Stephen
Kershnar
A Vicious Fight in Philosophy over
Homosexuality
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
October
4, 2016
Oxford University’s Richard
Swinburne, arguably the world’s leading Christian philosopher, recently caused
a firestorm when he argued that homosexuality is a disease and homosexual sex
is wrong.
Following
his comments, a nasty brawl broke out. Notre Dame professor Michael Rea, who is
part of the leadership team that invited Swinburne to the Society of Christian
Philosophers, apologized for his comments.
Yale
University professor Jason Stanley was harsher. He responded to Swinburne and
people who think like him by posting “Fuck those assholes” on Facebook. The
phrase was then repeated by Columbia University’s John Collins and University
of British Columbia’s Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa. Dan Steinberg stepped it up, posting,
“Fist those guys.” Georgetown University’s Rebecca Kukla outdid them. She posted,
“Those douche tankards can suck my giant queer cock.” Yale, Columbia, etc. are elite
institutions and Ichikawa, Kukla, Rea, and Stanley are well-known in philosophy.
The controversy reached Inside Higher
Education and is still swirling about.
Swinburne
gave two arguments in support of his claim that gay sex is wrong. First, God
prohibits gay sex (see 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and Romans 1:24-27). Second, gay
sex is wrong because a climate of disapproval would prevent some people from
becoming homosexual.
Swinburne
argued that homosexuality is a reversible disease (or disability). On his
account, it is a disease because a homosexual cannot beget children through a
loving act with a lifelong partner. He also argued that homosexuality should
not be encouraged because children nurtured by homosexual parents do not do as
well in life as those nurtured by heterosexual biological parents.
Swinburne’s arguments fail. First, even
if the Bible condemns gay sex, the Bible is unreliable on moral matters. The
Bible also condemns money lending (Ezekiel 18:13) and permits slave-owning
(Leviticus 25:44-46). These absurdities are enough to disqualify it.
Second, the inability to directly beget
children with one’s partner does not show that something is a disease unless we
build into the notion of a disease something like Swinburne’s or the Catholic view
of sex. This would make medicine depend on theology and they are independent. For
example, one can be a fine doctor without knowing anything about Christianity.
Third,
even if homosexuality were a disease (or disability), this does not make gay
sex wrong. Infertility is a disability, but this does not make it wrong for a
husband to have sex with his infertile wife. If gay sex wrongs no one, then it
is not wrong. Even if gay sex encourages children and young adults to be gay, no
one has a duty to be a role model, let alone a moral saint. The notion that it
wrongs God is even less plausible because God has no right to tell people what
they can do with their lives. They are not his chattel slaves.
There
are other plausible arguments that homosexuality is a mental disorder. New York
University’s Jerry Wakefield has the leading theory of a disorder. His theory
is that a disorder is a harmful dysfunction. He asserts that harm is what makes
someone’s life go worse. He argues that an individual has a dysfunction when he
has an internal body part (or mechanism) that fails to perform its natural
function, that is, the function for which evolution designed it. The natural
function is on some accounts, although perhaps not Wakefield’s, the part’s contribution
to reproduction (more specifically, reproductive fitness) and, perhaps, longevity.
On
this account, whether homosexuality is a disorder depends on whether homosexuality
is harmful and whether it prevents or lessens reproduction. The evidence here
is mixed. Homosexuals are less likely than
heterosexuals to say they were extremely or very happy and more likely to say
they were fairly unhappy or unhappy most of the time. Gay men are more likely
to suffer depression than straight men. My guess is that the greater
unhappiness of gays has an external cause (homophobia) and is not a result of
their orientation, but this is just a guess. Gays
have a lower level of reproductive fitness. They also have higher rates of
mental disorders than non-gay populations, although being associated with other
mental disorders need not make a condition itself a disorder.
Wakefield notes that psychiatrists
held that homosexuality is not a disorder because they think it is not harmful.
Specifically, they think that it does not lessen people’s capacity for loving
human relationships. He argues that psychiatrists sidestepped the thorny issue
of whether it is a dysfunction.
Whether homosexuality is a disorder,
then, is an empirical question and not one that can be answered by mere
armchair speculation. My guess is that it is not.
Whether it is a disease or not, gay
sex is clearly morally permissible because it wrongs no one. Relationships are
good to the extent they make the partners’ lives go better. There is little
reason to believe that gay people’s relationships contribute less to their
lives than do straight people’s relationships and, hence, they are as good as
straight relationships for participants. Whether it is a disorder is irrelevant
to the rightness or goodness of gay life.
The ferocity of the philosophers’
condemnation is striking. First, even if Swinburne’s arguments are
unconvincing, Wakefield’s theory of a disorder opens the door to the issue of whether
homosexuality is a disorder. Second, if one thinks what the Bible says is true,
then one is forced into adopting something like Swinburne’s approach to make
sense of the Bible’s and churches’ pronouncements on sexual morality. Thus, the
vicious criticism cuts deeply into Christianity. It likely cuts just as deeply
into Islam. Third, given the influence of these philosophers and their schools,
it is worth considering the degree to which these schools are hostile to
Christianity. If the two are going to go to war, it is good that the rest of us
know it.
Full
disclosure: While at Oxford, I had Swinburne as a professor.
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