Faith, Homosexuality and Vocation

If there's one thing evangelical-Christian and Islamic fundamentalists agree on, it is the moral 'depravity' of homosexuality. They agree on this point at least, even if some of their proponents reserve almost the same degree of condemnation for each other as they do for gay sex! If two credos that regard each other as so erroneous can still agree on the gay issue, then either they are both wrong about homosexuality or wrong in their judgements about each other. Either way, this on its own does not inspire confidence that their precepts concerning sexuality are always well grounded in faith terms.

In fact, however, there are many more areas of agreement on morals between strict, conservative Christians and devout Muslims; for instance, on the pivotal importance of the family and the roles of the sexes, with authority being invested in the male head of the household, or indeed of the church or the mosque. One could also mention the importance of regular communal prayer; of Sunday or Friday worship; the sacredness with which the little actions and rituals of daily life, particularly of home and hearth, are endowed; the importance of cleanliness and physical modesty, reflecting the sanctity of the bodily temple housing our immortal soul; and the reverence towards the Holy Book, whether Bible or Qur'an.

These characteristics of the world's two leading faiths are in fact common to all the world's great religions: orthodox Jews, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists all cherish these sacred, ritualistic and religiously prescribed features of daily, family life, and particularly the sanctity of the bond that unites husband and wife. And they all in different ways condemn active homosexuality as a 'sin'.

Perhaps, then, if the religions to which the great majority of humanity to some extent adheres all agree on the essentials of what constitutes a holy life, and all repudiate gay sex, there may be something in it. Either that, or they're all wrong - which is the understandable response of many gay persons. But my point is that maybe what is 'wrong' and 'sinful' about gay sexual activity needs to be seen in relation to the call or vocation to a holy life that all religions are essentially there to articulate and direct. Can a life in which a person asserts and enacts his or her 'right' to an active gay sex life truly be said to be 'holy'?

It seems almost oxymoronic to pose the question in this form. But this is perhaps precisely because the two categories - holiness and active homosexuality - are mutually inconsistent. Christian or Muslim conservatives cannot conceive that a gay sex life could have any place in a life dedicated to seeking God's will and striving to grow in holiness. Conversely, defenders of gay lifestyles and relationships - even religious liberals - never (at least, in my experience) claim that gay sex could be the expression of any sort of religious vocation: that God him- or herself is actually calling two people of the same sex to dedicate their lives to one another and express their mutual love in sexual activity. There may indeed be people and religious communities that celebrate such a view; but this sort of thinking certainly does not form part of the pro-gay mainstream, whether religious or not: gay rights are not advocated in the name of holiness.

Maybe this is how the 'sinfulness' of active homosexuality should be described: that it is inconsistent with a life of wholehearted dedication to seeking the will of God; with our religious vocation to holiness. In other words, an active gay lifestyle could be something that prevents an individual from being fully open and responsive to what God is calling them to: his infinitely loving purpose for that person's life here on earth and throughout eternity. This is because the gay person may be putting what 'I want'- even if that is to express love for someone of the same sex in a physical way - ahead of what God wants. In one sense, it's not the 'wanting' gay sex that is the problem but the structuring of a life around the satisfaction of those wants - rather than around the carrying out of God's will to the best of our ability, as we are able to discern it.

If the absence of any defence of the gay lifestyle in the name of holiness - which is not to say that actively gay people can't be generally good people and even good Christians; just that the gay sex itself is not holy - is an implicit recognition that it is not a holy way of life, why is this so? On one level, paradoxically, I'd argue that this not because of any 'inherent' sinfulness of homosexuality per se; and indeed, the Catholic Church does not teach that it is sinful to have a homosexual orientation and even the desires that flow from it, but merely to indulge in those desires in thought or deed in such a way that they override one's Christian duties. The 'non-holiness' of gay sex is the same as the non-holiness of any sexual activity that takes place without reference to the properly sacred character that sex is intended by God to have within marriage: as an expression, manifestation and acting out of God's undying love and commitment to us human beings through all our weaknesses and faults; a love which also is at the origin of all new created life, and present with us at and beyond the end of our mortal lives - meaning that marriage is an essential, consecrated means, established by God, for us as human beings to participate in his creative and redemptive work.

The sexual act is meant to be sacred, and in marriage that purpose is consecrated: sacred both in the divine love and grace for which it is a chosen vessel and, integral to that, in the new human life that is intended to arise from it. The gay sexual lifestyle can no more partake of this sacredness than can a straight relationship outside of marriage; which is not to say that those extra-marital relationships are not in their own way sacred and carry duties on the part the individuals involved towards each other. But these are not consecrated, sacramental, unions - not, therefore, unions as such: expressive of the very sacred, mystical union of Christ with humanity - through his birth, death and resurrection - which transforms our mortal flesh into a vessel of new life.

Sex, through marriage, is therefore intended by its creator to be part of a consecrated life, just as every part of our life and all our actions, for the devout Christian or Muslim, should be part a constant act of prayer and praise to God. Extra-marital sex, even gay sex, is of course not the only way in which we Christians (I can't really speak for Muslims) constantly fail to fully live out our vocation - but continue to be forgiven, held and revived through the mercy and grace of God. As such, gay sex - if allied to a predominantly caring, faithful and loving life - is not deserving of the special condemnation, indeed vilification, it receives from those whose own lives so often are not exemplary. Indeed, oftentimes, we Christians have much to learn - when it comes to love - from those we tend to despise; whether gays or, indeed, Muslims.

Embryos, Persons and the Mind Of God

“What one always has to bear in mind is that it’s the children that should come first - not chronologically or causally in this instance, of course, but in our thinking about what ultimately is in the mind of God for his children, as ‘our’ children have lived in his mind for all eternity. Does he want our children to be born of a father and a mother, and to grow up in the love of their father and mother? There can be no doubt, from the perspective of Christian faith, that the answer to this question is ‘yes’”.

The above is a quote from a post of mine on another blog. There it inspired a couple of comments, one of which was to the effect that if it was in God’s mind to bring children into this world through the loving union of a father and mother, wouldn’t he just do this? My reply - paraphrasing myself - was essentially ‘no’: it might be God’s will that this should happen, but our sin impedes and distorts God’s will, and must therefore be allowed to damage creation (if our freedom to choose evil as well as good is to be genuine); and that God could not arbitrarily alter the laws of biology he had made to reflect and express his loving purpose in creation simply to prevent us from abusing those laws to create and destroy human life without regard to the moral law.

This got me thinking about how we live in the mind of God, both during our temporal existence as living and breathing human beings, and in His eternity (which we view from our time-bound perspective as ‘before’ and ‘after’ our mortal lives). And how does that relate to our human personhood, and the ethics of human reproduction and embryo research?

My point is this: from the perspective of faith, human life by definition is always personal in the sense that it is an embodiment - a bodily image or reproduction - of the personhood of God himself: Father, Son and the love of the Spirit that unites them and gives rise to the whole of creation as the expression and reflection of the divine love and self-understanding (the Word). In this light, insofar as any actual human life form comes into existence, it necessarily has this essential personal character - as part of its DNA, one might say. This is the case from the moment of conception: the human person that has lived in the mind of God for all eternity now also lives in a time-bound, physical form. The Concept (the Word) has manifested itself in a material body: conception; the Word becomes flesh; a human being is made in God’s image. That human personhood is therefore as complete in a single fertilised ovum or a collection of undifferentiated embryonic stem cells as it is in a newborn baby or mature adult: alive, and able to survive and prosper outside the womb.

