Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Potpourri.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and I got a fascinating invitation recently to sit down with a guy named Kade to talk about Catholic sexual ethics and gay marriage and trans stuff, and all this stuff with a guy who, at one point, was a traditional Catholic and now is an atheist who is living a gay lifestyle.

Here's a so his name's Kade.

Sorry, I should have started with that.

Guy named Kade, and here's I'm just gonna let him introduce himself in his own words.

My background, I grew up in the secular suburbs of Minneapolis, kind of in a cafeteria Catholic household, um, going to a liberal parish.

Earlier in, early into high school, I went down the apologetics rabbit hole, so I got started with some Catholic Answers.

I think I read through, like, almost all of your publications at the time, a whole lot of the radio show, got into the whole Matt Fradd, Father Mike Schmitz, who is actually in Minnesota, um, met him a few different times, um, and then wanted to discern to become a Carmelite monk.

Loved the idea of religious life and ended up in San Diego near Catholic Answers to study philosophy and filmmaking.

Um, eventually, since leaving, have deconstructed and, and fall much more on kind of, like, the agnostic atheist side, and also like to take a look at Catholic beliefs through a queer lens since coming out and living my hashtag best life, as people say on, on, on my, on my woke left.

was, like, an hour and a half, mostly on, uh, Catholic sexual ethics generally and natural law, and then gay marriage specifically.

And it was I think it's fair.

The way he's billed it as more of a debate.

So there were times where you can probably tell I'm not sure exactly if I should be jumping in or, you know, letting him, uh, speak or e- So there were maybe times when I'd jump in when I shouldn't, and probably times where I didn't jump in when I should.

So I give that as a little bit of background.

I don't think he was, like, trying to trick me.

I think the conversation just went in a different direction than, than we thought it would.

I think it was a really good conversation.

I'm, uh, happy to have it, and I think one of the things that it reveals is, uh, the difficulty in some ways of getting to the bottom of these questions and the importance of getting our basic, uh, what someone has called first principles right at the outset.

So when we're talking about sexual ethics, and we're gonna be talking a lot about this idea of what's called natural law, but just on the moral law generally.

I'm gonna give a long clip here, and then I'm gonna give some shorter clips as we go, uh, from the conversation.

And by the way, I will include the entire conversation over on Kade's channel at the very end 'cause he graciously put the whole thing up, and I don't think he edited it at all.

Or if he did, it was just to eliminate some of, like, the awkward ums and uhs or, you know, something like that.

So on sexual ethics, I think it's important to understand what we're talking about because this is something that not only do a lot of non-Catholics or ex-Catholics get wrong, it's something I've even seen Catholics get wrong, where they think of the moral law as this external imposition of authority.

And that is neither a good nor biblical way of understanding it.

So here's kind of a contrast between those two.

Today we're going to be looking at the Catholic sexual ethic framework and how it relates to a few different LGBT or queer, um, issues that we want to talk about today.

So kind of hand it back to you, Joe, on explaining what is the framework that the Catholic Church uses when evaluating sexual ethics questions, um, and kind of what are the major principles, let's say, of what the Catholic Church teaches on sexuality?

And then we'll kind of base the discussion from there.

That sounds great.

And, and-

Yeah.

please feel free to jump in and cut in if you, you know, interject, whatever.

Awesome, yeah.

Um, I wanted to start, actually, f- found a quote from a 2016 Washington Post article, uh, entitled, Is Porn Immoral?

That Doesn't Matter.

It's a Public Health Crisis, and it's by-

Mm-hmm.

the sociologist Gail Dines.

And I think this is a good way of framing the conversation because I think that we get the whole idea of morality and ethics, um, pretty backwards from the beginning.

So people are often coming into it, whether they know it or not, with a set of misconceptions, and I thought this piece, really from the headline on, encapsulated that really well.

So Dines writes, The thing is, no matter what you think of pornography, whether it's harmful or a harmless fantasy, the science is there.

After 40 years of peer-reviewed research, so scholars can say with confidence that porn is an industrial product that shapes how we think about gender, sexuality, relationships, intimacy, sexual violence, and gender equality for the worse.

So what I thought was striking about that is, I mean, I agree with her conclusions.

I think if, if you asked anyone why, you know, Christians are against pornography, those would all be very close to the top of the list, if not the top of the list.

Um, she thought, like, okay, well, it's whether or not it's a moral issue, it's this public health issue.

And I thought that whole framing is, is just insane because the whole reason it's a moral issue is it's a public health issue.

So digging into that and kind of thinking about that, uh, I came up with three aspects that I think, when we think about morality badly, we tend to think about it, number one, as arbitrary.

Moral laws are arbitrary, you know?

So, uh, you know, the Church says no sex before marriage, but they could just as easily say no sex after marriage or no sex on Wednesdays or during Price Is Right or, you know, something, you know.

Like, it just, some arbitrary set of rules.

It's like the-

Yes.

off-sides rule in soccer where you're like, Uh, okay, whatever.

I mean Uh, and then second, if it's arbitrary, you're like, well, w- who gets to arbitrate?

And so in this view, the wrongness of a moral law is determined externally and in an authoritarian way, meaning it's all based on power and authority.

So God is more powerful than you, so he makes this thing that would have been fine not okay.

And if that's your conception, where morality is this external thing being imposed upon you, then the third thing that follows is the moral law, almost by definition, is an impediment to your freedom and flourishing and your hashtag best life.

Uh, so to-

Yeah.

to quote a phrase I heard recently.

Uh, so those would be kind of the three aspects of misunderstanding the moral law.

Meaning, like, if that's how you're thinking about morality, just know that the way you're thinking about it and the way that people who've really, like, thought about it- deeply, and, and believe in it, think about it, are just, like, completely passing.

Now, you might think people are wrong to think that it's something other than that, but you should at least be aware that there's, you know, there's a gulf there in what you're imagining moral law to be and what the people you're talking to understand moral law to be.

So, that's the negative view, that's the, the view I'd say don't hold that.

And the flip side, uh, if it wasn't obvious enough, would be to say, number one, moral laws are not arbitrary.

They are rooted in human nature, and sh- we would say human designedness, that God makes you a certain way.

So in the same way that, you know, the carmaker has an instruction manual, or if you've got a product it might say do this, don't do that, you know, don't, don't, uh, scrub a cast iron skillet, uh, don't put it in the dishwasher, you know, all of that's not some arbitrary limitation.

