In this episode, Trent explores how to defend Catholic teaching on sexuality by focusing on one key question.
The Disgusting End of the Slippery Slope:
Why The Church Cannot Marry the Impotent: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/why-the-church-cannot-marry-the-impotent
Transcription:
Trent:
Recently I saw clips of a documentary about an online pornographer and prostitute who had sex with 100 men in a single day to promote her brand. Another prostitute has said that she won up to this woman by having sex with a thousand men in a day. Now, I’m grateful that most people, even those who are non-religious, experienced the same disgust that I felt at learning about all of this. But if those same people sat down and really thought about what sex is for, they’d see having sex with one random person is also revolting. Both acts are sexually disordered, one is just so disordered, it becomes easier for average people to see the problem. That’s what we’ll talk about today, and I just want to say I’m grateful for your support to help us reach these average people and help them learn about the good news of the gospel and the truth of God’s love, and you can help us to do that by just subscribing to this channel and especially supporting us@trenthornpodcast.com.
For $5 a month or $50 a year, you get access to bonus content and you help us stay sponsor free. So please check it out. Now, when people debate sexual ethics, they usually say sex is fine as long as it’s consensual. They look at sexual ethics from a harm perspective, so their morality basically boils down to as long as it’s not rape, it’s okay, but most people concede that there are consensual sexual behaviors. They also consider to be morally revolting. So we need to answer a deeper question to explain that and that question is what is sex For? A few years ago, I went to a college campus in San Diego to ask students this question and I got a lot of interesting answers.
CLIP:
Some people might be for pleasure, might be for love, but it just depends on the person.
Everyone’s different and I guess to me sex is just like, I don’t know, it’s a special thing at least for me, it like to keep it simple, I guess.
I believe that sex is one for reproduction of course, and also an intimate relationship between two people who are in love and it’s sharing your body with someone else.
Sex is meant for reproduction. I guess most people say, I don’t think it’s specifically for reproduction for me personally, but I think it’s just a way of showing you love someone or you care about someone and it’s very intimate and it can be important.
I don’t think anybody has a right to determine what sex is as a definition because each person can do it for their own reasons. You can do it to bring yourself closer to a spouse or a partner. You could do it for personal enjoyment or just literally whatever you want to do. That is your life, your decision.
Trent:
The last girl gave a fairly honest, modern answer saying that sex isn’t for anything in particular. If you want sex to be special, it’s special and if you want to be for whatever and it’s for whatever sex is just something you do that makes you feel good, although I’m sure she’d add that as long as everyone involved consents, then there’s nothing wrong with using sex or whatever you want, and it’s not just college students who say sex isn’t for anything. The famous atheistic philosopher Peter Singer wrote the following in his textbook. Practical Ethics, even in the era of aids, sex raises, no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations of honesty, concern for others, prudence and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect. For the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. The Catholic philosopher, ed Faser has a wonderful reply to this.
He writes, I have long regarded this as one of the most in basilic things any philosopher has ever said that sex has special moral significance. Indeed, tremendous moral significance is blindingly obvious. Debating sexual ethics can be difficult because ethical arguments often go like this, you believe in X. Well, X logically entails y and Y is crazy, so believing X is crazy. The problem is that we used to be considered crazy is now considered normal. In the 1950s, many arguments against contraception relied on the claim that approving contraceptive sex entails approving homosexual acts. Back then, homosexual conduct was literally crazy given that the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders the DSM version three said homosexual conduct was indicative of a mental disorder. It said this until an aggressive propaganda campaign changed it in 1973 in all future editions of the DSM. So good luck making an argument against contraception like that today.
So you have to reach way out to the boundaries of sexual behavior to find a morally repugnant enough Y that proves casual view X about sex is wrong. For example, if sex is like photography, then all that matters is that you get consent from the person you photograph. There’s nothing weird. You could take a picture of a tree or a dead body if you have that aesthetic preference, it doesn’t matter and that’s not that gruesome if you consider pictures of popes and repose or incorruptible saints, but if sex is like photography, then there would be nothing weird about being sexually attracted to a tree. Dendro or dead bodies necrophilia pictures of trees and even dead human beings can be beautiful, but sex with those things is always ugly, morally sane. People know these acts are perverted, which shows sex as an intrinsic purpose beyond mere pleasure.
It is for something. Now some people may say that are discussed with stunts like having sex with a hundred people in a day has nothing to do with sexual morality. It’s related to someone risking their health and their body. I don’t buy that though because most people who hear about this experience express moral disgust, not biological disgust. How we feel about gross promiscuity is not like the anxiety we feel when we watch a daredevil risk his life for a stunt. It’s also not like the queasiness we might feel while watching someone break the world record for eating hot dogs 83 in 10 minutes in case you’re wondering and if you are morally disgusted by that, you identify the sin as gluttony too much of a good and natural thing. We don’t view it with the contempt that we have for people who misuse sex, which shows sex is not a mere biological process like eating, but has serious moral components and moral meaning.
