Private Emails

You gotta watch what you write. This is at least the fourth case this year I can think of where someone got in trouble when private emails were made public.

This time, it was a prof at the University of Illinois who taught courses in Catholic thought. He sent an email to a student discussing how utilitariansim and natural law applied to homosexuality. As you might expect, he had trouble with homosexual acts. This opened him up to charges of hate speech and he was gone.

I don't think this was the right decision. Professors (and students) must be allowed to make controversial, even hateful, arguments. Otherwise, the chilling effect will be so great that it will lead to a mindless consensus on certain issues (a fear even with full academic freedom), and people who know better having to check themselves every time they speak.

Not that the guy's arguments are any good:

This is where Natural Moral Law (NML) objects. NML says that Morality must be a response to REALITY. In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same. How do we know this? By looking at REALITY. Men and women are complementary in their anatomy, physiology, and psychology. Men and women are not interchangeable. So, a moral sexual act has to be between persons that are fitted for that act.

Gee, when I look at REALITY I see people practicing all sorts of sex acts, all the time, occasionally (but not usually) for procreation. This is people acting according to their NATURE. And guess what? They find that these sex acts are quite easy to accomplish. Their physiology and psychology makes them so that they can create pleasure, and in some cases bond.

Worse, this argument makes the unearned leap that because something is NATURAL it is MORAL (or at least that something unnatural is not moral). So even if people agree to do something they find mutually beneficial, and doesn't hurt anyone else, if this guy feels it's not natural enough, it's no good. It's as if someone said eating apples is moral, because we find that in nature. But combining flour (what is flour?--it's not found in nature), butter (in nature only the young drink milk, and no one has butter), sugar (apples have natural sugar--why should we add some) and apples, and heating the mixture (to temperatures hotter than are found in nature) to make an apple pie, we are committing an immoral act.