It's rooted in, uh, having a proper understand- a proper understanding of the design.

'Cause sometimes I think when you hear, you know, even, like, thinking about the name of this show, eh, where it is referenced to this intrinsically disordered language of the catechism, which sounds totally, uh, clinical, sterile, disembodied, maybe even, you know, dehumanizing, but it's coming from this, uh, this vision where it says moral law is rooted in a proper understanding of the human person.

And so, if we wanna know whether something is right and wrong, absolutely we should say, What does God say about it?

But we should also look at, like, well, what do we know about the human person and human flourishing?

And so anything that hurts my flourishing is wrong.

So that's, that's the first.

It's, it's not arbitrary, it's rooted in human nature.

But that means, secondly, moral law is principally something internal.

Like, sin makes you suffer not chiefly because, you know, oh, God's mad at you and he wants to hurt you.

No, no, no.

It's not that.

It's sin makes you suffer because you did the thing you were not supposed to do, and the reason you weren't supposed to do it is it hurt.

You know, my, uh, I've got a one-year-old and he knows he's not allowed to play with electrical cords, and he loves to do this as a result.

He l- he likes to just pick them up and hold onto them and say, Uh-oh.

Unfortunately, all he does is that, so it's actually pretty harmless.

But he doesn't know why he's not supposed to do them, and it just feels like an impediment to his freedom.

But the reality is, it's related to his design.

So even though there's an external kind of force saying don't do it- Yeah.

the harm caused would be internal.

I mean, literally in that case, 'cause it's electricity.

Uh, and, and so that's the nature of sin, that the harm it causes and the kind of weight or the force of the moral law happens at an interior level.

So even if you, you know, let's say you had a, like, the purge, you know?

Like, there's no laws for one day.

And even if that worked with divine law, you would actually do harm to yourself doing all the things that you were told not to do, because the reason you were told not to do them is it they'll hurt you.

The, even if there was no external force, God, society, whatever, you would still have this as, as a consequence.

So it's not authority-based, it's, uh, not external-based, it's internal in terms of the, the way sin plays out, and thus the way morality and ethics principally operate.

So at this point, Cade, I think very naturally, uh, raises several different objections to this idea of the moral law, and particularly, uh, he's got in view the question of what's called natural law.

Now, natural law are just those parts of the moral law that you can know from reason alone.

So, there are some things that we believe in as Catholic Christians that we can't expect a non-Christian to believe in, because it's something that's just coming from the Bible, right?

So, fair enough, you know, something like you need to go to mass.

There's an element of that that you couldn't possibly have known from reason alone.

Now, the idea that you should worship the creator in some way is something you can know from reason alone, and that's why we find religions all over the world.

The particulars of what that looks like aren't something you could know from reason.

You have to have God reveal that to you.

So sometimes we get confused in our thinking about this, because most of the time you know things from a combination of your reason and what God has revealed to you through faith.

And so you may not know which things are which, but it's important in a context like the imposition of law to know, well, which things could anyone from reason alone know?

Because that's kind of fair play, even in a secular society.

You don't have to be a Christian to know murder is wrong.

And even though as a Christian you may know it from a combination of both your reason and the Ten Commandments.

So, th- with that in mind, we're talking, like I said, about natural law, this idea that there are some principles that are gonna be knowable from reason alone, and that this is going to include some things like elements of sexual ethics.

And so Cade is going to, uh, begin by just spelling out his, his objection to the framework.

How I'm gonna approach the, the, the question And I think- Yeah.

what people watching are gonna see that we're both gonna approach these questions from wildly different lenses, and so there's absolutely gonna be, like, there's this huge mismatch to it.

It's really at this point, which is about 10 minutes into the interview or conversation, that I realized it was gonna be more of an informal debate, which again, is fine, but I hadn't necessarily prepared for that, which is one of the reasons I like having this opportunity to say, Here's some more stuff I would've prepared if I, if I knew this was going to be a debate.

And so, he has several critiques that he offers, and these are critiques that you should know if you're gonna, you know, argue from natural law, or critiques that, uh, maybe you have yourself against the idea of natural law.

And the first is that, for all of the talk about natural law being this thing that you can know from reason alone, it is suspiciously a very Catholic-dominated sort of field.

Now, that matters, because the whole point of natural law, as St. Paul says in Romans 2, is that there are some things that the Gentiles, who don't have the law, know, that by nature they know what the law requires and this shows that the law is written on their hearts.

That there are some things that God has written on every human heart.

So, for instance, you know that it is wrong to rob your neighbor, and if you are robbed, you feel a sense of an injustice having been done to you.

Now, that's true regardless of your religion, and you can educate yourself into stupidity.

You can come up with a moral theory that says actually robbery is okay under these conditions .

but that base-level knowledge is something that even a child realizes.

You know, they'll steal candy from a baby and you'll see that they get very outraged about it.

They have an intuitive sense, not only, I want something and don't have it, but, An injustice has been done to me.

So that's evidence of what we would call natural law.

Now obviously, not everyone has a sophisticated understanding of this, but moral intuition and everything is rooted in the idea of natural law.

When it's, you know, proper moral intuition.

Again, society, miseducation, those things can color it and distort it, but that base level knowledge that you should do the good and avoid evil, that's something that's built into our human programming, so to speak.

Now, Cade's first objection to this is that, sure, for all that talk of how this is open to everybody, again, this looks suspiciously like a front for Catholicism.

So when it comes to natural law, kind of my, my central thesis is that the Catholic conception of natural law is a unreliable, uninvestigatable, and empirically harmful framework that gets to conclusions that are ultimately all, or that are ultimately Catholic teachings, but with extra steps.

And what I mean by that is that once, in this whole conversation, the question becomes, so can we use that framework that you're bringing and w- and apply it in the secular sphere to questions when it comes to what we want to legislate?

And it seems like often there's this equivocation of like, is this for Christians or is this for the world, in that God designed us a particular way, and that natural law relies on the presupposition that God has designed us, so it seems like the conclusions are inherently religious.

So his argument there is, for all the talk of natural law, we're starting with a belief in God and deriving this idea of designedness and, uh, natures and all of this from our starting theological premises.

And the counterargument is that, no, this actually works the other way around, that we actually observe that things are designed, that they have a purpose, that they have what's called a telos, like an end or a goal or a function, and from that, people often, but not always, reason to God.

