No Place For Sheep

Deakin academic Michael Vagg has a piece in The Conversation today in which he explains just where the group “Doctors for the Family” gleaned their “evidence” that the healthiest type of family in which to raise children is heterosexual. It comes as no surprise to find that one study on which they base their opinions was funded by the Australian Christian Lobby. Other points they make in their submission to the Senate inquiry into marriage equality are blatantly cherry picked, and bear little if no relation to heterosexual relationships in this country.

As Vagg observes, while there have been vigorous protests against same-sex marriage for a long time, health arguments such as this one are a new weapon in the arsenal of the religious right.

The manner in which the group’s submission has been reported in the media is unreassuring. For example, ABC Breakfast news led with “Doctors claim …” Not a group of doctors, but doctors. This implies an authority that the submission completely lacks, just because it’s been written by “doctors.” In fact, when you look at Vagg’s piece it quickly becomes clear that no researcher worth her salt would accept anything at all about the doctors’ claims.

Who are these doctors? You can read about them here.

In Australia the child abuse statistics are appalling. Children are physically, sexually and emotionally abused by adults and almost all of these abuses occur within the family unit. And guess what? The overwhelming majority of those family units are heterosexual. The heterosexual family can be a highly dangerous and thus unhealthy environment in which to raise children, as at least some of these doctors must surely know.

Vagg concludes his piece thus: “Doctors for the Family are trying to hijack the credibility of science, while being disingenuous about their religious beliefs.” I’m glad for his sake he said “disingenuous,” and not “deceptive and duplicitous” and he didn’t call anyone a Baptist, probably avoiding defamation threats, unlike me. Those threats against me by Melinda Tankard Reist  still haven’t been withdrawn, by the way. I suspect Reist intends to leave them hanging over my head until January next year.

I can’t help but notice that the concealing of religious motivations is on the increase among believers trying to impose their faith agenda on a secular society via the back door. There was a bit of an outcry when I claimed Reist’s religious beliefs were relevant to her lobbying, and many cried “ad hominem!”

However, the ad hominem is not always fallacious. There are arguments for making what’s know as a circumstantial ad hominem. There are those, such as eminent Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who argue ad hominem reasoning can be essential to understanding moral issues. Arguments that question the opponent’s possible dogmatic bias, for example, or vested and conflicted interests, are legitimate critical responses.

The circumstantial ad hominem is an allegation of bias, and intended to serve as a warning that the arguments need to be scrutinized. Allegations are just that. They aren’t proof that an argument is incorrect or flawed, and are not used as proof: they merely raise legitimate questions about possible bias.

Making an allegation is not a biased act. Conflict of interest of all kinds can affect objectivity. It is perfectly acceptable to allege a conflict of interest when there are grounds to do so. It isn’t conducive to free speech and healthy debate for such allegations to be prevented, or silenced by dismissing them as fallacious.

The religious beliefs of “Doctors for the Family” are entirely relevant to their lobbying against same-sex marriage. Their scientific claims are bizarre, and they use the authority invested in their profession by the community to substantiate what is at best, very sloppy research and argument, and at worst, cherry-picked, highly manipulative argument to achieve a goal that is faith-based in origin.  We have the right to know where they are coming from, and why, before we end up like this:

There’s an interesting piece in The Drum today by Michael Brull, demonstrating just how unreliable are anti porn campaigner Gail Dines’ claims of “studies” and “research.” Dines argues the “studies” support her contention that we are all going to hell in a pornographic hand cart while compulsively masturbating, dressed in crotchless panties regardless of gender, and singing something with mofo in the chorus. For more about Dines unique turn of phrase see here  but if you haven’t got time, her description of men as “amoral life support systems for an erect penis” will give you an insight.

In a spontaneous example of Freudian free association, Brull’s article led me to consider Scott Stephen’s railing yesterday against the Qanda what can I call it, it never once rose to the level of a debate, encounter perhaps, and an acrimonious one at that, between Cardinal George Pell and atheist/agnostic/non believer Richard Dawkins. I was most disappointed with this mutually contemptuous exchange of scorn and mockery. If this is the best there is from both sides, we’re in trouble. Some respect, courtesy and genuine engagement would not have gone astray and on the whole, the audience questions were boring as bat scat. Actually, that is unfair to bats and those interested in their complex droppings.