Perhaps these stunts are disordered because sex is for expressing love. A modern person might say that though, which is still compatible with casual sex with someone you love. Now, I could mention really gross objects. Some people try to express sexual love to that show. This is still not a good explanation, but I prefer for you to keep your lunch. I have an episode on one of those gross counter examples listed below if you have the stomach to watch it instead, I’d point out that sex being for amorphous concepts of love or expressing emotion does not explain the serious exclusive love inherent to sexual relationships if it’s weirdly possessive to demand that your friend have no other friends but you, why isn’t it weirdly possessive to demand your lover have no other lovers but you? One objection would be that infidelity is wrong because it involves lying and that has nothing to do with what sex is for or the purpose of sex, but rooting the harm of infidelity in lying doesn’t explain the wrongness of asking permission to have an affair.
Doing something like that is insane. It’s like asking permission to murder someone, and yes, the analogy still holds because affairs can kill relationships. Now, there are people who try to act like monogamy is not an intrinsic part of sexual relationships, and it’s a mere social convention. People who reject monogamy and promote open relationships or so-called polyamory push this propaganda, but this is all just a bunch of magical thinking. For example, it’s diluted to think that happy thoughts will somehow cause the universe to give you the things that make you happy. This is the error behind things like the law of attraction. Likewise, it’s diluted to think that you can practice infidelity and merely thinking happy thoughts about your relationship will keep it from suffering the negative effects inherent to infidelity. This can be seen in television shows like Sister Wives, which followed polygamous, Cody Brown and his spiritual marriage to four women that eventually dissolved and led to three divorces with Cody remaining at this time with only one of his wives or in the streamer Destiny’s open relationship with his now ex-wife, Molina Garson. Now, normally I wouldn’t bring up someone’s divorce, but that’s fair game to show the consequences of a disordered lifestyle you were recently promoting that has the potential to ruin people’s lives if they adopt it, and Destiny was doing just that a few months before his divorce was finalized while he and his wife were on the whatever podcast.
CLIP:
What if someday one of you guys runs into somebody that you have a better emotional connection? What would you do? Then?
Again, I understand the question, but monogamous people have this exact same problem.
What you guard against it,
What you rely on with virtue, but the guardian in my opinion is the history that you’ve built together, right? There’s probably
Or the virtue that you choose to embody
If that’s how you want to do it, the history, yeah, but there’s probably history that’s still
Cheat though.
There’s probably some woman out there that would be a better match for me than Melina. There’s some guy, there’s probably some guy out there that would be a better match for her than me, but we’ve got four and a half years up to now of history built together that we know
And our lifestyle works really well. We match very, we want the same things.
Trent:
As I said, sexual ethics isn’t fun to talk about because you have to pick crazier and crazier Y’s to explain Y principle X is wrong, but one Y that’s easy to talk about is this. If sex only express mere love and emotion and so there’s nothing disordered about fornication with a partner, then why does sex usually ruin friendships? This happens by either turning the friends into committed lovers like in the film when Harry met Sally or by turning the friends into estranged friends who have an awkward history. The reason this happens is because sex objectively communicates a kind of permanent bond that is incompatible with mere friendship. What bonds friends together are things that exist beyond them, like shared interests, shared hobbies or social circles. When these external factors change, friendships often change as well or they go away and that’s all right, but what bonds lovers together is something intrinsic to each of them, the other person, and the hope is that the bond only dies when the other person dies.
Most people don’t expect the love of a friendship to last a lifetime, but they often desire the love that accompanies sex to last that long. So when you introduce the permanent bond created through sexual intercourse to the temporary bond inherent and friendship, it creates an uncomfortable dissonance, and when a person has sex with a hundred people in a day, the contrast between this extreme transience and the permanence of the sexual bond becomes blindingly obvious, but the same discord exists in any sexual act that takes place outside of the marital bond. That’s because sex just is for the expression of marital love. We call sex making babies and making love because sex is for expressing the kind of love that makes babies. Now at this point, a lot of people, especially Christians will agree and they’ll say sex is for babies. That’s really, really close to the correct answer.
Even many of the students that I spoke with on campus thought of procreation as the answer to my question, what is sex for? But they quickly brushed it aside as if it were an afterthought, something to begrudgingly acknowledge and then ignore. Now, it’s true that procreation is the primary end of the sexual act, and this explains why sex has permanence and exclusivity built into its meaning because babies benefit from having parents who are permanently and exclusively bonded to one another. However, if lean too heavily into the answer, sex is for babies, you might get tripped up by an objection. Here’s Christian commenters, Josiah and Isabella Moody saying Sex is for babies, and while I appreciate them speaking against contraception, they end up being unable to satisfactorily answer the host’s follow-up question. What about people who are infertile and can’t have babies?
CLIP:
Dude, sex is about having children. It’s about having babies. You pump yourself full of birth control and then you have sex with your wife and there’s no purpose there except just pleasure. That’s the only purpose. Pleasure.
Should people who are born like infertile have sex?
