Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Wake Forest Journal of Law & Policy

Abstract

In our book, Patriarchal Religion, Sexuality, and Gender: A Critique of New Natural Law, Nicholas Bamforth and I argue that a group of thinkers, the new natural lawyers—including, prominently, Professors John Finnis and Robert George—are not what they claim to be. The new natural lawyers claim that their views are a secular form of political theory and, as such, are as much entitled to clarify important questions of value in liberal democracies as are any other such secular political theories—say, utilitarianism or contractualism— that try to make sense of the deep values of equality and liberty that justify democracy. On critical examination, however— one developed at length in our book—the new natural lawyers are shown to propound not a secular democratic view, but a highly sectarian, theocratically religious one, centrally concerned with defending the anachronistic views of the currently embattled patriarchal papacy of the Catholic Church on a range of issues relating to sexuality and gender. In particular, the new natural lawyers offer an argument about, inter alia, the intrinsic moral wrongness of contraception, abortion, and all forms of gay and lesbian sexual intimacy. Connected to this, they defend the current papacy’s view of the subordination of women, a view reflected in the Vatican’s recent attempt to tighten its rules in abuse cases by adding an “attempt by a cleric to ordain a woman” to the “list of crimes deemed punishable by excommunication,” as if the sexual abuses of children were bizarrely somehow of the same order of moral wrongness as women in the priesthood. Our argument is that none of these views can reasonably be regarded as secular in character, and that the new natural lawyers are not propounding the secular view they claim to defend, but a highly sectarian religious view, one that is reasonably controversial among many Catholics, let alone other forms of religious and nonreligious believers.

First Page

281

Volume

1

Publication Date

2011

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