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The Ethics of Sex Mark D. Jordan Digital Instant
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Author(s): Mark D. Jordan
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Year: 2001
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 / ijnHM
Mark D. Jordan
The Ethics of Sex
NEW DIMENSIONS TO RELIGIOUS ETHICS

Series Editors: Frank G. Kirkpatrick and Susan Frank Parsons

Trinity College, Hartford, US, and Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology, Cambridge,
UK

The aim of this series is to offer high quality materials for use in the study of
ethics at the undergraduate or seminary level, by means of engagement in the
interdisciplinary debate about significant moral questions with a distinctive
theological voice. Each volume investigates a dimension of religious ethics that
has become problematic, not least due to the wider climate of reappraisal of
Enlightenment thought. More especially, it is understood that these are
dimensions which run through a number of contemporary moral dilemmas that
trouble the postmodern world. It is hoped that an analysis of basic assumptions
will provide students with a good grounding in ethical thought, and will open
windows onto new features of the moral landscape that require further attention.
The series thus looks forward to a most challenging renewal of thinking in
religious ethics and to the serious engagement of theologians in what are most
poignant questions of our time.

Published

1. The Ethics of Community

Frank G. Kirkpatrick

2. The Ethics of Gender

Susan Frank Parsons

3. The Ethics of Sex

Mark D. Jordan

4. The Ethics of Nature

Celia Deane Drummond

Forthcoming

The Ethics of Race

Shawn Copeland
The Ethics of Sex

Mark D. Jordan

Blackwell
Publishing
 © 2002 by Mark D. Jordan

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4 2007

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Jordan, Mark D.
The ethics of sex / Mark D. Jordan.
p. cm. — (New dimensions to religious ethics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-631-21817-3 (alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-631-21818-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Sex—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Christian ethics. 3. Sexual ethics.
I. Title. II. Series.
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 Contents

Acknowledgments vi
Prologue: Candid Advice to the Reader 1

1 The Vices of Christian Ethics 4

2 Scriptural Authorities 20

3 A New Life beyond Sex 47

4 Crimes against Nature 76

5 Marriage Acts 107

6 Attack upon Christendom 131

7 Redeeming Pleasures 155

Epilogue: Sex and Schism 173

Works Cited 176
Subject Index 184
Index of Biblical References 196
 Acknowledgments

Two sorts of thanks are needed. The first thanks go to friends, colleagues,
and a patient partner, all of whom endured me during the unsettling work
of drafting this little book. The second thanks go to those who have read
the manuscript at one stage or another. I am particularly grateful to Ted
Smith for reviewing the whole of it with such charitable thoroughness.
His questions and objections moved me to rewrite all of the book’s entrances
and exits — so that I could understand them.

M. D. J.
 Prologue: Candid Advice
to the Reader

The beginning of any speech about Christian ethics is risky for both hearer
and speaker. The hearer risks being misled about important things. Accepting
bad religious counsel in ethical matters can lead to diminished m
extreme case, to destruction. Even listening for long to some supposedly
istian” discourses about sex
sensibility. So hearers have good reason to be suspicious at the start of a
speech about Christian ethics. They should exercise suspicion not by making
violent accusations or rejections, but by attending deliberately to the motives
and effects of the speeches aimed at them.
Speakers ought to be suspicious too - and not only of themselves.
Certainly speakers should scrutinize their own motives, characters, and
prejudices. Theological ethicists always suffer the temptation to pretend
that they stand outside of their particular interests, genders, races, classes, or
nationalities and can speak directly and universally of human experience.
They often seem to confuse speaking about God’s law with laying down
the law on God’s behalf. The temptation is acute in sexual ethics, where
the hidden economy of one’s desires or the secret wounds of one’s past are
all too conveniently overlooked. But speakers cannot stop with suspicion
of themselves. They need to remember that they were hearers before they
began speaking and that much of what they now say will be repetition.
Every new speech about Christian sexual ethics comes out of a library
of older speeches. Before you speak Christian theology, you have already
heard it. You have attended to the words of some scripture, of a local
community, of authoritative individuals, of a denominational position or
tradition. These words will repeat themselves in what you try to say.
Indeed, many Christian speakers claim to do nothing more than repeat
exactly what they have been taught (a claim that merits another exercise of
suspicion). Others unwittingly repeat as their own clips of older speech.
2 Prologue: Candid Advice to the Reader

Christian speeches about sex are full up with terms, images, arguments, and
rules recorded from older speeches. These clips are remixed to produce
new speech, which is sometimes music, sometimes cacophony. So speakers
must be suspicious about how they are repeating what they have heard.
By describing the suspicions that should surround Christian speeches
about sexual matters, I don’t mean to suggest that the speeches cannot be
uttered responsibly. On the contrary, the risks they run are risks worth
running. Christians should keep talking about sex so that they can learn to
speak about it more adequately, that is, more theologically. Christians can
do this best by talking first with other Christians, within and without their
immediate communities. In talking across community boundaries, there are
a dozen more risks of misunderstanding and offense. Let me admit them, but
then set down three counter-assumptions about why it must be possible to
engage in this kind of conversation. The assumptions seem to me connected
to important Christian convictions about the possibility of revelation.
My first assumption is that human beings can listen to speeches about sex
across divisions of gender and sexual orientation. This assumption doesn’t
authorize us to speak “for” the members of another group, much less to
explain them to themselves. We should be suspicious of men who tell
women how to be women or of “heterosexuals” who prescribe the real
essence of “homosexuality” to lesbians or gay men. But we shouldn’t let
this suspicion deny our capacity for learning, for entering some way into
the language of another human community. If we did not have the capacity
for learning something of a radically different language, then we also could
not receive the revelation of a God who lives beyond the limits of sex, of
body, and who offers us a share in divine life.
The second assumption is that Christians can listen to theological speeches
across sectarian lines. This doesn’t mean that a Christian can stand outside
of all denominations or enter equally well into every one of them. Each of
us has a small number of “mother tongues,” of first forms of Christianity
in which we were raised or to which we converted. These remain with us
in the way that our first languages do. But we also have the capacity to
learn second languages. We can enter into the speeches of at least some
other Christian groups well enough to engage their texts. If we could not,
then we also could not receive a divine revelation mediated through a
text, because a revealed text always comes to us from outside even if in
our mother tongue; it always speaks to us as a foreigner.
The third assumption is that a Christian can listen to theological speeches
across history, that is, over lengths of time. The assumption means that we
can learn the languages of some older texts well enough to hear human voices
in them. Engaging these voices is much more important theologically than
 Prologue: Candid Advice to the Reader 3

