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42 Am. J. Juris. 135 (1997)
What Sex Can Be: Self-Alienation, Illusion, or One-Flesh Union

handle is hein.journals/ajj42 and id is 139 raw text is: Forum: Sexual Morality and the Possibility of Same-Sex Marriage WHAT SEX CAN BE: SELF-ALIENATION, ILLUSION, OR ONE-FLESH UNION PATRICK LEE AND ROBERT P. GEORGE* This article concerns the morality of sexual acts. Why, the reader may ask, should it appear in a journal ofjurisprudence? The law of marriage has long embodied the understanding that marriage, as a moral reality, is an inherently heterosexual institution. Nowhere is this more evident than in the legal rules regarding the consummation of marriage by, and only by, sexual acts which are reproductive in type. These rules, and the understanding of marriage from which they flow, have been called into question by people who propose the revision of marriage law on the ground that acts tradition- ally condemned as sodomitical may, in some cases, be the moral equivalent of reproductive-type acts. In particular, advocates of same-sex marriage claim that sound moral analysis demonstrates that homosexual sex can unify the whole lives of people as committed partners in just the way that the reproductive-type acts of spouses actualize and enable them to experience their true marital union. In this article we shall show that sexual acts are morally right only within marriage. Understanding this will enable one to see why nonmarital sexual acts, including homosexual acts, are intrinsically incapable of actualizing true marital union, and why the law ought not to treat such acts as equivalent in human significance to marital acts. Indeed, we shall argue that nonmarital sexual acts are always and in principle contrary to an intrinsic personal good, and as such harm the character of those freely choosing to engage in them. It is often assumed in treatments of sexual ethics that the central argument from natural law theory against nonmarital sexual acts is simply that such acts are unnatural, that is, contrary to the direction inscribed in the reproductive or procreative power. This argument, often described as the perverted faculty argument, is easily disposed of.1 It is then assumed that * We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Earhart Foundation. 1. It is not clear, for example, that acting against the orientation of a biological power is necessarily wrong; nor is it clear that sodomitical and other nonmarital acts are really contraryto the orientation of a biological power. It is worth noting that Pope John Paul II is among the recent natural law theorists who decline to use the perverted faculty argument. Cf. Familiaris Consortio, Part ill. The Pope specifically rejects this sort of argument in Veritatis Splendor, #48.

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