Andrew Clavin and Father Michael Schmitz clash over morality in Raid!, starting with the FBI’s politically charged raid on Michael Cohen—alleged bank fraud tied to Trump’s 2016 campaign—while comparing it to Hillary Clinton’s unpunished email scandal. Schmitz counters with Catholic doctrine: same-sex attraction isn’t sinful, but acting on it outside marriage is, framing chastity as universal. Clavin pivots to New York Times articles glorifying infidelity, accusing media of normalizing marital betrayal while ignoring traditional values. The debate exposes deep divides: legal double standards vs. religious consistency, and whether modern culture’s sexual liberation truly delivers happiness—or just chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
President Trump has declared Syria's poison gas attack a disgrace and has ordered a missile strike against the FBI.
Oh wait, maybe it's the other way around.
I think that's right.
Let's find out.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm the hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety boo.
Birds are wingy, also singing hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped tipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hoorah.
All right, hooray, hurrah.
Father Michael Schmitz is here.
He is the author of Made for Love, Same Sex Attraction, and the Catholic Church.
That should be an interesting conversation.
I am looking forward to it.
Meanwhile, I just want to let you know that if you are going to Scripps College, or if you've ever heard of Scripps College, one of the Claremont Colleges here, which is a big, big deal, they are funding a Venezuela propaganda tour.
I'm reading from the Claremont Independent.
It will host two of the country's consuls general for a three-day speaker series whitewashing the horrific human rights abuses of dictator Nicholas Maduro, who he murdered like 9,000 people.
There was Mao who said one person is a tragedy, but a million people is a statistic.
So in Venezuela, they've gotten to the point of statistics.
But there's one speaker they won't have, they will not have, which is they asked, it says in February, the college told us that we could not host conservative commentator Andrew Clavin.
So you are listening to a man who is banned at Scripps College where they're teaching the kids, oh, communism, it's great.
You get to eat cats, right?
You don't even like, you don't like cats, you get to eat cats under communism.
It's fantastic.
So that's what they're doing over at Scripps College.
You're getting a great education, kids.
But if you want to hear me, you can listen now or you can listen at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific, when today's episode of The Conversation is on.
That's me and Alicia Krauss.
It's our monthly Q ⁇ A where we answer any and all questions from politics to the personal.
The episode streams live on the Daily Wire's Facebook and YouTube pages.
Anyone can watch it, even students at Scripp University.
It's free for everyone, but only subscribers can ask the questions.
So kids, if you're at Scripps, you better sign on and subscribe.
That's only allows you $10 a month.
Peloton's Limited Time Offer00:03:06
And to ask questions as a subscriber, log into our website, dailywire.com.
Head over to the conversation page to watch the live stream.
And after that, just start typing into the Daily Wire chat box to hear your questions read in the mellifluous tones of Alicia Krauss.
Once again, subscribe to get your questions answered by me today on Tuesday, April 10th at 5.30 p.m. Eastern, 2.30 p.m. Pacific, and join the conversation.
I just read that last part, but obviously Tuesday, April 10th is today, if that was confusing to anybody.
And before we start talking about this genuine big deal that happened yesterday as they raided the personal attorney, Donald Trump's personal attorney, confiscating all kinds of things, apparently looking for evidence of, this is the FBI, evidence of bank fraud and other matters concerning the payoff to Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet.
You know, that's apparently a campaign funding violation.
That's, you know, misusing campaign funds.
That's why I donate to candidates.
I donate to candidates.
I check the box that says pay off to porn stars you've slept with to keep them quiet.
You know, so I didn't even know that that was something you're not supposed to do.
All right, Peloton, we got to talk about FIRST, which is the company that makes this really beautiful, beautiful piece of machinery, an exercise bike, but not just an exercise bike, because it comes with a beautiful 22-inch HD touchscreen.
And on that touchscreen, you get a subscription service that gives you classes.
So instead of having to get in your car, drive to the gym, you get to do live classes or you get to keep them and use old ones.
And they will take you through a cycling exercise class that will do everything you need it to do.
Plus, this thing is so beautiful.
I went to the store and looked at it.
It's got a very small footstep, so you can put it in a corner of your bedroom.
And it's virtually silent because of the belt system they have.
It's very innovative.
When you pedal it, it's completely quiet.
So if you do put it in your bedroom, you won't wake up your spouse.
So you can exercise at home, watch the exercise classes.
They also have other things like make-believe trips you can take.
It really is an amazing cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio experience to your home.
Peloton is offering listeners a limited time offer.
Go to onepellotin.com and enter the code Clavin at checkout.
And if you're pedaling on your Peloton right now, you might be thinking, how do you spell Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N, and that will get you $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase.
Get a great workout at home anytime you want.
Go to onepellotin.com and use the code Clavin to get started.
That's O-N-E-Pelletin.com and put in Klavin if you can spell it.