When I say that this intrinsic personhood of human life is built into our ‘DNA’, this is also a reference to the fact that, with respect to our genetic inheritance, we are all the expression and product of the union of our biological father and mother, even if the loving moral and spiritual union of our father and mother that God wills for us was absent from the specific biological process of our conception. God loves us into being even when love is absent from the human reproductive processes involved.

Those who attempt to morally justify embryonic stem-cell research seek to do so by denying that undifferentiated embryonic cells do constitute a ‘human person’ or ‘human being’ that might have rights similar to those of born human beings or even foetuses, such as the right to life; the right not to have medical experiments conducted on one’s body / person against one’s will; or the right not to have one’s fundamental genetic structure manipulated and combined with that of other species. It is doubtless scientifically and descriptively true - looking at the question from a materialist perspective - that a collection of undifferentiated embryonic cells does not (yet) have the characteristics that one tends to think of as defining personhood: the beginning of the formation of a recognisably human body, with all the immensely complex variety of cell and tissue types, and bodily organs.

But firstly, the religious - or certainly, the Catholic Christian - moral objection to stem-cell research is not based on such a definition of personhood: the bodily characteristics that appear to denote our status as human beings and persons are in a sense only the ‘outer’ material form of our personhood that in essence lives and exists in God. Once those cells exist, a human person that lives in the mind of God has begun to unfold in time and space, and to reveal and be a small but integral part of God’s loving creative and redemptive purpose.

Secondly, from a purely logical perspective, it is quite arbitrary to declare that after, say, 14 days from conception, what had previously been regarded as a mere collection of undifferentiated cells is now to be regarded as an embryonic human person with rights that it did not have during the first two weeks of its existence. The embryonic person would not exist now had it not gone through 14, or however many, days of undifferentiated-cell existence. This is a continuous process; and to declare that in the later stages of its development, the embryo has a humanity or personhood (humanity defined as personhood) that it did not have in the necessary earlier stages that went before seems completely illogical and self-serving; and it flies in the face of our intuitive perception of when our lives as human persons begin: from the moment of conception when the DNA structures that define who we are started to be laid down.
Besides which, the time limit from which embryos and foetuses are recognised as human beings or persons with legal and human rights is arbitrarily moveable depending on the purpose that is being justified: 14 days in UK legislation with respect to regulating stem-cell research, but 24 weeks when it comes to the legal limit for abortions. When does an unborn human person become a full human being and, as it were, a citizen with full legal rights? It appears to be the case that what defines the threshold for an embryo or foetus to be recognised in law as a human person in this way is merely the point at which they become physically (visually) recognisable as viable, autonomous human entities from the particular perspective that is invoked: that of the medical researcher who recognises that, beyond a certain point, he is extracting cells not from an amorphous, undifferentiated mass but from an actual living embryo that is starting to take on the visual, albeit microscopic, form of a human body and person; or the perspective of medical practice and childbirth, where the 24-week abortion limit was based on the latest stage at which a foetus could not survive if plucked untimely from the womb - a time limit which, for that very reason, is being revised in the current UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, as medical advances have made it possible for foetuses to survive from an earlier age.

This really is a rather primitive and, indeed, material, irrational and superstitious way to decide when an unborn human entity becomes a human person: simply when it corresponds to our bodily image of a human being - paradoxically defining the humanness of unborn life purely in relation to the appearances and conditions for survival of born life. The unborn clearly don’t stand a chance if the odds are so heavily weighted against them. In reality, the vision of faith and the science in this matter fundamentally concur; at least when the science is logically understood as describing a process whereby recognisable bodily-human personhood (what we think of as our existence and personhood) necessarily begins in the undifferentiated (’unrecognisably’ human) embryonic stem-cell state. If we are living human beings and persons now, that is because what we are now was already laid down and was potential within what we were from the moment of our conception - and, in the light of faith, within the eternal mind of God.

This is why, for me, it is so revealing that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, which has provoked such heated debate in the UK during the last week owing to prime minister Gordon Brown’s initial refusal to allow his Labour Party MPs a free vote on its morally controversial aspects, should sanction such diverse measures as the creation of hybrid human-animal embryos for the purposes of stem-cell research, and the removal of a legal reference to the ‘need for a father’ on the part of children born to Lesbian couples through IVF or other assisted-conception treatment. This latter provision extends to the very birth certificate of such children, in which it will now be possible for both women to be registered as the real (biological) parents, even if neither of them actually are the genetic parents (for instance, if a fertilised egg from another couple is used as opposed to IVF using the eggs of one of the women). This means that such children are officially without a father. They retain their existing legal right to try and trace their genetic father as soon as they reach the age of maturity (18 in the UK); but they will never be allowed to officially recognise that person as their true father - in the eyes of the law, he becomes a ‘mere’ sperm donor and no more.

The thread that these two measures in the Bill have in common is that they involve a denial of those two aspects of unborn human life that are fundamental from its very beginning: that it is personal and a product of the union of a man and a woman, in the sense that, from conception, the human entity is an individuated, unique and living combination of the DNA of its parents - DNA which in turn defines their personhood. And from the faith perspective, the unborn human being is also of course sacred: a living human person ultimately made by God in his image, which we are therefore commanded to respect and protect. And such is, not just the vocation of the believer, but the true calling of science: not so much to determine the ‘mind of God’ through empirical and theoretical enquiry into the material world that is in God but is not God; but to seek ways to cure the ills of our mortal existence that do not violate the purity and beauty of human life that is called in Christ to share God’s mind and love for all eternity.

Love of God or Love of Self: Homosexuality, Christian Ethics and Social Mores

They had Graeme Le Saux, the former England international footballer, on BBC Radio Four's Today programme on Tuesday of this week. He was talking about how, as a player, he was the object of innumerable insults and taunting for supposedly being gay, which he claims not to be. In 2002, I was present at a Spurs vs. Chelsea match where the Spurs home supporters did indeed mercilessly mock Le Saux for his gayness. I should add that this didn't prevent him from, as they say, playing a blinder and scoring the final goal in Spurs' 4-0 defeat – much to my chagrin at the time!

On the Today programme, Le Saux – who was promoting his autobiography – made the point that it is somewhat ridiculous and out-of-date that there should be such hostility and prejudice towards gays in the footballing world given that there is now so much openness and acceptance of homosexuality in all walks of life. On one level, this is of course true: dressing-room insinuations about a player colleague's sexuality smack of immature schoolboy humour, and there is clearly safety in a crowd in singing homophobic anthems from the stands.

On the other hand, football is one of the few heterosexual male-only preserves in our culture, and many of the men who play or watch the game would like to keep it that way. If they join in the gay-baiting, they are obviously in the wrong; but are they entirely wrong in feeling the way they do? It is the most natural thing in the world, or at least in human cultures, for men to seek heterosexual male-only activities as the occasion for so-called male bonding. In a culture in which women have increasingly – and justly so – asserted their rights to participate and compete in areas of society that were previously a male preserve, many ordinary straight men – not people one would think of as being reactionary or homophobic – feel inhibited from seeking and enjoying safe outlets for a bit of 'harmless' macho aggression, such as football.