constructing classifications for them or telling narratives about them. We

need historical access, not historical explanation or systematization. Gaining
access to the older voices through texts means hearing enough of them so
that we can recognize rhetorical purposes and then respond. If we cannot
cany out this kind of engagement with older human texts, then we also
could not inherit a revealed text.
With these assumptions, I mean not only to secure a beginning for the
speech that follows, but also to foreshadow its procedure. This book
assumes that it is possible to introduce the main topics of Christian sexual
ethics by engaging a variety of particular texts. The texts come from
different churches and different times; they speak in diverse voices in order
to give contradictory counsel. Certainly you will hear my own voice, with
its prejudices and secrets and repetitions, but hopefully not just my voice.
One thing that you will not hear often in what follows is comparison
with the teachings on sex in other religious traditions. I pass over them not
because 1 think that they are unimportant, but because engaging them well
presupposes deep conversation among Christians. In my experience, inter­
religious “dialogue” often tends to reduce the complexity of the participat-
• •
ing insistence on contradiction of Christian
teachings about sex seems to me a prerequisite to serious engagement with
other traditions. Once you have finished reading, I encourage you to go
further than I do by bringing voices from other religious traditions into
conversations with the Christian voices sampled here - and to do so with
a vivid awareness of how difficult interreligious comparison really is.
Whether you are inside the discourses of the Christian churches or
outside them, you should be suspicious of all the voices you hear. You
should listen to each with careful attention — with the same compassionate
skepticism you should apply to your own interpretations.
 Chapter 1
The Vices of Christian Ethics

Much of what Christians say about sex is confession. In the confessional

“box” or the pastor’s study, in public declarations of repentance or in mur-
niurings of private prayer, Christians accuse themselves of being impure,
unchaste, weak, luxurious, lustful. They are tempted by “the flesh,” and
they wrestle with a Satan who is master over it. Indeed, Christians can
seem to have lavished too much attention on the language of sexual self­
accusation. To take only the best-known example: Some of Augustine’s
most carefully contrived images in the Confessions are descriptions of disor­
dered desires for sexual pleasure. Aged 18, he hears about him the clanging
of the “cauldron of shameful loves.”1 2 Much later, as a grown man, and in
the moment of that we call his conversion, Augustine will hear softer
sounds - but the same shameful music. His “old friends,” “vanities of
vanities,” tug at his flesh and whisper, “‘Are you going to send us away?
. . . From this moment forward we will never, ever be with you again.’”
“Violent habit” speaks as well: “‘Do you really think that you can get
along without them?’
When Christians are not confessing sexual acts, they can seem to be prea­
ching about them - or, rather, against them. The language of self-accusation

1 Augustine, Confessions, 3.1.1, ed. M. Skutella, rev. L. Verheijen, Corpus Christianorum

Series Latina, vol. 27 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), line 26. Throughout this book, 1
translate afresh from the sources whenever I can, because theological writing about
sexual matters has suffered particularly from thorough mistranslation, both voluntary
and involuntary. Where there is a recommendable and readily available English translation
for a text I discuss at length, I will also include citations to it. For this passage in the
Confessions, see the translation by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1992), p. 35.
2 Augustine, Confessions, 8.11.26 (ed. Skutella, rev. Verheijen, lines 20-1, 30; trans.
Chadwick, p. 151),
 The Vices of Christian Ethics 5

turns quickly enough into the language of rebuke. Certainly it does so in

the Confessions, the punning title of which means at once (and at least)
istine mocks his
teachers for speaking according to the Ciceronian rules, “copiously and
ornately,” whenever they speak about their lusts.3 He quotes lines from

examples, we find ourselves swept along in the great river of human

desire, we are drowned in pandering fictions, we sink blindly under the
weight of the divine judgments on illegal desires.'1
against sex may be the most familiar Christian speech of all in
:, secular societies. People who know nothing of Christian
otures can recite the most notorious Christian sexual prohibi­
tions. They will be deeply confused about Trinity and Incarnation, but
ightly report that this or that Christian group condemns
contraception, or masturbation, or second marriages, or genital pleasures
between persons of the same sex. In the public imagination, Christianity
can figure as nothing more than a code of sexual conduct, a code that likes
especially to elaborate prohibitions.
Christians often reply to these stereotypes by shifting the blame to
cultural conditions - say, the sensationalism of news reports about religion
or a (contemporary?) tendency to reduce everything in human life to sex.
These replies may have merit, but we Christians would do better not to
excuse ourselves so quickly. The stereotypes about our hypocrisy over sex
or our hatred of it are reactions to the ways we have chosen to talk about
sex - and especially to the ways in which we have tried to stigmatize it so
as to regulate it. If sexual acts can carry many motives, so can speech about
sex. The speech of Christian sexual ethics seems often to have been moved
by unchristian fears and fantasies. It has served to sanction old designs
rather than to announce good news. Instead of confessing yet more sexual
sins, or preaching yet again against them, we might want to confess the
sins we have committed in presuming to teach about sex as we have. We
might want to consider our bad habits, our vices, when it comes to setting
forth a Christian ethics of sex.

3 Augustine, Confessions, 1.18.28 (ed. Skutella, rev. Verheijen, lines 24-5; trans.
Chadwick, p. 20).
4 Augustine, Confessions, 1.16.26 (ed. Skutella, rev. Verheijen lines 3-4; trans. Chadwick,
pp. 18-19).
Here I combine the master images of Augustine, Confessions, 1.16.25-1.18.28.
6 The Vices of Christian Ethics