No ease in Clavin.
All right, so the FBI raids the guy's Trump's lawyer's office.
This is his personal lawyer confiscating papers that may be covered by attorney-client privilege, and we'll talk about that.
But first, let's just put this in a little bit of context, okay?
There's a piece in the Wall Street Journal by Walter Russell Mead, their excellent new columnist.
Investigation Into Hillary00:16:07
And he's talking about John Bolton and the world that John Bolton comes into that he inherits.
And Mead, who is no hysteric, a very calm observer of life, says, not since the 1940s has a national security advisor faced an array of challenges this urgent, this numerous, and this perplexing.
You will remember 1940s, big war, right?
You might have vaguely heard of it, complete world war.
He's saying not since then has a national security faced an array of challenges.
He says that North Korea's drive toward nuclear weapons that threatens the U.S. has reached a critical junction.
China's militarization of the South China Sea coincides with a crisis in U.S.-China trade.
Russia's efforts to disrupt the Western Alliance system and re-establish itself as a major power in the Middle East has progressed to the point that not even Donald Trump can ignore them.
Iran's push to consolidate its gains in Syria and Lebanon has alarmed and provoked Israel and its once hostile Arab neighbors.
Islamist terrorism continues to lurk in the shadows, threatening to emerge at any moment and force Western governments to respond.
And all this is being faced by Donald Trump, who is by nature a chaotic guy, a guy who likes chaos, who doesn't trust the foreign policy establishment, and is under attack by the permanent government in ways that I have not seen since Richard Nixon.
And when we look back on what Richard Nixon did, you know, it was okay.
But the biggest scandal of my lifetime, and I lived through Watergate, was Obama's misuse of the IRS, and that was nothing.
But listen, listen, I am not, this is not going to be a Fox News, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingram, love them to death, but this is not going to be, oh my God, it's the deep state conspiracy, because that's not what's happening here.
But I want to address it from both angles.
So if you're waiting for me to just say, oh, Donald Trump, he's being martyred, not quite, okay?
Not exactly.
Here's the thing.
We can all feel, anybody can feel, that this is unfair when we compare it to the way Obama was treated after misusing the IRS, and it was like a nothing burger that he actually used the most powerful agency in the country to silence the voices of conservatives during an election.
That, to me, is the biggest presidential scandal of my lifetime.
Nothing.
Nothing happened, okay?
And of course, to compare it to the investigation of Hillary Clinton, anybody can see, even whether you hate Donald Trump or love him to death, there's something terribly, terribly unfair about this.
And Robert Mueller is coming across as a bit of a thug.
You know, recently he said, oh, Donald Trump is a subject of our investigation, but not a target.
Clearly, a ploy to get Trump to come in and testify so that he could accuse him of lying to the FBI.
I mean, that's clearly what he was doing.
He is playing very, very hard-boiled, hard ball.
But that's not this either, okay?
Because remember, this is something that he had to referred to the New York, he referred to the Justice Department, who then referred it to the New York attorney, U.S. attorney, who is a Trump appointee and apparently a really good guy.
But it does seem to me, Ann Coulter tweeted this today, and I agree with her.
It seems to me that Mueller is trying to get himself fired because then he's a martyr instead of the guy who couldn't get Donald Trump, which is what he's going to be because he's got nothing on.
All right, so they bring this into Trump.
Trump is discussing what do we do about Syria.
He's got all his big military guys, his security guys, John Bolton, who's walked into this enormous crisis, and they tell him about, and they ask him about this, and he just explodes.
He goes on a rant that must have been five minutes long.
We'll just play a bit of it.
The first Trump cut.
It's a disgraceful situation.
It's a total witch hunt.
I've been saying it for a long time.
I've wanted to keep it down.
We've given, I believe, over a million pages worth of documents to the special counsel.
They continue to just go forward.
And here we are talking about Syria.
We're talking about a lot of serious things with the greatest fighting force ever.
And I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now.
And actually much more than that.
You could say it was right after I won the nomination it started.
And it's a disgrace.
It's frankly a real disgrace.
It's an attack on our country in a true sense.
It's an attack on what we all stand for.
So when I saw this and when I heard it, I heard it like you did.
I said, that is really now in a whole new level of unfairness.
So this has been going on.
I saw one of the reporters who is not necessarily a fan of mine, not necessarily very good to me.
He said in effect that this is ridiculous.
This is now getting ridiculous.
They found no collusion whatsoever with Russia.
The reason they found it is there was no collusion at all.
No collusion.
This is the most biased group of people.
These people have the biggest conflicts of interest I've ever seen.
Democrats, all, or just about all, either Democrats or a couple of Republicans that worked for President Obama.
They're not looking at the other side.
They're not looking at the Hillary Clinton horrible things that she did and all of the crimes that were committed.
They're not looking at all of the things that happened that everybody is very angry about.
