Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

In preparing for a seminar next week on JPTG’s anthropology, I was reading through Love and Responsibility again. Karol WojtyÅ‚a’s analysis of love brought to mind an op-ed piece I read yesterday from the Seattle Times. The young editorial columnist railed against the “gray” generation (anyone older than Gen-X) for their anti-civil rights bias (i.e. their belief that marriage is between one man and one woman) and pleaded for it to be set aright by his generation. He has one good point. The divorce mentality of the last 40+ years has torn families apart and damaged children and society quite a bit already. Nevertheless, his non-sequitur that this justifies further damaging family and society (though he of course doesn’t see it this way) by extending the definition of marriage to same-sex couples is just one of his many errors.

What caught my attention was the following:

It was significant that the civil-rights law passed largely because of a Gen-X Republican’s vote. Sen. Bill Finkbeiner, R-Kirkland, was quoted from the Senate floor in The Seattle Times as saying, “We don’t choose who we love. The heart chooses who we love. I don’t believe it’s right for us to say … it’s acceptable to discriminate against people because of that. I cannot stand with that argument.”

This mistaken notion that love just happens to us and choice has nothing to do with it, is widespread. It is part of the reason for the epidemic of divorce from which our society now suffers. WojtyÅ‚a shows that authentic love is rather an integration of many things, including sensuality, sentiment, but most especially a gift-of-self actualized by using one’s free will. This Senator, and apparently the author, confuse love for a sexual urge, a physical attraction, emotion, or just about everything else that stands outside of free will. It is no wonder we see so many problems in family and society. When love is reduced to instinct, and there is no acknowledgement that instinct can be disordered, the human difference which makes for authentic love is extinguished and one is left to be controlled and led around by his fallen affectivities and appetites. The freedom to love is lost and is replaced by instinct, which will inevitably be disordered. No wonder so many demand the license to act like animals, they do not see that they are anything more.

It is not that the emotions and such things as the sexual urge are not part of love. They are not the whole of it. When two (or more) people make the mistake that it is, they reduce the other to an object of pleasure or emotional need. The other person, even if he is willing, becomes a utilitarian means rather than an end in themselves. For authentic love, all of these things, sensuality, sentiment, freedom, self-gift, free will, etc. must be integrated in order to serve the good of the person. Wojtyła says:

There can be no question of slurring over or neglecting the ’sexual’ values to which the senses and emotions react. Our concern is simply to bind these values tightly to the value of the person, since love is directed no towards ‘the body’ alone, nor yet towards a ‘human being of the other sex’, but precisely towards a person (Love and Responsibilty, 123).

But like love, for Gen-Xers, apparently what is morally right is also reduced to feelings. If it does not shock you, then it must be o.k.

What the gray-beards must realize is that my generation sees co-workers and friends in same-sex relationships. We watch sitcoms and movies with gay characters. We read novels where lesbians grace the pages. I was shocked by my first compact disc, not my first gay bar.

I suppose it is not surprising that youth thinks it has all the answers to which its parents’ generation is oblivious. It is just a shame that they have not broken the code by the time they make it to the editorial page.