Vices Seen and Unseen

Vices spread through the genres of Christian speech. Many can’t be assigned
to the “popular” as against the “academic.” Indeed, in Christian speeches
about sexual topics, it is impossible to draw a clear line dividing the “aca­
demic” from the “popular.” Some of the most technical theologians have
not so much written about sex as thundered against it. They share with
street preachers the highly charged rhetorics of ridicule or intimidation,
meaning to harm opponents instead of addressing them. In these and other
ways, some theological discussions of sexual topics resemble what is now
called “hate speech,” that is, speech that uses irrational caricature as an
incitement to violence.
Other theologians share with “popular” ministries the devices of enforced
silence. They simply refuse to discuss something so filthy or spiritually
dangerous as carnal copulation. They surround it instead with a zone of
silence - into the middle of which they project indescribable horrors. The
canonical letter “to the Ephesians” traditionally attributed to the apostle
Paul admonishes that “fornication [so the most common translation] or
uncleanness of any kind and greed must not even be named among you”
(5:3)/’ Generations of Christian theologians have read the remark as an
allusion to a whole class of “nameless” sexual sins, sins too horrible to
deserve a name.
Whether as horrified silence or as thundering condemnation, theological
speech about sex displays the vices of the most widely broadcast Christian
languages. But its failures are not only in these shared features. Theologians
who have tried to create a separate language or method for treating sexual
topics have fallen into bad habits on their own. These vices abound in
the plodding, pedantic, all-too methodical texts of the most “academic”
Christian writers on ethics. Some of them are obvious, others not.
The obvious vices in theology range from false precision and premature
codification to the multiplication of disconnected cases or problems. Too
many volumes of Christian ethics have wanted to be precise or rigorous
after the model of some other discipline — of some version of mathematics,
say, or of one or another of the natural sciences. They have sought to

6 We will consider the translation of ponicia more carefully in chapter 2. Note now
that I routinely pass over complicated theories about scriptural authorship, interpolation,
and redaction because they are not necessary for our purposes. For reasons I will
explain at the end of chapter 2, Christian ethics must often deal, not with philological
hypotheses about scriptural texts, but with the histories of their reception, that is, with
their traditional authority.
 The Vices of Christian Ethics 7

perfect a list of sexual sins, each unambiguously defined and carefully graded.
They have set forth axioms and proceeded with sequences of demonstrations.
Other volumes have tried to model Christian moral theology after some
system of civil or criminal law. They have wanted to codify comprehensive
principles for directing sexual behavior in order then to tabulate and
adjudicate every important case of sexual sin. Indeed, models taken from
the other sciences have been projected onto the Christian scriptures them­
selves, so that they are read as an exhaustive legal code or a completed
encyclopedia of human behavior. But the obvious vices, however common
and however powerful, are not the most dangerous.
The most dangerous vices in theological treatments of sex are not obvious.
They are hidden habits of thought. Particularly important are two vices of
tacit expectation or assumption. The first I call the Vice of the Obligatory
Answer. It is the bad habit of assuming as obvious that Christian ethics is
obliged to solve any moral puzzle that we pose it. Sometimes we indulge
the vice by assuming that there must be a rule or principle that responds to
whatever general questions we can formulate about sex. Is adultery a serious
sin? Is masturbation right or wrong? We formulate general questions. We
demand general answers. We ought rather to ask ourselves why we assume
that there are Christian “principles” to cover such general questions, a system
of “rules” for deciphering every moral abstraction. The same vice shows
itself in what seems the opposite direction - as the expectation that properly
described individual cases must be decidable one way or another. Is it a sin
for this particular woman to have sexual intercourse with this particular
man in such and such circumstances? We suppose that it is the business of
Christian ethics to settle the question. Is it really? We ought rather to ask:
What warrant do we find in Christian revelation for expecting that ethics,
like elementary algebra, will be able to solve word problems? In making
this assumption about cases or the related assumption about general prin­
ciples, we tacitly assume that Christian ethics should be like the aggressive
versions of regulatory law or behavioral management that now dominate
our lives.
It might be objected that the “Vice of the Obligatory Answer” is not a
vice at all. It is a cynical name for the breadth of Christian faith. If God is
Lord of all creation, then we should expect God’s direction in every
sphere or moment of our lives. Indeed, we must expect to answer for our
every action to God, who wills something particular of us from action to
action. Christian ethics is the study of what God wills for our actions. This
objection is serious, but perhaps also misleading. It supposes that Christian
ethics can be in fact a complete expression of God’s will. I don’t believe
that it can. Even if you expect to find the divine will completely in books,
8 The Vices of Christian Ethics

there are much more helpful kinds of books — the Scriptures, clearly, but
also lives of saints, liturgies, hymns, novels. Since I have a limited view of
the role of books of ethics in Christian discernment, I regard the assumption
that Christian ethics is obliged to have answers for every kind of moral
question as a vice and not a virtue.
The second hidden vice of theologians I call the Vice of Timeless Science.
It is the habit of conducting Christian ethics as if its categories and conclu­
sions had no history, as if it could think entirely in the present tense. This
denial of history is encouraged by powerful motives, both institutional
and personal. Christian institutions often tie their claims for authority to
assertions that they are merely repeating or applying an unchanging truth.
What God wrote on the tablets of stone, what the Lord Jesus spoke to the
disciples, that very same thing the institution now hands down as moral
truth. Such a claim to authority is often coded into the words “biblical” or

alleged Christian unanimity: The institution promises to teach only what

Christians have always and everywhere believed. The difficulty with these
institutional claims is that Christians have understood Mosaic law or Gospel
instructions very differently over centuries. Even in a single time, they have
disagreed sharply over important ethical questions. These embarrassing
facts are often concealed by Christian institutions precisely in order to
maintain authority. That is one reason why there are fewer histories of
Christian sexual ethics than handbooks of it. If theological ethics is cut off
from a dialectical engagement with its own history, it loses not only much
of its evidence, but also its most elusive meanings.
Indeed, the subtlest version of the Vice of the Timeless Science occurs
as a distinction between historical theology and constructive theology. The
distinction asserts that it is possible to do history without construction and
construction without history. But no theologian can read her or his prede­
cessors deeply without constructing along with them, without cooperating
in their constructions. No theologian can construct a recognizably Christian
ethics without using terms, topics, and starting-points from the historical
texts of Christianity. History without construction is at best a kind of parroting;
construction without history is private reverie.
We want a Christian ethics of sex. We come to the traditions of Christian
theology in search of one. But we need to be sure that our search is some­
thing more than an occasion for repeating their bad habits - or ours. We
should not want to encourage theologians in the belief that they can pro­
vide an algebra for Christian behavior that will calculate an answer to every
general question or particular case. Nor should we foster the belief that the
 The Vices of Christian Ethics 9

point of Christian ethics is to find a science that escapes history, either by

solving its perennial debates once for all or by presiding over them.
We want a Christian ethics of sex. We come with certain expectations and
write them into our questions. How must I behave sexually if I am to be
saved? How can I act sexually in order to avoid hurting others or myself?
Should I many or not? How can I many so as to be happiest? These ques­
tions and the many others like them have already been instructed by traditions
inside and outside of the churches. We have already been taught to have
certain expectations about what Christian ethics or moral theology might
be. It should be a science or a law code or a perfect therapy. As so often in
theology, the “should” becomes an “is.” Because we assume that there is
already a Christian ethics of sex conforming to these patterns, then we accept
as true teaching speeches that conform to our unexamined expectations.
Whatever kind of moral theology we have been taught to expect, there are
speakers eager to provide it. Christendom has no lack of loud moralizers.
We want a Christian ethics of sex - but unless we are particularly careful,
that may be too much already. The terms of our request may already mislead
us. Both “ethics” and “sex” not only risk asking for more than can be decently
given, they can lead us to conceal complicated and disconcerting histories.