I can tell you from the Republican side.
You know, you just can't help but feel for Trump.
I mean, no matter, again, no matter how you feel about him personally, he's making a fair point.
This is not how Hillary Clinton was treated.
And it really does raise questions.
Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer who is actually, obviously he's a liberal, but he has kind of taken the red pill and he sees that the government is all on one side, the power is all on one side, and it is a raid against Trump.
And he obviously, Dershowitz is no big fan of Trump, but he made this point himself in terms of the legal aspects of it.
Very dangerous day today for lawyer-client relations.
I deal with clients all the time.
I tell them on my word of honor that what you tell me is sacrosanct.
And now they say, just based on probable cause, even though this was cooperation with Cohen, they can burst into the office, grab all the computers, and then give it to another FBI agent and say, you're the fireworld.
We want you now to read all these confidential communications.
If this were Hillary Clinton being investigated and they went into her lawyer's office, the ACLU would be on every television station in America jumping up and down.
The deafening silence of the ACLU and civil libertarians about the intrusion into the lawyer client confidentiality is really appalling.
It really is.
It's just amazing the different reactions.
Let's just go back a little bit and revisit this thing with Hillary Clinton because the Hillary Clinton team is rewriting history.
Hillary Clinton was a dishonest person.
You know what's interesting?
Her foundation has vanished.
Now that she has no power, nobody's giving any money to her foundation.
That alone tells you something, right?
It tells you what they were buying.
The store closes when there's nothing to sell.
That's what the foundation was.
She was selling favors.
I mean, it seems obvious to me.
It always seemed to me that that's what they were going to get her on, but instead they got her on nothing.
Okay, they got her on nothing.
And let's just go back in time, keeping in mind, for instance, that Michael Flynn has been accused of lying to the FBI, one of those crimes that only exists because the investigation exists.
Like they go in to investigate something, but they don't find anything, but they get you for saying something to the FBI.
That's what they're trying to lure.
They've been trying to lure Trump into.
And I think this may be like a little bit of rage that they haven't been able to do it.
But let's just go back for a minute.
Here is Trey Gowdy cross-examining Comey about Clinton's testimony, what she said and what she did.
Just remember this for a minute.
So we remember what happened to this woman who got away scot-free.
Secretary Clinton said there was nothing marked classified on her emails, either sent or received.
Was that true?
That's not true.
There were a small number of portion markings on, I think, three of the documents.
Secretary Clinton said, I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email.
There is no classified material.
Was that true?
There was classified material emailed.
Secretary Clinton said she used just one device.
Was that true?
She used multiple devices during the four years of her term as Secretary of State.
Secretary Clinton said all work-related emails were returned to the State Department.
Was that true?
No, we found work-related emails, thousands that were not returned.
She lied about everything, and she just, you know, they didn't even put her under oath when they was no kicking down her lawyer's door.
She was just treated differently.
And let's not forget blandly sinister Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who was in her corner the whole way.
We don't know what she talked to on the tarmac with Clinton, but we doubt it was their grandchildren, like she said.
And Comey testified that the reason he came out to the public and basically laid out the criminal case against Hillary Clinton before saying, but we're not prosecuting, we're not recommending prosecution.
One of the things he listed, he listed the criminal, the tarmac meeting, and he said we just looked so bad that he felt that he had to come out to the public so that the FBI didn't lose all credibility.
But the other thing was that Loretta Lynch, blandly sinister Attorney General Loretta Lynch, called him in and said, I want you to refer to this as a matter instead of an investigation, which was what the campaign kept referring to it as.
So she was basically telling him to use the language of the campaign, not the language of the Federal Bureau of Matters, or investigations, as it is often called.
So now Blandly Sinister Attorney General Loretta Lynch is a blandly sinister citizen, private citizen.
And she went on, Lester Holt and NBC, and she told him, this was not a problem.
This conversation with Comey was not a problem.
She is still stonewalling about this.
Listen to this.
And my first response was, what is the issue here?
I remember specifically talking with him as we talked about sensitive things on a number of occasions.
We often would have to discuss sensitive matters, sensitive issues, terrorism and the like, law enforcement policy and the like.
And this was a very sensitive investigation, as everyone knew.
And the issue when he and I sat down at that time, which I think was early in the fall of 2015, was whether or not we were ready as a department to confirm an investigation going on when we typically do not confirm or deny investigations into anything, with rare exceptions.
So she says, oh, it was no problem.
There was no tension between me and James Comey.
And Comey said something entirely different when he was testifying.
Cut number 11, no.
Just compare the two just to understand the kind of, what would I say, cloud of concealment, the cloud of borderline corruption.
Maybe borderline is too kind.
It was a kind of corruption under which Hillary Clinton escaped every possible consequence of her actions.
Listen, this is Comey describing the same meeting.