But we're talking about attitudes to gay men here, not women. Well, yes and no. The point is football serves the purposes of straight male bonding: providing an outlet for men not just to display aggression but also affection for each other that is not tinged by other sorts of feelings. In English society, men are particularly inept at expressing their feelings of friendship for one another; so this typically needs to be enabled by a context that both draws men together in a common cause and allows them to behave in a way that demonstrates to their companions that they are masculine and straight – for example (but not necessarily) by making lewd remarks about women and derogatory remarks about gays. Clearly, gays are not welcome in such a 'club' of like-minded, red-blooded males. And if a member of the opposite club (i.e. the other team) can be insulted for their inadequacies as a man and put off their game by being slagged off as gay, then all the better. So while instances of homophobic chanting such as that directed towards Graeme Le Saux in the game I watched are clearly unacceptable and distressing, they could also be described simply as a group of men venting a bit of non-physically violent aggression and finding any excuse to jeer at their tribal rivals.

Hence, football provides for many men the opportunity to celebrate masculine prowess and enjoy male friendships in a way that poses no threat to their sexual orientation or gender identity. The growing involvement of women in the game probably adds to the feelings of anxiety that this male preserve is being encroached upon; it's just that gays, in traditional male society, are a more acceptable object of derision than women. Football is one example of more general anxieties felt by men to a varying degree, whereby the growing equality of women with men is perceived as leading to an increasing masculinisation of women (becoming physically stronger, socially more powerful and sexually more assertive) and a corresponding feminisation of men: encouraged to get more in touch with their feelings – traditionally thought of as a weakness; increasingly displaced by women from positions of power, e.g. in business, the family and the Church; and finding themselves presented as the (often inadequate, derided) object of feminine desire – or of gay desire.

This general cultural context provides a backdrop for understanding last week's expulsion of the middle-aged comedian Jim Davidson from the ITV reality-TV show Hells Kitchen. This was brought about by him asking the gay contestant Brian why 'shirt lifters' such as him always put on a particular camp facial expression. Brian took umbrage at the supposed homophobia of Davidson's words; and the comedian appeared to only add insult to injury when he later attempted to apologise by saying he understood where Brian was coming from and that he knew that GAY stood for 'as good as you'. Judging from the reactions of Brian and other contestants, this was clearly perceived as constituting another slur on gay people: either because it imputed to them an aggressive over-assertion of their rights (as Adele, the chief defender of Brian said, the correct phrase should be 'equal to you'); or because it was interpreted as being a sarcasm. Davidson was promptly asked to leave the show by its producers, as they couldn't risk the situation getting out of hand and generating a barrage of viewer complaints and regulatory criticism such as those which resulted from the so-called Shilpa Shetty racism row in Celebrity Big Brother earlier in the year (see my post of 23 February, The Amoral Market and the Randomness of Reward).

But were Davidson's remarks homophobic? I didn't think so. They were in keeping with Jim Davidson's comic style, characterised by humour appealing to the traditional male heterosexual audience: lots of jokes about gays and women. But Davidson is clearly used to getting as good as he gives; and in his circle, which indeed includes lots of gay performers, he would expect a remark such as his to be reciprocated with an equally cutting, sarcastic response – for instance, turning around the phrase 'shirt lifter' into a derogatory remark about middle-aged 'skirt lifters'. Instead, Brian just went into a wounded sulk, and some of the younger participants who thought Davidson had been completely out of order clearly did not understand or appreciate the humorous intent behind his comments. The point was that Davidson had overstepped the mark of acceptability. The goalposts have moved since Davidson was in his prime in the 1980s. Now, anything that implies hostility towards the inclusion and advancement of gays and women in roles traditionally reserved for straight men (such as the very masculine professional chef in Hells Kitchen, Marco Pierre White; or indeed, the stand-up comedian) is strictly taboo. Never mind that Brian, according to Davidson, had made a catalogue of unrepeatable remarks to him (not broadcast). Brian is a performer and comedian – his comedy and sexual insinuations are acceptable; Davidson's macho heterosexual humour is not.

The question about precisely where the boundaries of acceptability lie in relation to homosexuality is a really crucial one, for society and the Church. Leaving aside the related issue of how acceptable are ostensibly harmless, playful manifestations of macho behaviour and attitudes in general, there is a serious question about the extent to which 'public opinion' is now prepared to tolerate expressions of criticism, opposition or unease in relation to active homosexuality. For instance, is the taunting of supposed gays by football crowds really as bad as racist chants and obscenities, as Graeme Le Saux claimed? Liberal opinion would doubtless say that it is; but there is a difference between trying to wind up a player from the opposing team by mocking them as gay – when most people probably realise this isn't in fact true – and deriding someone for their ethnicity, which is an inescapable fact. The former is more an expression of aggressive support for the team, allied to ridicule of something that challenges heterosexual maleness; the latter is primarily an expression of real hatred.

An example of the shifting boundaries of acceptability in this area that is more far-reaching in its implications is the issue of adoption by gay couples, which has been the subject of several posts in this blog (see, for example, my post of 11 September). One of the conclusions that can be drawn from the whole stand off between the Church and the political establishment on this question towards the start of this year is that it demonstrates that it has become increasingly unacceptable in secular society to treat gay and lesbian people in any way differently from straight persons based on a moral condemnation of the gay lifestyle. If the decisions of our legislators do in fact reflect the general consensus of opinion, the eventual passing of the Equality Act without any special exemption for Christian adoption agencies could be taken as showing that the Church's moral beliefs about homosexuality are no longer shared by – indeed, are unacceptable to – the majority.

Another way to put this is that the civic and judicial principles of equality and human rights have encroached on another piece of the Church's traditional terrain: what the Church, along with the majority of society, has previously condemned as morally wrong is now declared as a human right; and gay sexual relationships (and by extension, the suitability of gay couples to become adoptive parents) are considered in effect to be morally equal to straight relationships, whether formalised in marriage or not.

It's worth observing at this point that this 'moral equality' corresponds more to an idea that gay relationships are equivalent to / 'equally as valid' as (no less but equally no more valid as) straight ones than to an idea that they represent an intrinsic, positive moral good – in the way that heterosexual marriage and traditional family life are generally accepted as being good in themselves. And this is because human rights are not the same as the moral right: they are morally neutral and content-less, essentially because what they constitute is freedoms; and freedom in itself is not a moral value but is rather the condition for making truly moral choices. For example, most people would accept the proposition that citizens of a free country should have the right to commit adultery, and many regard it as a woman's right to abort unwanted foetuses; but probably most people would regard both actions as not morally right – or at least, certainly not positively good. Similarly, while the majority may accept that it should be gay couples' right to adopt children, I doubt whether the majority believes this is better for most children than adoption by a father and mother – although it may in fact be better for some. Equally, it probably still is the majority view that homosexuality is not really 'normal' or 'natural' in quite the same way as heterosexuality – however these terms are defined – and, for this reason, gay relationships are not quite as 'wholesome', beautiful or conducive to true happiness as straight ones. But, partly out of sympathy for persons 'afflicted' in this way – and who therefore, it is thought, won't be able to have children – and partly out of guilt for society's past treatment of homosexuals, it is no longer acceptable to assimilate this sort of evaluation of homosexuality with any kind of moral judgement that it is 'wrong' or 'not as good as' heterosexuality. Or indeed the opposite of this: that homosexuality is as good as or better than heterosexuality. Any kind of valuation along the scale from good to evil is viewed as unacceptable; and an amoral equality suspends and takes the place of moral judgement. As Adele in Hells Kitchen put it, gay people are equal to straight, not as good as you, in Jim Davidson's words. From a traditional judgement that homosexuality is wrong, we've moved to a judgement that to make that moral judgement itself is wrong. But let's not dwell on the irony that it's the denizens of hell's kitchen who are the advocates of that view!

