Boxers consent all the time to being punched in the face – boxing is not morally wrong. Guys wanting to prove how tough and macho they are sometimes volunteer to be punched in the face, I don’t find complying with that morally wrong either.

Cd, thanks for the explanation of “natural law”. I have a bit of a hard time understanding you but if I’ve got it right christians take whatever they want to be law, even arbitrarily and claim that breaking their pet laws is against the law of nature.

“The professor did not equate homosexuality to bestiality or statutory rape. What he did do was suggest how certain arguments used to defend one cause could also be used for other, more unsavory causes. His point wasn’t, so far as I can tell, that homosexuals are the same as dog-f**kers and pedophiles. It was that while the “consent” line might be a sufficient defense for legality, it alone is not a sufficient moral defense as the same argument can be made for things that are clearly wrong.”

The professor’s inclusion of bestiality and pedophilia in his examples does nothing more than continue the mantra that has been part of the anti-gay right’s talking points since Day One. You can go back to Anita Bryant for that. It’s a tactic they’ve used again and again: equating sexual orientation to paraphilias in an effort to blur or obliterate the distinction. The most blatant example was the right’s finding that the hate crimes bill passed last year protected “thirty sexual orientations,” in which they included bestiality, pedophilia, necrophilia, and a host of others that are recognized as pathological. Of course he’s equating them — that was the whole point of using those examples. I doubt that even this professor is dim enough to think that a dog can give consent.

Think for a moment of the statement that the name of this blog satirizes. Think of “Man on Dog” Santorum. Think of every rabid anti-gay freak you’ve ever heard. He doesn’t have to say “homosexuality is the same as bestiality or pedophilia” any more — the link is out there.

University faculty are held to a higher standard than average workers: technically, your qualification for the the job is that you are demonstrably more knowledgeable and wiser than the students about the subject. The letter this fellow wrote to his students is frankly a grotesque embarrassment in that regard. Gay rights are a major public issue and the reasons he gives for his views on them are ridiculous to intelligent adults.

In short: Howell got terminated for being inexcusably stupid. Which can be ignored if it’s a verbal incident, but the idiot put it in writing.

I hear religionists talking about “natural law” all the time and it makes no sense to me. They don’t appear to be talking about something like laws of physics and there is no such thing as a legal system in nature – what does “natural law” mean?

It’s take from the European nature deity religions, aka paganisms. Their believers realized that their deities wanted all things to conform to ‘laws of Nature’. So they decided what these Laws were and things that violated them (“unnatural” things) had to be corrected or destroyed to achieve conformity with the divine desire. Basically this meant that mentally ill people routinely got killed, people engaging in the wrong kinds of sex too. In many cases “monsters” (neonates with terrible physical defects, really weird or deranged or disfigured adults) were killed or let die in some way. One child of twins was commonly let die. And that’s just some of the more explicable stuff.

This framework got taken up into Christianity and re-rationalized and conformed to the canonical Bible writings. Average people didn’t really bother with the intellectual niceties, they pretty much understood that not much had changed in practice for a long time after formal Christianization. Roughly around the time the Reformation began that began to change. But by that point an intellectualized form had been well incorporated into Church doctrine.

But, in whatever case, your consent to my punching you would, indeed, remove any immorality associated with the offense of attacking you.

You seem to be talking in circles. You agree that informed consent is a legitimate discussion while consent alone is not. But then you go on to repeat Howell’s dog comparison.

I’m becoming suspect of your motivations for coming back again and again to that comparison. They are seeming less than charitable.

Again, my point is only that in the first quoted snippet the professor is not saying homosexuality is bestiality or rape–anymore than my point above is saying that homosexuality is assault. It is a comparison of the underlying reasoning, not the act itself.

You can make any argument “weak” by stacking the deck. Doesn’t make it fair or honest, though.