So here's more of, uh, his argument kind of on that point.

It seems like the only people who take classical natural law seriously are people who've already, who already belong to the Catholic faith, that it seems to be an internally consistent worldview, where I don't think there's any gaping holes within it.

But I think that it's an unprincipled approach in that a secular person, even if they grant the idea of natural law, isn't going to even come close to the particular nuances of Catholic teaching when it comes to intrinsic evils.

I mean, Aristotle isn't able to come to it, nor do I think any other scholars out there in the field.

And even within the field of, let's say, ethics or metaethics among philosophers, natural law theory seems to really only be people that have a need to get to the conclusions of Catholic teaching.

Um, and that's kinda my, my, my, my, my assorted thoughts that I was thinking of this morning on natural law and how we approach this question.

So I think there's something kind of internally curious about claiming, on the one hand, uh, that the only people trying to do natural law and virtue ethics are Catholics seeking to justify a belief they really have from the Bible, uh, and then trying to come up with some sort of philosophical explanation to justify or rationalize that belief.

And then the only figure you cite is Aristotle, a Greek pagan who's clearly not trying to rationalize his belief in the Bible because, as far as we know, he'd never heard of the Bible.

And it's not just Aristotle.

Some of the biggest names in natural law and virtue ethics are people who weren't Catholic, or they became Catholic because of their interest in natural law and not the other way around.

And there's several important figures we can cite just in the history of 20th and 21st century, uh, philosophy in this field.

So almost without a doubt, like the biggest name in this field would be either Elizabeth Anscombe, we'll talk about her in a little bit, or Alasdair MacIntyre.

Now, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue is kind of the touchstone text, uh, in terms of a book-length treatment of virtue ethics.

And when he writes the first edition, he's an atheist who's just kind of coming out of Marxism.

A couple years later, he converts to Catholicism.

But notice, the cause and effect there is not he's already a committed Catholic who seeks to rationalize his beliefs.

No.

An intellectually honest inquiry leads him to the realization that virtue ethics is true, and this helps to open him up to the idea that maybe human nature does exist and there is a God who designed us with a nature and so on.

But that is the result of his honest intellectual inquiry, not a sort of rationalization of a preexisting belief.

And MacIntyre's by no means alone.

One of the other major players in the field, Philippa Foot, who I just discovered in preparing this episode was the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, the US president, even though she was a British philosopher.

Fascinating.

Neither here nor there.

Pretty interesting.

She's the one who gives us the famous trolley problem.

You know, if you got a trolley on the track and you can flip the switch, should you do it?

And she is a critic of utilitarianism and- and those kind of ethical systems, and she's a major force for virtue ethics and for natural law, and she's an atheist.

She doesn't believe in a God who actually gives us nature.

She does believe that things have natures, they have purposes, but she doesn't believe they're divinely given.

So she's clearly not trying to rationalize her Catholicism because she's not Catholic.

Third figure I'd point to here is Jay Budziszewski.

Uh, his book, Written on the Heart, was, I believe, 1997.

It's all about, as the subtitle says, the case for natural law, and it's something like seven years later that he converts to Catholicism.

So again, clearly there are plenty of people who end up Catholic because they take this, as Cade says, internally consistent way of viewing the world seriously and realize that it points to there being a God and that it ultimately points to the Catholic claims about God being true.It's not the case that these are all just, you know, blind, committed Catholics seeking to rationalize their worldview and make it look more secular than it is.

It's just, as a matter of fact, not the case.

And one of the ways we can see this is not just by looking at the major thinkers, but by doing a sort of application of natural law.

So, the whole point of natural law is that things have natures, they have purposes, they have design, they have what someone's gonna tell is an end.

And as I pointed out to Kade, this can be observed from just looking at the body, not from reading scripture or, you know, consulting the stars.

If I ask you, like, What does your respiratory system do?

I bet you can tell me, like, its purpose is to respire.

It's right there in the name.

If I ask you, What does your circulatory system do?

You, y- it circulates blood.

Right there in the name.

But for some reason, when we get to the reproductive system, people get very confused about what it does.

But once again, I would just say it's right there in the name.

That if you wanna know what is the telos and the purpose, biologists can tell you a good deal of that.

Like, why do mammals have reproductive systems?

Well, to reproduce, to, to bear offspring.

And so that doesn't mean you can't enjoy it, it doesn't mean it shouldn't be good.

And in fact, one of the reasons we enjoy it is to incentivize the creation of another generation, in the same way that you have taste buds that are there for your pleasure so that you'll do the work of eating, because otherwise you'll starve to death 'cause it's an inconvenience.

Um, and so all the pleasure and pain, the pains of hunger, the pleasure of taste, and all the pains and pleasures of sex are tied to the telos of the reproductive system, which you don't need the Bible to tell you.

You can look at a human body.

Um, and, and so to that end, the thing that we can then say, going one step further, is every other system in your body is complete.

You have a complete circulatory system, you have a complete respiratory system, but you only have half of a reproductive system.

Which means that when we talk about orientation, we often talk about psychological and psychosexual orientation, that you're romantically attracted to or sexually attracted to somebody else.

But physically, everyone is heterosexually oriented, that you have one piece of a two-piece puzzle and you can tell where that fits based on the design, based on the structure of the organ, or based on a deeper biological understanding.

So you have half a reproductive system, and it's only completed with one party of the opposite sex.

And so right there, we have what we might call a biological basis for what becomes the human institution of marriage.

So again, like, you can come to that conclusion just by understanding that the respiratory system is for respiring.

There's no verse in the Bible, you, you don't need to read about, you know, the breath of God going into Adam to be able to understand that.

You can look at the lungs, or you can look at the circulatory system, circulating blood, and you can look at the reproductive system.

You can observe animal behavior.

You can do just biology and come to a lot of these conclusions.

It's not a matter of you needing to, you know, even pray about it, to be quite frank.

All right, so that's the first objection.

This is just, you know, a thinly veiled Catholicism.

No, I agree with him that it often comes to extremely Catholic conclusions, but that's because all truth converges.

So, a proper truth from reason and a truth from scripture should end up in the same place.

If I know from reason that it's wrong to steal and I know from the Bible it's wrong to steal, that's not an argument against theft being, like, actually okay.

It's like, Oh, well you just think that because the Bible tells you so.

It's like, No, no.

Maybe the Bible's just right.

