All posts by kielkopf1

About kielkopf1

I am Professor philosophy (emeritus) of the Ohio State University. I am blogging to promote a book on sexual moral philosophy and to develop further themes not fully developed in the book. I live in Columbus, Ohio with my wife Marge. My three sons: Charles P., Mark S. and Andrew J. live in Columbus. My daughter Judy lives in Rhode Island while my daughter Susan lives in Fresno, CA. My wife and I are daily Mass goers at our Catholic parish: Immaculate Conception. Marge is an active Lay Cistercian and I am very active in the works of the Society of St. Vincent dePaul.

HHS Mandate as a War on Women

Critique of Birth Control, Sexual morality

The topic of this post is relevant to my book Confronting Sexual Nihilism. In the book, I argue that a practice of birth control subverts the foundations for traditional sexual morality. In the book, I adapt a Kantian morality that people are never to causually manipulate their humanity as means for some other ends. A woman’s femininity is an aspect of her humanity.

In August 2013, the AMA declared a war on obesity by classifying obesity as a disease. The enemy is the physical condition of obesity. The weapons of the war are medical care. Similarly provision of birth control medications and treatments, especially as mandated by HHS to implement the Affordable Care Act, is deployment of weapons in a war on a physical condition. The condition under attack is the capability of becoming pregnant through sexual intercourse: fertility. One significant difference between fertility and obesity is the impossibility of separating fertility from the people who have this condition, namely women. Another significant difference is that fertility is not an unhealthy condition So, a war on fertility is de facto a war on being a healthy young woman.

Unfortunately economic conditions and current permissive sexual morality outlooks recruit the majority of the soldiers in the war on women from women. This is a civil war amongst women; not primarily a war by middle aged Republican white men on women. Women are tempted to separate themselves from the condition of being a woman and to choose to manipulate their being a woman as a means for ends set by the economy and a permissive sexual morality. That is a more tempting choice than accepting being a woman as an end in itself which is controlled by free choice and is not manipulated by pharmecutical or surgical means for other ends.

Of course, pregnancy management is important.However, there are at least two ways of managing pregnancy. One way is to respect women by respecting their fertility which is crucial to being a woman and leaving them the choice to have sexual intercourse when appropriate. A second way is to regard their fertility as a medical condition needing preventive treatment and ignoring their capability of choosing when to have sexual intercourse. The second way offers women the opportunity to choose when to be a woman and leaves her in the meantime less than a woman. From the erspective of the second way,being a woman is a condition which for the most part is an unhealthy condition but on occasion can be put on and used. The first way does not try to impede the condition of being a woman but expects women to use their moral capabilities of when to have sexual intercourse.

Ultimately opposition to mechanical and chemical birth control is not based on the Bible or Catholic doctrine. It is based on respect for the dignity of women. They are not to be made “boy toys” by themselves or anyone else.

The serious vs. the ridiculous in discussion of gay marriage

Critique of gay-marriage

There are serious topics related to discussion of same sex marriage. One of these topics is
how to accommodate in our economies the various types of households people form. Another topic is the nature and importance of friendship. However, trying to use the word ‘marriage’ and its cognate terms to characterize homosexual partnerships is frivolous.

Today there are many ways of forming households. There is need for serious
debate over the privileges, rights and duties of the members of the various types of
households. We do not, though, live by bread alone. We guide our lives by words,
symbols , concepts. Words can hurt words. When our valuable words are hurt we are
hurt. ‘Marriage’ is still a valuable word. Thus pro-homosexuals are grasping for it. If
they get it, what the word conveys won’t be worth wanting. (As noted in my Dec. 18
Blog Post classing a gay couples living together as married is unlikely to give positive
moral status to their sexual acts.) All of us will live on with the loss of a valuable ideal for guiding the important and demanding roles of male/female bonding.

The sexual dysfunction of same sex attraction is an affliction. The possibility of
some of the most rewarding of human relations is lost. The loss is not recovered by
stealing the name ‘marriage.’ Friendship is a consolation . Marriage is more and less
than friendship. Married people frequently love one another and sometimes become
friends. But “bottom line” marriage is duty. Friendship between men is rare. It is to be
envied and respected. But to call it marriage is to make both the friendship and marriage
comic.