But do people really think that the traditional moral condemnation of homosexuality is wrong; or is it rather the case that it's just viewed as inappropriate to express it verbally and in one's actions? Jim Davidson's 'sin', as it were, was his perceived verbal violence towards Brian, viewed as a form of bullying and intimidation: he wasn't wrong to hold whatever views he does hold about gays; but he should have just kept them to himself. How can this be unpacked? Liberty and moral equality means that anyone is entitled to believe whatever they like and define their own morality. So, to be consistent, Davidson couldn't be condemned for his beliefs but only for the actions that flowed from them. These were seen as expressing an aggression directed against Brian's right to compete in Hells Kitchen and a slur on his personal morality.

These two ideas converge in the concepts of intrinsic human dignity and value. Because the secular-liberal ideas of rights and liberty are morally neutral, the concept that is used to transform them into positive moral values in their own right is that of the fundamental dignity and goodness of the human person. By making the universal dignity of the human person the place and source of moral goodness and value, this makes it impossible to make categorical moral judgements about a person based on their actual behaviour and desires. Whatever these may be, it is thought, they cannot impair the fundamental goodness of that person as a human being. That's why the liberal can morally condemn a person, rather than an action, only by labelling them as inhuman; and why psychopathic despots such as the Nazis can justify attempting to kill off whole races only by making them out to be sub-human.

The point of this is that any moral judgement, real or imagined, of someone that is associated with a characteristic viewed as defining them as a human being (e.g. homosexuality) is taken by the liberal – insofar as it is a moral judgement – as an attack on the dignity of that person, not a criticism of the morality of their behaviour or desires. Making jokes about 'gay shirt lifters' is an attack on them for being gay not a wry observation about their shirt lifting, which may contain a germ of truth. And the more that gay persons – and justly so – take a stand on their common humanity and equality, the more it becomes impossible to morally criticise any of their actions without appearing to condemn them as persons.

This presents a problem for the Church, which has always made a distinction between condemning the sin but not the sinner: it's not wrong for a person to be gay, but it is wrong for them to indulge in and act upon their desires. While there is a valid logical and ethical distinction between judging a person and judging their actions, in practice, it is often hard to tell them apart. The Church greatly contributes to society's perception that it condemns gay people for being gay rather than for their behaviour through the logic and tone of the language it uses to set out its position and teaching. Let's take the case of the opposition of some in the US Episcopalian Church to that Church's ordination / consecration of openly gay priests / bishops and the blessing of gay unions, chronicled in an interesting article this week in the Wall Street Journal. The terms in which the condemnation of such priests and unions is often expressed both logically and implicitly involve judging the person as well as their actions. The bone of contention is not just that some of the priests involved are in gay sexual relationships but that they are 'openly gay'. But, of course, you can be openly gay without being sexually active. The controversial gay bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, claimed that his gay partnership was 'celibate' / non-sexually active. It is as if the Church really is perpetrating what liberal defenders of gay rights and the likes of Brian perceive to be the case: that their moral criticism of behaviour implies impugning the dignity and goodness of the person as gay.

This impression is certainly supported by the lurid tone and imagery that's often used. The above Wall Street Journal article refers to the belief in the Ugandan Church, where dissident Episcopalian clergy have been consecrated as bishops, that homosexual acts are Satanic. By inference, one cannot imagine they would have too understanding a reaction to anyone, ordained or not, who came out as gay, even if they were committed to leading a celibate life. Do the conservative Episcopalians really wish to align themselves with such opinions? But they are not that far removed from the language and attitudes of conservative Christians of all denominations, and not just in the USA, some of whom draw support from the Old Testament teaching (as quoted by the Wall Street Journal article), “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination”.

Such views about homosexuality, active or not, are simply not shared by most people in Western societies and, arguably, by most Christians in those societies, too. Would any reasonable person not in fact think that using this sort of language implies a repudiation of homosexuality per se as well as an objection to homosexual behaviour, especially as many churches clearly don't bother too much to make this ethical distinction in the first place? If you regard gay sex as Satanic, then an openly gay person must logically be seen as being under the influence of Satan; which can then lead to the attempts made by some churches to 'exorcise' or 'heal' gay persons of their homosexuality. And it is also an obvious observation that even rational ethical teaching critical towards homosexuality can provide a 'safe' outlet for expressing a characteristically heterosexual repugnance towards the idea of gay sex acts, which strictly speaking has nothing to do with ethics. The fact, for instance, that you personally might find the idea of gay anal sex abhorrent doesn't of itself validate your belief that it is morally wrong; but the belief that it is morally wrong can provide an apparently reasonable justification for expressing homophobic feelings about it.

Even the more rational and tradition-heavy language used by the Catholic Church in its teaching about homosexuality presents huge difficulties in terms of bolstering the liberal view that the Church is simply stuck in the Dark Ages in its thinking in this area. For example, the use of the term 'unnatural' to describe gay sex is extremely difficult to explain or justify to non-believers. In two major respects, this classification is viewed by serious secular opinion as being completely inappropriate to describe homosexuality. Firstly, according to the empirical-scientific understanding of nature, homosexuality is a completely natural phenomenon: a universal characteristic of human societies and psycho-sexuality throughout the ages, for which many possible explanations have been brought forward by both the natural and human sciences. Secondly, from a philosophical point of view, the term 'natural' is regarded as highly problematic and relative. What any given society regards as natural is viewed as being determined to a very large extent – but not necessarily exclusively – by contingent cultural factors: it used to be thought unnatural for women to want to pursue careers, but now it's not; similarly, it used to be thought in Western societies that homosexuality was unnatural, but now it's largely not.

But when the Church uses the concepts of natural / unnatural, it's using them in a different sense from these secular understandings of the terms. The Church is of course referring to the concept of the divine Order of creation, lost through sin, and restored in Christ. Homosexuality, in this context, is considered unnatural because it goes against the purpose for which sexuality was made: to be the means through which human beings are called to share in God's creation of new life, making the union of husband and wife an objective, real union with and in Christ. And this is not, as is often thought, merely about procreation. God's work of bringing new life into being that married persons are called to share relates to the entirety of the cycle of creation and redemption in Christ: not just bringing a new human being into this world and into the life of the sin-bound flesh; but helping to bring them into the new and everlasting life of the Spirit, into which this life is but a slow and painful process of being born.

Sexuality is therefore intrinsically linked to our Christian vocation: to a calling to be led by God into a life of holiness and of the Spirit that ultimately transcends the needs, desires and values of a merely material world. The Order of nature from which homosexual behaviour is said to fall short – to be 'disordered' – therefore refers not primarily to the empirical nature of the scientists or the culturally specific world of the socio-anthropologists, but to a creation restored to union with God in Christ, of which this present, secular world is but a patchy blueprint.

Without a clear presentation of this metaphysical context for Christian beliefs about the role and place of sexuality, the teaching on homosexuality cannot fail to appear to be merely a form of outdated prejudice flying in the face of objectively observable fact. Simply discussing the issues using terms such as unnatural and disordered – because they are regarded as just not epistemologically accurate – then appears intellectually uncritical and homophobic. The Church must find contemporary language to put across its precious spiritual inheritance: not by changing the traditional teaching but translating and presenting it in clearer, more modern terms.