It depends. Listen, I am pro like people committing to celibacy for the rest of their life. I am pro like that, and if that was something that they couldn’t have babies, I believe that they should have that choice there.
Well, they have a choice.
Yeah, I’m saying is that what you believe is
Correct, infertile people, no sex for you?
I think that it’s crazy infertile. People don’t think, I don’t see anybody really saying that, Hey, I’m infertile, so I’m going to be celibate for the rest of my life. I’m not going to touch sex. I’m not going to have sex. You think
These crazy people don’t say that?
Yeah.
Wow.
I think that that would be very honorable.
No gay sex with
Trent:
Women guys.
CLIP:
Very true. I agree
Trent:
Saying sex is only for babies, so sex is wrong. When conception is impossible would mean sex is immoral when a couple becomes infertile or even when a wife is pregnant. There were some people in church history like St. Augustine who held this view as can be seen in his criticism of men incontinent to that degree that they spare not their wives even when pregnant. But the church does not teach that sex is immoral when conception is impossible. For example, while there is a minimum age for marriage, there is no maximum age, so elderly, infertile people who are free to marry, can marry and engage in the marital act, which means sex isn’t only for making babies, instead, sex is for the expression of marital love. Sex expresses the unique one flesh bond that exists between a man and a woman. Marital love is the full and complete gift of self to another person, including the gift of your fertility to that person, even if you have little or no fertility left to give your spouse in the marital act.
This might happen temporarily, as is the case for most women during their normal cycles, or it could be permanent. Once sterility has set in an advanced age, the church does not consider infertility an impediment to marriage and Canon 10 84, section three of the code of Canon law says sterility. Neither forbids nor invalidates a marriage, however, canon law does treat permanent impotence or an untreatable inability to have sex as an impediment to marriage. I discussed this more at length in an article linked in the description below, but many people find this cruel. Isn’t there more to marriage than sex? They’ll ask. Well, of course. However, there’s more to driving than seeing, and yet if you can’t see, you can’t drive. It’s a lie of our modern age that sex has nothing to do with marriage and that marriage has nothing to do with sex. Sex is for the expression of marital love, which is ordered towards procreation even if the act itself does not achieve the goal of procreation.
This does not mean however, that people who become impotent are no longer married. It just means you cannot get married if it is known before the marriage that it would be impossible for you to consummate the marriage. If this is discovered after the wedding ceremony, the marriage can be declared null and void because there’s no way for you to ever reach the goal of marriage becoming one flesh, and for those who say, what about Mary and St. Joseph? Because of the dogma of Mary’s perpetual virginity, this is a special case. Mary and Joseph were not incapable of becoming one flesh. They instead chose not to consummate their marriage. Their marriage would therefore be a valid dissolvable marriage because the two of them never became one flesh. Mary and Joseph were validly married, but Mary remained the handmaid of the Lord. So sex is for the expression of marital love, the kind of love that is capable of making a living sign of the couple’s love a child.
Of course, people copulate and procreate outside of marriage all the time. These may be physical acts that produce children, but they’re not examples of the specific love from which all children should proceed, and since human beings are made in the image of God, we don’t say human beings reproduce like animals or photocopy machines. Instead, human beings procreate. We partner with God’s creative act that brings a unique human being with an immortal soul into existence, and God is the one who ultimately decides if a child will be the fruit of the marital act. The catechism says a child is not something owed to one, but is a gift. The supreme gift of marriage is a human person. A child may not be considered a piece of property an idea to which an alleged right to a child would lead in this area. Only the child possesses genuine rights, the right to be the fruit of the specific act, of the conjugal love of his parents and the right to be respected as a person from the moment of his conception.
So to summarize, when discussing sexual ethics, we need to explain why certain sexual acts are almost universally considered good and others even those involving consenting adults are considered universally bad, and we need to answer the question, what is sex for? Saying sex isn’t for anything or even saying that it’s for expressing love and emotion. This fails to explain deep-seated views people have about sexuality, but saying sex is for the expression of marital love explains why we can condemn gross promiscuity and the commercialization of sex through things like OnlyFans. It explains why we were repulsed by infidelity, even if it’s disguised as polyamory. It explains why sexual disorders involving consenting adults or inanimate objects that don’t need consent are still grossly disordered. It explains why people refer to sex as making love and making babies. It’s for the kind of love that makes babies, but it is for that love, even if God doesn’t bless you with a baby, the love itself is still valuable and good for society, and so society should reverence it.
That’s why almost every society on earth has the institution of marriage and society should denounce evils against this great good, especially things like fornication, and it should go so far as to outlaw commercial enterprises that pedal the destruction of this good such as online pornography. For more on this subject, I recommend the books Catholic Sexual Ethics by Boyle Lawler and May and One Body, an essay in Christian Sexual Ethics by Alexander Press. And when it comes to Marriage, I recommend Ryan Anderson’s book, truth Overruled. I’d also recommend the book written by myself and coauthor Layla Miller that explains Catholic sexual ethics to young people and not so young people called Made This Way. Thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.