And so likewise, if you find that this internally consistent philosophical system, this way of viewing the world, this way of viewing ethics, leads to Catholic conclusions independent of the people being Catholic, that's just confirmation of the Catholic claim.

But the next objection that Kade raises, uh, it seems to be kind of the opposite.

So rather than this just being a, a way for Catholics to announce the Catholic Church's teaching, he objects also that natural law theorists disagree.

Like I said with it being unreliable, um, is that, uh, if natural law were negotiated like other ethical frameworks, like actor rule utilitarianism, like we expect disagreement in those because those fields allow for it.

But it seems like Catholicism comes to these very hard, um, very, very concrete barriers when it comes to ethics, talking, talking about things like intrinsic evils.

Um, it seems like we don't have a clear way to determine teloi.

We don't know that they exist, we don't know what they are or how they work, and if, if they is even their, their preferred, preferred pronouns, to throw in a joke in the middle of a conversation.

So I agree with about two-thirds of what he's just said there.

So on the one hand, he's absolutely right that natural law theorists will sometimes disagree, even on some important issues.

And he's also right that this is true of any kind of philosophical framework.

If you say, I'm gonna be a utilitarian, you're gonna find utilitarians disagree with each other.

So if it's an argument against a philosophical system, that philosophers disagree with each other, well, I've got bad news for you.

Philosophers love disagreeing with each other, even philosophers in the same kind of school.

Uh, Thomists disagree with each other.

You, you know, virtue ethicists disagree with each other.

Emotivists disagree with each other.

This isn't itself an argument against a philosophy.

If anything, it seems to prove that these people are actually doing honest inquiry and not just serving as, like, the PR spokespeople for the magisterium of the Catholic Church.

He's also right that the Catholic Church takes firmer positions at times than you would necessarily be able to get from natural reason alone.

In fact, the Catholic Church agrees with him there, and I'm gonna get to that in just a second.

The third is the part where I disagree.

Like, it doesn't follow that because there's some disagreement on the precise nature of ends, that we can't say if ends exist.

You know, like, people who are utilitarians believe that we should do the greatest good for the greatest number of people, and they wildly disagree about what that looks like in concrete cases.

That doesn't mean that there's no such thing as greatest good or greatest number of people or anything like that.The fact that we might disagree on how to achieve a goal doesn't mean that the goal doesn't exist.

It does mean that we might have opposite ideas of how to achieve it.

It does mean that we might disagree about, you know, the idea of nature, but that doesn't disprove nature in the philosophical sense any more than, say, two biologists disagreeing disproves the existence of biology.

So with that said, I want to turn back to the area where, um, I would suggest that the Catholic Church would agree with Kate, which is, there are times where God has revealed something more clearly than we would necessarily get from reason alone, and the Ten Commandments are going to be a great example of that.

Everything in the Ten Commandments is knowable from reason.

We can nuance out a little bit about the Sabbath, but even the idea that you should honor and worship God, that's knowable from reason.

But that you shouldn't covet other people's stuff, that you shouldn't steal, that you shouldn't murder, that you shouldn't, you know, create false idols, all of that, reason alone can tell you that.

And so, we have on the one hand Saint Paul in Romans 1 talking about how certain things are knowable from reason alone.

For instance, he says of the pagans, Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature, that's God's, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.

So clearly, there's an element where, you know so I, I want to resist.

Sometimes you'll hear Catholics say, Oh, sure.

Like, just embrace we get this all from Catholicism, and so let's just openly, like, enforce Catholicism on the secular polity.

And that's not actually the Catholic answer to this, because it's, it's obscuring this role of natural law, and the distinction between revealed and natural law.

But there's an overlap, and Vatican I talks about this.

That even though Romans 1 is true, that some of this stuff is knowable by reason, Nevertheless, the council says, it has pleased his wisdom and goodness to reveal himself and the eternal decrees of his will to the human race in another and supernatural way.

As the Apostle says, and then it quotes Hebrews 1, that God has revealed himself in many and various ways through the prophets, and then ultimately by his Son.

And then Vatican I says, Indeed it must be attributed to this divine revelation that those things which, in divine things are not impenetrable to human reason by itself, can even in this present condition of the human race be known readily by all with firm certitude and with no admixture of error.

That's a mouthful.

Let's unpack it.

There are things which you could, in principle, figure out from reason alone which God has nevertheless seen fit to reveal explicitly, directly in revelation.

And again, the Ten Commandments are a really good example of this.

Why?

So that they can be known by everybody, with firm certitude, and without the risk of error creeping in.

So, you know, maybe I could come up with a, an ethical system that says greed is good, and it's actually really good to covet, maybe it's even good to steal.

By reason, I should know that's wrong, but nevertheless, you will find people who, uh, fall into that error.

So to avoid the possibility of you falling into error, the Ten Commandments are revealed.

Even though strictly speaking they didn't have to be, it's still helpful for them to be, 'cause now everybody has access to them, you don't have to do a lot of work to get there, and you're less likely to fall into a mistake.

So Kate's right.

Uh, unaided reason, you might end up with a diversity of opinions about a certain topic that, with the aid of revelation, we would have a clearer answer on.

This then leads him, uh, to pose a question that I think is a common one, but I would suggest is actually malformed.

I'll explain why.

All to say, I think if people are honest in this discussion of, This comes from my religion, or, or this comes in spite of religion, or this be- this becomes, or this comes because that I'm not religious, I think it's, it's an honesty step.

And so to your earlier point, when it comes to your position on gay marriage, maybe explain that to the audience, a few reasons why you think that, and then is that a religious determination because of Catholicism?

Or is that purely secular and your mind could change based off of the studies?

So, right.

I mean, I would just say consider your opinion on theft and murder.

Are those things that you know to be wrong from scripture?

Well, certainly if you're a Christian or a Jew, or many of the world's religions.

Are those also things that you know to be wrong from reason?

Also yes.

So is it based on your religious belief or your secular belief?

Well, it'd be both.

But then he suggests that if it's based on secular belief, that it must be open to being changed by the studies, and I would just say that's wrong, because that's assuming a certain view of how secular knowledge works or ought to work in which there are no intrinsic evils, there are no principles that are always true, and anything could be upended by the next study that comes out.

And we're gonna talk about that k- as we go on, but think about this just in the context of murder and theft, because those are fairly non-controversial.

