"We take Scripture seriously, but not literally," he said. "Scripture says to be remarried after divorce is adultery, but in this country, we put tradition together with our own experience of formerly married persons who have found a second marriage to be a blessing. ...

"We went against Scripture and 2000 years of tradition by relaxing those rules and allowing remarriage. We used our own experience and reason to come to that conclusion." From the Washington Times, regarding the new Episcopal gay bishop

Contraception, homosexualism and the attack on Marriage

If a sermon had been preached even a decade ago in which an attempt was made to establish logical connections between contraception, the growing moral approval of homosexual acts and the declining respect for the institution of marriage, such a sermon would have almost certainly not have received a very favorable response in any church, including the typical Catholic parish. Yet today that effort might hopefully meet with a slightly more favorable response given the goings on in the Episcopal Church in this country, a church which seems hell bent on normalizing sodomy as a way of life compatible with the Gospel. We should not be misled by simplistic arguments based upon tolerance of diversity; the goal of this new openly practicing gay bishop-elect of the American Episcopal Church is flat out the moral equivalency, within “marriage,” of sodomy and heterosexual intercourse open to life.

Of course, that last qualification - open to life - is critical here, because it is hard to see the ultimate moral difference between an act of homosexual sodomy and a contraceptive act which is more like sodomy than may appear at first sight, sort of sodomy “through the front door” as it were. It is certain that when this controversial bishop-elect is making his moral equivalency, he is almost certainly thinking of the normal marital act today in terms of the contraceptive act, since that has become the almost universal form of sexual union in marriage in our day. So it is precisely in this moral equivalency tied to some notion of “marriage” that our gay bishop-elect makes his own the very argument mentioned above, an argument which would be only minimally welcomed if made by an orthodox clergyman, but may find more credence when made by this particular clergyman. What is sodomy if not an act that is intrinsically, totally devoid of any relation to life giving sexuality, and what is contraception if not a deliberate attempt to render a sexual act totally divorced from its life giving potential? One is a sexual act that is intrinsically sterile, unrelated to life-giving sexual union, and the other is an act which attempts to render an act intrinsically sterile, devoid of any relation to life-giving sexual union. The bishop-elect, moreover, attempts to justify this moral equivalency of the “normal” heterosexual act of intercourse, the contraceptive act, and the “normal” act of homosexual partners, sodomy, by situating them within the context of some kind of permanent relationship, or “marriage” of some kind. Thus there can be no question that on his agenda is not only the changing of his own church’s moral teaching on homosexual acts, but also its wavering teaching on marriage that presently does not allow gay marriages. He also makes it clear that he has a rather indeterminate notion of marriage, and does so in the very argument by which he wants to justify changing the moral teaching on homosexual acts. He is quoted as saying the following:

"We take Scripture seriously, but not literally," ... "Scripture says to be remarried after divorce is adultery, but in this country, we put tradition together with our own experience of formerly married persons who have found a second marriage to be a blessing.

"We went against Scripture and 2000 years of tradition by relaxing those rules and allowing remarriage. We used our own experience and reason to come to that conclusion."

His argument is clear enough. While there is clearly “2000 years of tradition” and very clear Sacred Scripture condemning homosexual acts, even excluding one from the final kingdom, that’s not a problem for modern Episcopalians like himself. He himself openly argues that way, for just as in the case of divorce and remarriage, his communion did not allow 2000 years of Scripture or tradition prevent them from “ relaxing those rules and allowing remarriage,” since their final determining norm is in fact their “own experience and reason,” so these original sources of revelation will not prevent them from reversing their teaching on homosexual acts, and, by logical extension, reversing their teaching on the nature of marriage, or for that matter, on anything else their “experience” assures them should be changed, in spite of these sources.

Many years ago there was a small minority of people fighting the abortion onslaught who argued that this situation could not be reversed without addressing contraception, and they were considered to be too extreme, even by others who were fighting this onslaught. Their argument was that abortion was, in practice if not in theory, simply the ultimate contraceptive, and that the contraceptive mentality is what has effectively generated the abortion onslaught, even if not abortion per se.

