The Disgusting End of the Slippery Slope

Welcome to The Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Hey everyone, real fast before we get started, today’s episode was recorded before I had my conversation on pornography with Destiny and Jazmen Jafar so you might recognize some of the arguments from this episode. Click on the link below in the description if you want to see some of today’s arguments being applied in that dialogue. I just wanted to give a heads-up so you understand why I didn’t include that exchange in discussing today’s topic because this show was recorded before I had that dialogue with Destiny. Now on with the show. I really don’t want to talk about the subject of today’s episode. Like I really don’t want to talk about it. It’s unpleasant, but the world is a toxic dump of evil and sometimes you just have to put on your moral hazmat suit and weigh it in so, here we go. Welcome Counsel of Trent podcast. Like and subscribe, you know the deal, right.

I really do loathe the fact that I have to sit here and talk about this, but it’s where we are, so let’s jump right into it. Here’s what happened. Last month, Peter Singer, one of the most famous philosophers in the world, shared an article. He didn’t write it, but he shared the article on X, the articles from the Journal of Controversial Ideas, a very aptly named journal for this particular article. Singer is also one of the founding co-editors of this journal. So here is what Singer tweeted, and it’ll give you an idea of what the article is about. He wrote, “Another thought-provoking article is Zoophilia Is Morally Permissible by Fira Bensto, pseudonym, which is just out in the current issue of Journal of Controversial Ideas. This piece challenges one of society’s strongest taboos and argues for the moral permissibility of some forms of sexual contact between humans and animals.

This article offers a controversial perspective that calls for a serious and open discussion on animal ethics and sex ethics.” In a follow-up tweet asked Peter Singer just point-blank, “Do you think beastiality is okay? You’re sharing this article, do you think it’s okay?” And in response, Singer simply asked the questioner and those listening, “Would you rather be an animal who is cruelly raised in a slaughterhouse or would you rather be an animal subjected to non-painful sexual acts by a committed owner who caress for you and euthanizes you in your old age?” Neither, I don’t want to be either of those. The question is not which form of violence would I choose to suffer if I had to suffer it? The question that was asked Peter Singer was, is it okay for people to have sexual relations or contact with animals, aka beastiality or what is now called zoophilia. Singer’s view ultimately entails that it is okay because it’s the natural consequence of two of his other famous views.

The first view is where Singer says that human beings having special rights and value is wrong. He says that human exceptionalism is actually a form of bigotry that he calls speciesism. Instead, according to singer animals and humans should be given equal consideration in our ethical discussions. We shouldn’t say that one is superior merely because of their genetics or species identification. And the second view that leads to this is that singer believes sex really isn’t a big deal. In the second edition of Peter Singer’s textbook Practical Ethics, he writes the following, “Even in the era of AIDS, sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations of honesty, concern for others, prudence and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect. For the same could be set of decisions about driving a car.” End quote. The Catholic philosopher Ed Feser has a wonderful reply to what Singer says here. Feser writes, “I have long regarded this as one of the most imbecilic things any philosopher has ever said, that sex has specific moral significance.

Indeed, tremendous moral significance is blindingly obvious.” End quote. So why am I talking about this today? Thankfully, we live in a society where almost everybody thinks beastiality or zoophilia, as modern practitioners or defenders like to call it, most people think that beastiality is not just wrong, it’s utterly depraved. Nearly anybody you talk to thinks that it’s so wrong, it’s fine to criminally prosecute people who engage in acts of beastiality. Most people do think, yeah, it’s fine to criminally prosecute someone who does this when usually people will be up in arms at the idea of criminally prosecuting anyone for sexual behavior. But in this case, most people think it’s not just wrong, it’s so depraved, it ought to be illegal. But how do we know things will always be that way? Society used to legally prosecute people for selling contraceptives or engaging in sodomy, things can change and they can change quickly.

However, heading off the rise of beastiality, that’s not the main focus in my episode today. I’m not giving a blueprint to how to stop beastiality from winning or something like that. Instead, I want to use this particular behavior as a way to point out the serious flaws in modern sexual ethics because modern sexual ethics can’t answer the challenges that are posed by philosophers like Peter Singer who defend things like beastiality. Sure, that kind of ethic can give an emotional response to the issue. Most people believe in modern sexual ethics when confronted with beastiality would just say, “Oh, well, what the hell is wrong with you? You’re gross. That’s sick. Why would you do that?” But this emotional response, it only lasts so long. That kind of response worked for a while against things like transgender ideology. But now look where we are. We also need a solid intellectual response to this as well, and in doing so, it’ll help show the fundamental weaknesses of modern sexual ethics divorced from natural law and God’s plan for our sexuality.

