Blogwatch and comments
Posted by Sappho on May 31st, 2006 filed in Blogwatch, Sexuality
Scandal hits the Episcopal Church. Via *Christopher and Br. Caelius. Let me start with the tamest part:
Bennison’s first affair — a 19-year-old girl from the church youth group he led.
Muriel, Bennison victim: “Being young, I was still used to doing what someone in authority tells you to do. You know, you don’t think of saying no.”
Muriel doesn’t want to use her last name or show her face. She’s concerned about the repercussions of speaking out.
She went to Bennison for counseling, but she says it quickly became a bizarre sexual relationship …
It gets a lot worse than this, and if these stories are true, Bishop Swing should have had this guy out on his ear a long time ago. As often happens in these cases, the guy has support from current parishioners, who believe that he has come fully clean with them, and that the problem was a one time consensual adult affair. But back to the nineteen-year-old: a nineteen-year-old who is in his youth group, and turning to him for counselling sounds sexually exploitive enough, by itself. And by the end of the story, you get accounts of rape, using church funds to pay for the abortion of an eighteen-year-old, sex with other women who had come to him for counselling, and one 14-year-old.
I hope the case may be properly investigated and resolved soon.
*Christopher also points to Gay Erasmus’ post on Monogamy and Other Relationships.
Last week’s Sydney Star Observer article on ‘Monogamy and Marriage’ caused quite a stir. Almost immediately, people leapt to defend either monogamy or open relationships.
The article contained two findings in particular that were of interest. The first is that, according to a recent survey, open relationships are slightly preferred to monogamous ones among gay men. The second is that, of gay men surveyed who have casual sex outside their stable relationships, only 34% agreed always to use condoms.
Two thoughts on this.
First: Gay men only slightly favor open relationships over monogamous ones? Given that, first, we’re talking about two men, and, second, that we’re talking about couples with a serious shortage of social pressure to be monogamous (much of the straight world won’t accept them regardless, and the gay world generally accepts whatever level of monogamy or open relationships people want to choose), I’m impressed that monogamy made that good a showing. I mean, I never bought “men are total horndogs,” whether it’s about straight men or gay men, but it’s not as if anyone’s as accustomed to expecting monogamy out of men as out of women. I guess monogamy has more pull than I realized.
Second: What the heck are all these guys thinking of, having casual sex outside their relationships and not even agreeing to always use condoms? Why would anyone accept that, from a lover? Why would anyone do that to a lover? I totally do not get this, decades after AIDS. Yes, I know all the stuff about how AIDS can now be made a chronic disease, and is no longer a quick death sentence. Well, I live with a husband who is chronically ill; you do not want a serious chronic illness. Everyone, male, female, gay, straight, who is sleeping with multiple partners sans condoms, should cut it out.
*Christopher responds by reflecting on moving toward covenant with his partner.
Eve Tushnet has more to say about Theology of the Body, having attended another in a series of lectures about that topic. What caught my eye this time was this part:
SEARCHING FOR MR RIGHT/WAITING UP HALF THE NIGHT: One of the recurring themes in these seminars is anxiety about the single life. And not in the way I might have expected (“How do I get married?”), but a much stranger and–in my opinion–less Catholic way, a desire to justify single life almost as a “vocation” in its own right, on a par with marriage and vowed religious life. I (…obviously?) understand the problem: How do we understand Flannery O’Connor? might be one way to put it. And of course I wouldn’t say that the only possible models for good Catholic living are marriage or religious life.
But I was a bit tripped out to hear the (very orthodox and awesome) priest who leads the seminars speak as if we shouldn’t assume a vocation to marriage and family as the default, but should sort of introspect and see if we have some kind of deep longing for it. That seems to me a) to require way too much self-knowledge, and b) to diminish the eschatological witness of vowed celibacy.
And she continues with some good thoughts on “finding one’s soulmate.” But I’m back wondering what I think about the single life as a vocation. As a Quaker, I don’t feel any particular obligation to promote the specialness of vowed religious life (though I do respect it). And, I think people can have varied vocations. I believe that people probably really do have a special vocation to be single and celibate, because in some people, that sort of life seems to have a kind of grace to it. And I think it’s possible the same could happen without any special vowed religious life.
Only, I have to wonder whether it happens very often. Because, vowed religious life isn’t simply being celibate; it takes celibacy and brings it into community, connects it, first with vows, and then with other people, whose rough edges you learn to live with, in the same way as we married people learn to live with the rough edges of our spouses. I’m thinking of what *Christopher often says about what marriage means to him – having to work things out, over and over again, with the person that you’ve hurt. I think vowed religious life is another way of doing this – a very different way, which for those who choose it can also be a sort of eschatological witness – but also something which resembles marriage in that you’re not, after all, solitary.
I have to wonder how many people are meant to be celibate all by themselves.