Be all that as it may, Stephens, the ABC’s Religion and Ethics Editor, was profoundly upset by this programme as you will see if you have a look at the piece he dashed off immediately afterwards. Link above . There are many things with which to take issue in Stephens’ piece, however, because of Gail Dines, I’m thinking about this:

Unlike socialism – which invariably took the form of the radical assertion of the state over the economy, culture and indeed the bodies of the people themselves – the revolution that has defined our time and continues to hold sway within Western liberal democracy is the assertion of the freedom, the rights and the pleasure of the body over every other person or institution that might stake some claim over it, whether it be nation, tradition, community, marriage, children or religion. Or, as Herve Juvin has nicely put it, the Western body is “a body without origin, character, country or determination”.

In just this way, this conception of the body that represents liberalism’s political and cultural centre of gravity is both ahistorical – in that it is unmoored from its traditional determinants of kith and kin, its moral and civic duties, and even its biological inheritance and gender – and nihilistic – determined by nothing but what it chooses for itself, and oriented toward nothing but its own health, safety and pleasure.

Christianity has always had a fraught relationship with the body, and has sought to prescribe and control its functions, particularly the sexual. The body is regarded as subordinate to the soul, or as a temple of the holy spirit. The New Testament is littered with such images. The religious right carries on this tradition with its close attention to female sexual and reproductive behaviours.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that there would eventually be a revolution of the kind Stephens describes, in which human beings in Western liberal democracies attempt to extricate themselves from the constraints imposed by Christianity on the body’s freedoms, rights and pleasures. Repress anything for long enough and it will eventually explode. The sexual revolution of the sixties was in part a reaction to the repression of the fifties, the intense interest in the body in 2012 a continuation of that revolution, enabled as never before by technology. We have the means to alter our bodies. We can do things to them we’ve never been able to do before. We can see the bodies of others as we’ve never been able to see them, just by sitting at our laptops. The body is available as never before, and of course we are enthralled by its availability.

However, there is an apocalyptic tone to both Stephens’ and Dines’ rhetoric. There is an “end times” desperation in their prose. They believe the  body is going to bring us undone. Our  unhealthy enslavement to its desires and demands will lead us into chaos and despair. It would seem that Stephens has nothing good to say about our intense interest in the body: like Dines and pornography, it’s all bad.

The “unmoored” body, that is, the anarchic body, caring only for its own welfare and pleasure, and Dines’ utopian vision of what might be:

We believe in a future free of oppression, and a cornerstone of this future is a world free of commodified sex and a media landscape that does not reproduce patriarchal culture. This is a truth we hold dear and there is no study, argument, or theory that will persuade us otherwise.

The moral fervour of this statement conceals, perhaps even from the enunciator, a blind desire to establish what she considers a legitimate sexual discourse and in so doing, repress and silence all others.

Both Dines and Stephens seem to nostalgically reference an imagined era far better than the one in which we currently exist. Both repudiate the unruly present. Both  imply a utopian dream of reinstating bourgeois moral values. The body must be policed, controlled and kept in its place. But by whom?

I have always considered the body to be miraculous in and of itself. It seems to me perfectly natural that the body should be a source of fascination and wonderment. I can’t agree with Stephens’ generalisation that the body is currently unmoored from its traditional determinants of kith and kin, its moral and civic duties, and even its biological inheritance and gender – or Dines’ ghastly assertions about male sexuality.     Some bodies are adrift, and that has always been so. Some sexual behaviour is frightening and dangerous, and that has always been so. However, both authors seem to be consumed by the same urgent project: that of ridding the world of what they consider to be “evil” and installing a new order stripped of the full human experience, which must, if it is to be real, include the dark, the difficult and the dangerous.

Which brings me back to Cardinal Pell. I detected in the Cardinal a distinct taste for revenge. He wants an afterlife in which those who behave badly are judged and punished. That’s his utopia. It’s not fair, he says, if those who cause suffering get away with it. Especially Hitler.