For starters, the Church has to overcome the impression that its teaching is that heterosexuality in general (however it is expressed) is of itself natural / good, and homosexuality (whether actively expressed or not) is always unnatural / evil. According to my understanding, at least, of Church doctrine on the order of nature as creation, the opposition is really between sex within marriage [good, holy] and (gay or straight) extra-marital sex [sinful, unholy], not between heterosexual and homosexual sex. Extra-marital heterosexual sex is to be considered unnatural and disordered, in a similar manner to homosexual sex, because it is a case of the couple using sex for their own gratification and purposes (which could even include having children) in a manner that is closed off from the life in Christ of which their loving sexual union is intended by God to be seal and symbol: a bringing together of the dual creative and redemptive work of Christ – creation of a new human being in the flesh and a commitment on the part of the couple to share in Christ's loving work of redemption and spiritual rebirth in that child.

According to this view, becoming involved in a sexual relationship (gay or straight) outside of the divine purpose for which sex was created necessarily leads to a person being drawn away from their vocation to a life of holiness and dedication to the loving service of God. For unmarried persons – some straight persons and, by definition, all gay persons – this vocation can therefore be lived out fully only in a celibate life. But, by the same logic, most people haven't attained true holiness yet and, therefore, many cannot sustain celibacy; and, indeed, it is unsustainable without dedication to a life of holiness and spiritual conversion. Therefore, we should be very wary about appearing to condemn sexually active gay individuals – whether avowedly Christian or not – unless we are prepared to condemn ourselves for our own misdemeanours, including the all-too frequent deviations from sexual holiness (chastity) on the part of married or unmarried straight persons: lusting after persons other than one's spouse; indulging in conjugal sex that is not open to the creative-redemptive purpose God intends for it; infidelities and one-night stands; etc. Judge not lest ye be judged.

Therefore, the Church has to find a language to put across the context of the call to holiness and to a new life in Christ and in the Spirit that is the foundation of its teaching about homosexuality. It's not wrong to be gay; but acting upon, and building one's life around, the desires that being gay induces can lead one away from knowing and loving God – from the meaning of life itself and the core of one's very being. Perhaps, in pastoral work and teaching, as well as referring to gay sex in the formal, doctrinal sense as unnatural and disordered, we could use terms such as 'alienated / alienating' (from one's true vocation); 'non-holy' (orientated towards material and temporal priorities, rather than eternal, spiritual ones); and 'non-vocational' (a gay life that ignores the traditional teaching about our Christian calling, rather than one which tries – albeit imperfectly – to conform itself to that teaching).

Moral objections to active homosexuality, if expressed in these or similar terms, and with reference to the full context of Christian belief, could begin to be understood as what they properly are: not an attack on but rather a defence of the person – a call for each of us to relinquish our self-love and, in so doing, embrace the love of God.

Gay Adoption and the Catholic Church: A Re-assessment

9 September 2007

A fitting day, indeed, in which to reconsider this topic: Our Lady's birthday, according to the traditional calendar of the Church. I don't mean this in any sacrilegious sense: I'm a Catholic believer myself and have a devotion to Our Lady. As the spiritual mother of all humanity – so the Church teaches – the Blessed Virgin stands as a sign of the love and compassion we owe to all children, whether the fruit of our loins or not.

There's been a strange silence these past few months on the issue of the potential closure of the UK's Catholic adoption agencies, unwilling or unable to accept the terms of the 2006 Equality Act that might oblige them to take on gay and lesbian prospective adoptive parents. The public debate over, and the Act passed into law, everything has been covered with a veil of discretion as delicate discussions are doubtless held internally within the Church, and between the Church and government.

I myself wrote a number of posts on the subject in this blog earlier this year, culminating in two rather agonising, heartfelt pieces in March. The second of these pieces chronologically (dated 29 March) contained a rather intricate argument to the effect that the Church's position rests on a belief that sexually active gay persons do not have a 'right to become parents'. This conviction, according to my argument, was in turn based on the view that such persons' wish to become parents was invested in their 'unnatural' and non-life-giving sexual behaviour and, for that reason, was also unnatural and corrupted (indeed, corrupting) at root.

I contrasted this view with one whereby gay persons' sexual activity could be seen, to some extent, as not expressing their reproductive instinct and wish to have children; and that, accordingly, that instinct and that wish could be considered to be natural – indeed, God-given and inspired by the Holy Spirit – as opposed to their 'unnatural' sexual feelings and behaviour. Gay persons – not in general, but particular individuals or couples – could in this way potentially even be thought to have a vocation to adopt needy children: sharing in the work of Mother Church in giving life to her children through the love and power of the Spirit.

Several months further down the road, I'm beginning to think I might have got things slightly mixed up: not the overall thrust of the argument, but the understanding of the relationship between homosexuality and the reproductive instinct, and of the Church's position on that. I think now that the Church's teaching is actually closer to how I described these matters from my own perspective at that time: that in gay sex, the sexual feelings and activity become somehow dissociated, closed off, from the reproductive drive and the wish to create new life; and that therefore, sexual gratification becomes, for the individuals concerned, an aim in itself, separated from the procreative purpose which sexual activity is intended by God to fulfil.

Meanwhile, my own position has flipped over to one that's closer to how I described the basis for the Church's beliefs: that actually, all sexual desire and activity – including the 'gay' variety – does in fact express the individual's reproductive instinct and wish to become a parent, even if these drives are hidden in the innermost depths of their heart. However, far from this then vitiating gay persons' urge to procreate – even though expressed homosexually – this presents a basis for saying that everyone, gay persons included, has a natural and God-given predisposition to parenthood. This is part of our core, common humanity; part of our true nature as creatures made in the image of God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit: parent, child, and giver and receiver of love and life.

Objectors might ask how it is possible for gay desire and sexual activity to be manifestations of a natural urge to reproduce, when they are clearly incompatible with such an aim. But from an impulse or an action being incompatible with its alleged underlying cause or stimulus, one does not have to infer a different, 'real' motivation (e.g. that gay sex represents, indeed in part springs from, a deliberate rejection of reproductivity). What we do in life is so often inappropriate or counter-productive in relation to what we set out to achieve, particularly so in the field of the human heart and relationships. The fact that gay sex cannot result in children being conceived does not mean that a wish for children is not part of the tangled causality of gay desire – as, indeed, the serried ranks of potential gay adopters and gay couples seeking means of assisted conception would appear to testify.

One important distinction, however, is that for gay persons, it could be argued that this natural, human wish to be a parent cannot automatically be squared with a vocation to parenthood. Not natural parenthood resulting from an act of heterosexual intercourse, that is. Or can it?

As I argued in my post of 29 March, the creation of new human life from a 'natural' act of heterosexual intercourse does not of itself indicate that the parents had a vocation to be the child's parents in the sense in which this term is often understood. E.g. the sexual act could have been entirely a one-off episode, with neither of the parents having the remote intention either to marry or become the progenitors of a new life; or one or both of the parents could already be married to someone else. In other words, the mere fact of a child being born as a result of a natural (heterosexual) sex act does not prove that it was right for the child to be conceived at all, according to the Church's moral law.

A contrary case could be the not uncommon situation whereby persons who are on balance probably more gay than straight enter into a marriage, partly because they want to try to be straight (sometimes out of religious conviction on top of the psychological motivation), and partly also to satisfy their 'natural' urge to become parents. Then, after a period of time, and perhaps not until the children have grown up, the 'gay' partner can no longer maintain the suppression or denial of their homosexuality, and comes out – often, but not in fact always, resulting in the destruction of the marriage. (Noted example, the gay Anglican Bishop of New Hampshire.) Can one assert with absolute confidence that the original motivation was so defective that the marriage should be annulled? However, if you do not think this should happen, this could be an instance of a gay person actually having had and responded to a vocation to be a natural parent: a biological parent, whose parenthood results from natural 'straight' sex.