Behind the Vices: Terms and Topics

There is no need now to recite complicated histories behind the Christian

appropriations of older terms such as “ethics.” We need only notice that
Christians still use different words to describe their teaching about sexual
desires and acts. For some it is a part of “Christian ethics,” for others it is
“moral theology.” This is rather more than a difference between a Greek
etymology (etliike) and a Latin one (theologin inoralis). It is even more than
a trace of different epochs in the history of theology, with Protestants
favoring “ethics” and Catholics “moral theology” (at least until recently).
The difference between the two names recalls different projects for dividing
up Christian theology and for relating it to (Christian?) philosophy.
Let me illustrate this point with some overly simple contrasts. When
Peter Abelard boldly entitled a work Ethics or Know Yourself (in the late
1130s), he was deliberately importing a word from the ancient schools of
philosophy - as well as yielding to a literary fid in Greek titles. Part of his
boldness consisted in using what was evidently a philosophic word for a
discussion that crossed and recrossed the border between philosophy and
theology. After all, medieval encyclopedias regularly gave the name “ethics
(ethica)” to one of the three parts of philosophy. But Abelard seemed to
10 The Vices of Christian Ethics

use it for a teaching that was both philosophical and theological - or at

least a teaching that a Christian theologian needed to have.
Despite Abelard’s boldness, “ethics” remained a philosophic term for
most medieval theologians and their modern Catholic followers. Thomas
Aquinas, for example, wrote a detailed exposition of Aristotle’s Nicomacheaii
Ethics around 1270, but did not apply the Aristotelian term “ethics” to
Christian theology or any of its parts - as he never applied the term
“philosopher” to a Christian. For Thomas and the Thomists after him,
Christian moral teaching was “moral theology,” understood either as the
moral moment of an integral theology or as a separable specialty. But the
terminology began to shift after the Protestant Reformation, and the Greek
philosophers’ term gained currency among theologians. Many Protestant
authors were better classicists than the medievals, but they also envisaged a
more complete conquest of philosophy by Christianity - that is, a more
thorough despoiling of it for Christian purposes. To say “Christian ethics”
was both to record that philosophy had been taken captive and led back to
Christ and to suggest new conceptions of the relations between civic lite
and faith, between external duties and inward spirit.
To take a single example: Philip Melanchthon was, like Aquinas, famous
as an expositor of Aristotle’s Nicomacheaii Ethics. But it is Melanchthon, and
not Aquinas, who deploys the term “ethics” within a comprehensive
Christian teaching. Indeed, from 1550 on Melanchthon published in one
volume his own “elements of ethical doctrine” and epitomes of sections
from the Nicomacheaii Ethics. At the beginning of his elements, “ethics”
names a doctrine that includes both teaching on the virtues and a consid­
eration of the “norms for human life in external actions.”7 8 The whole of
the doctrine testifies to God’s justice as the source of moral law. Ethics or
moral law is distinguished from the Gospel, which is the preaching of sin
and the promise of redemption. Nonetheless, ethics as the study of the
divinely disposed natural law is very useful to the Christian for the discipline
of actions in this world. Melanchthon repeats the definition more succinctly
at the opening of his paraphrase of Aristotle: “ethical doctrine is the part of
divine law about civil actions,” “ethics is part of the law of nature” that
God instituted and intends us to understand?

7 Philip Melanchthon, Ethicae doctriuae elementa, 1, opening paragraph and “Quid est
philosophia moralis?,” in his Opera quae snpersimt omnia, vol. 16, ed. K. G. Bretschneider
and H. E. Bindseil, Corpus Refonnatorum, vol. 16 (Halle, 1850; repr. New York:
Johnson Reprint, and Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1963), cols. 167-8.
8 Melanchthon, Euarrationes aliquot librorum ethicoriim Aristotelis, as in his Opera, vol. 16,
ed. Brentschneider and Bindseil, cols. 277-9.
 The Vices of Christian Ethics 11

Faced with such complications (and there are many more), we need some
sort of convention to continue speaking. In this book, I will use “ethics” and
“moral theology” interchangeably, because I use both suspiciously. After
all, my point is not to supply the Obligatory Answer or to unveil a Timeless
Science. 1 am eager for those vices to be questioned and then corrected.
Nor am I going to propose a novel “solution” to the problem of the
relations of theology to philosophy or of Christian faith to public life — as
if those were single problems admitting of single solutions. My point is not
to complete a Christian teaching about sexual actions, but to begin thinking
anew about that teaching - by describing some of the terms, topics, and
rhetorics that appear when Christian theologians talk about sex.
I should add immediately that my use of “Christian” will also be very
broad. It will include major and minor Christian groups that are claimed as
predecessors by denominations still existing, but it will also reach out to
groups that no one now claims, that have disappeared after being excluded
from Christian “orthodoxy.” Used in this way, “Christian” is not so much
a term of theological judgment as it is of rough designation or description.
We will be reading widely across speeches on sex by authors who counted
themselves Christians and who stood in various relations of continuity with
the sources, methods, and conclusions of other, self-described Christians.
Any stricter use of the term “Christian” would require untangling the
oldest knots of Christian history - namely, the occasions and causes of
Christian division.
Equally tangled histories lie concealed behind that word “sex,” though
it may be hard to see at first that its history might hold any surprises. After
all, our societies are supposed to be saturated with sex. It surrounds us in
tabloid headlines, academic jargon, novelistic obsessions, and in the most
powerful and seductive images — from the glossiest upscale advertisements
to the sleaziest pornographic videos hawked over the Internet. Sex is
everywhere, right? For that very reason, we are not likely to have thought
about its construction as a category.
Some theologians try to get at the category by conducting a survey of
ordinary English uses of the word “sex” or of terms that often appear
alongside it - say, the terms “gender” and “sexuality.” This kind of survey
often just repeats the concealment of familiarity. As native speakers of
English, we can easily produce samples of “sex” in ordinary speech. But
it may be that our linguistic habits were constructed to conceal certain
controversies, as it may be that there is no ordinary language about “sex.”
Our “ordinary” uses of “sex” and its related terms may be points of
tension and willed forgetfulness. They may be points of sharp controversy.
Certainly they have been in recent decades.
12 The Vices of Christian Ethics

