.@sullydish defends @CharlesMBlow frm @roddreher‘s seeming inability to understand reality of human passion/sexuality https://t.co/ASgjpDoYFK

— The Dish (@dishfeed) September 24, 2014

Yes, if by “understanding the reality” you mean “disagreeing on what the data on human passion/sexuality mean.” That’s a tendentious reading of my point, though a common one. Sullivan:

If Blow were heterosexual, I doubt Rod would have said anything about “disordered passion”.

Well, that’s crap. Of course I would have, had I run across a column in which a man wrote things like this about sexual attraction to women:

I would slowly learn to allow myself to follow attraction and curiosity wherever they might lead. I would grant myself latitude to explore the whole of me so that I could find the edges of me.

And:

But that’s not the way it works within me. I wasn’t moving; the … attraction was. Sometimes it withdrew from me almost completely, and at others it lapped up to my knees. I wasn’t making a choice; I was subject to the tide.

I do not question that Blow had these desires, and that those desires were real. What I question is his position that those desires constituted part of the essence of his identity, or at least ought to constitute same. What I question is Blow’s claim that he had no free will in this matter, that his desire was irresistible.

More Sullivan:

We all have unique and complex sexualities – and all Blow did was examine his own past and his own nature and channel both toward a constructive present. It has to be the element of homosexual attraction that provokes Rod’s splutter – as if anyone can simply master by reason who they actually are. We do not have control over that. But those who come to terms with their sexual identity, who face it squarely, are likely to have a much better chance of channeling such passions toward good ends.

It is incredibly depressing how quickly gay rights advocates resort to “you hate me!” (or, in SCOTUS-speak, “irrational animus”) as an all-purpose explanation for why anybody disagrees with them. Sullivan (surprise!) wants to make this a matter of homophobia, but it’s really a question of, What is a person? And: What role does desire have in constituting our personhood?

These are philosophical issues that have been around for a very long time. Human beings desire; that is an undeniable fact. Every society puts limits on those desires. Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith, in his book What Is A Person?, writes:

Persons are also self-governing centers of moral commitment. As I have written at length elsewhere and mentioned above, one ineliminable feature of human personhood is possessing a moral orientation that creates moral differentiations in the world through beliefs and judgments about what are good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust, worthy and unworthy. Crucial to these beliefs and judgments is the fat that they are understood as grounded not in our own desires, decisions, or preferences, but are believed to exist apart from these, providing normative standards by which our desires, decisions, and preferences can themselves be judged. Humans possess the capacity and propensity not only to have desires, beliefs, and feelings, but also the capacity and disposition to make moral evaluations of our desires, beliefs, and feelings, which opens the potential to change them. One cannot be a human person without also being a moral creature. One cannot live as a functioning human agent or sustain a personal or social identity without locating oneself in a moral space. Persons are the particular kind of existent creatures that are self-governing centers of moral perception, evaluation, judgment, and commitment. Persons are not the passive object recipients of the consequences of moral influences, but the active, involved, responsible subject participants of moral thought, order and behavior. Persons and only persons are the subjects and agents of their moral lives.

The thing that separates humans from animals is our ability to reason — and that includes moral reason. I dissent from Blow’s column not in the conclusion he drew (though I would do so, just not here), but the process by which he got there. This is a process that is quite common in our society when it comes to sexual desire. We believe that in most cases, sexual desire justifies itself, and that to resist or to deny those passions is somehow to be inauthentic, to deny one’s own personhood.

Are there any other passions and desires we set aside in this way? Blow may certainly have deliberated in some rational sense before arriving at his conclusion, but he didn’t write about that. He talked about giving himself permission to follow his own curiosity and desire as part of his search for “me.” And he talked about surrendering his reason to his passion. That’s what I’m talking about too.

