Andrew Sullivan used to make the "conservative" case for re-defining marriage, arguing that recognizing same-sex sexual partnerships as marriages would spread traditional norms of monogamy and sexual fidelity where promiscuity and "open" partnerships tended to prevail. Of course, he gave that up long ago, announcing in the face of criticism (by Peter Kurth) of such advocacy that he affirmed “the beauty and mystery and spirituality of sex, including anonymous sex.” Anonymous sex, I gather, is sex between strangers who do not even bother to reveal their names to each other, and in some cases don't show their faces to each other.
So it's scarcely a surprise that Dr. Sullivan disapproves of the efforts I have undertaken with Shaykh Hamza Yusuf to persuade CEOs of America's major hotel chains to stop offering pornography to their customers. Why would someone who celebrates promiscuity and casual sexual encounters as a form of "spirituality" think there is anything degrading or dehumanizing about porn and the porn trade? In commenting on our efforts, though, Sullivan oddly claims that Shaykh Hamza and I are "hiding behind the civil rights movement" to take his porn away: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/civil-rights-and-hotel-porn.html
Of course, in our letter to hotel executives, posted here yesterday, we weren't "hiding behind" anything. We made our argument in an open and straightforward way. Here is what we said:
Pornography is degrading, dehumanizing, and corrupting. It undermines self-respect and respect for others. It reduces persons—creatures bearing profound, inherent, and equal dignity—to the status of objects. It robs a central aspect of our humanity—our sexuality—of its dignity and beauty. It ensnares some in addiction. It deprives others of their sense of self-worth. It teaches our young people to settle for the cheap satisfactions of lust, rather than to do the hard, yet ultimately liberating and fulfilling, work of love.
Later in the letter, having made our substantive argument, we mentioned racial injustice in anticipating and rebutting a possible rejoinder, namely, the claim that there is nothing objectionable about offering pornography in hotel rooms, since offering the material is perfectly legal (assuming that the porn in question, however graphic or violent, does not technically qualify as "obscenity"). We reminded the hotel executives that not all that many decades ago racial segregation, for example, was legal; but that didn't make it right. Our appeal to the respectable business people who are profiting from porn-dealing today was not to law, but to conscience. We asked them to consider whether they would want their own wives, sisters, or daughters to be depicted as women are depicted in pornographic films and other materials. And we urged them to regard all women as they would wish their wives, sisters, and daughters to be regarded, i.e., not as de-personalized sexual objects or bundles of sexual appetites, but as persons---bearers of dignity who, as such, deserve respect.
Our point was not that the fight against the dehumanizing and degrading phenomenon of pornography is just like the fight against the dehumanizing and degrading practice of racial segregation. There are important and obvious differences. Our point was that something's being legal does not justify anyone's doing it, even for the sake of increasing shareholders' profits in a corporate business (which, as a general matter, management has a fiduciary obligation to do). But since Dr. Sullivan has raised the issue of parallels between the civil rights movement and the struggle against pornography, if only to deride the idea, it's worth mentioning one important parallel: the sickeningly widespread exploitation of women (among them many troubled or abused teenage girls who have run away from home, and many young women lured from Eastern Europe, southeast Asia, and elsewhere with false promises of honorable employment) who are trafficked into the porn production business (and often into prostitution, as well). No need to trust me or Shaykh Hamza on the reality of this vile and massive abuse of civil rights. Here's Lara Janson, writing on the liberal Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lara-janson/the-price-of-peddling-por_b_569242.html.
Surely decent people on the left and the right can agree that the trafficking of human beings into sexual slavery is a horrific evil that we should do everything in our power to oppose. But if we are to make any progress in the struggle, we need to take the measure of the problem and that means recognizing its connection to, among other evils, the porn business. Regarding and depicting porn makers as mere purveyors of harmless "naughtiness" of the sort that it's prudish and silly for sophisticated people to get worked up about is to abandon victims of exploitation whose fundamental human rights are routinely being violated.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Get Religion, not surprisingly, has can't-miss analysis of the media's coverage of the recently concluded Fortnight for Freedom.
Last week, I joined Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, one of our nation's most brilliant public intellectuals and a leading scholar and teacher of the Islamic tradition, in a letter to the chief executive officers of America's largest hotel chains asking them to stop offering pornography in their hotel rooms. We wrote as a Muslim and a Christian, but we appealed to the executives "not on the basis of truths revealed in our scriptures but on the basis of a commitment that should be shared by all people of reason and goodwill: a commitment to human dignity and the common good." We noted that "as teachers and as parents, we seek a society in which young people are encouraged to respect others and themselves—treating no one as an impersonal object or thing."
