Robbie George Hits The Big Time
When we last checked in with Robbie George, our McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence was busy leading the fight to keep Obama's openly-gay "Safe Schools Czar" Kevin Jennings from advancing "pro-homosexualist propaganda" in our nation's classrooms.As of this posting, Jennings has kept his job in the Education Department, and Professor George has moved on to even bigger things. Things like a HUGE profile in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. In "Robert P. George, The Conservative-Christian Big Thinker," Princeton alumnus David Kirkpatrick '92 charts the academic and political evolution of the nation's “pre-eminent Catholic intellectual.”The article goes light on personal insights about Professor George (though Kirkpatrick finds it relevant to report that George's wife, Cindy, is Jewish) but does provide a pretty thorough accounting of George's emergence as a major figure in socially conservative political circles.The article also provides a preview of an upcoming paper by George on the connection between marriage and sex ("bodily sharing"). SPOILER ALERT!
First, he contends that marriage is a uniquely “comprehensive” union, meaning that it is shared at several different levels at once — emotional, spiritual and bodily. “And the really interesting evidence that it is comprehensive is that it is anchored in bodily sharing,” he says. “Ordinary friendships wouldn’t be friendships anymore if they involved bodily sharing,” he explained to me. “If I, despite being a married man, had this female friend of mine and I said, ‘Well, gosh, why don’t we do some bodily sharing,’ and we had straightforward sexual intercourse, well, that wouldn’t be friendship or marriage. It is bodily, O.K., but it is not part of a comprehensive sharing of life. My comprehensive sharing of life is with my wife, which I just now violated.” But just as friendships with sex are not friendships, marriage without sex is not marriage. Sex, George said, is the key to this “comprehensive unity.” He then imagined himself as a man with no interest in sex who proposed to seal a romance by committing to play tennis only with his beloved. Breaking that promise, he said, would not be adultery.The second step is more complicated, and more graphic. George argues that only vaginal intercourse — “procreative-type” sex acts, as George puts it — can consummate this “multilevel” mind-body union. Only in reproduction, unlike digestion, circulation, respiration or any other bodily function, do two individuals perform a single function and thus become, in effect, “one organism.” Each opposite-sex partner is incomplete for the task; yet together they create a “one-flesh union,” in the language of Scripture. “Their bodies become one (they are biologically united, and do not merely rub together) in coitus (and only in coitus), similarly to the way in which one’s heart, lungs and other organs form a unity by coordinating for the biological good of the whole,” George writes in a draft of his latest essay on the subject. Unloving sex between married partners does not perform the same multilevel function, he argues, nor does oral or anal sex — even between loving spouses.
This is good journalism, but I've gotta say: I'm a little disappointed that Kirkpatrick couldn't find any place in the article (all five thousand words of it!) to give props to George's mad banjo skillz.