We were getting to a place where the Attorney General and I were both going to have to testify and talk publicly about it.
And I wanted to know, was she going to authorize us to confirm we had an investigation?
And she said, yes, but don't call it that.
Call it a matter.
And I said, why would I do that?
And she said, just call it a matter.
And again, you look back in hindsight, you think, should I have resisted harder?
I just said, all right, this isn't a hill worth dying on.
And so I just said, okay, the press is going to completely ignore it.
And that's what happened.
When I said, we have opened a matter, they all reported the FBI has an investigation open.
And so that concerned me because that language tracked the way the campaign was talking about the FBI's work.
And that's concerning.
It gave the impression that the campaign was somehow using the same language as the FBI because you were handed the campaign language and told them to be able to use the campaign.
And again, I don't know whether it was intentional or not, but it gave the impression that the Attorney General was looking to align the way we talked about our work with the way political campaign was describing the same activity, which was inaccurate.
We had a criminal investigation open.
As I've said before, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
We had an investigation open at the time, and so that gave me a queasy feeling.
So he's queasy.
Loretta Lynch, it's all good.
It's all good, you know.
So the unfairness feels bad.
And I can understand the guys on Fox News ranting and saying the president is being unfairly treated.
He is being unfairly treated.
But let's just compare to the way the Democrats are treated, certainly the way Obama was treated during the IRS scandal, certainly the way Hillary Clinton was treated during the investigation into her emails and all the other corruption that I think she was involved in.
I kept thinking the FBI, at the time, I really did think the FBI was going to come out and say the emails, never mind the emails, but the emails were covering up the selling of government favors, and that's what we're going after for.
But nothing, just absolutely nothing.
And it became clear after seeing Loretta Lynch that nothing was ever going to happen.
It had been decided from the top.
So while that's true, let's be clear about what this matter is, this raid on Michael Cohen is.
It is not Robert Mueller.
Robert Mueller is doing his investigation into Russia.
He doesn't seem to be coming up with much.
He seems to be acting in a kind of thuggish way, really bringing the pressure on to people who talk to him.
Anyone who talks to him, trying to trick people into talking to him.
Yeah, you're a subject, not a target, which is absurd because they can just say, oh, yeah, now you're a target.
They can literally just declare that anytime they want.
And suddenly it's a whole different ballgame, and anything you say can be used against you.
But along the way, he felt that Mueller felt, oh, I've got something on Michael Cohen.
Maybe it was the Stormy Daniels thing, but there's a source who says it has to do with bank fraud, which may be something entirely different.
He refers this to Rod Rosenstein at justice.
Rosenstein sends it to the Southern District in New York, where the guy, like I said, is a Trump appointee, apparently a straight arrow, and he's the guy who goes after this and stages this raid.
So Dan Abrams, who is the legal guy on ABC, just talks about the levels that had to happen.
I mean, look, you can, you know, last night as I was driving home from a dinner, I was listening to one of those crazy conspiracy shows where I never know what the conspiracy is.
When you're listening to them, there's always a conspiracy, but you're never quite sure what the purpose of the conspiracy is.
So they were talking about, oh, the deep state and this and that, and they're going back and we predicted everything and it's all coming true.
And I kept thinking, what, what, what's happening?
But they never get to that point.
It really is interesting.
You just know that something oppressive is happening.
But the world is not really like that.
And America is still not really like that.
Along the way, there are many, many checks and balances.
So here is Dan Abrams, legal guy at ABC, explaining what has to happen before a raid like this on a personal lawyer, which affects lawyer-client communications, can be had.
Explain how many hoops they had to go through to get this raid of Michael Cohen's offices.
Robert Mueller did not make this decision.
Robert Mueller made the decision that this is actually outside the scope of what I'm supposed to be doing.
But to be clear, he came upon evidence he thought of some criminal activity.
It seems he came upon some sort of potential criminal activity.
He then hands it off effectively to Rod Rosenstein, who's the Deputy Attorney General, says, Look, we found this, you decide what to do with it.
Rod Rosenstein then makes a referral, meaning basically says to the Southern District of New York, look, here's what we got.
You decide what to do with this.
Potential Criminal Activity00:04:11
Then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, appointed by Jeff Sessions just recently, interviewed with Donald Trump, makes a decision to then seek out a search warrant.
A judge then signs off on it.
The standard for a judge to sign off on this is high.
Now, this doesn't mean, don't get it into your head that this means, oh, they must really have something on him.
It means they really think they have something on him.
In other words, they can't just go in on a phishing expedition and find this out.
They have this thing that's called a taint team.
And the reason, you know, you can say, well, oh, yeah, but it's their team.
It's the FBI's team.
This team goes through to make sure that these documents will not taint their investigation.
So it's to their advantage not to find themselves before a judge who says, wait, you violated lawyer-client privilege.
Now, you know, you're in big trouble.