So one classic approach to making a philosophical argument, especially in ethics, is the reductio ad absurdum. You take someone’s opinion and then you show that opinion is absurd by pointing to the logical consequences of that opinion people are not willing to stomach. For example, you can show that most arguments in favor of legal abortion logically entail the permissibility of infanticide. And since infanticide, most people say is definitely wrong, that would mean if abortion entails infanticide, abortion must also be wrong. The problem with using the reductio ad absurdum approach with sexual ethics is that our culture is morally sick. In the past, you could have argued, for example, that contraception is morally wrong because logically it entails justifying other non-procreative sexual acts like homosexual acts. But of course today most people don’t consider those acts to be absurd, so that argument’s not going to work with very many people or consider saying that you can redefine marriage to include same-sex couples.

You might say, and I’ve argued this before, that this logically entails redefining not just the gender elements of marriage, but the number of people involved from two to however many you want. Unfortunately, that argument is losing more and more weight as more and more people come to accept things like polyamory as being socially acceptable. So you see the problem here. In order to show a sexual ethic leads to an absurd consequence you have to keep reaching further and further out into depravity town before you can find something that’s depraved and absurd, and nearly everybody can agree that that is the case, that yes, we all agree that this particular sexual behavior is extremely disordered and would be a bad consequence of a sexual ethic. So it’s getting harder and harder to find those things people universally reject. Bestiality, zoophilia is one of those things, at least right now, that nearly everybody agrees is wrong, but the more important question is why we all agree it’s wrong, because that’s something we don’t all agree about.

So how do you argue against beastiality? First, I’m going to go through the ways that don’t work before I get to the way that does work and actually reinforces traditional Christian sexual ethics. Once again, two things. One, I do want to apologize for having to get into this one. I’m going to go through this article from the Journal of Controversial Ideas to show how the author actually refutes arguments against beastiality that are rooted in modern sexual ethics that don’t work, and I think the author, he or she, remember they’re anonymous is actually right about how modern sexual ethics can’t show that this is wrong. So thank you. I know this isn’t the easiest stuff to hear or philosophically conceptually analyze. I’ll do my best to get through this and also to remind you that we can’t just say, the argument can’t just be that’s gross, it’s gross and disgusting.

That which is disgusting can certainly be a clue to something being wrong, but it’s not an undefeatable kind of argument. Not all evil things seem gross to people, and there are some moral things that can make people uncomfortable when they think about them. Most people don’t want to think about their elderly grandparents having marital relations, but there’s absolutely nothing immoral about that behavior. So just saying something’s gross, it’s not enough to make an argument. You might say, then, okay, well it’s easy to show beastiality is wrong because it harms animals. We shouldn’t harm little innocent animals. That’s why it’s wrong. But this won’t work for a few reasons. First, it doesn’t work if you think it is okay to harm animals for other reasons, the defender of beastiality could just say, why is it okay to commit the greater harm to animals by eating them, but it’s not okay to commit the lesser harm of having sexual contact with those animals.

Also, Peter Singer and others have pointed out that some sex acts with animals don’t seem to harm them, like allowing a dog to enjoy your leg, I suppose. Once again, I don’t want to use a lot of examples in this because it’s gross, but this is the kind of thing that these critics will put forward. I really don’t like talking about this, but it does show that the common arguments that our culture would rely on to say that this is wrong apart from a traditional Christian worldview related to sexuality actually don’t work when they use things like the harm argument because the critics should say, “Well, you’re okay with harming animals by eating them. What’s wrong with this lesser harm?” Or, “How do you know all of these acts actually are harmful? Where is your evidence for that?” What’s interesting though is that the author of the article, he makes this comparison when he compares sexual contact with animals and sexual contact with children.

