Sexual Ethics Is a Social Justice Issue

Pope Leo XIV recently stated that “We tend to think that when the church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual. And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, that would all take priority before that particular issue.” As much as I agree that issues of sexual morality are not the most important, I fear that creating a dichotomy between sexual morality and “more important issues” like social justice reflects the influence American cultural politics has had on Leo’s outlook—perhaps to a fault. 

This past March, Greece’s Council of State ruled to uphold the right of same-sex couples to adopt children. The ruling comes only two years after Greece became the first Orthodox Christian country to legally recognize same-sex marriage. The strongest opposition to the ruling came from Greek Orthodox clergy—and, shockingly, from the Greek Communist Party (KKE). The party argued that granting same-sex couples the right to marry and adopt undermines the “complementary function of man and woman in the process of procreation” and risks “commercializing” children, thereby denying their “social rights.” Such an argument sounds foreign to Western—especially American—ears. Typically, the political right opposes gay rights and other issues that go against traditional sexual ethics, whereas the left is supportive. It was the Democratic Party that overwhelmingly backed the legalization of same-sex marriage eleven years ago, while only a minority of Republicans were in support of it. 

I’m no communist. But I can’t deny that I find KKE’s logic compelling. Sexual liberation dovetails with a consumerist mindset that plays an essential role in sustaining our present neoliberal economic system. We can learn from the KKE that traditional sexual ethics and social justice are two sides of the same coin rather than separate issues. 

Founded in 1918, KKE boasts twenty-one members (about 9 percent) in the Greek parliament and won over 400,000 votes (about 7 percent of the electorate) in the most recent elections. Citing their Stalinist commitment to classical dialectical materialism, they are known to take conservative positions on social issues. While they strongly support legislation to protect gays from hate crimes, they believe that the push for gay marriage and adoption is part of a greater movement to replace class and labor politics with “bourgeois,” individualistic identity politics. 

“We shall not forget,” writes Nikos Mottas, editor in chief of the blog In Defense of Communism, “that capitalism frequently uses ‘individual rights’ in order to mislead and disorientate the working masses from the class struggle and the collective rights. Bourgeois societies,” he continues, advocate for “equality for all,” but “leave completely untouchable the private property in the means of production. . . . The capitalist system encourages people to self-identify based on sexual orientation or any other individual characteristic, rather than their actually existing class position.”

In most developed Western countries, it’s taken for granted that the liberation of LGBTQ individuals and other “oppressed” identity groups will automatically be supported by the political left. Those who accuse KKE of hypocrisy reflect the shift from the “old” to the “new” left in the 1960s. Whereas the old left focused on material issues like workers’ rights and other class-related matters, the new left focused on issues tied to identity and the right of individuals to freely express themselves. 

This split was furthered in the United States, when politics came to be defined more by cultural issues than by economic ones. The left’s increased emphasis on women’s and gay rights in the late ’60s led to the emergence of the “religious right” in the late ’70s, whose main concern was maintaining traditional moral values. 

While most leftists view gay marriage, gender self-identification, and abortion as emancipatory causes, traditional leftists view these as part of a broader push to turn individuals into consumers who are perpetually seeking to gratify their whims—which are increasingly shaped by corporate interests. Alas, it’s rare to find American leftists who still believe sexual “liberation” runs contrary to the liberation of the poor. Figures like Ronald W. Dworkin and outlets like Sublation Media are among the few exceptions. 

Marxist dialectical materialism overlooks the metaphysical meaning of marriage and sexuality, which are oriented not only toward building a stable society but toward true flourishing and communion with God and others. And a Stalinist insistence on class warfare by means of violent revolution and opposition to religion run contrary to Church teaching on solidarity and religious freedom. But the KKE and other communist movements are right to insist that sexual morality is not a private or “individual” matter. On the contrary, it is intimately tied to the Common Good—especially to the rights of the poor and other marginalized groups. 

In his seminal 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII relied on natural law theory to advocate for both the rights of workers and the family as the building block of society. Both are essential to the Common Good. Indeed, St. Thomas Aquinas—on whose theological framework Rerum Novarum builds—insisted that unnatural sexual acts and depriving workers of their wages are both sins “crying to heaven for vengeance.” 

These ideas converge in the witness of the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, Dorothy Day. After suffering an abortion, immersing herself in communist circles, and seeing the limits of both sexual libertinism and dialectical materialism, she entered the Catholic Church and dedicated her life to advocating for the poor. Day was one of those rare American Catholics who understood how much the Church’s teachings on chastity were intertwined with its teachings on social and economic matters. Her strong opposition to abortion and extramarital sex stemmed from her belief that they have adverse consequences on the poor more so than on the rich, who can more easily escape the costs of unchastity. 

Pope Leo XIV is right to insist that Catholics should not harp endlessly about sexual ethics, to the exclusion of witnessing to more essential aspects of our faith—the redemptive love of Christ crucified and the joy of the gospel. Yet Catholics must beware the false dichotomy between sexual ethics and social justice. Eleven years after Obergefell v. Hodges, Greece’s rogue leftists, Day, and Leo XIII offer a compelling counterpoint.