Taken from Pruss's book One Body: An Essay in Christian Sexual Ethics
Section I: Fulfillment
There are three senses of tragic love
Metaphysical impossibility; the woman and the statue (it is logically impossible for the statue, x, to unite intellectually with the woman, qua x)
Practical impossibility; the man away at war
Unawares impossibility; the woman doesn’t know that he’s a statue.
Homosexuality falls “closer” to (1). It is impossible to unite sexually with a member of the same-sex.
Is this impossibility surmountable or not? i.e., reassignment surgery. If it is insurmountable, then this pushes homosexuality closer to (1).
Reassignment surgery as it now is merely makes cavities and fleshy appendages. An artificial vagina is no more a vagina than an ear canal is.
Requirements for reassignment surgery to be successful for sexual union to occur
The created organs must be at least capable of trying to reproduce
The created organs must be appropriately linked with the rest of the person’s body, i.e., the organs should be directed at the person in question’s reproduction.
So, no donated sexual organs from other people or head transplants onto opposite sex bodies.
More promising?
If it were possible to change the entire genetic identity of a person, then the problems listed in (5) and (6) may be surmountable.
Two questions/problems arise:
It may be medically impossible—it isn’t clear that a person could survive such an operation
It isn’t clear that the resultant person is identical with the person prior to the surgery. Genetic identity may be necessary for personal identity.
However, a homosexual person typically does not want their partner to be changed into the opposite sex, as they are homosexual. So,
It isn’t something that homosexuals typically want,
And, homosexuality may also exemplify the sort of impossibility enumerated in (3) – many homosexuals believe that they have united sexually with their partners, even when they have not.
Love calls on us to adjust our relationships to the reality of the beloved. Homosexual love fails to do this, and is thus immoral.
Section II: Appropriate
A love that is incapable of fulfillment (tragic love) may nevertheless be appropriate.
The man who loses his genitalia may appropriately still romantically love his wife.
Is homosexuality love akin to the love enumerated in (11)? It seems not. Consider the following:
Martha longs to conversate with a brain injured person. Martha’s love needs to adapt to some degree. She should seek union that is possible. But perhaps it is quite appropriate for her also to continue to love the individual with a suffering love that seeks the intellectual communion that is no longer possible.
Compare the case in (12) with Jack and his goldfish. It isn’t appropriate to love the goldfish with suffering intellectual love. Alfred’s love mistakes the kind of being the goldfish is, while Martha’s love does not mistake the kind of being Francine is. Francine is a being with whom intellectual conversation would normally be possible. On the other hand, goldfish normally cannot engage in intellectual communion.
This suggests that kinds of beings is relevant to the kinds of love that is appropriate for those beings.
Natural kinds of love are those loves that simply flow from human nature.
It is in the nature of human beings to mate and to cooperate.
But there are other kinds of love that are not natural, like supernatural love between God and man and artificial love between scientists.
Eros is a natural love. Natural love seeks a love that is possible by nature, or normally possible.
But union between the same-sex is normally impossible.
But if this is the case, then it is not appropriate
Even if it were possible to make a person receive the sexual organs of the opposite sex, so that the functioning of these organs were genuinely directed toward the person’s reproduction, this would not be a normal state. Whether erotic love would be appropriate in such a case is a question for further investigation; I suspect that because erotic love is natural, the answer is negative.
Erotic love is a natural love (it flows from human nature)
Natural loves are appropriately to be directed at natural states (think of the goldfish vs brain dead example: it’s natural from brain dead to be intellectual but not for goldfish, so it is appropriate from brain dead but not goldfish)
Sex-changed individuals are not in a natural state
So erotic love is not appropriately directed at sex-changed individuals.
Formal union: Always present in love (a directedness to the good of the other)
“Real” union: An additional union that one pursues (spending time with the other, engaging in marital relations, teaching, etc.)
The formal union is just as real. (The terms are unfortunate.)
Formal union is basically the same across different kinds of love
Real union is different
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