Your whole case gets thrown out of court.
So it's to their advantage to clear this up.
So there are a lot of stopgaps.
Richard Blumenthal, who is a Trump senator and a Trump nemesis, he's always got the big, you know, he's always got big descriptions of how evil Donald Trump is.
This time, I feel he has a little bit of legitimacy to what he's saying.
Listen to what he says.
A little bit like a nuclear strike with multiple warheads.
First, remember that it had to go through multiple levels of review, all by Trump appointees, the assistant attorney general for the criminal division, the acting U.S. attorney in New York, not to mention Rod Rosenstein, the director of the FBI.
They're all Trump appointees.
And so a raid on a lawyer's office is an extraordinary event.
For a prosecutor as I was to even contemplate it is just a remarkable act of audacity, particularly when the lawyer is the sitting president's lawyer.
And he has the vault.
He has the keys to the kingdom.
He knows all the secrets about Donald Trump.
And if he were to cooperate, it would be indeed a transformative event.
So the raid is seismic.
And remember that when this kind of act is undertaken, there has to be more than just probable cause.
The FBI and the U.S. Attorney have to convince the Department of Justice that they are going to come away with very significant evidence of a crime.
They have to be convinced a crime has been committed.
So here's what I'm trying to get at.
It's entirely possible that the president is being treated utterly unfairly and they have something on Michael Cohn.
Those two things can be both true.
And it's a central premise of conservative thought that life is unfair.
But this may be the case.
They may have some kind of fraud or at least believe they have some kind of real evidence against Michael Cohn, which may not have to do with Stormy Daniels.
That may just be an ancillary thing.
If they come out with some nonsense about Stormy Daniels, yeah, you can get tried for that stuff.
You really can.
You can't get tried for misusing campaign funds.
I think it's done a little bit unfairly.
You know, they go after some and not others, but still, you can get tried for that.
If it's something else that they find that has nothing to do with the president, then it's just going to be, you know, bad for Michael Cohn.
I don't think he has that much to deal because he can't deal privileged communications.
Communications are not privileged if they discussed a crime, but it's very hard to get people doing that, you know, like pay off, you know, use campaign funds to pay off Stormy Daniels.
If Trump had paid her out of his own pocket, it wouldn't be a crime.
I mean, if he'd just taken the money out of his pocket and said, go away, you know, that would not be a crime.
But if he used campaign funds, that would be a crime.
Anyway, my point is simply this.
Trump is being treated unfairly.
He's being treated unpatriotically at a moment when the world is really a dangerous place and we need a little less chaos in Washington.
We need a little less persecution complex going on in the mind of the president.
It's a stupid thing to do unless they have got some serious, serious business.
If they haven't, if they haven't, Mueller is going to be humiliated as well he should be.
But if they've got something in Cohn, all right, then bring it.
Essentially Chastity Oriented00:15:21
Let's see what it is.
Let's find out.
We don't know yet.
All right, we've got Father Michael Schmitz coming up, the author of Made for Love, Same Sex Attraction, and the Catholic Church.
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Father Michael Schmitz is coming up.
All right.
Father Michael Schmitz is the author of Made for Love, Same Sex Attraction, and the Catholic Church, which presents the Catholic teaching on same-sex attraction and relations.
Father Schmitz is the Director of Youth and Young Adult Ministry for the Diocese of Duluth and also chaplain for the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
And you can find him on YouTube on the Ascension Presents channel where he shares the gospel in bite-sized videos, which sounds great.
How you doing, Father?
It's good to see you.
I'm doing great.
It's great to see you too.
Thank you for coming on.
I think this is a really interesting story.
And I always hate the way, I'm not a Catholic, but I hate the way the Catholic Church is covered.
It is usually covered by people in complete ignorance of what the beliefs are.
So we're going to start with some very basic stuff.
Before we get to what the church's policy is on same-sex attraction, why that term exactly?
Why same-sex attraction instead of calling it homosexuality or gay or whatever?
Yeah, it's a great question.
And actually, I'll go back and forth because when I talk with men and women who experience same-sex attraction, a lot of times they'll say, you know, I identify as gay, right?
Lesbian or bisexual.
And so just use the terms that I've asked you to use.
And in that case, absolutely.
I want to be respectful as much as I can.
But when it comes to language, one of the things this particular issue and a lot of other issues, it's really easy to fall into the trap of saying what one experiences is now their identity.
And so I say someone experiences same-sex attraction as opposed to, oh, you are this.
And it's really interesting because the power of that kind of self-identification, even the power of a cultural identification means that if you are your experience or if you are your attraction, then anyone else can't have an opinion about that without essentially attacking your very identity.
And so we can't have a discussion that's fair and can't have that's objective because the entire time, if this is who you are, not just something you experience, then it's a personal attack.
Excellent answer.
I actually hadn't thought of that, but it's a perfectly valid answer.
