Three Articles on Popular Ideas About Sex

Three useful articles on sexual matters:

First, Lesbians are the Best Parents Ever!! NOT! , by the economist Jennifer Roback Morse, gives “8 reasons why the latest study doesn’t prove anything.” As she summarizes her argument in the Ruth Institute’ s e-mail:

the study that made the headlines in Fox News and MSNBC is small sample of politically interested, statistically unrepresentative, self-identified lesbian mothers reporting on the behavior of their children. The researchers found these mothers via announcements at lesbian events, women’s bookstores and lesbian newspapers in Boston, Washington D.C. and San Francisco, hardly a scientifically representative sample.

And would you be impressed by a report that says, “My precious little darling is doing fine in school,” without ever asking the teacher, or checking the child’s grades? That’s the basis for this survey’s claim that the children of lesbians do better in school than the children of the general population.

And did I mention the sample size? The study surveys 77 mothers of 78 children. You read that correctly: the latest spasm of political correctness was based on 78 children.

The comments are useful because they include some defenders of the study.

Second, more theologically, Dawn Eden has posted her speech on Christopher West’s presentation of John Paul II’s “theology of the body,” presented to the the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception. She is quite critical of West’s ideas (a matter on which I have no opinion, let me say), but among interesting insights ends with this one:

the need for catechists to incorporate into the theology of the body the Church’s teachings on suffering. Pope John Paul II himself said, in his final Wednesday address on the theology of the body, that catechesis on the topic would not be complete without addressing “the problem of suffering and death.”

If catechists do not account for this—if they present a vision of married life that is all about couples’ sharing in Trinitarian communion, without articulating how they also share in Christ’s sufferings on the Cross—then their words will be like those in the parable of the sower, that fall on rocky ground. As Our Lord said, “Those on rocky ground are the ones who, when they hear, receive the word with joy, but they have no root; they believe only for a time and fall away in time of trial.”

She offers free copies of her thesis to those who work for the Church and asks for a donation from everyone else. (The links are on the page.)

And third, one from May, Frank Beckwith’s Interracial Marriage and Same-Sex Marriage . Dealing with the claim that bans on homosexual marriage are equivalent to the now (and finally) bans on interracial marriage, he argues that

The overwhelming consensus among scholars is that the reason for these laws was to enforce racial purity, an idea that begins its cultural ascendancy with the commencement of race-based slavery of Africans in early 17th-century America and eventually receives the imprimatur of “science” when the eugenics movement comes of age in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Loving , for example, the statue overturned, SB 219, The Racial Integrity Act of 1924, was the product of the eugenics movement.   . . .  The Racial Integrity Act and The Eugenical Sterilization Act were of a piece, both legislative accomplishments of the eugenics movement and its goal of racial purity.

Anti-miscegenation laws, therefore, were attempts to eradicate the legal status of real marriages by injecting a condition—sameness of race—that had no precedent in common law. For in the common law, a necessary condition for a legitimate marriage was male-female complementarity, a condition on which race has no bearing.