down the house of some Muslim family living in America and killed the kids. Something crazy like that. One could argue that sites like W4 and Jihad Watch “led to” their actions, and in a weird sense, that might even be true, but that wouldn’t mean that we were necessarily wrong to write what we did.

That’s just a strange example, and my point is simply that the intrinsic wrongness of a thing can sometimes be _pointed to_ by its negative consequences but that one has to be careful not to rely too heavily on that argument. Ultimately the intrinsic wrongness of a thing has to be argued for the thing in itself, and of course as you and I are agreeing, even when the thing is intrinsically wrong, it may be in many senses “less bad” than what it “leads to.”

William Luse says:
June 3, 2013 at 11:11 pm (Edit)
Not sure I understood all that, but I do agree that “the intrinsic wrongness of a thing has to be argued for the thing in itself.”