Earlier today on Twitter I passed on a news article being shared by the Irish drag queen, Panti Bliss. It was a story about how the Catholic Church has made a ruling that transsexuals cannot be godparents because they “do not meet the moral requirement”. This has caused a lot of confusion in social media because people today equate being “moral” with being “good”. The Church, of course, does nothing of the sort. It equates being “moral” with “not committing sin”, and sadly what constitutes “sin” has not been updated in quite a while.

To some extent this is all Aristotle’s fault. He taught that the human seed is contained solely within the male semen. Women are simply the fertile soil in which men plant their seeds in order for them to grow. If you think about that for a minute, perhaps with your Evangelical Fundamentalist hat on, you’ll see one can conclude that if a man ejaculates without placing his semen inside a woman then he is effectively aborting that seed. You can see where things will go from there, can’t you?

In fact Clement of Alexandria went one step further. In his view, in order to have sex morally, one had to do so with the intention of creating legitimate offspring. So not only was it sinful to masturbate, to have oral sex, or and sort of gay relationship, it was also sinful to have sex with any woman other than your wife. Oh, and it was sinful to have sex with your wife if she was pregnant, because again a legitimate child could not result. He wasn’t very keen on sex, was our Clement.

These days we tend to think of “sodomy” as having gay sex, possibly only as having anal sex, but throughout most of Christian history the definition has been much wider than that. The 16th Century Spanish theologian and pioneering economist, Martín de Azpilcueta Navarro, defined sodomy thus: “as when a man sins with a man, a woman with a woman, or a man with a woman outside of the natural vessel”. The latter was the case even if the man and woman in question were married. He was quite liberal, though. The 15th Century Diccionario de los inquisidores describes sodomy as “incomparably more serious than having sex with your own mother”, presumably on the grounds that getting one’s mother pregnant was preferable to “wasting” one’s seed.

My guess is that almost everyone reading this will classify as a sodomite in one way or another. Sorry about that, folks. Though you may find it useful to remember that when Mr. Wrong fulminates against “filthy sodomites” he doesn’t just mean Hal Duncan, he means you as well. (Mr. Wrong prides himself in being a classical scholar, I’m sure he knows all this stuff.)

But to get back to transsexuals, the thing isn’t that we are not just having sex in unapproved ways; we have modified our bodies in such a way that we can’t have sex in the approved way. For the folks in the Vatican, that is sin right up the wazoo and back again. Which is why they see us as “immoral”.