Grace & Peace!
Portrait, I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you…some days are good days for writing, others not so much.
That homosexual liasons such as yours can be loving is something that I would not deny (although a priori they cannot attain the same richness as the heterosexual mutuality God has ordained).
First, I want to thank you for seriously engaging my post. I value and appreciate the dialogue.
I don’t wish to launch, in this thread, a broad defense of homosexuality as that’s largely beyond the scope of the question as initially stated. For my purposes, my claim in this thread is that homosexual relationships are not necessarily immoral–that it is possible for homosexual relationships to bear good fruit and to contribute to the fulfillment of those who participate in them. This does not mean that all homosexual relationships are necessarily moral–but it means that they *can *be, just as not all heterosexual relationships are moral–but they
can be.
Granted, this moral position does not place very heavy stress on natural law as a value which informs morality (and I will admit that I am not much of a Thomist, nor much of an Aristotelian). Or, rather, it assumes that what is natural is not merely an external or forensic value which is predicated on either normative culture or biology alone, but that it is a
total value which considers actual human wholeness and its fulfillment to be the core value of morality. That it does not consider heterosexuality necessary to that fulfillment is not to say that it considers biology to be separate from human wholeness, or that it considers the body to be merely instrumental to the will (a belief that djeter suggests is at the root of this value system). In fact, I would argue that morality must ever more and more divorce itself from principally deriving value from instrumentality or utility–which includes no longer seeing sex as merely or primarily reproductive because those are the biological ends to which the genitals tend.
For me, the principles of this value system are as follows:
1–We are made, body and soul, to be in relationship.
2–Sexuality is an important part of our human relational capacity.
3–A properly ordered sexuality is a sexuality ordered toward loving human relationship.
4–The reproductive capacity of heterosexual relationships does not
determine their value, but
augments it in a particularly meaningful way.
5–That this capacity does not exist in homosexual relationships does not determine the value of homosexual relationships either.
6–The reproductive *capacity or potentiality *of any man or woman does not morally
necessitate the *realization *of that capacity. Otherwise, celibacy, virginity, and impotency in its many forms would be immoral. But they are not.
7–What
is immoral, however, is to frustrate the realization of the human relational capacity insofar as human flourishing and wholeness are impeded or denied.
I have a feeling we can find a lot of common ground in these principles. Where we differ , I would suppose, is in seeing the reproductive capacity as identical to the relational capacity (which is why Rome views homosexuality as disordered–the two capacities are out of synch–and because the body cannot be wrong, it must be a problem of the soul/will–but if the reproductive capacity does not assume the force of moral imperative, then body and soul are no longer out of synch, but instead form a unique human whole).
Such is my understanding, at any rate. Far be it from me, though, to assume that my understanding of this or of anything is complete, however!
However, the love-quality of such liasons is not sufficient to justify them.
We differ here as well–the love-quality of
anything is sufficient to justify or condemn *everything. *Blessed John says that Love is God, and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. And Our Lord says that we know a tree by its fruit. If a relationship does not bear good fruit, we know it is not a good relationship.
Love is concerned for the highest welfare of the beloved and our highest human welfare is found in obedience to God’s law and purpose, not in revolt against them.
Agreed, though I would caution anyone who believed that obedience to God lay in following a moral code. Our Lord says, This is my commandment, that you love one another. Elsewhere he says, I am the Way. The Way is not a book of laws and ordinances, but an actual, real, whole human (and divine!) person.
(CONTINUED…)