When American speakers of English think of controversies over sex in

language, they tend to focus on the quarrels over “gendered” language
(say, the use of the pronoun “he” for all human beings). There have been
other struggles. For example, one of the most urgent tasks for contemporary
feminist thinking was to block a direct inference from genital configuration
to social and political subordination. Feminists had to show that being a
woman physically did not mean being a “woman” socially, that is, someone
who should be denied the right to own property or to vote, who should
be excluded from education and the professions, who should always remain
the ward of some man (father, husband, bishop, pastor). In order to
distinguish these two senses of “woman,” theorists and activists alike began
to insist on the difference between (physically determined) sex and (cultur­
ally constructed) gender. Sex was the kind of body you were born with.
Gender was the way you were taught to use that sexed body within a
certain sociopolitical regime. Sex was nature, gender was nurture. Between
sex so contrasted, line “sexu seemed
to some (or sometimes) physiologically based and cross-cultural; to others
(or at other times), culturally specific and always under construction. This
ambivalence is familiar enou compound “homo-sexuality,” which
appears alternately as a fate, ical fact, a choice, and a lifestyle. It
appears, in short, sometimes at the pole of sex-nature, sometimes at the
pole of gender—nurture.
Of course, the trichotomy sex/sexuality/gender was never particularly
stable, and not only because of the instability built into the conception of
sexuality.9 It was never clear, for example, what was to be included in
“gender” and what not. Some feminists objected that general discussions
of “woman” or “the feminine” were hopelessly confused attempts to
universalize culturally-specific gender roles. The discussions, they thought,
took features of gender and tried to make them features of sex. Others
pointed out that the idea of physical sex was itself hardly clear. To begin
with, modern medicine finds cases where there is contradictory evidence
of sex at different physical levels. External genital anatomy is hardly the
only marker of physical sex, though it may be the most decisive socially.

figured quite variously across cultures. The scientific notions of sex that
prevail among educated Europeans and Americans are conditioned by
culturally-produced systems of gender. So far as our medical descriptions

I here skim over a complicated and interesting series of critiques. One of the best of
them can be found in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and (he Subi
tity (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), esp. pp. 1-34.
 The Vices of Christian Ethics 13

of female bodies are in important senses still masculine descriptions, for

example, they falsely impose gendered categories as if they were neutral,
universal, natural categories of sex. Feminists too have to combat the vices
of the Obligatory Answer and the Timeless Science.
The situation is perhaps more confused with regard to “sexuality,” which
has a quite specific pedigree in European law and medicine of the nineteenth
century. It goes along with classifications of perversions and with the strict
dualism, heterosexuality/homosexuality. It also privileges sexual desires or
appetites in constructing personal identities. The importance of this historical
origin is hotly debated, especially in relation to the notions of heterosexuality
and homosexuality. No debate among contemporary writers on same-sex
desire has been more long-lived or more rancorous than the debate about
the very application of the term “homosexuality” before the nineteenth
century - or in cultures that do not participate in the medico-legal project
of European “sexuality.”
So fir as the category “sexuality” enacts a historically particular set of
relations to criminal law, medicine, and the natural sciences, it shows
another complication in the histories behind the terms. “Sex,” “sexuality,”
and “gender” are not just terms in Christian theology, they are terms in
law, medicine, and what we now call the “social sciences.” When Christian
ethics uses them, it places itself inside a long competition between theology
and other sciences or technologies concerned with the human body or
soul. The meanings of the terms cannot be settled or stipulated by theolo­
gians in complete disregard of their other uses. Nor can the theological
teaching about sex proceed as if no one else were talking about it.
Theology risks crude ignorance if it refuses to learn new legal and medical
theories about sexed human bodies. It risks silliness if it simply adopts
those theories without examining their origins, purposes, and consequences.
If theology is no longer Queen of the Sciences, it shouldn’t become just
their gullible sidekick. This is especially important in sexual matters, which
are so vulnerable to abuse by scientific, medical, and legal structures of
power. But it is no easy thing to negotiate the conflicting claims of theology
and modern medicine or science. Indeed, much argument would be required
just to claim that religious and medical or scientific discourses overlap enough
to produce negotiable conflicts. On some views, theology and science or
medicine must talk past each other because they never talk about the same
things, even when they use the same words. On other views, they do talk
to each other, but with one or the other in an assumed position of superiority.
For example, some theologians hold that Christian revelation cannot in
principle be corrected by science or medicine, since it has higher standing
so far as it derives from revelation.
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
The text on this page is estimated to be only 24.59%
accurate

COMYN, LORD OF KILBRIDE CONTRIBUTOR TO THE

BUILDING OF GLASGOW CATHEDRAL, A.D. 1 258 Facing page 62.
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.60%
accurate

CLAN COMYN 63 they retired to the church of the Minorites,

which had been built by Comyn's grandmother, the famous
Devorgilla, heiress of the ancient Lords of Galloway. There, as all the
world knows, question, reproach, and retort ended in Bruce losing
his temper, drawing his dagger, and stabbing the Red Corny n in the
throat. The deed was completed by Bruce's henchman, Kirkpatrick of
Closeburn, with the unforgotten exclamation " I mak siccar," and Sir
Robert Comyn, uncle of the slain man, who rushed in to save him,
met the same fate. It was this act which drove Bruce to open war,
and brought about the ultimate freedom of Scotland ; but during the
struggle which ensued the king again and again paid bitterly for the
rash deed he had done at the high altar of the Minorites in Dumfries.
Alexander of Argyll had married the Red Comyn's daughter, and for
that reason his son, John of Lome, was Bruce's bitterest foe, and
more than once put the king to the utmost peril of his life. John of
Lome, of course, was overcome at last, and his descendants survive
only as private gentlemen, the MacDougalls of Dunolly. The same
fate sooner or later overtook all the other connections of the great
house of Comyn. The Corny ns themselves, under the leadership of
Comyn, Earl of Buchan, were finally defeated by Bruce at the battle
of Inverury. For many days, sick to death, the king had been carried
about in a litter, and the hearts of his followers had begun to fail,
when the Earl of Buchan and Sir David of Brechin made the attack;
whereupon the king, calling for his warhorse, mounted, led his little
force to battle, and vanquished his sickness and his enemies the
Comyns at the same time. Buchan fled to England, while Bruce
burned his earldom from end to end to such effect That eftir that,
weile fifty yheir, Men menyt " the Heirschip of Bouchane." The son of
the Red Comyn was the last of his line, and about the time of his
death the collateral branch which held the earldom of Buchan also
became extinct. In the churchyard of Bourtie is to be seen the effigy
of a knight said to have been one of the Comyns slain in the battle
of Inverury. Gradually throughout the country the Comyns were
supplanted by other families. An instance of this is the occurrence
enshrined in the tradition regarding the transference of Castle Grant
on Speyside to the family of its present owners. According to
tradition a younger son of
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.79%
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64 CLAN COMYN Grant of Stratherrick eloped with a

