Defending Traditional Christian Sexual Ethics

Defending Traditional Christian Sexual Ethics

1st Edition, prepared June 2022 Jennifer Roback Morse

If you see a broken-down house in an otherwise nice neighborhood, you might think to yourself, “What is wrong with those people? They should pull themselves together.”

But if you see an entire neighborhood where every house is broken-down, you wonder, “What happened here?”

Then someone tells you: “A hurricane or two came through.” Now, you don’t blame the people. Instead, you ask, “what can I do to help?”

This is what has been happening to the family. We have been living through a cultural and social hurricane for decades.

Back in the day when divorce was around 6% and even poor people got married and stayed married, you might think badly of people who got divorced or had kids out of wedlock.

Today, divorce disrupts the lives a million new children each year.

Today, over 40% of all births are to unmarried women, over half of births to millennial moms are to unmarried women. Now you must ask yourself, “What happened here?” Evidently, something big happened that affects everyone.

We’ve been living through a cultural hurricane called the Sexual Revolution since roughly 1965. That Hurricane says that everyone can have as much sex as they want and nothing bad will happen. The Revolution says that kids are resilient: they don’t really need their parents all that much. The parents can change their sex partners and living arrangements as much as they want, and nothing bad will happen. That Hurricane says the differences between men and women are not all that significant. We can change our sex roles and even the sex of our bodies any way we want and nothing bad will happen. But many bad things have happened.

How might we make things better?

The Core Christian teaching

Traditional Christian sexual ethics teaches something very different. We believe that every human being who has ever been conceived comes into existence because God wants him or her to exist. God could have created each and every new human being with a special act of creation, requiring no human participation at all. But in fact, in the world in which we actually live, new human beings come into existence as the result of interactions between a man and a woman. God wants our participation in his loving creation. He built this into our bodies.

Let’s just focus on one issue: what is owed to children?

• The Ruth institute believes that:
• Every person has the right to know his or her cultural heritage and genetic identity.
• Every child has a right to a relationship with his or her natural mother and father except for an unavoidable tragedy.

We sometimes hear people express concerns about children and their unequal access to schooling or housing or health care. I have a different concern:

• Do kids have access to their own parents?
• Do kids even get to know who their parents are? Let’s say, as good and decent people, we want to make sure that as many kids as possible, get to live with their own mom and dad for their whole childhood.

How would we go about doing that?

Well, for the child to be in relationship with both parents, we’d want the parents to first be in relationship with each other.

We’d want them to have a plan for cooperating with each other in the raising of the child.

We’d want the parents to get along reasonably well with each other. We’d want them to live together, so the child doesn’t have to change houses every weekend. We’d want that plan to be a lifelong plan. Not just a plan for ten years or eighteen years, but a lifelong plan. After all, the relationship between parent and child is still important, even after the children have grown up and left home.

We would want to limit the drama that distracts each parent from paying attention to the child and being loving toward the other parent. Of course, some distractions are unavoidable. People get sick and have accidents. People get grumpy and have bad days. But we’d want the adults to avoid the avoidable: passionate or sexual relationships with someone who is not invested in the child.

So how could we arrange for this kind of long-term cooperation between parents, so that the child can have access to both of them without too much trouble?

Let’s spell it out in terms of the “Thou shalt nots:” Well, only have sex with one person.

• No sex before marriage.
• No sex outside of marriage. Stay with that person.
• No divorce without serious cause, and no attempts at subsequent marriages while the spouse is still living.
• And absolutely no anonymous donation of sperm or eggs. In that situation, the child never knows one of the parents.
• No sperm or egg donation. And finally,
• No petty criticism of your spouse.

That was always part of the package, as we can see from this quotation from the old Baltimore catechism, a reliable source about traditional Christian morality.

“What are the chief effects of the sacrament of matrimony?” “The special help of God for husband and wife to love each other faithfully, to bear with each other’s faults and bring up their children properly.”

Instead of “Thou Shalt Nots,” let’s restate the elements of the Lifelong Cooperation Plan in positive terms.

What are we positively supposed to DO, rather than what are we NOT ALLOWED to do.

• Get married before having sex.
• Only have sex with your spouse.
• Stay married unless someone does something really awful.
• Be nice to your spouse.
• Be satisfied with the children God gives you.
  • The number, and timing
  • The condition of the children God gives you.

This illustration is of Senator Rick Santorum and his family, including his disabled daughter Bella. She has a rare genetic condition that she was not supposed to survive for long.

As you can see, Bella loves her daddy.

And as you can see from this photo of her First Communion, her entire family dotes on her.

What is this whole package called?

This is Traditional Christian marriage, supported by traditional Christian sexual ethics. That’s the package.

The overall social result of this system is:

• For every child, a mother and a father.
  • No matter how powerful, rich, or influential,
  • No matter how weak and poor,
• For every child, a mother and a father.
  • For every man, no matter how rich, no matter how powerful, one and only one wife.
  • For every woman, no matter how attractive, no matter how influential, one and only one husband.