OK, you could argue that, at the time when the sexual acts in question took place, the 'gay' spouse either felt or believed themselves to be straight; or at the very least, they loved their spouse and wanted to be a good wife or husband, and a good mother or father. But that's really making a judgement about a person's true inner motivation and feelings that no human being is in a position to make. What if, in reality, that person knew that what they were doing was fake but still wanted it out of compassion for their spouse and a genuine, natural longing to be a parent? Does that mean their vocation to marriage and parenthood was also a sham?

From the above two examples, I would conclude that neither the presence of 'natural' heterosexual desire within the sex act resulting in conception nor its absence necessarily validates or invalidates the proposition that the persons involved had a vocation to produce that child – when one looks at the issue of vocation in a traditional, legalistic way. But it is possible and necessary to look at it another way: that the vocation is demonstrated by the very existence of the child, called into being by God as the child of both parents – necessarily requiring them both to be involved as part of its very being. The vocation is, in this perspective, entirely separate from any consideration about the morality or appropriateness of the human situation that gave rise to the conception. And, indeed, one must remember that, according to the traditional teaching, all human flesh is born to some degree out of sin; all origination is bound up with original sin. It is not the motivation to become a parent that demonstrates the presence of a vocation to do so; rather, it is the fact of being a biological parent that represents the giving of the calling to become a true parent: the vocation to bring a child to life in the Spirit as well as in the flesh.

It is clear that many straight biological parents fail to respond to this true parental vocation by not living up to their responsibility to care for their offspring or by abandoning their children altogether, whether as a result of their own personal problems or out of callous indifference. Equally, it should be clear that gay biological parents are sometimes better than straight ones at being true parents: emotional and spiritual nurturers and carers of their children. Just as the circumstances in which the child was conceived has no intrinsic bearing on the vocation of the parents to become true parents (the vocation being their duty of obedience to God's will for them in this regard), neither does their sexual orientation.

Can one apply these same principles to the issue of adoption? Without repeating all my arguments about the potential suitability of gay persons – whether single or in a relationship – to become adoptive parents (see my post of 21 March), it would be consistent with this view of vocation to say that the mere fact of a person or a couple being straight or gay does not make them intrinsically more or less worthy of receiving and responding to a vocation to become an adoptive parent, if one defines an adoptive parent as someone who takes on the vocation to be a true spiritual parent to a child which that child's biological parents have not been able to fulfil.

There is, however, a crucial difference: whereas in the case of biological parenthood, the suitability of the individuals to become parents and the morality of the situation in which they did so have no bearing on their receiving a parental vocation, in situations of adoption, it is of course incumbent on adoption agencies to find parents who will be able to fulfil that vocation, which the child's natural parents failed to do. And in this respect, criteria such as whether the adopters are 'suitable parents' and the extent to which their lifestyles are moral or not, come into play. Clearly, for the Church, a sexually active gay couple is automatically deemed to be unsuitable to adopt children, as their lifestyle is considered to be gravely immoral. There seems no way out of this closed circle. All the same, if gay persons in fact can be good biological parents – in the ordinary sense of the term 'good parent': loving and devoted to their children's best interests – it seems logically inconsistent, at least, to state that no gay person or couple could ever be suitable candidates to adopt a child: incapable of living out a vocation for parenthood.

This is not in fact – at least, not in principle – the position of the Church, which in theory recognises that single gay persons (but not, contradictorily (?), celibate gay couples) can make excellent adoptive parents. But in practice, the Church appears to have excluded any possibility of working within the terms of the new UK legislation, for instance by submitting prospective gay adopters to a rigorous process of examination and scrutiny as to their ability to give particular children on an agency's books the love and security they need.

Are we to conclude from this that it's the Church's view that it is better for children to be placed with stable straight couples – even if they're not Christian, and even if they're not married – than with stable, gay Christian couples, even if they're celibate? What's the logic behind that, if that really is what's implied by the Church's stance? That a loving sexual union between a man and woman, even outside of formal Christian matrimony, presents a more authentic image to the child of the pattern of true Christian living than the love of two Christian persons of the same sex for each other and for the child? And it does not even appear necessary for gay sexual activity to be present for the latter type of relationship to be considered un-Christian. This is because the Church appears to make no real qualitative distinction between celibate and sexually active gay couples in this context, as both are ruled out in relation to adoption. Indeed, even a celibate 'union' between two gay persons can involve an exclusive, mutually self-giving commitment on the part of two individuals that can resemble a marriage in all but name and could be wrongly (in the eyes of the Church) accepted by the child as morally equivalent to a marriage.

Ultimately, then, it comes down to this: the Church is defending not the sanctity of marriage, but marriage as the sign and symbol of the naturalness of heterosexuality as the wellspring of family and parenthood. But whether one is heterosexual or not has no intrinsic bearing on whether God choses one as a parent. Gay or straight, promiscuous or faithful, all parents are answerable to God for the way they respond to his choice of them. The Church, on the other hand, choses not to chose gay persons for the role of parent; and in this, she, too, is fulfilling the responsibility to defend the truth and obey the divine commandment as she has received it. But gay persons will continue to be chosen by God for a vocation as parents, whether biological or adoptive. In the latter case, this choice will be made through the medium of adoption agencies but, regrettably, no longer Catholic ones, it seems. But it is to be hoped that the couples and children involved will not be left as orphans: bereft of the support and prayers of Mother Church. For if the Church is not the only agency that can open up the grace of adoption for gay couples and their children, it still holds the keys to the door.

Car Culture: Time For a Change? (Part Four)

Possibly the most significant impact the car has had on the human environment is its contribution to the erosion of communities. There was some radio poll earlier this week, when people were asked to vote for their choice of the greatest contemporary social problem - or some such. I won't bore you with my Top Ten; but my number one is definitely the break down of community. Of course, a topic like this is itself somewhat question-begging. What do you mean by 'community'? Are you in danger of sentimentalising the value of community per se or the qualities of specific communities in the past? Would you really want to live in a close-knit community where everyone knows each other's business - having grown used to the privacy and self-reliance of modern living?

There undoubtedly is an element of viewing things through rose-tinted spectacles when we talk nostalgically about the loss of community. However, the absence of community throughout much of modern Britain, and the sense that it is something that we've lost, is undeniable. But how much of this is really attributable to the car? The decline in communities is usually ascribed to more general socio-cultural trends such as greater social 'mobility'; technology reducing our dependence on other people; increased materialism and individualism; women's access to work and careers diminishing the time and energy they have to devote to community building, which was largely driven by women in the past; the collapse of traditional social structures that gave people a sense of their place within a community, such as marriage, class and the church; and the increased levels of crime and delinquency, making people feel unsafe and forcing them to retreat into their own homes.

