Fortnight for Freedom, Day 2

An article in the Friday, June 22, Baltimore Sun, "Catholic leaders launch campaign against Obama policies," reports on the Mass celebrated the previous day at Baltimore's Baslica of the Assumption, the oldest cathedral in the United States, by Archbishop William Lori to kick off Fortnight for Freedom. In his homily, Archbishop Lori said President Obama's policies are "morally objectionable":

"On Aug. 1, less than six weeks from now, the Health and Human Services mandate will go into effect. This will force conscientious private employers to violate their consciences by funding and facilitating through their employee health insurance plans reproductive 'services' that are morally objectionable. Religious freedom includes the freedom of individuals to act in accord with their faith but also the freedom of church institutions to act in accord with their teachings and to serve as a buffer between the power of the state and the freedom of the individual conscience."

Fortnight for Freedom is an argument about power.

I have it on good authority that human sexuality, and thus all human sex qua sex, is also an argument about power.

Margaret A. Farley

In her book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, retired professor Margaret A. Farley of the Yale Divinity School, who is also a Catholic nun (Sisters of Mercy), summarizes the scholarship of Michel Foucault in his own series of books on "The History of Sexuality." Foucault holds that you cannot understand human "sex" until you understand how "sexuality" has been construed down through history. Foucault's research shows that the most consistent aspect of "sexuality" in different Western epochs is that, as Farley puts it, "Sexuality is [perennially] a 'transfer point' for relations of power — between women and men, parents and children, teachers and students, clergy and laity, the young and the old, rulers and people ruled."

For humans, that is, there is no "sex" or "sexuality" without power relationships, and sex can never be reduced to a mere instinct or urge, as it can for animals. Instead, it is actually not reproductive urges but power relationships that channel — nay, define — what sex is to us in any given age.

Foucault shows that the nexus of thought among power elites in ancient pagan cultures constructed a sexuality focused on satisfying human desires for "health, beauty, and freedom." Then, Farley writes, in the pre-modern Christian era the seeking of "purity of heart before God" demanded new sexual ethics that amounted in large part to "procedures ... to make us detest the body."

Yet, according to Farley — per Foucault — "religious, political, medical, [and] psychological forces have been at work at various times in the past both in [that form and in the form of] 'ruses ... to make us love sex'."

So in every epoch, including the modern one, power has been exerted by competing elites to sway humanity in the direction of one or the other of these two opposed forces.

In our modern Western world of the last three centuries or so, our incessant "self-examining and self-reporting" have served up for us, courtesy of our power elites, a sexual ethic in which (we now say) we are "repressed" — Foucault urges upon us the question of exactly why we say this — and one in which we "burden ourselves ... with so much guilt for having made sex a sin" — another crucial "why" question for Foucault.

We need not hope to ever get away from our tendency toward fostering bodily detestation or our competing tendency toward a ruse-inspired, hyped up sexual ardor, I would suppose. But my point here is that Fortnight for Freedom is oriented toward reinstating a constricted attitude toward sexuality, á la the first force, while claiming to be upholding religious liberty instead. It is a plea for making "purity of heart before God" once again the watchword: the (supposedly) traditional mantra which (or so says the Church hierarchy) is inconsistent with the (supposedly) purely carnal sex that the widespread use of contraception supposedly must unleash.

It's a double-edged power play by the bishops: First they insist on their own definition of which sexual attitudes and practices foster the requisite "purity of heart before God," and then they insist that any government action that "forces" Catholic institutions and business owners to underwrite contrary attitudes and practices constitutes an assault on religious freedom.

Plenty of Catholics aren't buying it, per the Baltimore Sun article: "According to recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute ... about 57 percent of American Catholics do not feel their religious freedom is being threatened, and 65 percent believe publicly held corporations should be held to the mandates of the Obama administration's health reform law."

Still, as many as a third of Catholics would seem to be, at least to an extent, in sync with the bishops. The bishops would call these the "conscientious" ones. But I'd say that such language itself, as carefully couched rhetoric, constitutes its own attempted use of force.