In this editorial I would like to offer some personal reflections on the planned, and cancelled, visit of Jason Evert to Ireland last month. For those not familiar with the controversy generated by the planned visit, Jason Evert is a well-known American public speaker on the virtue of chastity and is also the founder of the Chastity Project. He was due to speak in Dublin: in two secondary schools, a university (guest of the Catholic Newman Society) and in a Catholic parish; speaking appearances were also booked in Waterford. These were to take place in mid January and the theme of his talks was to be on the virtue of chastity. The theme of his tour was billed as: “It Starts With the Heart”, and topics likely to be covered included friendships, dating as a Catholic, being truly free to love, the meaning of sex, Christian marriage, and more. No explicit mention was made of homosexual attractions. The talks were promoted on Catholic websites.
Several days before he was due to arrive serious objections to these speaking engagements appeared in several media outlets, and eventually in the national media, finding an echo also in media abroad. The core of the objections centred on the fact that Evert, his book Pure Manhood, wrote that “the homosexual act is disordered”. Several groups had grave reservations about the planned talks, and expressed the fear that the presence of Evert at these speaking venues could be significantly detrimental to the mental wellbeing of younger people in attendance, especially those who experience homosexual attractions or who were unsure of their sexuality, and especially so if Evert were making claims that were not objectively true.
I have to admit that I found these claims unsettling: was it the case that Jason Evert was grossly insensitive in his treatment of homosexuality as these claims suggested? It brought to my mind Steven L Anderson, the Arizona based Baptist pastor who was refused entry to Ireland in May last year due to the virulence of his preaching against homosexuals. I looked him up at the time and what I saw of his material was enough to convince me that Ireland could certainly do without his presence here. Was Jason Evert more of the same. I doubted it, and my doubts were confirmed by a quick search for “Jason Evert homosexuality” on YouTube. The first item up was a short video entitled “Homosexuality, Gay Marriage, and Holiness”. I was very pleasantly surprised by what I heard him saying in the video: there was nothing even remotely insensitive in his treatment of the matter; on the contrary, the way he dealt with homosexual attraction was striking for its tact and sensitivity. In fact the video begins with a rotund rejection of the likes of Steven L. Anderson, those as Evert said, who parade around with “God hates gays” placards: “What God hates are your placards”, he says. Maybe his longer video: “Homosexuality, Gay Marriage, and Holiness” would turn up something less sensitive? But no – just more of the same tact and sensitivity. On then to his Chastity Project website (www.chastity.com) and to the section dealing with homosexuality. What I was looking for in particular was the use of the word “disorder” in connection with homosexuality. All I managed to turn up was this: “Theologians explain that we all have weakened wills, darkened intellects, and disordered desires – all of us. Same-sex attraction is only one manifestation of the universal human condition.”
If indeed Evert had spoken of homosexuality in a hateful, demeaning and abusive manner in his videos or on the Chastity Project website, I think that there would have be grounds for the censorship of his talks, but this is patently not the case. And of course it takes only a few minutes to verify that his videos and website treats homosexuality with the utmost delicacy. But what about his claim, in his book Pure Manhood, that “the homosexual act is disordered”? I bought the Kindle version of the book and looked up what he says on the matter. The term appears once, in a section entitled: “What if you have homosexual attractions?” The first thing he says in the section is quite reassuring: “Few people, including myself, can grasp the challenges that individuals with same-sex attractions face on a daily basis.” A little later in that section he writes: “Much like contraceptive sex between heterosexuals, the homosexual act is a dis-order of God’s purpose for sex: babies and bonding.”
Clearly Evert is using the term “disorder” in the same way as it is used in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. There acts are described as “intrinsically disordered” (CCC2357) and the homosexual inclination itself is called “objectively disordered” (CCC2358). (The word used in the original Latin is “inordinatus”.) Note that the Catechism only ever applies the term “disordered” to acts and inclinations, never to persons themselves. It is a technical rather than pejorative term, and is used to mean an act or desire whose connection to God as its final goal is either completely or partially absent. The term appears thirty-eight times in the Catechism, two of which are in connection with homosexual acts and desires. So clearly homosexuality has not been singled out in the Catechism for special treatment as a unique “disorder”; in the same chapter lust is called a “disordered desire” (CCC2351); it is asserted “that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action” (CCC2352); and that divorce “introduces disorder into the family and into society”. There is clearly no intention to insult or demean those who experience homosexual attractions, or engage in homosexual acts. It is simply being stated, very much in keeping with the Church’s millennial teaching on matters sexual, that any voluntary act which seeks sexual pleasures without the intrinsic connection of sex to procreation is not ordered correctly, ie, it is “disordered”.
