Pope Says Condoms to Stop AIDS May Be Acceptable
-headline in New York Times story on the pope recognizing that people are. . . people.
Well, some of us, perhaps:
“There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants,” the pope said.
That’s nice.
It’s a fine thing to recognize that the lives of gay men are worth saving. And Sullivan points out that by so recognizing the worth of said lives, the Pope introduces the possibility that gay men who have sex may act in a manner not completely outside of the moral sphere:
[O]nce you introduce a spectrum of moral choices for the homosexual, you have to discuss a morality for homosexuals. Previously, it was simply: whatever you do is so vile none of can be moral. Now, it appears to be: even in a sexual encounter between a prostitute and his john there is a spectrum of moral conduct.
Again, most excellent, not least because it allows for the possibility, however slim, that long-term gay male relationships may someday be recognized as morally licit.
Sullivan then goes on to note that this stance actually favors gay male relationships:
It’s okay for a gay prostitute to wear a condom because he was never going to procreate anyway. But for a poor straight couple in Africa, where the husband is HIV-positive and the wife HIV-negative, nothing must come in the way of being open to procreation … even if that means the infection of someone you love with a terminal disease.
It’s then you realize that the Vatican’s problem is not just homophobia. It’s heterophobia as well.
Dan Savage pushes the point a bit further:
So… condoms are okay when they’re being used to protect men who see male prostitutes. They’re not okay when they’re being used to protect a woman—a woman who might already have more kids than she can possibly feed—from an unwanted pregnancy or a sexually transmitted infection.
Allow me to push this all the way over the edge: Is there any recognition of women, any sense that we might have any say at all in our own sexual or moral lives?
Okay, so this is just an excerpt from Il Papa’s forthcoming book—maybe he’s got a whole chapter about the intellect and worth of those of us who wear our generative bits (most decidedly not ‘junk’) on the inside—but I gotta be honest with you, I’m thinking: no.
‘Heterophobia’ might work for Sullivan, but I’m old school: I think I’ll stick with the more traditional ‘misogyny’.
AbsurdBeats 
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30 06 2010Pediatrician Maria New, in a 2001 presentation to the CARES Foundation, a ‘nonprofit organization committed to improving the lives of families and individuals affected by Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia.’ Girls affected by CAH have been prenatally exposed to higher-than-normal levels of androgens, and can lead to ambiguous genitalia; there may—emphasize may—also be a link to bi- and homosexuality.
New has been experimenting—without any institutional review board approval or the usual experimental controls—on pregnant women, dosing them with the steroid dexamethasone. Notes Alice Dreger, Ellen Feder, and Anne Tamar-Mattis in a recent Hastings Center Bioethics Forum post quote another paper by New & her colleague Saroj Nimkarn:
Dreger et. al. note that ‘It seems more than a little ironic to have New, one of the first women pediatric endocrinologists and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, constructing women who go into “men’s” fields as “abnormal.”’
(h/ts: Andrew Sullivan, Dan Savage, the Bioethics Forum)
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Tags: bioethics, nature, normality, sexuality
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