If some study came out that said, Hey, if you steal from people, th- like, the GDP goes up, would you be like, I guess I'm gonna go take my neighbor's PlayStation?

I don't know if PlayStations are still the latest thing.

Wii?

No?

That's old.

I'm an old person.

I'm gonna go take my neighbor's gaming system.

No, you wouldn't say that hopefully, right?

You would realize, doesn't matter what the study is, I know from reason, and if I'm a Christian, from faith as well, that this is wrong and this is inherently wrong regardless of the ends they Like, uh, they don't justify the evil means of stealing.

Okay.

That bit about studies is relevant because a lot of his argument against natural law is that actually, if you look at the latest and greatest studies, you'll see gay marriage is actually good.

And his claim is that it's good not just for the individuals, but also even good for children who are kind of subjected to it.

I'd also throw in there that, um, that as you pointed out, when it comes to true human flourishing, it seems like natural law has this game of special pleading in that, um, it talks about, like, natural law is our participation in an- an authentic human flourishing.

So then the question becomes, if we see something that does lead to authentic human flourishing, and there's studies that support that, then would natural law say something different?

'Cause I think, well, we'll talk about this later in detail when it comes to something like gay marriage.

I would say that the ability for couples to get married of the same sex leads to human flourishing and to legislate or to make steps against that actually causes harm.

Now, you'll hear this kinda claim a lot, you know, just trust the science, in science we trust, that sort of thing.

But there's one study in particular, or really it's a set of studies, it's kind of a meta-analysis, sort of.

And, uh, it's one that I didn't have access to at the time, but now do and have more intelligent things I can add to the conversation.

It's the so-called Cornell studies.

When it comes to kids flourishing, I, I grant the premise that kids raised in a two-parent household, statistically speaking, do better.

I, I, I don't think any, uh, any serious sociologist is disagreeing with that particular data set.

And what we see if we look at something like Cornell's What We Know where it looks at out of 75, out of 79 studies that they looked at when it comes to gay marriage, when you account for factors, um, some of the studies that are like, ah, kids don't do as well when it comes to gay parents, rely on, um, one of the parents having been divorced and, or both parents having been divorced and then straight marriages and then coming together later in life.

And like, uh, I mean, we, we know that divorce is, is tough on kids.

Um, or they look at particularly adoption issues and we know that adoption, especially later in life, which we know that gay couples are more likely to do, is something that, statistically speaking, has challenges both for straight and gay couples.

So if we count for all relevant factors, and that's why I like to use the language of similarly situated, kids do just as well, if not better, according to a majority of peer-reviewed studies.

So the first thing that we should know is the What We Know project at Cornell is by no means some sort of neutral analysis of the evidence just i- in the pursuit of truth.

It's an advocacy project and only very thinly veiled.

And if you look at the bios of any of the people involved, particularly the director of it, Dr. Nathaniel Frank, who is living a gay lifestyle himself and boasts in his bio that for more, more than two decades he's been a consulting research and communications strategist for LGBTQ organizations, h- this is openly activists running the kind of collection of research and deciding which research gets reported on and which doesn't.

And so as a result, they're claiming conclusions that just cannot be justified from the flimsy evidentiary basis that they have.

I'll give you a few examples 'cause they, they kind of acknowledge some of the critiques they've been getting.

Uh, in the What We Know Project's own kind of analysis on what does the scholarly research say, they said that they identified 79 scholarly c- studies that met their criteria.

So notice they're already screening some studies out, which is normal, but it'd be great to have a, a deeper, uh, look into what their bases are for what they include and what they exclude, because a lot of the ones that get included are pretty weak studies.

But they're gonna say 75 of them find that the children of gay and lesbian parents fare no worse than other children and they've got reasons to throw out the other four.

But then they say, While many of the sample sizes were small and some studies lacked a control group, so yikes and yikes.

If you know anything about research, this isn't double-blind, this, there's not, like, two groups that you're comparing a control and a variable.

Y- And you're dealing with a small sample size, these are all things that are, are big red flags.

Nevertheless, they say, Researchers regard such studies as providing the best available knowledge about child adjustment and do not view large representative samples as essential.

Now, already that's a little bit striking.

I understand there's a role for things like longitudinal studies, but a lot of these aren't.

But then they say, Some critics of the LGB parenting research object to the small, nonrandom sampling methods known as convenience sampling.

So now we've introduced a third problem with the research is this is not randomized.

And they say, Yet within the field, convenience sampling is not considered a methodological flaw, but simply a limitation to generalizability.

Well, the problem here is they are generalizing.

They're saying the scholarly research says there's no worse outcomes.

That's a generalization that, by their own analysis, can't be defended on the flimsy evidence that they have of, you know, small sample sizes, no control group, uh, nonrandom sampling methods and the like.

Nevertheless, in fairness, they do point to a couple of studies that they say are immune from these critiques.

They say, It is important to note, moreover, that some of the research that finds no differences among children with same-sex parents does use large representative data.

A 2010 study by Stanford researcher Michael Rosenfeld used census data to examine the school advancement of 3,500 children with same-sex parents, finding no significant differences between households headed by same-sex and opposite-sex parents when controlling for family background.

So, I thought it'd be nice to take a closer look at this study.

And the first thing to note, uh, is that it's only looking at one factor: how likely a student is held back or how likely they move on to the next grade.

And so that's already, uh, a little bit striking because if the claim is the outcomes are just as good, and by just as good you only mean how likely are they to fail a class and, and that's it, that's an astonishingly, uh, exaggerated claim to draw from that evidence.

Now, in fairness, you've got 79 different studies, but a lot of them are bad studies.

Some of them don't agree with you.

So these are still pretty wild conclusions to be coming to on the basis of literally looking at one factor of just how likely are students to have to repeat a grade.The other thing that, uh, should be noticed is that as they explain, the studies find that while the children of same-sex couples are as likely to progress normally through the grades as children of most other family structures, there is one family structure that consistently outperforms them, heterosexual married couples, which I thought was the whole claim, that they did just as well.

But no, actually the study says, Heterosexual married couples are the family type whose children have the lowest rates of grade retention.

Grade retention means you have to repeat the grade, so the lower the better.

So, f- in other words, they have the highest rate of going onto the next grade or of graduating.

But it, then it says, But the advantage of heterosexual married couples is mostly due to their higher socioeconomic status.