And yet even then the Chastity Project website appears to restricts its quotes from the Catechism to more benign statement that: “Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.”
Nevertheless, despite the manifestly sensitive and balanced way in which Evert presents the Catholic view of sexuality, a storm had been generated in what was a knee-jerk reaction. Even though Evert clearly opposes the likes of Steven L Anderson, the calls for his talks to be banned were successful in that several of Evert’s Dublin and Waterford venues felt obliged to withdraw their invitations. Clearly each institution had to make a prudent decision in the light of the intensely negative publicity which had been generated in the media – they had not generated the furore, but had to respond to it in a manner they felt was appropriate. What was deeply unsettling was not their response to the pressure, but the manner in which the intense pressure had been generated in the media and on social-media. As it so happened Jason Evert took ill (genuinely, not tactically, as it turned out) and none of the planned events were able to take place.
More and more it became clear to me that what had happened was grossly unjust, to Jason Evert in the first place, and then to all those who wished to hear him speak. Perhaps those who called for his talks to be banned had simply taken on good faith what was reported to them regarding the content of Evert’s material. And yet it really only takes a few minutes to see that Evert is evidently no Anderson. If this simply measure been taken an injustice would have been averted.
Catholic venues and audiences: three Catholic secondary schools, a Catholic university club and a Catholic parish ended up being in effect censored. This violation of a most fundamental human right should not leave Catholics (or indeed any citizens) unperturbed. It is also disturbing that one of the institutions concerned was University College Dublin. While it is unclear precisely how Evert’s planned appearance came to be cancelled there, it is especially to be feared that an institution such as a university should be subject to covert censorship. If anything a university has to be a locus for greater freedom of investigation and expression than in the wider society. Jason Evert himself later commented on this: “The idea that [university staff] have to shelter a 21-year-old from opinions other than his own kind of sounds like [they] don’t have much confidence in their critical thinking abilities.”
The Irish Constitution guarantees that: “Freedom of conscience and the free profession and practice of religion are, subject to public order and morality, guaranteed to every citizen” (Article 44, 2, 1). It would be risible to suggest that public order or morality were even remotely threatened by the presence of a benign speaker who would simply defend the view – in private venues moreover – that unchaste acts are not good for relationships?
What are Catholics to do about the covert (and not so covert) interference with their constitutionally guaranteed freedom to believe, practice and profess their faith? I think in the first place to treasure this freedom, and be zealous in its defence. In the words of the American lawyer Louis Brandeis:
Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties: and that in its government the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary…. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; … that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty and that this should be a fundamental principle of American government (Whitney v. California, 1927).
His line that the “greatest menace to freedom is an inert people” seems unfortunately applicable in the case of the planned Jason Evert visit. It is remarkable to see how a small number of people, making perhaps sincerely held but also readily falsifiable claims, were so successful in preventing a speaker from appearing at Catholic venues. I suspect that many who have no sympathy for Catholic teaching on human sexuality would nevertheless be disturbed to see a fundamental right such as free-speech being so easily violated.
This is of particular importance now given the current review by the Irish Department of Justice and Equality of our existing hate speech legislation – a review which given the example of the treatment by the media of the planned Jason Evert events does not bode well for Catholics in this State. As David Thunder put it in an opinion piece in the Irish Times:
What one person views as legitimate criticism of group behaviour, another will perceive as an intervention “intended or likely to stir up hatred” against the group in question (to use the language of the 1989 Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act).
For example, if someone publicly satirises the beliefs of Catholics as naive or childish, is that person engaging in legitimate social critique or stirring up hatred against Catholics? When someone queries the legitimacy of sex-change operations for children, is that person defending children’s rights or inciting hatred against transgender persons? Shouldn’t these sorts of thorny question be thrashed out politically rather than settled in a court of law? (IT, Dec.12, 2019)
It is contrary to the dignity of any group of citizens to look on with inertia while their fundamental civic rights are violated in practice, or undermined in law. It might be timely to remember the sobering warning in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that societies “without the light the Gospel sheds on God and man … easily become totalitarian” (CCC2257). Catholics should not allow themselves to be cowed. At the same time, even when experiencing disturbing injustices – as happened last month – we should never lose our conviction that justice always finally conquers, even in the short term. Certainly it gave me great pleasure to learn that traffic to Jason Evert’s website had increased website by 150 per cent following the controversy. There’s a lesson there.