Homosexuality and natural law: beyond a medieval construct

In my last column, I faulted the Vatican's recent document on homo sexual persons and their unions, for erecting a prejudiced stereotypical image lacking in reality.

Here, I want to expose the flawed understanding of the natural law that allows officialdom to condemn homosexual acts and unions as unnatural.

Traditional Catholic natural law teaching holds, as St. Thomas Aquinas taught in the 13th century, that there are universally valid ethical principles-couched in general terms such as "Do good and avoid evil," which are accepted by all human beings. But Aquinas recognized that further ethical deductions of a more specific and concrete nature may change due to circumstances of time and place. Their elaboration depends on experience, our own and others.

Following St. Thomas. American ethicist Richard Gula writes: "The modern worldview of contemporary morality does not look on nature as a finished product prescribing God's will and commanding a fixed moral response. Rather, it looks on nature as evolving. For example, the laws and properties of the given world can and do combine with unexpected circumstances to give us something new."

As St. Thomas sums up: "Human nature is not immutable as is the divine nature, and that is why the conditions of the natural law vary with the different states and conditions of humankind" given that "the nature of man is changeable."

Back then to the drawing board on our developing understanding of the law of nature and its dictates.

Biomedical scientist Robert P. Heaney, M.D. of Creighton University. Omaha enriches the current Roman Catholic dialogue by noting that "those who transmit natural law to us often rely on medieval constructions of nature," forgetting that Aquinas held that natures were to De inferred from observable phenomena. Conclusions drawn from such "must always be tentative, always subject to further nuancing and interpretation, to newer syntheses, Our notions of the natures of things have changed because our observations are better. Moral absolutes based ultimately on faulty conceptions of nature are not inherently compelling, only authoritarian.

Observations of the sex lives of the higher social animals, particularly the primates, show us 'a rich variety of genital displays and pseudo-copulatory behaviours that serve not to procreate. but to establish and reinforce social structures and thus to sustain the group." Thus, "these attitudes retain a certain generative character, even if only indirectly. To assert that (they) are somehow flawed for that reason would be so obviously silly as to require no comment. But that is precisely what we do assert about counterpart behaviours when we cross the primate border into human territory."

Professor Heaney draws the obvious biological inference that such activity entails "functional utility" that "might tell us something about the nature of sex in human affairs." He reasons that "of its nature, sexual intercourse serves the enduring committed relationship between partners and that the openness to life inheres in the relationship and not in individual sexual acts. These acts nurture. support, even ritualize that relationship and as such are always procreative."

Today such considerations aid the progress of our dialogue, providing truer insights into the fuller spectrum of human sexual relationships based on a developing science. This creates a sea change from our current official Catholic approach, which Heaney cites as "marked by bad biology." Soberly, he concludes that "while we are more than our biology, we are not less."

Such evolving attempts to discover God's will creates, for us, problems and risks as well as possibilities for the development of doctrine, including moral theology. New and, yes, challenging vistas open up before our eyes. It's only natural.

Father James Roberts writes from Vancouver, B.C.

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