There was a certain amount of unnecessary condescension toward fundamentalists in Lisa Miller’s essay on the Christian case for marriage equality. But the spluttering anger of the responses struck me as excessive. Larison oozes contempt for Jon Meacham in ways that seem intended to miss Meacham’s point. The essence of fundamentalism is not, it seems to me, the assertion that Christ is the same “yesterday, today and forever” (I believe the same and my faith is anti-fundamentalist); it is the assertion that every single aspect in the bewilderingly expansive and contradictory and over-determined texts we call the Bible are literally true in every particular and every injunction should be applied today as literally as possible. This crude recourse to Biblical authority, without any larger theological argument, is what Meacham is rightly complaining about. Larison agrees, in fact, when you read his full post. He notes that it is simply impossible to deduce one simple meaning from the Bible on most complicated current issues. The texts have
a richness and depth that cannot be exhausted by one kind of interpretation alone.
So a vast document that has only a handful of opaque references to sex between two heterosexuals of the same gender and no concept of homosexuality as such requires interpretation. We cannot resolve this issue by the plain meaning of the text alone. The minute we do this reduction – with, say, the Leviticus proscriptions – we are required to explain further why the prohibition of eating shell-fish is no longer operable. And an attempt to insist on the eternal, literal authority of Scripture with respect to marriage in churches that accept divorce – plainly and clearly ruled illicit by Jesus himself – reveals the deep intellectual confusion among the fundamentalists.
Larison knows all this, which is why he, in fact, does not resort to Scripture, but smuggles in natural law, to make his case:
In a fallen world, everyone has a predisposition to act contrary to our true nature, but in no other case that I can think of do we pretend that indulging such a predisposition is inevitable, much less something to be embraced and approved.
My italics. The root of Larison’s argument here is a Thomist assertion that homosexuality is actually an "objective disorder" contrary to our "true nature." By marrying the man I love, I am, according to Larison, violating my true nature. We are all defined as heterosexuals in this universe, and heterosexuality is defined primarily by sex acts that cannot ever be divorced from reproduction.
This concept of nature is, however, itself divorced from modern science – which finds that same-sex orientation is close to universal among all natural species and that sexual orientation is far deeper and broader than sex acts – and rests on medieval conceptions of the teleology of sex. I deal with these natural law arguments at great length on homosexuality in Virtually Normal, and on abortion and end-of-life issues in The Conservative Soul. From a Catholic perspective, I am forced to respond that these neo-Thomist assertions about "our true nature" are philosophically circular, incompatible with the vast increase in our knowledge of human psychology and sexuality and evolution over the last two centuries, and have ended up marginalizing a small minority of humans as the one true symbol of moral righteousness.
None of this advances caritas or veritas. And in the end, a Christianity resistant to truth and terrified of love is the real objective disorder.
The Dish 