This is the social result of Christian sexual morality: true equality.

• For every child, a mother and a father.
• For every man, one wife.
• For every woman, one husband.

We might even call it “reproductive equality,” because people rich and poor, are reproducing on equal terms.

This is true justice. We might even call it “social justice.” Traditional Christian sexual morality secures this kind of equality and justice for all.

This is the birthright of all children: to be conceived in the loving embrace of their own mother and father, married to each other, For a lifetime.

Now you may ask, what about adoption? We must make some provision for the children, who cannot be cared for by their own mother and father. We must recognize that children in these situations have already sustained a loss. We owe it to them to give them the best we can, and try to replicate as nearly as possible, what they have lost.

In some cases, this will mean their other relatives will take responsibility for them.

In other cases, it will mean they will be adopted by a stable loving married couple.

In all cases, it means that we give priority to the needs of the child for parents, over the desires of the adult for a child.

Now some rich and powerful and influential people don’t like this system. They think there are too many people in the world. They have spent billions of dollars trying to reduce population growth. They want to replace traditional Christian sexual ethics with a system more to their liking,

A system that allows them to do what they want.

They try to convince us that Traditional Christian sexual ethics is outdated.

They say we have contraception now. So, Traditional Christian sexual ethics is no longer needed.

But all forms of contraception sometimes fail. When it fails, what options do the parents have?

• The parents can get married and raise the child together. Not ideal, if the parents are not really a good match and are being stampeded into marriage. But it can be made to work.
• Both parents can relinquish their parental rights and make an adoption plan for their child. Also, not ideal, since the child loses access to both biological parents. However, the child does have the opportunity to be raised by a stable married couple who love each other.
• One parent raises the child alone, with limited and uncertain contact with the other parent. Worse than “not ideal.” Fundamentally unjust to the child.
• Abort the child. Completely unjust to the child. In other words, when contraception fails, the options range from “not ideal” to “completely unjust.”

If we can predict these outcomes in advance, we can truthfully say, “The Contraceptive System is systematically unjust to children.” Some might say that this system places great demands and hardships on parents.

I reply, when there is something hard that needs to be done, the adults should do the hard thing, not the children.

Some might say that this is all well and good to be concerned about the interests of children. But what about gay people? This system isn’t fair to them. Why can’t they use the modern techniques that allow people to become parents without having sex with the child’s other parent?

These techniques are inherently unfair to the child. The child is deprived of one of his or her parents, not from an unavoidable tragedy. The child is separated from a parent by design, from birth and forever.

I reply, when there is something hard that needs to be done, the adults should do the hard thing, not the children.

Besides, no one is born gay. There are a number of reasons people experience persistent same sex attraction. Even the American Psychological Association admits:

There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors.”

I checked this link right before I started this talk. Yes, the American Psychological Association still says this. https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/orientation CLICK

There is no “gay gene.” This has been proven numerous times. I am showing some of the more recent studies on this slide.  Some say no one can stop being gay. This is a bold statement. Even a single person who was once gay and who changes their patterns of attraction, behavior, thoughts, and feelings is enough to disprove it.

And the fact is: people change every day. Some do it through counseling and therapy. Others have conversion experiences.

Some people for a variety of reasons, decide they’ve had enough and walk away from it all.

No one is born gay. No one has to stay gay.  Here are some recent studies showing people can change their patterns of sexual attraction and that the efforts to change do not harm people.

And no one is born in the wrong body. A person can change their appearance and behavior. But no one can change the sex of the body.

Most importantly, there are many ways to be a girl.

There are many ways to be a boy. If you feel out of place or awkward in so-called typical sex roles, that doesn’t mean you were born in the wrong body. The idea is ridiculous and unscientific.

At the heart of the universe is a deep and abiding love. God loves every person who has ever been conceived. God wants our participation in his loving creation. This is the heart of Traditional Christian Sexual Morality.

I am not ashamed to say that this is what I believe.

To obtain materials relating to this talk, including a flash drive with the slides and script, visit the Ruth Institute booth, or go to RuthInstitute.org. You and your loved ones can Defend Marriage, like a pro. So you too can say, I am not ashamed to say that this is what I believe.

Dr. Morse was a spokeswoman for California’s winning Proposition 8 campaign, defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. She has authored or co-authored six books and spoken around the globe on marriage, family and human sexuality. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Polish and Chuukese, the native language of the Micronesian Islands. Her latest book is The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies are Destroying Lives and Why the Church was Right All Along. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Rochester and taught economics at Yale and George Mason Universities. Dr. Morse was named one of the “Catholic Stars of 2013” on a list that included Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI. Dr. Morse and her husband are parents of an adopted child and a birth child, and were foster parents for San Diego County to eight children. In 2015, Dr. Morse and her husband relocated to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where the work of the Ruth Institute continues.