daughter of a Macgregor chief. With thirty followers the pair fled to
Strathspey, and found a hiding-place in a cavern not far from the
castle, then known as Freuchie. The Comyns naturally looked with
disfavour upon such an invasion, and tried to dislodge the band, but
Grant kept possession of the cave. Then Macgregor descended
Strathspey at the head of a party of his clan, and demanded his
daughter. His son-in-law was astute. Receiving him with every show
of respect, he contrived in the torchlight and among the shadows of
the wood to make his men appear a much larger following than his
father-in-law had supposed, and a complete reconciliation took
place. Grant then pushed his advantage farther. He complained of
the attacks of the Comyns, and induced Macgregor to join in an
assault on Freuchie. By stratagem and valour they took the
stronghold ; the chief of the Comyns was slain in the attack, and his
skull remains a trophy in possession of the Earl of Seafield to the
present day. The Comyns at Dunphail had a similar fate, which is
well told by Mr. George Bain in his book on the Findhorn. When
Bruce's nephew, Thomas Randolph, was made Earl of Moray, the
Comyns found their old privileges as Rangers of the king's forest of
Darnaway restricted. By way of reprisal the Comyns set out, a
thousand strong, under the leadership of young Alastair of Dunphail,
to burn Randolph's new great hall at Darnaway. The force, however,
was ambushed by the Earl at Whitemire, and cut to pieces. Young
Alastair Corny n fought his way to the Findhorn. He found the
further bank lined by the Earl's men, but, throwing his standard
among them with the shout " Let the bravest keep it," he leapt the
chasm at the spot wrongly called Randolph's Leap, and with four of
his followers made his escape. Moray then besieged Alastair's father
in his Castle of Dunphail, and brought the garrison to starvation
point. On a dark night, however, the young man managed to heave
some bags of meal from a high bank into the stronghold. Next day,
by means of a bloodhound, he was tracked to a cave on the Divie.
He begged to be allowed out to die by the sword, but was smoked
to death by the Earl's men. Then the heads of himself and his
companions were thrown into his father's courtyard, with the shout "
Here is beef for your bannocks." The old chief took up the head of
his son. " It is indeed a bitter morsel," he said, " but I will gnaw the
last bone of it before I surrender." In the end the little garrison,
driven by hunger, sallied out and were
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.47%
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CLAN COMYN 65 cut to pieces. Early in the nineteenth

century the minister of Edinkilly found the skeletons of young
Alastair and his companions, seven in number, at a spot still known
from the fact as the " grave of the headless Comyns." The Comyns
were still powerful, however, after Bruce's time. Edward III., when
he overran Scotland in the interest of Edward Baliol, made David
Comyn, Earl of Atholl, governor of the country. It was he whom
Bruce's brother-in-law, Sir Andrew Moray, overthrew and slew at the
battle of Kilblene, and it was his countess whom Moray was
besieging in the stronghold of Lochindorb when word arrived that
the English king and his army were at hand. Moray, it is said, put
courage into his little force by waiting to adjust his girths, and even
to mend a thong of his armour, before retreating. But he knew the
passes of the Findhorn, and led his little company into safety across
the river at Randolph's Leap. At a later day the Comyns had
descended to be merely a warring clan among the clans. In their
feud with the Mackintoshes it was they who attempted to drown the
latter out by raising the waters round the castle in Loch Moy, when
the attempt was defeated by a Mackintosh clansmen issuing on a
raft at night, breaking the barrier, and letting the flood loose upon
the besiegers. On another occasion the Comyns, pretending peace,
invited the Mackintoshes to a feast at Rait Castle, where at a secret
signal, each Comyn clansman was to stab a Mackintosh to the heart.
But Comyn's daughter had revealed the plot to her Mackintosh lover;
the Mackintoshes gave the signal first, and the ri plotters were hoist
with their own petard. Still another incident of the long feud with the
Mackintoshes arose out of jealousy regarding a fair dame of the
time. Comyn of Badenoch had reason to resent the attentions paid
to his wife by his neighbour, Mackintosh of Tyrinie, and the feeling
reached its climax when Mackintosh presented the lady with no less
a gift than a Dull and twelve cows. Comyn, thinking it time to
interfere, invited Mackintosh and his followers to a feast, and slew
them all. As the Comyns were slowly ousted by their Mackintosh and
Macpherson neighbours they were driven to wild and lawless deeds,
and on one occasion, in reprisal, Alexander Macpherson, known as
the Revengeful, slew nine of their chief men in a cave to which they
had resorted for hiding. The Comyns, however, were not altogether
exinguished by the warfare and feuds in which they played >o
striking and unfortunate a part. In the eighteenth VOL. i. e
The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.63%
accurate

