Now on the website: John Corvino on what social conservatives get wrong about sexuality:

[In First Things this past March], Michael Hannon argues that religious conservatives should embrace queer theorists’ view that sexual orientation is a social construction, rather than a natural and inevitable feature of persons. Furthermore, they should stop categorizing anyone as gay, because doing so organizes that person’s sexual identity around a particular temptation to sin, leading him to believe that he needs that sin in order to be fulfilled. Finally, and most important, they should stop categorizing anyone as heterosexual, because doing so lets people off the hook as “normal,” thus blinding them to their own sin. The general idea is that shedding these labels will enable people better to focus on the proper Christian grounding for sex and marriage.

Hannon, who is a candidate for religious life with the Norbertine order, is hardly the first Catholic to invoke queer theory in support of conservative causes.... What’s interesting about Hannon’s version is how far he goes in revealing what’s troubling social conservatives today: what they fear, what they really want, and why they’re unlikely to get it.

Read all of "Thinking Straight?" here.