Religious motivation behind gay marriage movement

Critique of gay-marriage, Religious morality

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Frequently, opponents of gay marriage are accused of trying to impose their religious outlook on society at large. Fundamentally, the dispute over acceptance of gay marriage is a religious dispute. But the religious stances fundamental in the dispute are not the Judaic, Christian and Islamic religions vs. secularism. The religious dispute is between different visions of the civic religions for Western societies.

In my judgment coming out to endorse “gay marriage” is something like being
converted to a religious doctrine and practicing a ritual to declare the belief. Declaration
of acceptance is like an offering of incense to a god of the Durkheimian religion of
Western societies. (See Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger (1) for an account of how a
society’s civil religion makes sacred the basic structure of the society.) Anecdotal
evidence indicates that switching to support of gay marriage is similar to having a
conversion experience. My interpretation is that heterosexuals who come out for gay
marriage are switching to a progressive stance on sexuality. A progressive stance
changes significant boundaries between males and females. Endorsing gay marriage
sacralizes this new social structure.

In the Durkheimian sense of religion, a new religious outlook is emerging. This
new religious outlook does not fit well with religions of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
We can be told that nothing much will change if there are same sex marriages. So, why
not accept them? Indeed, offering incense to the emperor did little or nothing except
corrupt early Christians who succumbed to threats. Fidelity and honesty requires holders
of traditional sexual morality to speak against and to vote against same sex marriage if they
have an opportunity to do so.

If same sex marriage is not made a public issue, it is best to
keep silence and hope the silliness passes away. I suggest regarding gay weddings as
outrageous “camp.” The seriousness with which some heterosexuals discuss homosexual
marriage is comic. They include the president of the United States whom I otherwise
take seriously. Why classify gay-weddings as comic or “gay theater?”

To gain some understanding of camp in the gay life style, see David Hailperin’s
How To Be Gay.(2) Participating in camp is a way of compensating for a homosexual’s
sense of being marginalized. Dramatic mockery of structures, practices and institutions
taken seriously in the larger society helps in some way to expose the boundaries of
structures marginalizing homosexuals as ultimately not serious. Basically it is all role-playing
in a tragic comedy.

1. Routledge and Kegan Paul London, 1966
2. Belknap/Harvard U. Press, Cambridge MA, 2012. Reviewed by Edmund White, New
York Review of Books , Oct. 25, 2012

Gay marriage as trivialization of marriage

Critique of gay-marriage, Sexual morality

The main sexual behavior and attitude I criticize in my book Confronting Sexual Nihilism: Traditional sexual morality as an antidote for nihilism is male adultery and a corresponding attitude that a man may have sexual intercourse with any willing woman regardless of marital status. Condemnation of male homosexuality is only a corollary of a general principle – The Paternal Principle-for condemning adultery. Homosexuality is, of course, wrong in light of the Paternal Principle. However, homosexual acts often seem to be more naughty than deeply evil. Indeed, a greater evil than homosexual acts is having an attitude and making a claim that homosexual acts are morally acceptable. This pro-homo sexual attitude and these claims subvert traditional sexual morality which I support in my book.

Support for gay-marriage is a proclamation that homosexual acts are morally acceptable. Simply decriminalizing homosexual acts suffices to accept homosexual acts as legally tolerable immoralities or to express uncertainty about their morality. So, I devote some sections of my book to making a case against gay-marriage. When I began writing my book around 2006, very few advocated gay-marriage. Now as 2014 begins,received public opinion is heavily in favor of gay-marriage. So, I am not optimistic that arguments against gay-marriage will prevent its legalizaton in almost every state of the USA. However, it is important for keeping alive traditional sexual morality to have voices on record as condemning gay-marriage.

The next three of four posts on this blog site will sketch out some reasons for rejecting the ridiculous but still morally subversive notion of same sex marriage. The first condsideration shows how gay-marriage leads to the moral trivializaton of marriage.