Now, that's an explanation to try to explain away the data, but there's a very different claim between saying, Yeah, even though the children of same-sex couples actually do a lot worse, that might just be because of money, and saying, The children of same-sex couples don't do a lot worse, because they, in fact, do.

And as we're gonna see, they do pretty markedly worse, and that's with Rosenfeld putting a pretty big thumb, well, two thumbs, as we're gonna see, on the scales.

But even he has to try to explain away, uh, the disparities that you might notice the Cornell study claims don't exist.

The disparities do exist, and Rosenfeld tries to explain them away.

He suggests there are actually several theoretical reasons for explaining away these disparities.

Uh, the first is that maybe it's the legal privileges of marriage.

We're gonna remember that.

So, it was the idea like, oh, because dad and dad aren't married, therefore their son's doing worse in school.

That's the argument.

Second, the evolutionary theory that parents invest more in their own biological children.

Now, that's actually pretty huge because, as they note, Same-sex couples, absent a prior sex change, cannot both be the biological parents of any one child.

So, this is already actually a red flag, that putting kids in a same-sex environment where they're with zero or one biological parent is likely to do some damage.

Now, I understand, like, children cannot always be with their two biological parents, but Rosenfeld is not saying this is irrelevant.

He's pretty explicitly saying, you know, this is very relevant.

Third, the large majority of children of same-sex couples from the 2000 census were children from prior heterosexual relationships.

In other words, they live with mom or dad, but mom or dad divorced and sh- now they live with a new partner.

But notice here, the critique is on the one hand, well, they're with non-biological parents, or on the other hand, well, they're with a divorced parent who's remarried.

Now, that's relevant because as I'm gonna point out in a little bit, uh, in response to Kade, those are the two ways that you're likely to end up in a gay home, is, you know, parental divorce or adoption, and if you say both of those are bad for kids, it seems like you're making a pretty good argument against same-sex parenting.

But it turns out Rosenfeld isn't telling the whole truth.

So, that was in the Demography journal, and I think three years later there was a follow-up by Douglas Allen, Katherine Pakaluk, and Joseph Price looking at literally the exact same data, and they took the same body of census data.

And what they found is that the original study, the Rosenfeld one, used a sample in which the children are, number one, biologically related to the household head, and number two, in which the children and parents have been living at the same address for the past five years.

So, they're only looking at kind of stable relationships in which a kid is with, uh, one biological parent.

As they note, Rosenfeld is right to recognize that there are potential confounders here, the, you know, all of those things, as I said a second ago, can make life more complicated.

When you have divorce, when you have, you know, dad leaving mom to go, you know, date another guy or vice versa, or w- when you're adopted into a family, you're not biologically related to either parent, any of those things, those things are all complicated, they're messy.

But if you control for those, if you eliminate those cases from the census data, you're actually getting rid of most cases.

As the follow-up study points out, there's two problems with this.

Number one, those two factors might actually be really relevant in that same-sex and opposite-sex couples might be in different positions relative to their kids.

For instance, the odds that both parents are biologically mom and dad of the child is clearly higher in a heterosexual marriage.

And the other reason this is a problem is that if you get rid of all of those cases where there are these complicating factors, you're getting r- rid of most of the real-life cases.

You've reduced the sample size by 55%.

So, sure, if you only take the cases you regard as, like, the cream of the crop, same-sex couples, then you can make them look pretty good, but you're not actually giving a representative sample.

You've gotten rid of most of the cases that we find in the census data.

Now, I didn't have access to all of this during my conversation with Kade, but I did point out this same problem, that these confounders are really relevant to how we think about kids' success or failure, uh, living with two people of the same sex.

You said, um, something like, If we account for all relevant factors, kids do just as well, if not better- Mm-hmm.

in a same-sex, uh, family, but you isolated the two factors that would produce a child in this situation, which were adoption and divorce, because they're not biologically being born into, you know, a situation with two dads or two moms.

So, they're either getting there because of divorce and remarriage or because of, you know, IVF or because of adoption, and all of those are tremendously, uh, hard on kids.

What if you just take your thumbs off the scale?

Leave that 55% in even though they've got messy real-life circumstances .

and just compare how are real life same-sex and opposite sex kids performing in the census data.

Now, admittedly, this is from 2000, but this is the stuff that Cornell is pointing to as evidence that it's equal outcome.

Is it really?

Well, if you don't screen out 55% of the cases, you've got a sample size of 1.6 million.

This is mass- this is great, and it's, uh, completely fair, right?

You're not screening for your preferred preferential group, you're just taking what we find in the census data, and what we find is alarming.

Namely, we find that the children of heterosexual, uh, married couples outperform by 35% on the one rubric that Rosenfeld is looking at.

That is a huge difference, and in journal article meant to tell us that they perform basically the same, there's actually a statistically significant, quite large difference.

In fact, even if you look at heterosexual cohabitating couples, remember, one of the excuses was, Well, maybe it's because gay people can't get married, at the time that, you know, you're looking at the data.

Well, if you just compare heterosexual couples who aren't married, we find that even their kids are outperforming by 15%.

So, no, there actually appears to be a quite serious disparity in the educational outcomes, which again, are just one small sliver of the life outcome kind of differences.

The authors conclude together, These findings are strikingly different from those of the original study, and the differences are large enough to be noteworthy.

With respect to normal school progress, children residing in same-sex households can be distinguished statistically from those in traditional married homes and in heterosexual cohabitating households.

This isn't just like a blip in the data.

This is a statistically significant conclusion looking at 1.6 million cases.

That's huge.

Now, you might say, in fairness, well, we have scant data on a lot of this stuff because we don't have, you know, multiple generations of huge numbers of people being raised in same-sex households, so it's hard to isolate the variables and all that.

And I will agree with all of that, which is why Cornell shouldn't be lying through its teeth about the outcomes being the same.

But it also is worth pointing out that moms and dads aren't the same, and we've had moms and dads for a long time, and there's actually a wealth of studies that point to moms and dads not being the same, which should tell us that two moms and two dads aren't the same as a mom and a dad, right?

Like, it follows logically that even if you don't have same-sex couples, if you know the difference between moms and dads, you can point to there being some difference in outcomes.

I'm just gonna give you one slightly provocative example from the 2014, uh, issue of the Pediatrics Journal called Parental Death During Childhood and Subsequent School Performance.

I will not even attempt to explain why this is.