So what is the Catholic policy about homosexuality?
What is the church telling people?
I come in, I'm a Catholic, and I say, I'm experiencing this.
What does the church teach?
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, it's interesting because there's this book called The Catechism of the Catholic Church.
It's a big chunk of change, really.
It's kind of a summary of what Catholics believe.
There are three paragraphs that are devoted to this particular, because a lot of people think, oh, this overwhelmingly massive teaching of the church that we're just so overtly preoccupied with, gays or lesbians or whatever.
And it's like, no, actually, it is an integral part of our entire understanding of what it is to be a human being, what it is to have to be sexual, which is to be a human being.
So what is the teaching?
The teaching is that every one of us experiences, A, we're all sexual.
B, we all experience a woundedness because of what we would call original sin.
And what I think most Christians call original sin.
And so because of that, one of the ways we're wounded, I think we share it across the board, every human being, is in our sexuality.
So the technical term is called concupiscence, which means that I desire things that are not essentially good for me, not just with regard to sex, but with regard to anything.
And so I need to, in some ways, learn how to love.
And so I'm not, because of original sin, I'm tempted not always to love.
I'm sometimes tempted to use.
So this is, again, for the heterosexual people, homosexual people, whatever, it doesn't matter.
The recognition that sexuality is always meant to be oriented towards the union of the couple.
It's oriented towards permanence.
And it's always oriented towards children.
And so that's a kind of a long, wordy way of essentially saying that the church's teaching with regard to same-sex attraction is part and parcel with the church's teaching regarding all sexuality, heterosexual or homosexual.
But can someone take communion if he's gay?
If he's a practicing gay person, can he take communion?
Great question.
So someone's experience or their attraction is amoral, right?
So we would say that all morality has to do with the intellect and the will.
So if I know something is wrong and freely choose to do it anyways, then that's when I've ventured into the area of sin.
But an attraction or a feeling, an emotion, a situation, those can be basically amoral.
It's when I give consent to that kind of a thing and act upon it.
So for example, here is a heterosexual man who part of his woundedness, part of his brokenness is he seeks out pornography.
So that would be a, I experienced this brokenness.
Now I've given consent to that brokenness and pursued something that's not good for me and he uses other people.
And so they wouldn't be able to receive Holy Communion in that sense as well.
They would have to repent of that, go to confession and whatnot.
Same thing.
Here's a homosexual man.
Maybe even the same behavior.
We would say that, yeah, he would also have to go to confession, repent of that, and then he could move forward when it comes to Holy Communion.
Sorry, I'll stop.
I was going to go on and on.
I was going to go on tear.
Yeah, well, I guess, I mean, I'm just trying to picture if a guy's addicted to porn and he's coming into confession and he confesses and then he takes communion, but then he goes back and he's still addicted to porn and he keeps doing the same thing.
You know, better to ask forgiveness than permission or whatever.
You know, so in other words, is a person in a gay relationship, is he especially excluded in a way that perhaps a divorced person or a guy using porn would not be?
That's a great question.
Because I want to talk about two elements of that, like being especially, because when the church approaches issue of same-sex attraction, it approaches it not as a special case.
Like there's a certain temptation, I think, when it comes to this particular issue of like exceptionalism.
So the exceptionalism is this, is like, if I understand the church is teaching that all human beings are called to chastity, which means rightly ordered sexual, living out rightly ordered sexuality.
But in my case, because I experience this attraction, I'm exempt from the teaching.
Now, we all are tempted to do that with regard to our own kind of pet thing, right?
That temptation is like, well, I have a buddy, my best friend.
He says that ever since he was a kid, he was really arrogant.
He just was really cocky.
And so then he comes along and he encounters Jesus and Jesus says, be humble, for I'm humble kind of a thing, or be humble of heart, gentle of humble heart.
He's like, what?
That's who I am.
Like I've always, my arrogance is kind of what makes me really funny.
It gets me ahead.
And so that sense of being able to say, okay, but I'm not the exception.
So in this case, what you're saying is, is the church being exceptionally harsh to someone?
And I would say, no, but here's the reason why.
Because the church calls everyone to the heights of holiness, essentially.
Now, what makes someone happy is not necessarily having a romantic relationship.
And I think that's one of the big things, big kind of illusions maybe of romanticism that, you know, that's arisen for the last, what, 400, 500 years is this idea that it's domestication or it's that romantic relationship that really fulfills a human being.
Now, it's good, and we would affirm that completely, but we all know, I mean, that you can even be absolutely in love with your wife and still experience a lack.
You can still experience like, I want more out of life.
This is good and it helps me a ton.
But there's even more.
And I think that that's the case when it comes to any kind of relationship, heterosexual or homosexual.
Okay, but sex, an erotic, intimate relationship, is one of the great consolations of life.
I mean, it is one of the things that makes it.
So I hear.
