Winter Books: Sex that contributes

THE SEXUAL PERSON: TOWARD A RENEWED CATHOLIC ANTHROPOLOGY
By Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler
Published by Georgetown University Press, $29.95

Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler's new book The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology is among the most important works in Catholic sexual ethics to emerge in the last two decades. The authors, professors at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., have both written extensively on sexual ethics and have a thorough knowledge of current theological debates. They stand firmly within the Catholic tradition even as they argue for significant change.

Their book will be noticed because of its controversial positions on contraception, same-sex relationships, cohabitation and artificial means of reproduction. However, its contribution is its clear articulation of a person-centered natural-law ethic that offers Catholics an authentic way to think about sex in relation to their faith.

Salzman and Lawler, both married Catholics, offer a new approach to sexual ethics that questions the adequacy of a traditional sexual morality that says sexual acts must take place within marriage and be open to life. They show that historical critical scholarship raises questions about whether these principles are truly scriptural and truly human. Although they embrace reasoning from natural law, they argue it is impossible to gain pure knowledge of nature. We can only reflect on our limited human experience of nature, acknowledging that it is always partial, evolving and in need of application. Thus, traditionalist assertions about the unnaturalness of certain sexual actions are flawed.

This book’s authors and other revisionists, on the other hand, offer a more adequate person-centered ethic in which making good sexual decisions means discerning whether or not actions contribute to human flourishing. Sexual acts that are “truly human” must be loving, just and able to meet the test of “holistic complementarity.” Complementarity is defined in relation to sexual orientation. For persons with a homosexual orientation, sexual relationships with a person of the same sex are complementary and can be loving, just and moral.

Personal complementarity is more significant than reproductive complementarity, the capacity to generate new life, because the sexual acts of infertile couples, older couples, couples using contraception and couples who abstain from sex during fertile times are all equally incapable of generating life. Thus, contraception can be morally legitimate if couples choose procreation within the context of a loving, fruitful relationship. “Making love” contributes to the good of marriage, even if “reproductive complementarity” is not a possibility.

Couples who have promised to marry but are cohabiting can legitimately engage in sexual activity because they have initiated the love and fruitfulness that will be developed over the course of their lives. And if sex can be good even if it is not reproductive, non-sexual reproductive acts such as artificial insemination can also be discerned, within the context of particular relationships, as loving, fruitful and moral.

Salzman and Lawler’s claims about the need for a person-centered natural-law ethic and for recognition of relationship as the primary end of marriage and sex are well-defended. Their critique of newer traditionalist theologians, their assertions about the importance of sexual orientation to complementarity, and their willingness to consider new technologies and forms of committed relationship will be more controversial.

The proposals on cohabitation and artificial means of reproduction require further consideration. Most cohabiting couples who are testing their relationships rather than preparing for a wedding do not fit Salzman and Lawler’s description. Though new data questioning the potential destabilizing effects of cohabitation should make us slow to announce its inherent dangers, caution is still warranted.

Though the authors are reluctant to impose any absolute limits on artificial means of reproduction, the use of artificial donors and surrogates is seen by most moral theologians as violating something at the core of the loving-procreative meaning of marriage. What’s more, the risk to embryos is almost impossible to avoid, and the huge expense of the procedures are difficult to justify when so many people lack health care and so many children wait to be adopted.

The strength of Salzman and Lawler’s book is that it aggressively invites questions like these. They have begun exactly the right kind of dialogue about how sexual actions affect real people’s lives. May it continue in peace.

Julie Hanlon Rubio is associate professor of Christian ethics at St. Louis University. She is the author of A Christian Theology of Marriage and Family and coeditor, with Charles E. Curran, of Marriage: Readings in Moral Theology No. 15, both from Paulist Press.

National Catholic Reporter February 6, 2009