What they find is not only, unsurprisingly, that kids perform a lot worse in school if a parent has died, but they specifically perform a lot worse if their dad has died.

They perform badly, but not as badly if their mom has died.

This is true for girls and for boys.

This is true regardless of the age of parental death, and so on.

Now, I don't make any grand theory as to why that is, but only observe that we see very clearly in the data, if we didn't have the intuition to figure this out on our own, that moms and dads are not the same.

They don't provide the same thing for kids, and that kids benefit from having a mom and a dad in a way that even the most generous, loving, same-sex couple can't possibly provide for their kids.

So, that leaves one last dimension to this.

And really, again, there's, there's much more in the conversation, but I wanted to just highlight these kind of aspects, because one of the arguments that Kade raises is this idea of intrinsic evils.

He's against this idea.

So I wanna ask, you know, are there moral absolutes?

And he makes a couple of arguments that appear to be against it.

So first he says this.

But it seems like the Catholic church has these absolute stances on these quote, intrinsic evils, unquote, that make it unable to actually engage with the dialogue that's happening.

And so if natural law was a framework in which we looked for true flourishing of human persons, like what makes sense to engage in these issues and have disagreements, it would make sense to engage in these issues and have nuance and have particular cases.

But if I came to the table with a framework that says, Everything before I enter this discussion is, like, kind of these clear-cut issues, there's intrinsic evils, and then if there is gray area, it seems counterintuitive to have a framework that gives black and white statements, give gray statements.

I'd say two things.

Number one, I think it's unreasonable to say you're gonna discount from the conversation someone who comes in believing that there are moral absolutes, like, We should never torture.

We should never rape.

We should never kill.

And number two, I don't think there's any hypocrisy or confusion about saying some things are absolute issues of right and wrong, and other things aren't.

Like, I think that's completely, perfectly coherent.And so I ended up, a little later in the conversa- a couple minutes later in the conversation, uh, pressing Cade on this a little bit.

So a- at the beginning when you were talking about intrinsic evils, is it your stance that there should be absolutely no absolutes, or is it okay that some things, like say, tort- torture or murder- Mm-hmm.

are always and everywhere wrong regardless of situations?

'Cause I know- Yeah.

like, from a utilitarian standpoint, they're gonna have to say rape might be okay, torture might be okay, murder might be okay if, if the situation calls for it, and those might not be a lot of situations.

Yeah.

But I would just say, on, y- y- I don't think you have to be religious.

If, if somebody says, I'm usually against rape, that you're like, I don't wanna spend time with you.

You, you sound like a moral monster.

Yeah.

Uh, you know, like, I don't wanna find out what your exception clause is for that.

Uh, you know, so- Yeah, so- I guess, is your stance that it's, it's like putting a thumb on the scale to say that there are moral black and white issues?

I, I would put it this way.

The, insofar as I've looked into various ethical frameworks, the one that makes the most sense to me is emotivism.

It seems to explain the data points around morality the best, um, which, like, the crash course for the audience is that, when it comes to moral decisions, I wouldn't use the term truth, not because there isn't objective realities to it or objective harms, but that I, I, like, I define truth as predictive utility, so it is really only in an empirical sense.

So, Is it true that murder is wrong?

isn't a sentence that I would use.

I would say, I have never seen a society in which allowing murder leads to flourishing and doesn't lead to absolute harm, and I don't know a society in which I would ever conceive of that being a possibility that I would allow from a legal perspective.

So are there, there absolutes?

There are situations in which I can't think of a counterexample, um, that we would allow for a particular thing to happen, um, and I think those are remote circumstances, um, because I, I, I So we can have objective science, um, objective whether that's, uh, societal levels on, on self-reported mental health outcomes.

We can talk about cortisol levels.

We can talk about, um, the rates, the increase or decrease of things that we don't want to happen in society.

All this when it comes to both overall ethical questions and more particularly legislation on, let's say, gay marriage, I think that it's negotiated and that we have to look at the data and ultimately work in the dialectic of the people that we're talking to rather than claim there is this moral law written out there that we have to decipher from the stars.

Um, I don't, I don't know if that, that answered the, the core premise of your question.

I think it, I think it might.

It does sound like you're saying we can't just say murder is wrong 'cause w- it'd be like astrology.

Um-

Yeah.

But it sounds like you don't, you can't think offhand of cases in which it would be okay.

I can think of cases offhand in which people have thought it would be okay, uh, on utilitarian grounds because killing a small group of people might save the lives of more people and in treating people in a less than human way.

Yeah.

I mean, even taking a, a less extreme example, so in 1986, uh, William Buckley had, uh, an article in The New York Times, I believe it was, or New Y- New York Times Review of Books, whatever, W- Mm-hmm.

New York Review of Books, whatever that's called, in which he argued, y- you know, AIDS was a brand new thing at the time.

Yeah.

He argued everyone with AIDS needed to be forcibly tattooed so that people could see who, who had AIDS, and so just creating a second class kinda tier.

Mm-hmm.

And the idea there was to stop the spread of a deadly disease that at the time had no known cure, and, and it seemed like we were very far from developing a cure.

And so you can imagine a, a more extreme version of that proposal where anyone diagnosed with AIDS is just summarily murdered, not out of a hatred of them but to, you know, public health reasons.

Or you could do this with COVID. You could do this- Hm.

with any number of things, where you say, Well, if everyone in 2019 who was diagnosed with COVID was just killed, that would have saved more lives on the s- you know, in the long run.

Um, if it's something where we just have to figure out with a calculator, uh, you know, how much pleasure, how much pain is this causing and kinda do the utilitarian calculation, then it's not clear that we could say out the gate that it's abhorrent and wrong.

But I think everyone has a natural and immediate reaction that there's something revolting about that even if you can make the numbers look like you're gonna save lives in the, in the long run.

Yeah, and, and that's where I think a lot of When it comes to these particular questions, the phrase that I tend to use is, I want to live, uh, in a world in which blank.

In this case, I want to live in a world in which people have a right to their life, um, in that society cannot, uh, out of a sense of panic or fear decide that somebody, because of an unknown disease that we don't know how it spreads, we don't know how it affects, can make a decision like that.

So there's both eth- ethical considerations in, like, vacuum-type situations where let's, as you brought up, like, the trolley problem, I find to be an interesting one in a vacuum, like, if we know all of the inputs.

But we also have to recognize our epistemic limitations in a society, especially from a legislative side or what we allow as a society, and that's where I find the most fruitful dialogue.

