An adjunct professor who taught courses on Catholicism at the University of Illinois has lost his teaching job there, and he claims it is a violation of his academic freedom.
Kenneth Howell was told after the spring semester ended that he would no longer be teaching in the UI’s Department of Religion. The decision came after a student complained about a discussion of homosexuality in the class in which Howell taught that the Catholic Church believes homosexual acts are morally wrong. (source)
The email can be read here and the student’s complaint here. Howell went further than explaining Catholic teaching. Here’s part of his email:
If what I just said is true, then this disassociation of morality and sexual reality did not begin with homosexuality. It began long ago. But it took a huge leap forward in the wide spread use of artificial contraceptives. What this use allowed was for people to disassociate procreation and children from sexual activity. So, for people who have grown up only in a time when there is no inherent connection between procreation and sex –- notice not natural but manipulated by humans –- it follows “logically” that sex can mean anything we want it to mean.
Natural Moral Theory says that if we are to have healthy sexual lives, we must return to a connection between procreation and sex. Why? Because that is what is REAL. It is based on human sexual anatomy and physiology. Human sexuality is inherently unitive and procreative. If we encourage sexual relations that violate this basic meaning, we will end up denying something essential about our humanity, about our feminine and masculine nature.
I don’t think he should be sacked for his views about homosexuality. There’s a much bigger problem with the professor’s thoughts. He is like a flat-earther teaching geography.
Because we don’t have red bottoms. That is, women, human females, do not advertise their fecundity. It’s hard to tell when a woman is fertile. And that’s very rare indeed. Almost all species do advertise their fertility and copulate only at the right time, setting aside dominance behaviours of the sort you see in dogs.
There’s only one possible reason why fertility should go unannounced: it is to disconnect sex from procreation. There are lots of different ideas why this might have happened, but no doubt that it has. We have evolved specifically to have recreational sex.
This is the principle characteristic of human sexuality. All else follows from it. If the professor is teaching a course in the ethics of sexuality and was unaware of this he should be sacked, not for having unpleasant opinions, but for being unqualified to discuss the subject.
