The Galileo Affair 2.0

In The Eighteenth of Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx said, "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." 

In the early 17th Century, the Roman Catholic Church committed an enormous, wholly unnecessary own goal when it condemned Galileo's astronomical findings that demonstrated that the solar system revolves around the sun rather than the Earth.  It's important to understand that Galileo was not breaking any new ground with what he was saying, as pretty much every scientifically literate person at the time had a heliocentric view of the universe.  Indeed, that's why it was so damaging--no one at the time who knew anything about the topic could take what the Church was saying seriously.  From that, the intellectual world concluded that there was no reason to take anything the Church had to say about the natural world seriously--if they were willing to metaphorically be the old man shaking a fist at a cloud here, then one could assume they would do it about any other, similar topic.  

It didn't have to be this way--Nicholas Copernicus was a priest, after all.  The Roman Catholic Church did not have to go to war with the Scientific Revolution.  But they, as the kids say, chose violence, and in so doing alienated the intellectual world of Europe.  The Roman Catholic Church was declaring itself to be the enemy, rather than the partner, of scientific development.  And it was doing so over a position on an issue that, again at the time, seemed really dumb.  Having taken that position, it took 375 years for Pope John Paul II to finally admit, yeah, that was a mistake.  Needless to say, that was rather substantially too late to undue the damage the decision caused.     

I believe we are seeing the farcical version of the tragedy of Galileo, in the form of the utterly all-consuming paranoia around "gender ideology."  Witness this piece, discussing the opposition of the U.S. Bishops to the Equality Act.  According to the article, backed up with a laundry list of concrete examples, the U.S. Bishops have taken the position that they will oppose any piece of legislation that contains any provision for legal protections for LGBT individuals.  In this, they have put themselves in opposition to not simply the broad majority of American society, but the position of, to take a singular example, the Latter Day Saints church.  The LDS church have crafted and endorsed a provision in both the Utah legislature (the traditional "homeland" of the LDS church) as well as in Congress that would contain fairly broad protections for LGBT people coupled with robust carve-outs for religious institutions.  Nope, no good, say the U.S. Bishops--what is at stake is an anthropological question, you see.  "Gender ideology" must be opposed in all ways.  

To begin, if you find yourself taking the position that the LDS church is "too liberal" with regard to gender and sexuality practices, that is a strong sign that you are way, way out on the limb.  Putting aside the relative merits of the LDS approach, the fact that the U.S. Bishops are not even willing to countenance such an approach speaks to their extreme position.  Instead, only laws that contain no hint of support for gay and lesbian people, and no hint of support for the notion that the law might be indifferent about a personal construction of one's gender identity, are acceptable.  Only if you accept our "anthropology" in toto can you get our endorsement, they seem to be saying.  As the always pragmatic LDS church seems to recognize, such acceptance seems fantastical in light of where people (including, it must always be noted, most rank-and-file Roman Catholics in the United States) are on these questions.   

Given this intransigent insistence, let's talk about that "anthropology."  The article quoted above gives us this:

"A Christian understanding of sex and gender is not about following arbitrary rules," wrote New York's Cardinal Dolan in a recent op-ed. "One's identity is inseparable from one's body. Gender ideology presents a counter anthropology, claiming that one's given body could somehow contradict one's identity."

If we can be real for a moment, no one has ever mistaken Timothy Dolan for a deep thinker.  But, by any standard, this is a profoundly dumb statement.

Let me ask you this--how many of you have ever felt any sort of disconnect between your body and some more fundamental sense of yourself?  As a personal example, I'm 5 foot, 5 inches tall.  I have been this height since I was 13 years old.  Most everyone I encounter is taller than I am, and this has been true for the entirety of my life.  I am literally looking up at everyone else.  And, yet, I don't feel that I look up at people all the time in an internal, identity-oriented sense.  Indeed, I feel most myself when doing public speaking, and the reason for that is public speaking gives me a very tangible feeling of being bigger.  And I have had people in the audience tell me that they see it as well--my speech coach in high school said after a particular speech that I look like I grow when I talk.  

Objectively, I am a small person; that is my biological reality.  And yet I don't feel small, at least not all the time.  I do in fact claim that my "given body [can] somehow contradict [my] identity."  According to Cardinal Dolan, this represents a "counter anthropology."  I guess, according to Cardinal Dolan, I must simply accept the fact that I am smaller than most everyone else around me (and certainly most other men) and. . . act accordingly?  Not attempt to command a room?  Refrain from public speaking, which triggers my "body dysphoria"?  If that's what it means to have a counter anthropology, then I am assuredly guilty of it.