I agree that people who experience sexual desire should confront it honestly, and that it’s destructive simply to deny the reality of one’s desires. In Blow’s piece, though, he presents himself as being guided not by reason, but by his feelings. He found himself in the room with a man who wanted to have sex with him, and he decided this didn’t feel right — and he left. Still, the thing that determined his actions were his feelings. 

All of us do this at some point, about this or that. I’m guilty of it too. But the narrative Blow presents about his own journey is the Woody Allen defense: the heart wants what it wants.

And: I am what my heart wants.

I disagree, and I think that a lot of folks simply will not confront the fact that what they consider a matter of reason is more a matter of the will. They do what they want to do, and construct ex post facto rationalizations for it. To me, the criticism of my leaving the Catholic Church eight years ago that hit home the most was the claim that I didn’t reason my way out of the Catholic Church, but I wanted to escape it for emotional reasons, and constructed an argument to rationalize what I wanted to do. There was a lot of truth to that. I think the argument I constructed was, and is, true, but I was so overwhelmed by anger, fear, and anxiety at the time that I let go of rationality.

That is not the way life should work, normally. I can understand why people do it, and can forgive it as a concession to human nature. But let’s not claim it as an ideal. In fact, I know that I’m in the minority on this in our post-Christian, emotivist society, but there is reason behind my thinking. How can any non-MTD Christian think otherwise? It is depressing that a Harvard PhD who pledges allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church, which has a very long and deep history of thinking through these issues, can only respond to an interesting and perennial philosophical concern with little more than argumentum ad hominem.

One more thing: Blow didn’t characterize his journey in Christian terms, and I don’t know what his faith is, or if he has religious belief. But I will say that for years I told myself that I couldn’t be sure if Christianity was true or not, because I had Doubts. I eventually recognized that all my “doubts” amounted to an elaborate rationalization for a refusal to accept a religion that wouldn’t let me get laid when I wanted to get laid. It was not a matter of intellection; it was a matter of will. So much modern Christian sexually liberal theologizing is nothing more than the Prosperity Gospel of the Religious Left.

The entire Divine Comedy is an exploration of desire and its role in human affairs. I like Andrew, but on these matters, I trust Dante more. And the Church.

UPDATE: Great comment by Anastasia:

Thanks so much for helping us struggle through this thorny distinction, Rod. As I read it, I kept thinking about Garrison Keillor’s wonderful “Letter from Jim,” which is all about adultery, about a man who comes to understand what it means — not only to himself but also to the world around him — to allow his desire to take the upper hand, to allow his desire to frame his identity. He waiting for his lover to pick him up, ostensibly to attend a conference together in Chicago:

I thought, so this is what adultery is like: simple. I sat down in the front yard under our spruce tree and waited for her to pick me up. I believe that men and women can part for many reasons, including the lack of love and appreciation. I left my parents for my wife because she appreciated me and they didn’t. Twenty years later, I sit in my own front yard, waiting to join a woman who appreciates me more. But in five years, or six, or eight, will I go to a higher bidder? What happens when I’m older and my grade falls? Who do I choose when I’m old and can’t run fast and nobody chooses me?

I sat there in the front yard and thought, so this is what adultery is like: it’s just horse-trading.

As I sat on the lawn, looking down the street, I saw that we all depend on each other. I saw that although I thought my sins could be secret, that they would be no more secret than an earthquake. All these houses and all these families, my infidelity will somehow shake them. It will pollute the drinking water. It will make noxious gasses come out of the ventilators in the elementary school.

When my wife and I scream in senseless anger, blocks away a little girl we do not know spills a bowl of gravy all over a white tablecloth.

If I go to Chicago with this woman who is not my wife, somehow the school patrol will forget to guard an intersection, and someone’s child may be injured. A sixth-grade teacher will think, ‘What the hell?’ and eliminate South America from geography. Our minister will decide, ‘What the hell? I’m not going to give that sermon on the poor.’ Somehow, my adultery will cause the man in the grocery store to say, ‘To hell with the health department, this sausage was good yesterday; it certainly can’t be any worse today.’