Now we can see further logical effects, or impacts, of this same mentality, the gradual acceptance of the moral legitimacy of homosexual acts in our society, the intrinsic disorder of which our contraceptive society can logically no longer comprehend, and the gradual inability to defend the true nature of marriage, since divorce and contraception have become so extensively related to marriage. If a contracepted act of intercourse can be seen as a true marriage act, then what exactly is the relation of marriage as such to the generation of life? If that act can truly express the nature of marriage, then marriage can only be incidentally related to the generation of life, and if that is true, then why not allow homosexuals to “marry”? There is a logic here that is behind the adamancy of the new bishop-elect, and he expresses it, even if not brilliantly, in that quote above.

Now it seems this deteriorating moral situation may be an opening to an ecumenism of life, where Christians come together to defend the institution of marriage and the moral character of their society in a way in which until now they have not been challenged to do so. And the issue cannot really be faced without facing anew the issue of contraception in relation to marriage. Lots of arguments can be made to show how contraception contradicts the true nature of marriage and the acts by which marriage is supremely signified and substantially nourished, but they require a good deal of time and background to understand. Likewise it can be argued how the massive use of contraception outside marriage, which is at the heart of the sexual revolution that has taken place in our time, has its greatest moral support from the acceptance of contraception as morally permissible inside marriage, especially marriage in a divorce ridden society where it can no longer logically be understood to be essentially a permanent relationship. But that too is a difficult argument to make in a society that has such a short attention span as ours does, and so little ability to actually follow a reasoned argument.

But perhaps the aggressive movement to accept homosexual activity as the moral equivalent of heterosexual intercourse, and at the same time to see this equivalency as generating another equivalency, this one being between homosexual unions and traditional marriage, may have opened a door among more Christians for a deeper discussion of the way that contraception has played an essential role in this whole development. The bishop-elect thinks this will not radically effect the Episcopal communion because he sees his agenda as basically already acceptable to most Episcopalians who did not split over the ordination of women. Maybe he is right, as far as the Episcopal church in North America is concerned, but his ordination and obvious agenda has shocked many of his co-religionists overseas, and has evidently sounded a warning to many Protestants, and Catholics, that we are facing a crisis that we could not have suspected not all that long ago.

The idea that revisiting the moral teaching which accepts contraception in marriage, the teaching from Lambeth in 1930 which was bought by most Protestant communions in the 20^th Century, may not be so wild an ecumenical notion finds support long ago in, of all places, The Washington Post. It was not a Catholic bishop, but a Methodist layman who wrote the following in an editorial excoriating a decision on the part of the National Council of Churches (then known as the National Federation) to adopt the policy of the Lambeth Conference in 1930 legitimizing contraception:

It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation of or suppression of human life. The Church must either reject the plain teachings of the Bible, or reject schemes for the "scientific" production of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee's report, if carried into effect, would sound the death knell of marriage as a holy institution by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be "careful and restrained" is preposterous.

It did not take a degree in theology for this Christian layman to understand the implications for introducing contraception into married intimacy. He saw it leading to indiscriminate immorality outside and inside marriage, the latter being a death knell for marriage as a holy institution. Today he might have changed one thing, and said, if not the death of marriage itself in this society. But he probably could not even imagine at that time that this practice would also lead to the acceptance of homosexual activity as morally upright, and the eventual effort to establish a moral equivalency of sodomy and the marriage act between husband and wife, and the logical next step, converting that equivalency into a demand to allow homosexuals to be married in the same sense as the traditional marriage between man and woman.

That gentleman’s foresight could perhaps become the basis for a new ecumenical contact, a new examination of the practice he condemned along with Pius XI and his successors, thus extending the sensus fidei in a true ecumenical direction. What could be of more common interest among Catholics and our fellow Christians than defending the holy institution of marriage against this new moral onslaught? And in this case, we see the ultimate threat in this movement today, the denial of the very sources of revelation by the proponents of this new Christianity, a new religion with no absolutes, including the sources of revelation themselves, Tradition or Scripture. The issue at Lambeth can now bee seen more clearly, that it was never simply a moral norm that was at stake, but the sources of revelation and the teaching authority of the Church rooted in those sources. Today we see the consequences of this departure from the Church’s foundations, and given the pragmatic character of most Americans, the results we now see can hopefully open a new dialogue, which is not simply to restore a common Christian moral life, but a real communion of life and faith leading to the restoration of the deepest unity in the life of the Church.