My Reply to the Anonymous Reply

Here is my original post and here is the anonymous reply.  Here, now, my reply:

When I said that it was dismissive to refer to homosexual sexual intimacy with the word "sodomy"--or "anal intercourse", or whatever term my anonymous replier prefers--I meant that it was dimissive in the same sense it would be dismissive to refer to my wife's and my sexual intimacy with the term "vaginal intercourse".  Maybe "reductionist" would have been better--clearer--than "dismissive".

May I recommend, again, that interested readers take the time to purchase/read Sister Margaret Farley's new book, Just Love:   A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (2006).

Book Description
This long-awaited book by one of American Christianity’s foremost ethicists proposes a framework for sexual ethics whereby justice is the criterion for all loving, including love that is related to sexual activity and relationships. It begins with historical and cross-cultural explorations, and then addresses the large questions of embodiment, gender, and sexuality. Following this is a normative chapter that delineates the justice framework for sexual ethics. Though the particular focus is Christian sexual ethics, the framework is broad enough to have relevance for multiple traditions of sexual ethics. The remaining chapters focus on specific issues in sexual ethics, including same-sex relationships, marriage and family, divorce and second marriage, celibacy, and sex and its negativities.      

About the Author
Margaret A. Farley holds the Gilbert L. Stark Chair in Christian Ethics at Yale University Divinity School, where she has taught since 1971. She is a past president of the Society of Christian Ethics and the Catholic Theological Society of America as well as being a recipient of the latter’s John Courtney Murray Award for Excellence in Theology. She was a founding member of the Bioethics Committee at Yale-New Haven Hospital; director of the Yale Divinity School Project on Gender, Faith, and Responses to HIV/AIDS in Africa; and codirector of the All Africa Conference: Sister to Sister, which facilitates responses to HIV/AIDS on the part of Roman Catholic women in Africa. She is the author of Personal Commitments and Compassionate Respect, the Madaleva Lecture for 2002.