Professor John Finnis is a devout and learned Catholic legal scholar, who is currently being attacked at Oxford University for his views on sexuality as expressed in a lecture to the Catholic University of Notre Dame, Indiana, in 1994 at the height of the culture wars. By reason of his religious commitments, his language, and indeed his beliefs, are profoundly homophobic. He believes himself to have a privileged access to reality which transcends the mere emotions of those who disagree with him. Homosexual acts, he writes, “cannot really actualize the mutual devotion which some homosexual persons hope to manifest and experience by [them]”. His only defence to the charge of homophobia is that he makes it clear that these strictures apply to everything but vanilla sex within the context of marriage. In this most charitable explanation, he is merely weird. He would not, for instance, ban contraception entirely: it would be allowed, but only for married couples, and it could not be advertised or advocated. That is the burden of the last footnote of his essay and what he argues the American constitution really teaches. Such reasoning is apparently the way to be known as a great legal scholar.
These absurd views are put forward with admirable clarity and precision. He writes much better than the popes whose teaching he expounds. The question is whether these repugnant views should disqualify him from any role in the University of Oxford. That they are wrong goes without saying. They violate our moral sensibilities as deeply as his are violated by the modern world. But will they corrupt the young, to use his own yardstick? Will graduate students leave his occasional seminars convinced that he is right and that their own experience has deceived them?
One argument is that gay students might feel discouraged and undermined by the knowledge that their university tolerated the teaching of such views. Straight men do not feel existentially threatened by his condemnation of their actions in the ways that women or gay people might. It’s worth noticing that Professor Finnis himself adduced arguments of victimhood in his own favour in 1994 if the law should change, as it did, to repudiate his views. A society in which moral disputes are resolved by competitive victimhood has got something very wrong. If acts of discrimination towards students or junior faculty were alleged against him that would be a grave abuse of power. But none have been. Freedom of religion implies the freedom to be wrong, and to argue, in absurd and morally disgusting ways. Allowing students or even respectable opinion to determine the boundaries of academic freedom has a very bad history. In 1940, Bertrand Russell was driven from a post teaching philosophy in New York by an agitation among conservative parents who found a sympathetic Catholic judge for the suit they brought. In that instance, he was being persecuted for promoting exactly that view of humanity and sexuality that Professor Finnis abhors. The Finnis position was then the legal and political orthodoxy, as Russell’s is now.
These arguments are not conducted in a vacuum. The law faculty of the university can now, by inaction, gravely damage the university’s reputation. It should reconsider his invitations to its seminars.