Today, Public Discourse, the on-line journal of the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, publishes the text of our letter. Here is a link: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/07/5815
Much has been learned about the harmful personal effects and social costs of pornography since the 1950s when Hugh Hefner launched his successful (and astonishingly lucrative) effort to make "soft-core" pornography socially acceptable. Still, many people continue to imagine that pornography, if it is a vice at all, is a harmless one. "Naughty, naughty," but nothing to really worry much about. Some even push the line that porn is a good thing---fulfilling and liberating, something that "spices up" marriages and helps people to get over ignorant taboos and debilitating sexual "hang ups." Readers who are interested in a summary of what has been learned by experts in psychiatry, psychology, counseling, family therapy, and related fields might have a look at The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations, prepared under Witherspoon auspices by Mary Eberstadt of the Hudson Institute and Mary Anne Layden, Director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. A pdf is available here: http://www.internetsafety101.org/upload/file/Social%20Costs%20of%20Pornography%20Report.pdf/
Our letter to hotel executives is one more example of Christians and Muslims working together to uphold values that people of both faiths understand are central to personal and civic virtue and to justice and the common good. It is important for Catholics and other Christians to recognize that the vast majority of our Muslim fellow citizens, like the vast majority of American Christians, want for their children the kind of society in which they are encouraged to respect themselves and others as persons bearing profound and inherent dignity. It is no accident that across the country Christian parents who are, for example, fighting against programs in middle and high schools (and now even in some elementary schools) that offend modesty and undermine chastity find themselves standing should to shoulder with Muslim parents (and in many areas with orthodox Jewish parents as well) in the struggle. Muslim Americans share with Christian Americans and others a belief in freedom and in fundamental rights and liberties; but like other people of faith they are not taken in by expressive individualist and relativist conceptions of freedom that erase the distinction between liberty and license. They know that freedom and virtue, far from being adversaries, stand or fall together.
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Paul Caron shares great advice on marriage.
I know that it has been declared that it is partisan, bad form, alarmist, etc., to worry about the administration's understanding of, and dedication to, religious freedom, well understood. Still, what Tom Farr writes here ("Religious Freedom Under the Gun") seems worrisome.
The State Department recently announced that it was dropping coverage of religious freedom from its annual Human Rights Report. The declared reason: to avoid duplicating coverage available in the annual Report on International Religious Freedom.
[M]illions of people are suffering because of violent religious persecution. We should care about that, especially in places like Iraq, where U.S. military action—and our utter failure to advance the cause of religious freedom—has led to the devastation of Iraqi Christian and other minority communities (see the recent speech of Iraqi bishop Shlemon Warduni to the convocation of American Catholic bishops).
[Also,] he advancement of religious freedom would serve vital American interests. Both history and social science make it clear that highly religious nations like Egypt and Pakistan will not achieve stable democracy unless they embrace religious freedom in full. Nor will they be able to defeat the toxic religious ideas that feed violent Islamist terrorism, including the kind that has reached American shores.
In short, the Obama administration’s sidelining of religious liberty . . . is terribly shortsighted. America needs a resurgence of religious freedom, both here and abroad. The stakes are too high for this issue to be ignored any longer.
Here , with thanks to Rocco, is a link to Archbishop Chaput's excellent close-of-the-Fortnight-for-Freedom homily, "We Belong to God, and Only to God." An important point:
Thinking about the relationship of Caesar and God, religious faith and secular
authority, is important. It helps us sort through our different duties as
Christians and citizens. But on a deeper level, Caesar is a creature -- a
creature of this world -- and Christ’s message is uncompromising: We should give
Caesar nothing of ourselves. Obviously
we’re in the world. That means we have obligations of charity and justice to the
people with whom we share it. For Christians, patriotism is a virtue. Love of
country is an honorable thing. As Chesterton once said, if we build a wall
between ourselves and the world, it makes little difference whether we describe
ourselves as locked in or locked out.
But God has made us for more than the world. Our real home isn’t here. The point of today’s Gospel passage is not how we might calculate a fair division of goods between Caesar and God. In reality, it all belongs to God and nothing
– at least nothing permanent and important – belongs to Caesar. . . .
As Marc noted a few days ago, my friend and former colleague, Steve Smith, is blogging over at St. John's' Center for Law and Religion Forum. Here is his latest post, "The Dis-Integration of Neutrality," which is, like everything Steve writes, a must-read. Here's a taste:
Most of so-called neutralities (non-sectarianism, for example) are upon examination not really versions of neutrality: at least they do not fit the official specifications or deliver what “neutrality” was supposed to deliver. And, alas, the only version of neutrality that seems on its face truly neutral . . . is impossible and self-negating, as critics argue. It is only through obfuscation and equivocation that we manage to avoid this distressing verdict, and to persist in professing an ideal that we are not prepared to relinquish. . .
But why does “neutrality” have such a powerful spell over us? A principal reason, I suspect, is because to admit that neutrality is impossible and that governments are not, never have been, and never could be religiously neutral might imply that we ought candidly to explain why our governments in fact favor some religious (or anti-religious) positions and reject others. And as things stand, “we” as a society are constitutionally unprepared to do that. . . .
