John Corvino

Tag: sex

  • Similar Unions

    First published in “Between the lines” in December of 2004.

    On December 17 my current state of residence (Michigan) will amend its constitution to declare that “the union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose.”

    Same-sex marriage is already against the law in Michigan, so that prohibition is nothing new. What is new is the prohibition of any “similar union for any purpose.”

    But what, exactly, does that mean? Our opponents have long argued that our unions aren’t really “similar” to heterosexual marriage at all. Frankly, I’m tempted to agree with them: ours are much better, thank you very much.

    Still, when I take an unbiased view, I have to acknowledge SOME similarities.

    In themselves, such similarities cannot be “unconstitutional”: the constitution shapes laws and policies, not personal behaviors. Nevertheless, in a spirit of constitutional deference, I have decided to reduce the ways in which my relationship with my partner Mark constitutes a “similar union” to marriage. One can’t be too careful these days, after all.

    So Mark will no longer be getting a card on our anniversary, since anniversary cards treat our relationship as a similar union for some purpose. No more anniversary cakes, either — although those are pretty high in carbs, so we’re probably better off.

    Mark and I live together. Sharing a household is similar to marriage for some purpose — indeed, for many purposes.

    Mark does most of the gardening at our household. When I help him rake leaves, we look a lot like our heterosexual married neighbors (only cuter and better dressed). Similar for some purpose. (I hate raking leaves anyway, so this is probably good.)

    I do most of the cooking in our relationship, and when Mark tries to help, I usually shoo him away from the kitchen. Again, similar to marriage. I’d still like him to clean the dishes, though. Maybe there’s a constitutional loophole.

    Mark does most of the driving when we’re together. (Now you know why my nickname is “Miss Daisy.” It has nothing — absolutely nothing — to do with those ill-advised cutoff shorts I used to wear as a teenager.) I suppose now we’ll take separate cars. Screw the environment — we’ve got to respect the constitution!

    We have health insurance through our respective employers, so that’s not an issue. If one of us were to die, bereavement leave might be a problem, but at thirtysomething I prefer not to think about such things.

    But Mark is the first person I call when something bad happens, like when my grandmother died last month. Mark actually flew home to New York with me and put up with my loud Italian family for four days. By talking Mark’s ear off, feeding him constantly, and embracing him as one of their own, my family was treating our union as similar to marriage. In New York we can get away with it, but in Michigan? No more.

    No more code-phrases at parties. From now on, when I say to Mark, “My, these cocktail franks are DELICIOUS,” it’s going to mean that the cocktail franks are delicious, not “These people bore me to tears; can we please leave — now!”

    (Note to my friends: when we used that phrase at YOUR house, it’s because the cocktail franks were delicious. Really.)

    Those cute address labels with both our names on them? Gone. “For any purpose” means for ANY purpose, postal convenience included. So too with those tacky “His & His” hand towels someone gave us for our first anniversary.

    No more shared expenses, shared chores, shared party-hosting, shared party-attending. No more inviting my parents to visit us for Thanksgiving. No more sending them — or anyone — a card signed “Love, John & Mark.” I repeat: “similar union for any purpose” means what it says. I take the constitution seriously.

    No more renting movies together — or for that matter, renting movies myself, since I can’t work the darn DVD player without Mark. Our “similar union” used to compensate for my technophobia, but no more.

    No more blaming Mark for not being able to read my mind. “Yes, I know I didn’t SAY I wanted to stop for lunch, but you KNOW I get cranky when I get hungry.”

    No more bickering, followed by the silent treatment, then an apology — then silly, delightful affection. That’s all similar to marriage. No more quiet moments when words are unnecessary because, sometimes, it really does seem like we can read each other’s minds.

    No more morning breath, farting under the covers, or asking Mark to help me shave my back hair. WAY too similar to marriage.

    However, I’m guessing we’re going to get to have LOTS more sex. There have got to be some perks to this amendment.

  • Is Homosexuality Harmful — and So What?

    First published June 17, 2004, in Between the Lines

    The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or so it seems as gay-rights opponents, in a desperate last-ditch effort to win their cultural war against homosexuality, trot out arguments that have been discredited for decades.

    Many of these focus on the alleged harms of homosexuality. Having failed to make a convincing moral case, gay-rights opponents often shift to claims of “health risks” — including disease, decreased life expectancy, higher suicide rates, and so on.