66 CLAN COMYN century their chief was a simple

gentleman, Gumming of Altyre on the Findhorn. He represented the
knight who fell with his chief, the Red Comyn, in the church of the
Minorites at Dumfries. That knight was Sir Robert Comyn, fourth son
of John, Lord of Badenoch, who died about 1275. Early in the
eighteenth century, Robert Cumming of Altyre married Lucy,
daughter of Sir Ludovic Gordon, Bart., of Gordonstown, lineally
descended from William, Earl of Sutherland and his wife the Princess
Margaret, daughter of King Robert the Bruce, and from George, Earl
of Huntly, and his wife, the Princess Jean, daughter of King James I.
Robert Cumming's great-great-grandson, Alexander Penrose
Cumming, through this connection inherited the estate of
Gordonstown, near Elgin, assumed the name of Gordon, and was
created a baronet in 1804. He was M.P. for the Dumfries burghs. The
second baronet was member for the Elgin burghs at the time of the
Reform Bill. He married a daughter of Campbell of Islay and grand
daughter of John, Duke of Argyll, by his duchess, the famous beauty,
Elizabeth Gunning. His second son was Roualeyn George, the
famous lion-hunter, while his youngest daughter is the well-known
traveller and author, Miss Constance F. Gordon-Cumming, and the
present baronet is his grandson. Sir William Gordon-Cumming, Bart.,
of Altyre, is the fourth holder of the title. He succeeded his father in
1866, and saw active service as a Captain and Lieut.Colonel of the
Scots Fusilier Guards. He holds the medal with clasp for the South
African Campaign of 1879, the medal with clasp and the bronze star
for the Egyptian Campaign of 1882, and two clasps for the Nile
Expedition of 1884. His possessions in the county, some 38,500
acres, are considerable for a private gentleman, but will hardly
compare with the vast possessions once owned by his ancestors, the
great chiefs of the Comyns of the days of King Alexander III. It
should be added that a considerable body of the Comyns at one
time, taking offence at being refused interment in the family burial-
place, changed their name to Farquharson, as descendants of
Ferquhard, son of Alexander, sixth laird of Altyre, in the middle of
the fifteenth century. SEPTS OF CUN COMYN Buchan MacNiven
Niven
The text on this page is estimated to be only 29.50%
accurate

DAVIDSON Facing page 66.

The text on this page is estimated to be only 28.77%
accurate

CLAN DAVIDSON BADGE : Lus nam Braoileag (vaccineum

vitis idea) Red whortleberr3r. PIBROCH : Spaidsearach-Chaisteal
Thulaich. ACCORDING to the Highland manuscript believed to be
written by one MacLauchlan, bearing the date 1467, and containing
an account of the genealogies of Highland clans down to about the
year 1450, which was accepted as authoritative by Skene in his
Celtic Scotland, and believed to embody the common tradition of its
time, the origin of the Davidsons is attributed to a certain Gilliecattan
Mhor, chief of Clan Chattan in the time of David I. This personage, it
is stated, had two sons, Muirich Mhor and Dhai Dhu. From the
former of these was descended Clan Mhuirich or Macpherson, and
from the latter Clan Dhai or Davidson. Sir Aeneas Macpherson, the
historian of the clan of that name, states that both the Macphersons
and the Davidsons were descended from Muirich, parson of
Kingussie in the twelfth century. Against this statement it has been
urged that the Roman kirk had no parson at Kingussie at that time.
But this fact need not militate against the existence of Muirich at
that place. The Culdee church was still strong in the twelfth century,
and, as its clergy were allowed to marry, there was nothing to hinder
Muirich from being the father of two sons, the elder of whom might
carry on his name, and originate Clan Macpherson, while the
younger, David, became ancestor of the Davidsons. Still another
account is given in the Kinrara MS. upon which Mr. A. M. Mackintosh,
the historian of Clan Mackintosh, chiefly relies : This MS. names
David Dubh as ancestor of the clan, but makes him of the fourteenth
century, and declares him to be of the race of the Comyns. His
mother, it says, was Slane, daughter of Angus, sixth chief of the
Mackintoshes, and his residence was at Nuid in Badenoch. Upon the
whole, it seems most reasonable to accept the earliest account, that
contained in the MS. of 1467, which no doubt embodied the
traditions considered most authentic in its time. The chiefs of the
Davidsons are said to have been settled in early times at
Invernahavon, a small estate in Badenoch, at the junction of the
Truim with the Spey, and 67
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68 CLAN DAVIDSON when they emerge into history in 1370

or 1386 the holders of the name appear to have been of
considerable number, and in close alliance with the Mackintoshes
from whose forebears they claim descent. The event known as the
battle of Invernahavon is well known as a landmark in Highland
history. According to commonly accepted tradition, the older Clan
Chattan, descended from Gilliecattan Mhor of the time of Malcolm
Canmore or David I., saw the line of its chiefs come to an end in the
latter days of the thirteenth century in the person of an only child, a
daughter named Eva. This heiress in 1291 married Angus, the young
sixth chief of the Mackintoshes, who along with her received from
Gilpatrick, his father-in-law, not only the lands of Glenlui and
Locharkaig, but also the chiefship of Clan Chattan. The lands of
Glenlui and Locharkaig, however, appear to have been seized and
settled by the Camerons, and eighty or ninety years later the dispute
regarding their ownership came to a head. After many harryings of
the Camerons by the Mackintoshes and of the Mackintoshes by the
Camerons, it appears that in 1370 or 1386 — accounts differ as to
the date — a body of some four hundred Camerons made an
incursion into Badenoch. As they returned laden with booty they
were intercepted at Invernahavon by Lachlan Mackintosh, the eighth
chief, with a body of Clan Chattan which included not only
Mackintoshes but Macphersons and Davidsons, each led by its
respective chieftain. At the moment of attack a dispute arose
between the chiefs of these two septs as to which should have the
honour of commanding Clan Chattan's right wing. Macpherson
claimed the honour as male representative of the chiefs of the older
Clan Chattan ; Davidson, on the other hand, insisted that he should
have the post as the oldest cadet. These claims would appear to
uphold the account of the origin of these two septs which derives
them, not from the Mackintoshes but from Gilliecattan Mhor, chief of
the older Clan Chattan. Mackintosh, forced to decide in the urgency
of the moment, gave the post of honour to the Davidson chief, and
as a result, the Macphersons, highly offended, withdrew from the
battle. As a result of this, the Mackintoshes and Davidsons, greatly
outnumbered, were routed and cut to pieces. What followed is the
subject of a tradition given by Bishop Mackintosh in his History of
Moray. According to this tradition Mackintosh sent his bard to the
Macpherson camp, where he treated the Macphersons
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CLAN DAVIDSON 69 round their camp fires to a taunting