Here’s what he writes. “Interestingly, those sex with animals has often been compared to sex with children to suggest that both are wrong for the same reason, that it harms them. They actually stand in sharp contrast in this respect. We are justified in thinking that having sex with children always imposes a risk of future harm to them, even if no immediate harm is caused, which may be a good ground for prescribing it. The same argument fails when it comes to zoophilia.” So the author’s assumption is that sex acts with children are wrong because it causes future harm to a child. Even if the child is not aware of the harm of the evil act, what it causes in the moment that it occurs, it always causes some kind of a future harm to the child.

But saying pedophilia is wrong only because of empirically verifiable harm that it causes to children, if that is your only reason, the problem with that argument is that it leaves the door open for pedophilia if you have researchers and scientists who come along and say, “Oh, well, we just looked at the empirical data and maybe it’s not actually as harmful as we thought.” You’ve rested this ironclad moral principle, one ought not have sex acts with children on the shifting sands of what the studies say. You can find studies that say all kinds of things. In fact, the author of the article mentions this and tucks it away in a footnote. He writes, “There has been some controversy in the empirical literature about the question of whether adult child sex always imposes a risk of future harm.

A further question concerns whether the harm in question is entirely mediated by society’s reaction.” End quote. In other words, you could have researchers that say, “Hey, we just did a new study and maybe sex isn’t that bad for kids. It’s only bad because the prudes in society tell kids to be ashamed of it.” I mean, you can see this kind of attitude in a culture that is beginning to try to groom children. I actually did an entire episode on my podcast recently about things like drag queen story hour and inviting children to drag shows where there’s lewd and lascivious behavior. This is meant to desensitize children to sex, so they think it’s not that big a deal. You even have academics defending this in books like Harmful to Minors, The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex by Judith Levine.

This is actually published by a university press. It’s not just some random pervert’s opinion. It’s an academic perverts opinion. So as I said, I cover this in more detail in my older video on the subject of grooming children. Check out that episode in the description below. So the harm answer to beastiality has a big weakness when it comes to condemning not just sex acts with animals, but also sex acts with children because the harm argument always depends on social science research to prove that this is harmful, and it depends on a metric of harm that’s developed by psychologists and sociologists who’ve probably been corrupted by our depraved sex positive society. So they aren’t a reliable guide to determine what constitutes harm in the first place.

Many of these same experts would say depriving teenagers or possibly younger children of sexual experiences is itself a kind of harm society has to avoid. So the harm argument from just… Now, I agree that sex acts with children are harmful, but they are harmful not just in what we can determine from empirical research and they harm children and harm animals. It’s harmful not just from what empirical research shows us, but from what we can know from basic moral principles in the natural law of what sex is for. These are universal principles that can never be gain saint by any kind of, quote unquote, research. So we see that the argument from harm in modern secular sexual ethics doesn’t explain why beastiality is wrong. Is there any other way that modern sexual ethics could try to do this apart from traditional ethics?

Well, at this point, many of the defenders of modern ethics would talk about consent. They’ll say that sex acts with animals is wrong because animals cannot consent and sex always requires consent, case closed. Here’s Cenk Uygur from the Young Turks ridiculing Senator Rick Santorum. He was doing this a few years ago. He was ridiculing how Rick Santorum once said back in 2003 that if the state cannot ban sodomy because people have the right to engage in sex acts in private, then the state wouldn’t be able to ban other things, including beastiality or as Santorum put it man on dog. Here’s the clip.

And at the time when Rick Santorum was asked about it, he said, “In every society the definition of marriage is not ever, to my knowledge included homosexuality. It’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not man on child, man on dog or whatever the case may be.” Yeah, no man on child is not consensual. Man on animals is not consensual. But you just lump it in there with gay sex, which is a consensual, gay marriage which is consensual, and you go, “Oh yeah, you see how you opened the door there now because of the Supreme Court. I was right all along.”

This is a popular response because modern sexual ethics makes everything about consent. As long as sex involves two consenting adults or more than two, who caress. All right, so what are the problems though with this consent argument against beastiality? Well, as the author of this journal article notes, we already do things to animals that require consent when the same thing is done to human beings. For example, in order to test medicine on human beings or do scientific experiments upon them, you need the human being’s consent. It’s fair to say a scientific experiment like sex is something that always requires consent, but we test food, medicine, and cosmetics. We experiment on animals all the time without their consent presumably. So if a person engages in or does science to animals without the animal’s consent, then why can’t a person do sex to animals without their consent?