    Such scientific-sounding concerns give these opponents a veneer of objectivity. Indeed, their arguments sound almost compassionate at times. Consider the following question posed by Marquette University professor Christopher Wolfe:

    “On the basis of health considerations alone, is it unreasonable to ask if it is better not to be an active homosexual? At the very least, don’t the facts suggest that it is desirable to prevent the formation of a homosexual orientation and to bring people out of it when we can?”

    The correct answer to Wolfe is, “It depends.” For there are three key questions we must first ask:

    (1) Are the allegations of harm accurate?

    This question seems obvious, but it’s crucial. Many of the studies cited by gay-rights opponents are abysmally bad.

    Consider the oft-repeated claim that homosexual males face a dramatic decrease in life expectancy. The claim is rooted in the research of psychologist Paul Cameron, who argues that even apart from AIDS, gay men on average die over thirty years sooner than their straight counterparts.

    How did he reach this startling conclusion? By comparing obituaries in 16 gay publications with those in two mainstream newspapers.

    As Dave Barry says, I am not making this up. Cameron’s methodology is laughable even to those with no formal statistical training. Newspaper obituaries are unscientific. Those that appear in gay publications are far more apt to record the deaths of those lost in their prime than of those who died elderly, especially given the target demographic of such publications. There was no control group (after all, gays have obituaries in mainstream publications too). And so on.

    It should thus come as no surprise that 1983 Cameron was expelled from the American Psychological Association for ethical violations. Yet his work continues to get cited by otherwise respectable researchers like Wolfe.

    But suppose, purely for the sake of argument, we were to grant the allegations of harm cited by gay-rights opponents.

    We would still have to ask a second question:

    (2) Are the alleged harms caused by homosexuality itself, or some external factor?

    In particular, we would have to ask whether many of the alleged harms result from anti-gay sentiment. In that case, there would be a vicious circle: opponents of homosexuality would be basing their opposition on factors caused by that very opposition — a classic case of “blaming the victim.”

    In some cases these external factors are complex. Gays are, to a considerable extent, a wounded people. Many experience ostracism from their own families during formative years, with deep emotional scars resulting.

    To say this is not to say that gay life is miserable or that we should not take responsibility for our own well-being. Rather, it is to remind those who allege various problems in gay life that they may share responsibility for those problems.

    But suppose I’m wrong. Suppose — again for the sake of argument — that the alleged problems result from homosexuality itself, rather than social pressure. There is a third question that must be asked:

    (3) What follows?

    This is the question most people miss. They assume that if a practice is riskier than the alternatives, the practice must be wrong. But that assumption is demonstrably false.

    Driving is riskier than walking. Being a coal miner is riskier than being a newspaper columnist. Football is riskier than chess. Yet no one thinks that the former activity in each example is wrong just because of the risks involved.

    There are too many holes in the argument that links homosexuality with risk and risk with wrongness. Consider how Wolfe’s argument would look if we applied it to football:

    “On the basis of health considerations alone, is it unreasonable to ask if it is better not to be [a football player]? At the very least, don’t the facts suggest that it is desirable to prevent the formation of [an interest in football] and to bring people out of it when we can?”

    After all, there are safer hobbies, like chess!

    Well, sure. But football players don’t want to play chess; they want to play football. The argument reminds me of an old joke:

    Question: What’s the best way to avoid spilling your coffee while driving?
    Answer: Drink tea.

    Gays, like everyone else, can take steps to minimize risks in their lives. They can start by confronting the pseudo-science and invalid inferences of their opponents.

  • The Inclusive Santorum

    First Published at Between the Lines on May 1, 2003

    By now you’ve no doubt heard the flap about Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who, in response to a question about whether homosexual persons should remain celibate, stated that “if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything.”

    The slippery-slope argument linking homosexuality with polygamy has become a familiar rhetorical move in antigay rhetoric. Unfortunately, its use is not limited to those (like Santorum) whose mouths clearly move faster than their minds: there are a number of smart, thoughtful people who believe that the case for one lends support to the case for the other, and not all of these people are anti-gay.

    But Santorum’s version seems to go further than most. And it’s not just because he extends the list from polygamy to incest, adultery, indeed, to “anything.” It’s because the thing that initiates Santorum’s parade of horribles is not “homosexual sex” but simply “consensual sex.” According to Santorum, if the Supreme Court says you have “the right to consensual sex within your home … you have the right to anything.”