ballad describing the cowardice of men who forsook their friends in
the hour of danger. This, it is said, so enraged the Macpherson chief
that he forthwith called his men to arms, and fell upon the
Camerons in their camp at midnight, where he cut them to pieces,
and put them to flight. This battle at Invernahavon appears to have
been one of the incidents which directly led up to the famous
combat of " threttie against threttie before King Robert III. on the
North Inch of Perth in 1396. According to the chronicler Wyntoun,
the parties who fought in that combat were the Clan Quhele and the
Clan Kay, and authorities have always differed as to who these clans
were. According to some, the battle was a direct outcome of the
mutual jealousy of the Macphersons and Davidsons following the
rupture at Invernahavon; and the Gaelic name of the Davidsons,
Clan Dhai, which might easily be mistaken by a Lowland chronicler
for Kay, lends some superficial colour to the claim. It is scarcely
likely, however, that the Macphersons and Davidsons were at that
time so important as to warrant a great national trial by combat such
as that on the North Inch, which has made such a striking mark in
Scottish history. The probability seems rather to be that the combat
within the barriers before King Robert III. was between Clan Chattan
as a whole and Clan Cameron. According to the Kinrara MS., Clan
Quhewil was led on the North Inch by a Mackintosh chieftain, Shaw,
founder of the Rothiemurcus branch of the family. Maclan, in his
Costumes of the Clans of Scotland, is evidently seeking a pretext
when he asserts that it was mortification at defeat on the North Inch
which drove the Davidsons into obscurity, and finally induced the
chief with some of his followers to remove further north, and settle
in the county of Cromarty. It seems more likely that the decimation
of their ranks at Invernahavon, and the losses caused by subsequent
feuds, so reduced the numbers of the clan as to render it of small
account during the succeeding century. Lachlan Shaw in his MS.
history of Moray states that early in the seventeenth century the
Invernahavon family changed its name from Davidson to
Macpherson, the individual who did so being James of
Invernahavon, commonly called Seumas Lagach, great-grandfather
of John of Invernahavon. But Mr. A. M. Mackintosh, the historian of
Clan Chattan, has ascertained that the James of Invernahavon
referred to was son of a John Macpherson,
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70 CLAN DAVIDSON who, according to Sir Aeneas

Macpherson's MS., had feued the property. It can thus be seen how
Lachlan Shaw made the mistake of supposing that the Davidsons of
Invernahavon had changed their name. The historian of Clan
Chattan above referred to offers another theory to account for the
comparative disappearance of Clan Davidson from the historic page,
by pointing out that two of the name were concerned in the murder
of Lachlan, the fourteenth Mackintosh chief, in 1524. One of these
two, Milmoir MacDhaibhidh, was the chief's foster-brother, but
believed that Mackintosh had helped to destroy his prospects of
marrying a rich widow, and accordingly, on 25th March, along with
John Malcolmson and other accomplices, fell upon the chief and slew
him while hunting at Ravoch on the Findhorn. For this deed the
three assassins were seized and kept in chains in the dungeon on
Loch-an-Eilan till 1531, when, after trial, Malcolmson was beheaded
and quartered, and the two Davidsons were tortured, hanged, and
had their heads fixed on poles at the spot where they committed the
crime. Mr. Mackintosh also points out that another Davidson, Donald
MacWilliam vie Dai dui, conspired with the son of the above John
Malcolmson against William, the fifteenth Mackintosh chief in 1550,
when the head of that chief was brought to the block by the Earl of
Huntly at Strathbogie. The Davidsons who did these things, however,
were merely servants and humble holders of the name, and their
acts can hardly have brought the whole clan into serious disrepute.
That the Davidsons did not altogether cease to play a part in
important events is shown by an entry in the Exchequer Rolls (iv.
510) in 1429. This is a record of a distribution of cloth of divers
colours to Walter Davidson and his men by command of the King,
and the gift is taken to be possibly an acknowledgment of the loyalty
of the Davidson chief and his clan during the Highland troubles of
the year. Later popular tradition has associated the Davidsons with
the estate of Davidston in Cromarty, the laird of which is mentioned
in 1501 and 1508, in the course of a legal action taken against
Dingwall and Tain by the Burgh of Inverness. Here again, however,
the historian of Clan Chattan has pointed out that, according to
Fraser Mackintosh's Invernessiana, pages 175-184, the owners of
the estate of Davidston were a family named Denoon or Dunound.
In any case, however, the Davidsons had taken root in
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CLAN DAVIDSON 71 this neighbourhood. In the second half

of the seventeenth century Donald Davidson owned certain land and
other property in Cromarty. His son, Alexander Davidson, was town
clerk of the county town, and his son William succeeded him in the
same office. In 1719 this William Davidson married Jean, daughter
of Kenneth Bayne of Knockbayne, nephew and heir of Duncan Bayne
of Tulloch. The son of this pair, Henry Davidson, born in 1729, made-
a great fortune as a London West India merchant. His wife was the
daughter of a shipmaster of Cromarty, who was son of Bernard
MacKenzie, last Bishop of Ross. In 1763, when the estate of Tulloch
was sold by the creditors of the ancient owners, the Baynes, it was
purchased by Henry Davidson for ,£10,500, and has since been the
seat of his family. On the death of Henry Davidson, first of Tulloch, in
1781, he was succeeded by his brother Duncan. This laird was an
energetic and notable man in his day. On the Tulloch estate he
carried out vast improvements, including the reclamation of a great
stretch of land from the sea, and the construction of the main road
from Dingwall to the North. He was provost of Dingwall from 1784
till 1786, and M.P. for Cromarty from 1790 to 1796. This laird's son,
Henry, was, like his uncle, a successful West India merchant in
London, and, like his father, was a g-eat planter of woods and
reclaimer of land. His son, uncan, the fourth laird of Tulloch, began
life as an officer in the Grenadier Guards. His first wife was a
daughter of the third Lord MacDonald, and his return to Parliament
as member for Cromarty in 1826 was the occasion of great
celebrations in the countryside. As a politician he was chiefly noted
for his opposition to the Reform Bill. An enthusiastic sportsman, he
was the reviver of horse racing at the Northern Meeting at
Inverness, and he drove the first coach which ran from Perth to
Inverness, on the Queen's birthday in 1841. At his death in 1881 he
was succeeded by his eldest son, Duncan, who married Georgina,
daughter of John MacKenzie, M.B., of the Gareloch family, and in
turn died in 1889. His son, the sixth and present laird, who was born
in 1865, married in 1887 Gwendoline, daughter of William Dalziel
MacKenzie of Farr and of Fawley Court, Buckinghamshire. He was
trained for a commercial career, but after fourteen years in London,
his health breaking down, he retired to live at Tulloch. He takes an
active part in county business, is a J.P., D.L., and Honorary Sheriff-
Substitute, as well as county
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