All of these are of course contributory factors, although some of them are arguably more by-products of community break down rather than causes. The car is another such contributory factor: it is, to coin a metaphor, an accelerator of all of the above trends. It's possible to think of ways in which the rise of universal car ownership has facilitated each of these social changes. For 'social mobility' substitute mobility in general: the way in which - in part thanks to the car - people are no longer tied to a particular locality (viz community) to be the centre of their personal or work life. Similarly, because of automotive technology, we are no longer dependent on public (local community-provided) transport, or on assistance in moving ourselves and our possessions provided by neighbours or local acquaintances. Women's access to careers, too, has been greatly advanced by their access to cars, meaning they have far more choice about the jobs they do; their work becomes personal and aspirational, rather than being involved in the provision of basic services to a local community, which was often the only work available to women.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I used to think it was ridiculous and - when I learnt the meaning of the term - decadent for households to own more than one car. This was based on the model that father either used the car for work, in which case mother didn't need a car (because she either didn't have a job at all or, if she did, this was more locally based); or else, father used public transport to get to work and mother than had the use of the car (which was my childhood situation). Nowadays, of course, it's common to see houses with at least two, sometimes as many as four or five, cars in the front drive and in what used to be called the front garden: at least one for each of the master and mistress of the household, along with cars for each of the grown-up children as they stay on in the parental home increasingly longer. And indeed, it would be hard for the families involved to envisage how they could manage without their cars if they all have 'no alternative' other than to travel out to work and to use the car for social life - neither of which are centred around their local area. For myself, I grumble about having to provide an unpaid taxi service to my non-driving partner. But I wonder what the effect on our relationship would be if she did pass a driving test and acquire a car. Would we miss the time we spend together in the car and the opportunity it provides to talk about things? Would our lives diverge even more if, instead of using only one car to go about our chores and our pleasures (the more sociable and greener option), we started using two? Individual cars lead to separate lives and careers, which in turn so often lead to separation.

I'm not trying to imply that women shouldn't enjoy the independence and freedoms which the car has played its part in bringing about. The car has undoubtedly brought tremendous social benefits - but, as I've said before, there has also been a social cost. One of the biggest of these, related to the whole community question, is the restriction of our children's freedom to roam and play outdoors. The two main reasons why parents are so afraid to let their children go out on their own nowadays are both directly car-related: 1) they could get run over; 2) they could be abducted (most easily by someone driving a car or van who can whisk them away in a flash).

The first of these concerns relates to the fact that we have still not adapted to the lethal potential of the car, in ways that I've discussed in previous instalments of this blog series. This is ultimately a case of our tolerating a certain quotient of child fatalities because of our personal and economic dependence on the car. But if we really wanted to put a stop to these accidents and reduce at least this aspect of our fear for our children, then only radical measures would do, such as banning cars and commercial vehicles altogether from driving through residential areas in hours when children are about, and imposing strict speed restrictions backed up by draconian penalties for violations - and even more so for any accidents involving children that still occurred. Is this a social cost we'd be prepared to pay to protect our children and let them play outdoors; or is endangering children's lives the cost we're willing to pay for the convenience of driving around wherever and whenever we want? And it's not just a case of reducing the number of road deaths but of a massive quality-of-life improvement that could result: for our kids who could suddenly reclaim the great outdoors; for parents who would no longer need to live in fear; and for all the 'community' who could enjoy the reduction in noise and pollution, and even start to enjoy walking around their own streets and getting to know their neighbours.

But what of the other concern of parents: that their kids could be abducted or 'befriended' by a paedophile who would then abuse them? Wouldn't children be more vulnerable not less to the unwelcome attention of local paedophiles if they were all out playing in the streets? Yes, if you're just looking at this with today's context in mind: the lack of a community that is watching out for the kids and is even out and about in the streets in question; cars that can just come along at any time when kids might be about; people, including those on the sex offenders list, living as strangers from one another and not known to the parents and others in the community who are concerned for the children's safety. If neighbourhoods are transformed into communities where people know each other and take on shared responsibility for keeping an eye on the children, and can be trusted because they're known to each other; and if, above all, the car is kept out (vital for communities to feel safe in their environment, to enjoy it, and look after it and each other) - then maybe parents would feel more confident that their children would be safe outdoors. Because they'd feel they owned and were in control of the world beyond the front door. Because this was a human world, a community, as it was when they were children and were safe to roam.

More on the car and the community in the next instalment of this blog series.

Car Culture: Time For a Change? (Part Three)

Here I am, then, sitting in the cafeteria of the hospital of a town about 30 miles away from Cambridge, having once again discharged my taxi-driving duties to bring my partner over here. The A-road connecting the two towns has recently had a substantial upgrade, and most of the journey is along fresh-surfaced dual carriageways. While the convenience of a quicker and easier trip is greatly appreciated, the road now has the soulless, dehumanised character of many of today's routes, which bypass the towns and villages through which once they passed. We build our highways from scratch 'in the middle of nowhere', as the saying goes, with the deliberate intention that they should not pass directly by and through human habitations and settlements.

This has involved a total transformation of one of the main purposes of roads. In the past, roads were designed for 'connecting people', to adapt a well-known corporate tag line. That is, they went directly to where people lived; they were for journeys by people to people – lifelines connecting people to each other and the outside world. And they operated at a human level: your journey not only took you to specific people, but you could and would have encounters along the way with people you hadn't intended to meet: other travellers, with whom you could exchange greetings because you were proceeding at a pace that allowed such pleasantries; or just people living and working by the wayside. And there were roadside inns, farms and villages where one's basic needs could be met and further human contact could be had.

Nowadays, along our soulless dual carriageways, chance encounters are often of the unwelcome kind: when your car breaks down, suddenly exposing you to a sense of vulnerability as an individual who find yourself alone in remote surroundings without the friendly assistance of strangers; or with strangers who appear willing to assist but whose motives you can't trust. Or when suddenly, you get stuck in a traffic jam that seems to extend further than the eye can see, caused by further road development or maintenance ahead, or yet another accident. However, in such circumstances, there is always the mobile phone to connect you back to civilisation: to summon break-down assistance, or to alert family or business colleagues that you have been unavoidably held up.

The mobile phone provides one of the main supporting infrastructures for roads that are built in the 'middle of nowhere': it enables a tenuous link to be maintained between the remote, impersonal road environment and the human environments that are the points of departure and arrival. This, plus the additional array of in-car entertainments and navigational aids with which we surround ourselves, allows us to fool ourselves that we are still in a human environment: that there is a kind of seamless connectivity between A and B that accompanies us on our way. The reality is that we have become disconnected from the physical environment through which we move, and that this is no longer a place that has a comfortable human face for us. So we hasten to pass through it as quickly as possible. Our car is a little bubble of civilisation: its synthetic, technological smells and air-conditioned atmosphere a welcome means for us to forget the carbon emissions we pour out into the sweet fresh air of nature; the radio or CD player a lullaby that makes us unconscious of the engine's roar.

Yet, the irony of the mobile phone – or what were originally called 'car phones' until their use got generalised across all our activities – is that, while it perfectly fulfils this purpose of keeping us connected to our activities and human contacts during the temporary suspension of our involvement with them as we pass through an alien landscape, it has not yet adapted itself to the real human situation of driving. It is dangerous to use the mobile, precisely, while we are mobile – at least in what might be described as the archetypal context for its use: the individual driver maintaining a connection with points A and B as (s)he drives between them. Just how dangerous is of course demonstrated by the terrible lethal accidents of which mobile-phone use while driving is still one of the main causes – such as the killing of that 64-year-old granny by a 19-year-old 'texter-driver' referred to in the previous post in this series. And yet, the very utility of the mobile phone for drivers as they are driving – delivery men keeping in contact with the logistics office; husband and father phoning to say he's on his way after being detained at that meeting; friends organising their evenings while travelling to meet up – is the very reason why the law proscribing mobile-phone use while driving is so regularly flouted. And why the mobile-phone companies have made damn sure they provide optimal connectivity alongside motorways and other major trunk routes.