    Okay, so not everyone speaks in final draft. Maybe the “you” here refers to “you homosexuals.” Or maybe Santorum thinks no one has a Constitutional right to consensual sex, and thus that laws limiting such activity are all Constitutional (which is not the same as saying that they’re wise or justified).

    Attention to the full text of the interview, as well as to follow-up interviews, suggests that Santorum didn’t really know quite what he was saying, jumbling together some defensible constitutional concerns with radical views on privacy rights and a clear antipathy toward all things gay.

    Santorum went on to argue that polygamy, adultery, sodomy, “all of those things, are antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family.” In his view, the state’s failure to regulate people’s sex lives — even when they are consensual and private — “destroys the basic unit of our society.”

    Santorum is the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, so you might think the president would be a bit concerned about the image he’s creating for the party. And Bush, finally, has weighed in. The “compassionate conservative,” the man who so ardently defends freedom from oppressive religious regimes (but only where oil is involved), has come out in support of Santorum, calling him “an inclusive man.”

    Excuse me?

    And then I thought about it for a while, and realized that the president is right.

    Recall that Santorum claims that right to consensual sodomy entails not just the right to polygamy but indeed, to anything. Anything. Rape. Tax fraud. Mass murder. You name it. That’s pretty damn inclusive.

    Or consider Santorum’s position on gay marriage: “In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.”

    So, according to Santorum, gays’ interest in securing marriage rights for their consensual adult relationships is not merely akin to polygamists’ doing the same. It’s also akin to “man on child” or “man on dog.” That’s pretty damn inclusive too.

    (Although if he were really inclusive, he would have included “dog on man” as well. Why should the man always get to be on top?)

    Santorum’s “man on dog” comment was so surprising, it prompted the reporter to interrupt, “I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was going to talk about ‘man on dog’ with a United States senator; it’s sort of freaking me out.” Santorum’s reply scaled new heights of inclusiveness: “And that’s sort of where we are in today’s world, unfortunately. The idea is that the state doesn’t have rights to limit individuals’ wants and passions. I disagree with that. I think we absolutely have rights because there are consequences to letting people live out whatever wants or passions they desire.”

    So Santorum thinks that the state needs to limit not just harmful behaviors, but “individuals’ wants and passions.” Lest you think this was a verbal slip, he repeated it again in response to the next question: “I’ve been very clear about that. The right to privacy is a right that was created in a law that set forth a (ban on) rights to limit individual passions. And I don’t agree with that.”

    (If this is being clear, I’d hate to see what he’s like when he’s being muddled.) What is clear is that Santorum thinks that your bedroom should be included among the places the state belongs.

    If this is inclusiveness, count me out.

  • Pedophilia in the Priesthood: Are Gays the Problem?

    First Published in “Between the Lines.” March 28, 2002

    FIFTEEN YEARS AGO I was a candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood. One night during a candidate retreat I was alone in a monastery rec room with a youngish priest — let’s call him Fr. Jack — who was attempting to counsel me as I struggled with the difficult decision of whether to enter training that year. Fr. Jack, who seemed genuinely concerned about my emotional state, offered to give me a massage. The proposition was simultaneously strange and appealing, and I nervously accepted. He began with my back and proceeded slowly to cover virtually every inch of my body — except, notably, my genitals and buttocks. Fr. Jack then looked at me in an eager and suggestive manner and asked, “Is there any part of you that is still tense?” Quite uncomfortable at this point, I blurted, “Um, yes — my mind!” and then quickly gathered my shirt (which one of us had removed) and excused myself.

    The current pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church reminded me of this event. I do not mean to suggest that Fr. Jack was a pedophile. The massage, though sexual at some not-very-hidden level, was not tantamount to sex. More to the point, I was about eighteen years old at the time — not a child, and not incapable of granting or withholding consent. But the story involves a number of issues that have been raised, often confusedly, in discussions of the ongoing scandal: priestly sexuality; priestly homosexuality; authority, secrecy, and vulnerability.