Yes.
Well, it's the news.
I don't think it comes to you as a shock to hear that.
So, I mean, I'm in the arts.
I've lived my whole life in the arts.
I have a lot of gay people in my life who have been great people that I respect and love and admire.
I feel really, you know, I have a wonderful, wonderful marriage, but we're past the age where we're going to have kids.
You know, we don't stop having an erotic relationship because of that, right?
And we continue, and the church would never condemn that.
So if somebody is using their sexuality in a faithful relationship with someone of the same sex, it's hard for me to see.
I think it's hard for a lot of modern people to see what's wrong with that exactly.
Why is that against God's will?
Why isn't that essentially using something for a secondary good?
If I, you know, if I walk outside and I'm carrying your book and somebody attacks me and I hit them over the head with the binding, that's not the purpose of the book, but it's subsuming it into my general safety.
So if I subsume my sexual urge into a friendly, loving, faithful relationship with someone of the same sex, why am I doing something against God?
Right.
That's a great question.
And I would actually affirm, one of the things the church tries to do is affirm everything it can affirm.
So years ago, I was giving a talk on a college campus and on this topic and after the presentation, this young woman stood up and she said, what you say to me about here's my girlfriend is she makes me a better person.
She makes me more generous.
She makes me more patient, all these good things.
And at the end of it, I said, everything you just described, the church would say, that's great.
That is a good relationship.
That is a good friendship.
That's a good support.
That's good companionship.
All the things you described are goods.
The only thing the church would say is not a good would be acting out in the sexual, genital, sexual way with a member of the same sex.
And so then you ask the question, well, why?
So the first thing is needing to recognize that the church isn't a big no.
It's actually affirming all of the great things we can affirm.
So I have a lot of many women who experience same-sex attraction in my life as well, who even live that lifestyle.
And when I speak with them, I will make a point of affirming every positive thing about their stable relationships.
At the same time, there's one thing that I can't affirm, and that's the sexual expression of their relationship.
Why?
It goes back to, I would say, multiple things, but one thing we'll go back to is, okay, what's the nature of the human being and what's the nature of sex?
And so I think that if we were to ask the question, what's the nature of something, we're asking the question, the what it is-ness, the what it-is-ness of a thing.
And a lot of times we can determine the what it isness, of the nature of a thing, by asking the question, what is it for?
So that we find the what it is-ness if we ask the what it's forness.
And so if we look at the reproductive function of the human body or the human person, what is sex for?
It's for two things.
Really clearly, it seems to be scientifically, biologically, experientially.
It's for the unity, union of the couple.
Like you mentioned, that expression of affection, expression of desire and love.
It's also oriented towards children.
Now, children don't have to come out of this, but the very nature of the thing, the what it is-ness, is connected essentially to the what it's for-ness.
And that what it's forness is both those two things.
You'd say unity and procreation.
And so the thing the church maintains is we wade into really dangerous territories when we intentionally work against one or the other.
And so that's what, I mean, so if I, if I were, if a person were to have relations with their spouse or with anybody just to impregnate them against their will, you'd say that is, whoa, that is not a good thing.
And we would also say that if a person were to enter into the sexual embrace with someone for the good unity of it, but we're directly working against the openness to life, we'd also say that that is a disintegration of something that's meant to be integrated.
Okay, I'm not sure.
I'm still not sure I see why it can't be.
You said it has two purposes.
One of them is the unification in love.
And I don't see why it can't be subsumed.
You know, the part about childbearing and procreation, which I agree, that is what it's for.
We know that.
But still, it seems to me that I guess what I'm trying to get at here is this is what always bothers me about Catholic theology.
I love Catholic theology.
I always say that I'm always just on the borderline.
I converted from Judaism to become an Episcopalian, which is Catholic light.
And I get it.
But the thing that always bothers me is this disconnect between theory, the good Thomas Aristotelian theory that I hear you putting forward and people's lives.
So that I feel like a person barred from because gay people fall in love with people of the same sex.
I mean, this is the thing that always kind of astounds me about it not being gay, that they actually fall in love with people of the same sex.
Why isn't there something that is kind of cruel, I suppose, is the word I'm looking for, is kind of cruel in separating them from that instinct that is what they've been given.
It's where they come from.
Right.
That's a great question.
And I would say that in many ways.
So you mentioned our experience versus the theory and how there can be a disconnect in the goodness of it.
So the theory of it, like that sounds sound.
It sounds true.
But to live it out, that doesn't sound good or beautiful.
It sounds painful or even like you said, cruel.
And I would say let's look at the opposite.
Let's look at what's happened in a culture that has kind of wholeheartedly embraced this notion that we can use sexuality or use sex in any way.
Sexuality Redefined: The Cultural Folly00:06:11
We can redefine it for ourselves.
So nature is not about, or not mother nature, but the nature of a thing, is not to be discovered.