Basing things on consent doesn’t really answer that question. And number two, some animals do seem capable of consenting to enjoyable activities. For example, if I’m going to go play with a human being at the park, I need their consent. If I just run up and play tag with a stranger that can be considered assault, a crime, but if I throw a frisbee to someone, he catches it, throws it back and waves his hand to return the frisbee, well, it looks like we have a consenting game or play. So, what if I throw the frisbee to a dog and he has fun and brings it back and he runs to get it? It seems like the dog is consenting to an activity he enjoys. You see where this is going? It’s gross, but the problem is the burden is on people like Cenk to show that sex is this really, really unique activity that requires human verbal and rational capacities to consent beyond just the behavioral consent you could give to other activities like play.

And the only way he could do that, the only way he could show that sex requires this higher level of consent than anything else that we might do with animals, like play with them, the only way that he could do that would be to use the harm argument that sex is different than play because sex causes unique harm to animals. But we’ve already shown that the harm argument does not work for secular critics of beastiality because the harm argument rests on first tolerating the fact that we use animals for greater harms like eating them and the totally subjective notion of defining what harm is under that metric in the first place.

All right, I thank you for your patience in wadding through this disturbing topic with me. Now we’re at the better part. We do have good reasons to think beastiality is wrong. What are some of those reasons? Number one, God told us it’s wrong. God says it’s wrong. Don’t do it. It’s awful. That’s good enough for me. If the all good creator of the universe says it’s bad, I’m not going to do it. Deuteronomy 27:21 says, “A man is cursed who lies with an animal.” And Leviticus 18:23 says that lying with an animal like you would lie with a man is a perversion. Exodus 22:19 and Leviticus 20:15-16 even prescribe the death penalty for beastiality. God has clearly unequivocally condemned such a flagrant misuse of sexuality that is meant to unite human beings, men and women, into a one flesh union. Now, I wonder, will Father James Martin be bold enough to say that?

Well, we can’t really say beastiality is wrong because it’s only the Old Testament that says it’s wrong, and the Old Testament says that eating shellfish is wrong. Check out my episode on answering Father Martin’s shellfish objection by the way, in the description link below. Number two, even if you don’t believe in God, you can use reason. You can use your rational abilities to see that sex is for a particular purpose. Sex is for expressing the procreative and unitive elements that exist explicitly and uniquely in marital love. In other words, sex is for babies and bonding. That is what sex is for. And because sex is such a good thing, it is very, very bad to misuse, corrupt or intentionally disorder the sexual act. The journal article’s author even says the following in a footnote, he writes, “If we think that perversions are wrong, then we get a straightforward argument against zoophilia.”

Of course he doesn’t think that they’re wrong or he doesn’t argue for that in this article, but we certainly can. So the strongest argument against beastiality is that it’s disordered. Sex is not for that purpose, and it is wrong to use sex in a way that acts against its inherent purpose. When you use sex in a way apart from its purpose, you harm people, you subject them to harm, and oftentimes this is evident in empirically verifiable harms. When you misuse sex not just with non-human animals, but even with other human beings, but the empirically detectable harms that can come about by misusing sex, that is not what makes misusing sex wrong. Those are the symptoms, those are the signs that it’s wrong, but those in of themselves are not what makes it wrong. What makes it wrong is by intentionally misusing and perverting that thing which is a good in and of itself.

So by going this route, we don’t have to argue about, well, why is it okay to eat animals but not have sex with them? Or why is consent either irrelevant towards animals or even possible with animals in some cases? We can just point to the obvious fact of what sex is for and from there, since we know what sex is for, uniting men and women together into a one flesh union, that’s how we know it is for human beings. It’s for babies and bonding. We’ve got a solid foundation to condemn this morally depraved behavior. But notice what’s happened now. We can do more than just condemn beastiality. We can point out that if sex is for babies and bonding, that is what it is for. Now, that doesn’t mean of course every time you have sex, you have to have the intention of conceiving a child.

