The New Chastity

In Color Me Confused ... I opined that we ought to be teaching our kids not just abstinence but good old-fashioned chastity. My commitment to chastity, however, was tempered by my intuition that the old-fashioned rules of sexual morality as set forth in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (which I am a proud member of) overly glorify, idolize, and even fetishize women's unique capacity to conceive and bear children.

That traditional estimation, in turn, paves the way for what has been called a "new Catholic feminism." It seems to be based on the postulate of a "unique dignity and vocation of women." (See my comments on this topic, as brought up in a recent column by George Weigel, in Confronting Theological and Ideological Tensions.)

I am suspicious of this thrust among today's conservative Catholics. I don't want to give up on the "old feminism," which holds that women's dignity and vocation is not radically distinct from men's. And so this idea has just occurred to me: we ought to endorse gay marriage as a way around linking chastity too firmly to the mystique of female reproductive capacity.

When I say "gay marriage," I mean, of course, same-sex unions, whether between two men or two women.

Now, I am not gay, and as my previous post reveals I am not terribly happy about the recent finding of the National Survey of Family Growth that almost 11% of girls 15 to 19 admit to at least one same-sex encounter. But I consider that statistic revealing not so much of an inclination toward being gay as one toward being unchaste.

Gay sex does not necessarily equal unchaste sex ... but it too often does. I'd say the rules of chastity are, or ought to be, the same for gays and lesbians as for heterosexuals. But "no sex outside marriage" can't be the rule for gays if gays can't marry.

If gays and lesbians were allowed to practice chastity within holy wedlock, we could teach our kids a form of chastity that does not turn female childbearing capacity back into a mystique and women accordingly back into slaves to their own reproductive selves. Such a framework for the "new chastity" would put the brakes on rates of unwanted pregnancy and abortion ... just as would the "old chastity" framework, I readily admit. But the "new chastity" would actually be feminism-friendly, and it would open the door to tolerance for gays and lesbians.

I like the sound of that.