So I see.

Eve Tushnet posting on marriage, gay marriage, sex, &c.: here and here.

The point about marriage providing a home is a good one. The need for home is a powerful one, and I feel it pretty strongly due to having felt a lot of alienation as a teenager myself. It's something the world doesn't seem to provide much these days, due to the atomisation of society &c &c. (Cue usual crunchy-conservative rant about how the Middle Ages were better, if you like...) I'm not sure how much, in my case, marriage would actually provide a home, but I guess that's because I've never tried it.

Money graf:

And this longing for home is one reason the Church's silences, clinical language, and general lameness w/r/t speaking to actual gay people is so frustrating. Because the truest and best alternative to the home promised by gay marriage is precisely the home promised by Christ, the loving embrace of the Holy Family. When I say that the cure for alienation is in kneeling at the altar rail, this is not especially believable if the actual Catholics you've known were clueless at best and bullying at worst.

Word. It's not good, and doesn't reflect well on modern society, if the only "home" or "family" you can turn to is that built up around marriage (which should be the pre-eminent, but not the only, way of making a home); it especially doesn't reflect well on the Church, which should absolutely be in the vanguard of providing a family and a home not based on (earthly) marriage.

And yes, the cure for alienation is in kneeling at the altar rail, although not just in that: there has to be kneeling outside of church too, you have to learn prayer, and learn how to wrestle God and submit to His will (sometimes both at the same time...) But being created for fellowship we need to have relationships with other people too; and if other members of the family of God are acting like idiots that doesn't help. (Though it can be comforting in a way: a family that accepts the clueless and the unpleasant probably doesn't have standards so high as to exclude me... hey, do I even want a home where everyone else is less defective than I am?)

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Ms. Tushnet also linked to this article on sex and religion (describing it as "depressing"); I find it kinda interesting, partly for what it says about that strange species of people we know as "Americans" (although maybe the mindset strikes me as foreign for reasons not related to coming from someplace other than America, I dunno). The description of Christian sexual morality is a little dubious: "The history of Christianity is a long struggle against sex" is one of those things that says more about the writer than the things he describes. Attitudes towards sex are a major component of anyone's worldview, and of any society's worldview, so you couldn't leave out issues of sexuality from the history of Christianity, or from history generally; but it's seldom sensible to describe sexuality as the defining feature of any individual, society, culture or religion - even modern-day Western culture, which is obsessed with sex, has a lot more to it; early Christianity certainly did. (Regarding the "struggle against sex", Christianity existed from the start within certain definite doctrines: sex is OK within appropriate limits (marriage being the most notable, but sodomy and contraception were off-limits even within marriage); taking it outside those limits was sinful, and denying that sex was OK within appropriate limits was the first heresy ever to get a heretic executed by Christian authorities. In addition to this there were issues of self-control, which were of particular importance to ascetics and celibates, who happened to be the people who wrote most early Christian theology; which meant the rhetoric of Christian theology was generally negative towards passion and desire, although not permitted to be negative towards sex per se. Actual pastoral practice was often another matter: Augustine's famous for having Issues with his own sexuality, but as bishop with pastoral care of a lot of married couples he wasn't that interested (AFAIK) in filling his flock with revulsion for their own sexuality.)

(One interesting point that the article raises is "A faithful Christian who was able to achieve self-mastery could free himself from this world. In this, they promoted the radical idea that women could be equal to men." This can be seen from the way both Priscillian - executed for despising sex - and St. Jerome - who enraged a lot of people for despising "the filth of marriage", but was less keen on going around telling people that they shouldn't be having sex - had a following containing lots of women who were drawn to the ascetic life.)

What's most interesting is the metric of asking how many religious people believe fornication to be wrong, and then asking how many have actually indulged in it. If someone were to write about anger, you wouldn't write something like "65% of believers believe wrath to be a sin, even though over 80% of them confess to having lost their tempers from time to time. This indicates, according to most reports, a 'guilt gap' of at least 40%." But you would feel there to be a contradiction with regards to murder or gang-rape, if large numbers of people thought they were wrong but did them anyway.

The thing is, when I were a lad, our youth group at church had sexual goings-on. We just assumed, hey, it's one of those things. People screw up. It's not that the matter isn't serious, but there is forgiveness. The article writer "once asked the student leader of the Campus Crusade for Christ whether her members were chaste." - I'd have asked, if I wanted to know, how many of them try to be chaste, and how many of them regarded it as needful. (I think few of the Christian Union where I went to university were casually unchaste. How many of them thought it no big deal I don't know. Was I oblivious, or do American evangelicals have different standards?)

Maybe it's a cultural thing. A lot of people are sensitive to hearing "traditional" standards of morality preached as regards to sex because it describes their own behaviour as sinful, or the behaviour of those they love, and they take it personally; but as mentioned, traditional standards as regard anger or gossip wouldn't trigger the same response, even if ludicrously strict. America's been described as a nation of apostate Puritans (and Canada, as America's Hat, has a lot of cultural overlap); maybe that's the reason - there's an inherited sense of chastity as something you have to keep pristine or you're doomed, so once people have fallen they give up on keeping their honour in a way no sane person would give up on keeping their temper just because they flew off the handle once; and the whole culture has by now flipped over from thinking chastity good to thinking it impossible, but without losing the "one-mistake-and-you've-lost-it" attitude to fornication. Or maybe it's a consciousness that sex is really a lot more significant than keeping one's temper, which means that it's a terrible and offensive thought that there are standards higher than the ones everyone keeps.

(The part of me that thinks like a young teenage Pentecostal rebels at this thought, not because it's wrong, but because once you start thinking that way, you do get into the habit of regarding unchastity as irreversible - a "fallen woman" has no way back to being "respectable", so you're faced with the choice of being a prude who sneers at the fallen or the libertine who thinks being fallen is no big deal. Neither of these is the truth, which is (among other things) that God both commands and forgives and the Church is supposed to be composed of forgiven sinners.)

Or maybe people have forgotten what Original Sin means - which, I think, is at the root of a lot of criticism of "conservatives", i.e. traditional morality types: not just that there are conservatives who are genuinely hateful and judgemental, but because any sane traditional morality has a sense of Original Sin, the fallenness of humanity, and unless you share the same assumptions it's easy to misunderstand. I eventually learned not to speak "judgementally", that is, in the consciousness of my own flawed nature, of the sinfulness of all (and especially myself) combined with the possibility of hope and grace and forgiveness for all, for this reason: people just assumed I thought I was better than everybody else. (In the interests of honesty, I should note that sometimes they were right... as I say, I was flawed and sinful myself.)

(And if conservatives specifically get the rep of hatefulness and judgementalism, I suspect it's also because hateful and judgemental people show up most when raging against inappropriate, unusual, or wide-ranging targets. Hate and judge the same thing as everyone else, though, and who cares? It won't even register on most people's radar.) (I read Bellwether by Connie Willis recently and was reminded of how incredibly vicious people can be to socially-approved targets, and how utterly self-righteous they can be when doing so.)