It's to be invented and then reinvented as many times as we want to.
It's kind of infinitely malleable.
If we can do it, then we might as well do it.
But I would say, let's look at the way the culture has progressed when as a culture, we've kind of wholeheartedly embraced that idea that we can kind of pick and choose or we can intentionally separate the sexual act, unitive part, and the purcative part from each other.
And I would say that it seems to bear out that it's caused more heartache than it has caused more love.
Now, no, there are obviously couples who contracept who are still in love with each other.
There are, as you mentioned, there are gay couples, lesbian couples who truly, like you said, are in love with each other.
And that's the next step is I would say it would be cruel if we were to say, anyone were to say, that you may not love someone.
That's why the book's called Made for Love is I think we've taken this massive reality in our lives called love, and we've reduced this love to eros, right?
So romantic love.
And then we further reduced romantic love or eros to sex.
In our minds, if someone says, like, you can't have sex, they're like, what, are you kidding me?
But I have this thing in my heart that just wants to give myself.
You're like, yes, that is to be affirmed again, but there's more ways to give yourself.
I mean, as a celibate priest, right?
There's hopefully, God willing, there's more than one way to give yourself and to really actually know deep and real and true love that's ordered again towards like how we I've understood sex to be and how we understand what we understand marriage to be really about.
That yeah.
Well, I have to stop because I'm out of time, but it's an articulate defense of the church, made for love, same-sex attractions, and the Catholic Church by Father Michael Schmitz.
Father Schmitz, thank you very much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Andrew.
Yeah, you know, I mean, he's very articulate in his defense of the church.
I will talk about it another time.
Let's go to sexual follies because we're running out of time.
So a couple of articles caught my eye this week and last one from The New York Times called What Sleeping With Married Men Taught Me About Infidelity.
And really, just the headline alone, I just thought, you know, I'm so glad we've stopped slut-shaming so we can hear from sluts who should be ashamed.
It's just like you're sleeping with married men, you're doing something wrong.
And she says, she says, I'm not sure it's possible to justify my liaisons with married men, but what I learned from having them warrants discussion.
And she goes on to say that most of these guys, that she got a divorce, she was unhappy, she only wanted sex, but she didn't want a relationship.
So she advertised on one of the apps like Tinder, and she got all these approaches from married men because that was what was going to keep them from getting involved with her.
And all of them told her they were not getting any sex at home.
And she comes to the conclusion, she says, in the end, I had to wonder if what these men couldn't face was something else altogether, hearing why their wives no longer wanted to have sex with them.
It's much easier, after all, to set up an account on Tinder.
And it seemed to me that that is a kind of self-blind comment, a comment of somebody saying that they don't understand what they were doing, what she was doing, her experience.
She doesn't know anything.
She doesn't know a single thing about the marriages of the people whose husbands she slept with.
She doesn't know one single thing about it.
She just knows what these guys who are out for prey are telling her.
That's all she knows.
Her experience is the experience of cheating other women from their husbands, of alienating the affections of other women's husbands.
That's her experience.
And I would like to hear, that's what I would like to hear, because that's the only thing she has any expertise in.
Her only expertise is in doing something wrong.
It's in doing something wrong, sleeping with people who belong by right to other women.
That's what she knows about.
And so this idea that she has now become some kind of expert on these people's marriages about which she knows nothing is absolutely absurd.
And this article kind of went together with another article in the New York Post called My Epsom.
I shouldn't laugh at this, but My Epic Bender of Drugs, Booze, and Sex Led to a Happy Marriage.
And this is for a woman who's written a book called Unwifable and how it ended up with her having a happy marriage.
Now, this article, when I first saw this, I thought this is in the same basic, the same basic genre of people doing something terrible to themselves and terrible to other people, probably, and then bragging about it.
But in fact, this article, once you read it, was absolutely opposite.
It was about how she descended into this hell of drug use and sexual licentiousness and sexual promiscuity.
And only when she finally dug her way out of this absolute trench of self-abuse and she went out with a guy and presented him with a list of her emotional demands, and he looked at them and said, Yeah, that's fair.
That's when she got married.
So it was actually a moral story.
But you know, it really does bother me that the New York Times, a former newspaper, is now spend so much of its time waging war against the kind of life that makes most people happy, the kind of sexual life that makes a large, large majority of people happy.
The life of marriage and children and devotion and fidelity.
I mean, If you are in a marriage and the sex has gone out of it, you should find out why.
I mean, that is what you should find out, both of you, not just the man, but also the woman, because that is a very serious part of your marriage.
And to put this forward as if this woman has anything to say about anything except what she was doing is just dishonest.
And I think that is what I have to say because I just feel that this is the sexual folly that is being pushed on people through the New York Times and through all these liberal publications trying to get you to feel that this is normal and this is a normal way of life.
Mailbag Ask00:00:57
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