    The scandal by now is familiar to anyone paying attention. In brief, there has been a disproportionately high incidence of sexual abuse among Roman Catholic priests, and the Church hierarchy have been going to great lengths to cover it up. These things by themselves would be bad enough, but in fact it’s worse: Not only have the hierarchy covered up the scandal, but they have repeatedly reassigned known pedophiles to posts which put them in contact with children. These reassignments are perhaps the most inexplicable aspect of the scandal. The pedophilia can be explained (to an extent) as a psychological disorder combined with moral weakness. The cover-up can be explained as a misguided attempt at damage-control. (To say that these two things can be explained is not to say that they should be excused — both involve culpable behavior.) But the reassignments are sheer reckless stupidity. The current priest-shortage notwithstanding, there are plenty of posts within the church that do not involve youth ministry. (Next time you’re in Church, consider the ratio of blue hair to baseball caps and you’ll see what I mean.) If these known pedophiles were to be reassigned at all (and that’s a big “if”), why not restrict them to working with older parishioners?

    The Vatican’s response to this and other difficult questions has been — you guessed it — to change the subject and scapegoat gays. In a recent interview Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls contended that most of the sexual abuse cases involved teenage boys, not children, and thus did not really constitute pedophilia. He then inferred that gays must be unfit for the priesthood: “People with [homosexual] inclinations just cannot be ordained,” he concluded, suggesting that ordinations of gay men should perhaps be invalidated.

    Navarro-Valls’ proposal, if implemented, would eliminate about half of the priests in the United States. (As a former candidate who spent a lot of time with priests and seminarians, I can confirm that this oft-repeated estimate is a reasonable one.) But does his argument for the proposal work? Even supposing (what seems likely from the reports) that the majority of the victims have been male, Navarro-Valls’ conclusion doesn’t follow. For the question to ask is not what percentage of sexual abusers are gays, but rather, what percentage of gays are sexual abusers. Consider an analogy: The vast majority of rapists are male. But it does not follow (and it is not true, pace Andrea Dworkin) that the vast majority of males are rapists. Thus, eliminating males from a given population would not be a fair or appropriate way of curtailing rape. Analogously, even if most sexual abusers within the priesthood were gay, it would not follow that most gays within the priesthood were sexual abusers. Eliminating gays from the priesthood would be horribly unjust to the vast majority of gay priests, who are innocent of sexual abuse and as horrified by it as the rest of us.

    Thus, Navarro-Valls’ point about gays is a red herring. It is one thing to be attracted to persons of the same sex; it is quite another to be inclined to abuse persons of the same sex, be they children or otherwise. Conflating these distinctions not only slanders gays, it misdirects our attention away from the real problem, which is sexual abuse. Such scapegoating is a familiar tactic, sadly, and it is morally repugnant — far more so, I would contend, than the clumsy advances of Fr. Jack when I was eighteen.

    Which brings me back to the age issue. Navarro-Valls is correct that in some of the cases, pedophilia is not the real problem. (It is difficult to know the percentages, since the Church has been stubbornly uncooperative in releasing data.) There’s a big difference — legally, psychologically, morally — between sex with an eight-year-old and sex with a seventeen-year-old. Cases of the latter type, which often involve seminarians and seminary candidates, may be an abuse of power and a violation of priestly vows, but they are not pedophilia.

    Eliminating gays from the priesthood would, indeed, eliminate many of these latter cases. But it would also eliminate a good many decent priests, and needlessly so. For the real culprit here is not homosexuality, but rather the Church’s refusal to address the issue of sexuality directly and realistically. Human beings are sexual, and priests are no exception. Celibacy is demanding, and repression and denial are not helpful in mastering it. If the Church is serious about addressing sexual misconduct, it should focus on healthy ways for its priests to manage their sexuality, which does not disappear once they take vows.

    Fr. Jack is a prime example, and my memory of him reminds me of the saying “There but for the grace of God go I.” Had I decided during that retreat to enter religious life, I would have done so as an eighteen-year-old with no sexual or romantic experience to speak of. I would have been thrust into an all-male environment where I would be forbidden not only to have sex but also to masturbate. And sooner or later my sexuality would have asserted itself — doubtlessly in the awkward manner characteristic of the sexually immature. Perhaps I, too, would have eventually found myself attracted to a naive and fresh-faced seminary candidate, and perhaps I too would have behaved like a creep. (For the record, I decided to enter when I was nineteen and then withdrew almost immediately, correctly believing that I needed more “life experience.”) Navarro-Valls’ scapegoating of gays doesn’t solve such problems; it perpetuates them — while ignoring far more serious ones. It is time for the Church to worry less about protecting its image and more about protecting the people it serves.