Now, you might say "come on, Mike, that's not what he means."  But that's the problem when you find yourself defending extreme positions--you have to go so far out on the limb that you end up having to incorporate a bunch of nonsense that no one would accept on its own.  In staking out a position that the reporting of people regarding their own embodied reality must be false (for a priori, ideological reasons), you end up offering an anthropology that rings false for everyone if you give it even a half-way thorough analysis.  If what Cardinal Dolan means to say is "trans people cannot/should not undertake any behaviors or activities that are inconsistent with (a particular understanding of) their biological gender, because Reasons," then there's not much to be said in response, for better or worse.  But the moment you start talking about anthropology, in order to pretend this is not some targeted move against a discrete group of people, then your "anthropology" is going to be subject to scrutiny, to see whether it makes sense in the general run of the human experience.  And, when you do, you see pretty quickly that this anthropology is nonsensical.  If you are going to insist you are not engaging in special pleading, people are going to take you at your word.    

I don't think anyone who is looking at questions regarding gender identity thinks we have arrived in a settled place.  No one is asking for, or even desiring, some sort of comprehensive account of gender identity, least of all from the Roman Catholic Church.  This is a time for tentative statements, preliminary positions, leaving room to figure things out.  But this, this is not helpful to anyone.  The Roman Catholic Church is showing its whole ass with this gender identity crusade.

And, adding to the farcical nature of this whole thing, this push is not really about these issues at all!  All of this is a stalking horse for what the Roman Catholic Church really cares about, which is (1) keeping women out of the priesthood, and (2) fighting the rearguard action on gay rights, in order to protect the closet where a big chunk of the clergy reside.  Here we see another parallel to the Galileo story--the ultimate principle at play there was not astronomy, but the exclusive authority of the Church (read: the Vatican) to interpret Scripture and have that interpretation control in the broader world.  The powers of the clergy in general and the Vatican in specific are and have always been the neuralgic point, especially from the clergy side of the equation.  For the sake of defending something that is at the end of the day wholly inside baseball, they make sweeping statements that alienate large swaths of the population, not to mention their own flock.  

Thus what is really at stake in these discussions, at their heart, is the extent to which the broader society is going to put pressure on the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church to change their internal processes regarding women and gay men.  The Roman Catholic Church is very committed to the idea that "the extent" here be "not at all."  But, again, they are unwilling to be that transparent, unwilling to admit that they are seeking special pleading, and so everything has to be framed all the time as a statement of universal principle.  Once again, the contrast with the LDS church is instructive.  The compromise embraced by the LDS church, crafted and offered by LDS members, embraces the idea of special pleading--so long as we get to maintain our rules as to our internal operations, we will not oppose the open rules in the broader cultural space.  And it is motivated by similar considerations to those held by the RC church--protecting a very particular and idiosyncratic account of the family and family structure.  Critically, it's transparent about its intentions and goals.  The Roman Catholic Church is not willing to be similarly honest about what it really cares about.  It is not simply that all of this is driven by the internal psychodrama of the Roman Catholic priesthood; all of this is driven by the psychodrama of the Roman Catholic priesthood that they won't admit to.     

And it is getting worse.  These recent statements and interventions from these various institutional organs and luminaries show that the plan of action is to double-down, all the way down.  The sliver of pragmatic analysis buried somewhere in the collective intelligence of the U.S. Bishops conference has to know that this extremist position only empowers those who are pushing forward the Equality Act (especially as some of those same people still bear the scars of being burned by the U.S. Bishops on the Affordable Care Act/birth control mandate).  After all, if the other side has made clear that they will not negotiate, then there is no reason to try.  All of this activity is being done in the context of the recent statement poo-poo'ing blessing same-sex union from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which, justified or unjustified, has been received as a betrayal by Francis and the RC Church.  Other organizations might conclude that it would be prudent to lay low, pick your battles, and wait to build up good will in other areas.  Apparently not the Vatican, and certainly not the U.S. Bishops.

In the 17th Century, the Galileo affair convinced the world that no one had to take the Roman Catholic Church seriously when it pontificated on the natural world.  In the 21st Century, it is doing its level best to convince everyone that no one has to take it seriously when it pontificates on the human world, on the nature of ourselves.  I suppose this means that an apology about this obsession over gender ideology will be forthcoming in the 2380s.  Assuming anyone is around at that point who cares.