I pointed to these paradoxes when I made a layperson's contribution to the public consultation on the proposed law banning mobile-phone use by drivers a few years ago: that the technology and infrastructure as it has been established and made readily available creates a reasonable expectation on the part of ordinary drivers that they should be allowed to use their mobile phones while actually on the move; and that there might be some mitigating circumstances where using one's phone could in fact be safer and more socially responsible than not – so long as it was genuinely safe to use the phone in the specific driving situation. These circumstances included things like arranging for someone to pick up the children from school if one had been badly delayed by the traffic; or a 'life and death' situation, where a woman, for instance, might feel she needed to call the police because she was afraid she was being followed by a potential aggressor and obviously, therefore, didn't wish to stop.

And this is one of the major problems: because our roads pass through the 'middle of nowhere' – and because they enable us to travel in a little cocoon of civilisation through areas we would never dream of visiting on foot, particularly at night – there are many roads where there just aren't enough safe places to stop. This is another way, as with the mobile, in which the support infrastructure and physical circumstances of driving are not adapted to real human needs and limitations. It always strikes me as absurd when you pass electronic signs on the motorway – messengers of some vague motorway-surveillance authority; but are there actually any people on the job sending and updating those messages? – reminding you that 'tiredness kills' and urging you to take a break; often when you are miles away from any service station, or even – on some A-roads – when most of the service stations are closed. Someone on high has recognised that the expectations that have been built into our road-transport system – that people should be able to undertake their journeys, contrary to the traditional pattern of human life and work, at any time of the day or week (24/7) – might just be a tad out of sync with the way our human minds and bodies work. We need to take a break, but we've built our roads in a way that deliberately and literally by-passes normal human life – facilitators of seamless transition from point to point but without any intrinsic human value or reality. So we then haven't created places along the way – such as the inns, farms and villages of old – where people can safely satisfy their basic needs and renew contact with their own and others' humanity.

Our journeys, then, have been transformed from intrinsically human events to a somewhat tedious process of transition between points A and B, where the space in between has no fundamental value or relevance for us. And the car is what has enabled this to take place. So what?, you might say: the benefits outweigh the costs. Well, I suppose that is the heart of the matter: what you think the real costs and benefits are, and how they balance out. There's no doubt that the environmental costs have been monumental and continue to get worse. How much of the world's carbon emissions are accounted for by the internal combustion engine? I don't know what the latest estimates are but I'm sure it must be much, much more than the 3% attributed to air travel that everyone seems conveniently to get so het up about. And the carbon cost is just one of the many environmental impacts that our thrall to the car has brought about.

But more so even than the direct consequences of car culture on the environment, it is the impact on the culture in general that needs to be re-examined – particularly, the way the car has contributed massively to the break down of communities, and our alienation from the physical and human world around us. The next entry will return to a discussion of these matters.

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Civil Partnerships Are the Best Way To Protect the Rights Of Unmarried Couples

The proposals on new measures to protect the legal rights of co-habiting couples, published today by the Law Commission, constitute a valuable, well thought-out contribution to the debate on the rights, responsibilities, legal status and social provisions relating to couples, whether married or not.

However, the proposals stop short of recommending any formal legal status for co-habiting couples, such as a registered or civil partnership - for straight couples as well as gay. The primary justification for not making such a recommendation appears to be that this would be viewed by some organisations, such as the Church, as undermining the marriage institution; and that this might undermine support for the new regulations the Law Commission is recommending.

An alternative view, set out in my blog entry on civil partnerships of 10 July and in a supporting article on new principles for marriage, is that civil partnerships are necessary and desirable for a number of reasons. The proposals made by the Law Commission today are complementary to my own proposals on civil partnerships. Indeed, the Law Commission's recommendations provide a useful regulatory framework for the resolution of financial issues resulting from the break up of a partnership, which was an issue for which I did not make any specific proposals (see items 3 and 4 in the table of differences in the provisions for separating married and unmarried couples in the 10 July post).

The Law Commission's proposals essentially give co-habiting couples the right to opt out of the regulations assuring an equitable resolution of financial and property claims resulting from a separation. The existence of formal (straight as well as gay) civil partnerships would effectively provide the opportunity for couples to opt in to a similar but more extensive set of regulations, whether or not they would otherwise have been eligible to apply for the support envisaged by the Law Commission for couples who have not opted out from it.

This might appear to be merely a technical distinction. However, it relates to more fundamental questions about why civil partnerships for straight couples may still be required even if satisfactory regulations - such as those suggested by the Law Commission - are brought in to protect the rights of separating co-habiting couples and their dependents. These reasons are set out below:

1) Civil partnerships such as those I recommend would not undermine marriage because they would be part of a more comprehensive, 360-degrees reform of the legislation and regulations governing marriage and partnerships. These would be designed to greatly strengthen marriage, and ensure that the commitments made by marrying persons are more far-reaching, strict and enforceable in law. A registered / civil partnership, in this context, would be similar to current civil marriage in terms of the degree and scope of commitment that was being made - less than the full commitment of a marriage, which would be greater than that which is formally prescribed for civil marriage in the present.

2) The full set of proposals I make involve the legalisation of marriage for gay couples, which would involve exactly the same set of rights and responsibilities as those applying to straight couples. Religious marriage would be preserved as a heterosexual-only institution - unless the Church or other religious body decided otherwise. But the civil law regulating marriages consecrated in a formal religious context would be the same as that which applied to marriages - gay or straight - formalised in a civil ceremony.

If gay marriage were introduced, there would be a need to consider whether the existing regulations governing (gay) civil partnerships should be retained or modified. Having created the legal entity of civil partnerships, it could be considered unjust to expect gay civil partners to be legally obliged to 'upgrade' their status to that of married partners if they did not choose to do so - especially if marriage implied a stricter set of rights and responsibilities than do civil partnerships and marriages today. However, if gay persons were allowed to remain civil partners even if gay marriage were legalised, it would seem discriminatory to deny the same set of options to straight couples: marriage, civil partnership or co-habitation (governed by regulations such as those recommended by the Law Commission).

Clearly, gay marriage is not immediately on the agenda, and the Law Commission's proposals do at least represent a sensible option for improving the protection afforded to co-habiting couples that currently choose not to marry. However, in my view at least, it is inevitable that gay marriage will eventually be introduced. This is because, in a civil context, it is discriminatory that gay persons cannot marry but straight persons can. People of a conventional religious conviction are entitled to hold the belief that gay marriage is an invalid concept. But then equally, if gay marriage were legalised, religious institutions would still be under no obligation to accept them as valid - just as, for instance, the Catholic Church does not accept that a civil marriage entered into by a Catholic without the consent of the Church is valid; or the Church of England does not necessarily accept the validity of second marriages. The fact that the Church holds a particular opinion about gay marriage should not prevent secular society from reforming the civil marriage institution so that it is not discriminatory.

However, even if gay marriage is never legalised, there is still an argument to be made that denying civil partnerships to straight couples is discriminatory under current legislation. This is for two related reasons: a) it involves denying to straight couples the rights and responsibilities bestowed on gay civil partners; b) as part of this, straight couples are denied the possibility to opt in to a particular set of regulations (those applying to civil partnerships), which is not denied to gay couples.

Any set of regulations designed to protect the rights of co-habiting / unmarried couples must surely apply equally to straight and gay couples, including the measures being proposed by the Law Commission. So if co-habiting couples - gay or straight - are allowed to opt out of the minimal set of supportive legal regulations advocated by the Law Commission, they should also be allowed to opt in to the more maximal set of regulations involved in civil partnerships.

But ultimately, only the legalisation of gay civil marriage will enable full equality and a balanced set of regulations, in which gay and straight couples will be allowed the same set of options: marriage, civil partnership and legally protected co-habitation.

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