Okay, so there's a couple things going on there.

Obviously, you can tell probably a utilitarian bent, this idea that truth isn't what's true, it's what's useful, and so, you know, the utility part.

And so we don't speak of things as true or false but useful or un-useful, and so a thing is true inasmuch as it's useful.

I think that's alarming in, in re- repudiation of truth as such, you know?

The placebo effect, w- is an obvious case where something can be a lie and be useful.

So once we say, you know, Actually, uh, lies are true because they're helpful, they're, they're useful, we no longer have a meaningful sense of what lying is.

But second is this idea of emotivism, and now many of you are not gonna be familiar with that.

I'm gonna, again, you know, kinda do the crash course thing.

A.J. Ayer is one of the major figures, uh, in this.

His claim was that moral claims don't respond to anything that can be considered true or false, so again very similar to what we just heard.

Instead, they just show that we approve or disapprove of it, and this has been disparagingly called the boo/hurrah theory of ethical claims, that if I say, Murder is wrong, I just mean, Boo, murder, and that if I mean, you know, helping the poor is good, I just mean, Hooray, helping the poor.

Now on the surface you might say, Well, yeah, I do boo murder.

I do hoorah, you know, helping the poor.

What's wrong with that?

I'm gonna point you to a brilliant husband-and-wife team, Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach, and they did some of the best work in virtue ethics as well .

uh, let, especially Elizabeth Anscombe, and we're gonna get to her at the very end.

But I wanna turn first to Peter Geach because he attacks emotivism and shows that it's just nonsensical, that the claims that Oxford moralists like Ayer are making are just literally not true.

Now I'm gonna warn you, this whole essay is a little technical.

I'm gonna do my best to, uh, make it as straightforward as I can.

So the question is, what do we mean when we say something is good?

Are we describing it or are we, uh, commending it?

Are we saying, Yay, or are we saying something about it?

And the Oxford moralists, people like A.J. Ayer, are gonna say it's just commendation.

That's a good book, means, Hooray, book, or, I recommend that book, or, Choose that book.

Now Geach is gonna respond that, no, this just literally is not true.

And the reason it's not true is that good always has a primarily descriptive force.

He points out He gives a lot of funny examples in the essay, which is one of the reasons I like it.

Somebody who doesn't care two pins about cricket but fully understood how the game worked, and he says, not an impossible proposition, could supply a purely descriptive sense for the phrase 'good batting wicket' regardless of the tastes of the cricket fans.

So when you say, uh, That's a good batting wicket, you're not saying, I like that.

You're not even saying, Cricket fans like that.

You're just saying it is objectively good.

It succeeds at what it's meant to be.

And then he gives some more provocative examples.

If you say someone is a good burglar or a good cutthroat, you're not saying they're morally good, clearly, and you're not commending them.

He says, You can imagine cases where you might, uh, commend someone as a cutthroat or a burglar, but such circumstances are rare and cannot give the primary sense of the descriptions.

Right?

Like, obviously, if you say somebody's really good at committing crimes, you're not saying, Hooray, crime.

You're doing something else.

You're describing that the nature of what it is they're doing, they succeed at that nature.

Now it might be an evil thing.

And, you know, man-made natures, like being a cutthroat or a burglar, can be evil.

And so to be good at it is actually really bad.

We would say in nature, the things God has created, to succeed as a man, as a fish, as whatever, are good.

But nevertheless, like, you, you can make sense of that hopefully.

So if you have, you know, two clocks, one of them is beautiful, ornate, extremely expensive, doesn't tell time.

The other one feels like the one you got at Target and it works perfectly.

You might prefer the first one, but the second one is a good clock in the way the first one isn't.

Because if you know what a clock is, then you realize that telling time is part of its nature, it's part of its telos.

And it has achieved that in the way that beautiful decorative wall piece hasn't.

And so once you realize that, that you know good is descriptive, not commendatory.

You're not saying, Hooray, Target clock, when you say it's a good clock in a way the other one isn't.

Geach concludes He doesn't give the Target example, but he would agree with it.

He says, It ought to be clear that calling a thing a good A does not influence choice, unless the one who's choosing happens to want an A. So if you want a cutthroat, if you want a burglar, if you want a clock, well then knowing this is a good one tells you to get it.

But that Just saying it's a good X, Y, Z doesn't immediately tell you, I support this and I think you should support it.

So that's just, like The ethical theory of emotivism is built on a false theory of language, which is a big problem.

That it's not true that when we say something is good or bad or good or evil, we're just saying, Hooray, or, Boo.

That's just not what it means in any language when we do that.

But then Geach's wife, Elizabeth Anscombe, has really the kill shot here, in her work Modern Moral Philosophy.

I really highly recommend both On Good and Evil by Geach and especially Modern Moral Philosophy by Anscombe.

You can get both of these online.

She makes the point that the problem with any theory that looks at just the consequences and the results, it's not just that then you become subject to w- with the next, you know, the next study that comes out could upend your entire philosophy.

There's something even deeper, because you can't say anything is inherently evil.

And she puts it like this.

She says, If someone really thinks in advance that it is open to question whether such an action as procuring the judicial execution of the innocent should be quite excluded from consideration, I do not want to argue with him.

He shows a corrupt mind.

What that means is this.

You can imagine a world in which So let's say you live in a, a neighborhood or a state or a country in which the crime rate is high, and you could, for deterrent reasons, judicially execute the innocent.

And it would almost certainly lead to a lot of utility.

It would deter crime.

It might save more innocent lives than it even takes.

But if you can't say at the outset, I don't need to run the numbers to know that it is wrong to intentionally murder innocent people as a judicial system, then you're not doing moral philosophy, whatever you're doing.

You're showing yourself to have a corrupt mind.

That's her argument.

And so we should watch out for what was at the time of Anscombe, and is still today, a lot of the mainstream philosophical systems, like consequentialism, like emotivism, where you do end up not being able to say there are intrinsic evils.

The point there is not to be, you know, ruthless and doctrinaire and oppress people's freedom.

The point is, it's a foundational thing that you should know from reason, that there are some things that ought never to be done, no matter how good the result you hope to get from it happens to be.

Okay.

Now, there's much more that we talked about.

So the last thing I wanna suggest to you, if you wanna see more about this, uh, I've just I'm gonna link right here to the full debate with Kade.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.