Progressives promoting same-sex marriage have standards for moral evaluation of
homosexual acts. They use standards such as coercion and age of the participants. What
is a likely effect of extending marriage to cover homosexual relations? An effect could
be having marital status for moral evaluation of homosexual acts. In general, pre-marital
and extra-marital sexual acts have been morally condemned. So same-sex marriage
might provide a standard for moral condemnation of most male homosexual behavior.
However, in these times it is unlikely that there will be an increase in moral
condemnation of most homosexual behavior? Would not a more likely result be that use
of marital status as a moral standard for sexual behavior is weakened even more than it is
now. It is not improbable that in our mainline society marital status becomes morally
irrelevant for judging sexual behavior. Of course, being morally irrelevant to evaluation
of sexual behavior does not make marriage totally irrelevant to sexuality. However,
marriage would be far less significant than at present. A slogan promoting same-sex
marriage is “Marriage Equality.” Marriage equality equals marriage trivialization.

Whole book available on line,Remarks on nihilism

Book promotion, Sexual morality

Penultimate drafts of all chapters of my book Confronting Sexual Nihilism: Traditional sexual morality as an antidote to nihilism can now be downloaded from the website Confronting Sexual Nihilism .
No longer available on line. Email kielkopf.1@osu.edu for a free hard copy of my book.

The introductory chapter, Chapter I, provides information about me and the perspective from which I argue. Here it suffices to note that I am a Catholic who argues using only assumptions acceptable to atheists that a strong case can be made for traditional sexual morality. In the first chapter, the sections of I.3 give a preliminary account of nihilism and its role in the argument of the book. The opening sections of Chapter IX examine nihilism in much greater detail. A few remarks on nihilism are given below.

Nihilism is a combination of thought and sentiment. There is a thought that nothing matters and a melancholy mood that life has no significance. Both the thought and the sentiment are required for nihilism. An atheist may think that nothing matters but is not a nihilistic because, being blessed with an upbeat temperament, loves being alife. A believer in God many think that people ought to live to please their creator but feel that life has no significance. Despite nihilistic feelings such a theistic is not a nihilist He can use his belief in God to struggle to overcome his nihilistic feelings. Nihilistic feelings are a “dark night of the soul” for mystics and contemplatives.

The nihilistic thought that nothing matters is expressible with the judgment that everything is permitted. For instance, suppose someone hands you a deck of cards. He asks you to play a game. You ask “What game? What are the rules?” He replies “There aren’t any rules. You can do what every you want with the cards.” There is no game because what you do with the cards has no significance for anything. Similarly, if there are no rules for correct or incorrect living what we do with our lives has no significance or meaning.

In the book, the thought of “sexual nihilism” is expressed as the judgment that by itself there are no right or wrong types of sexual conduct. The phrase “by itself” means that apart from general non-sexual rules on interpersonal behavior there are no proper or improper expressions of sexuality. The mood of sexual nihilism is a sense of regret and fear that our sexuality is only a trivial means for pleasure or a demonic force driving us. One line of argument of the book is that sexual nihilism leads to general nihilism because we cannot separate human sexuality from our human nature. If a large part of our nature is insignificant, what is left to be of significance?

Unfortunately, the move from the thought of sexual nihilism to general nihilism is long and complicated. The thought of so-called sexual nihilism is, I think, the most commonly held opinion on the subject. It is what I call in the book the “progressive stance” on sexuality. In subsequent Blog Posts, I will state the major phases of this long and complicated line of thought. I will not argue for the claims of these major phases because that is the purpose of the book

Introductory Post

Book promotion, Moral philosophy

The purpose of my Blog posts is tripartite.

The first purpose is to promote a book I am having published on the philosophical foundations of sexual morality. The book is titled Confronting Sexual Nihilism: Traditional sexual morality as an antidote to nihilism. The book is forthcoming in March 2014. Visit http://www.sexualnihilism.org for more elaboration on the book.

The second purpose is to explore further and defend better themes of the book.

The third purpose is to allow readers of the book to ask and receive answers about themes of the book.

The book is a work in progress whose completion is to extend beyond its publication with Blog posts and material added to the book’s website.

Charles F. Kielkopf
Professor, Philosophy (emeritus)
The Ohio State University