Sex is just for bringing a man and woman together so that they are open to life, so that they are ordered towards a procreative end even if there is something that prevents them from reaching that end, such as either temporary infertility such as it is a woman’s infertile period during the month, or permanent infertility that is caused by old age, for example. If that is what sex is for, it is for procreative and unitive end, then it is wrong to misuse our sexual powers, so to speak. It’s wrong to misuse them, to engage them for sexual gratification with other things that are not just animals. We can show by this reasoning that other kinds of sexual relations are disordered and thus they’re wrong. So for example, if sex is for uniting human beings together because it’s for uniting men and women towards the procreative unitive ends, then that means it’s disordered to have sex with animals.

It’s also disordered to have sex with other non-human, non-animal things like a sex doll or an inanimate object. It would also be wrong to have sexual relations with your own body parts because those things are not human beings. If sex is for uniting human beings, then animals, non-human beings or just other body parts would be disordered. Aka, this is masturbation. I mean, honestly, that’s what we’ve been talking about here with beastiality. It’s just another form of masturbation, but with a different masturbatory aid. People will use inanimate objects, animals, or even parts of themselves to accomplish this disordered goal. I’d also point out that the reason we know sex is for human to human contact is because our human bodies are ordered towards human procreation. We can see this in the design of our human bodies. So this provides a reason for why it is grossly disordered to engage in sex acts with humans who have not yet reached their procreative abilities ie young children. These individuals are not ordered towards sex at all, so it is disordered and gravely immoral to engage in sex acts with them.

Now, that doesn’t mean sex is wrong with infertile people who have lost their procreative abilities because they still have developed sexual organs. They can still engage in the sexual act even if they can’t achieve the end goal of procreation. That also doesn’t make sex with post pubescent children like teenagers moral just because they’re able to procreate because sex is still harmful to unmarried, undeveloped humans. What it does mean is that only by viewing sex as being for the expression of marital love, which is procreative and unitive, only in that framework can we sufficiently explain the wrongness of sex acts with non-human animals, with objects and very young humans without relying on merely empirical harm arguments. We can simply see these behaviors are grossly disordered. They are sexual abuses, and thus they’re immoral sexual behaviors.

Once again, I don’t like talking about this, but if we don’t say anything, the culture keeps sliding down the slippery slope until it reaches the really gross bottom of the slippery slope and it seems like there’s nowhere else to go. Now, I do want to be clear here. I am not saying that the act of masturbation and the act of beastiality are morally equivalent. The culpability of any person who engages in a sexual act outside of the marital act, their moral responsibility for that act is going to depend on their age, their maturity, their upbringing, these different elements. Something can be gravely wrong, but a person’s responsibility for it can be diminished based on psychological immaturity, defects, things like that. But what I am saying though is that if it is disordered to engage in sexual stimulation with an object that is not another human being, then it is disordered to do that no matter what the non-human object is.

And it would also be disordered to engage in sexual relations with a human being who has rendered themselves into essentially a masturbatory aid or just a sexual object, to engage in sexual relations, for example, with body parts that are not designed for uniting a man and woman in one flesh. For example, engaging in the act of sodomy. In closing, I don’t want someone listening to this episode who has struggled with sexual sin or is struggling in that area right now to just give up hope. Don’t do that. God loves you. God loves you so much. He doesn’t want this behavior to define you, and he doesn’t want you chasing after fleeting sexual pleasures that never truly satisfy. It’s why God gave you and me the gift of our sexuality, which is a good thing.

He made this, and he always provides us a way to have our sins forgiven and to turn to him to find peace, life and refreshment in him. But the thing is, in our culture sex has become so warped. It’s become so warped and distorted from what God gave us, the good thing that God gave us, that sometimes we just need a really disturbing absurd conclusion or consequence to wake people up to see they’re riding the sled down the slippery slope really fast, and it’s going to hit something a rock bottom for society they would probably rather not get to. In fact, the author of this article in the Journal of Controversial Ideas even says this. He says, “There are obvious pragmatic considerations to downplay the plea for decriminalizing zoophilia, and even more so including it within the LGBT Plus umbrella.”

In other words, these people know they need to hide this stuff until society becomes more and more degraded that it’s willing to accept it. But we, we have to do the opposite. Ephesians 5 says this, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them for it is a shame even to speak of the things that they do in secret. Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise men, but as wise making the most of the time because the days are evil.” And so I pray this episode gives you one more tool to do just that. Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope that you have a very blessed day.

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