They claim the right to do wrong, or more accurately, that the wrong they do is their right

 

Conclusion

This brings us to the conclusion of this sad story and its lessons. In his debates with Stephen Douglas on slavery, Abraham Lincoln said that one “cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong”.1 The insistence of certain homosexuals to foist their personal moral confusion—as a “right” mandated by the courts or state legislatures—upon the general populace so that it becomes public moral confusion is not some harmless caprice. They claim the right to do wrong, or more accurately, that the wrong they do is their right. I have tried to demonstrate that this is dangerous for more than them.

STo paraphrase Roger Scruton’s remark about the phony in modern art, activist homosexuals and others campaigning for same-sex marriage are asking us to conspire in their own self-deception, to help them create a fantasy world, to join in their flight from reality.2 Their goal is to make the flight enforceable, in fact mandatory, to have society reorganized around it so that nothing can interrupt the flight. I have endeavored to show how the homosexual rationalization has eaten its way through America’s civic and political institutions with dire results. Since the moral acceptance of sodomy requires the denial of a teleologically ordered Nature, it, in turn, necessarily affects everything—including the ultimate ends of life, as perceived by Socrates and Aristotle. They are part of the loss.

Nevertheless, same-sex proponents insist that their unreality will not affect the reality of others. Same-sex marriage, they say, will leave real marriage untouched, but the denial of reality never remains partial. The unreal part is in tension with the real part, even if the two are not directly in contention on a specific issue. The ultimate vulnerability of the rationalization is reality, which remains despite the rationalization’s denial of it. To support itself, unreality must advance, or be advanced upon. Assertions of unreality are always aggressive—not only because they are a negation of something, but because, like Napoleon, they must conquer to survive

A perfect example of this is the spread of heterosexual sodomy subsequent to its moral approval in homosexual relationships. Dr. Mark Regnerus reports that “there’s been a wide and comparatively recent uptake of anal sex in heterosexual relationships, boosted by the normalization of gay men’s sexual behavior in the American [male] imagination.”3 And the purveyors of sex education and contraception are keeping up with, or perhaps even promoting, the trend. Recently at a public high school in San Francisco, a heterosexual female student was provided with a flyer that included instructions on how to use female condoms, including in anal intercourse. The information is the same as that on the Planned Parenthood website, which says that women can use such condoms “for vaginal and anal intercourse.” (Interestingly, the Mayo Clinic website instructs women not to use a female condom for anal sex.) It is worth repeating Mary Eberstadt’s line, quoted earlier, but now in reverse order: “Once homosexuals start claiming the rights of heterosexuals, it would not be long before heterosexuals started claiming the right to act as homosexuals.

The denial of reality imperils even prohibitions that some homosexuals may wish to keep. But on what grounds can they now be retained? As formerly active homosexual Ronald G. Lee observed, “If you support what is now described in euphemistic terms as ‘the blessing of same-sex unions,’ in practice you are supporting the abolition of the entire Christian sexual ethic, and its substitution with an unrestricted, laissez faire, free sexual market. The reason that the homosexual rights movement has managed to pick up such a large contingent of heterosexual fellow-travelers is simple: Because once that taboo is abrogated, no taboos are left.”4 Exactly. All rationalizations for sexual misbehavior, no matter of what sort, are allied to and reinforce each other. The rationalization being complete, anything goes, including “bug chasing”—the new craze in which homosexuals actively seek HIV infection because of the added sexual thrill. They call the men who infect them “gift givers”. One bug chaser said, “It’s about freedom.”5 Freedom is slavery. Others claim that the virus and its treatment impart a better quality of life.6 Indeed, sickness is health, just as death is life—remember Dr. Brandt

Lee needed only add that, in addition to Christian morality, the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” are also abolished—with some rather grave political consequences. The price for this has not yet been paid in full. The nineteenth-century French political philosopher Frederic Bastiat warned: “When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe.”7The celebration of the “rich diversity” to which we are all being invited or coerced is not diverse enough to include those who have not shared in the unreality or who have refused to join in the flight—that would include the observant followers of every major religion. Those religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, hold that homosexual acts are morally repugnant. Therefore, their teachings must be privatized, while homosexuality is publicized and celebrated. Fr. James Schall remarked that “we are seeing more and more not just the legally enforced living of disordered lives but the official effort to repress any speaking or information that suggests anything is wrong with it. This is really what is behind the establishment of ‘diversity’ as the only criterion of truth. It is a form of relativism that seeks to silence any possibility that ‘the goodness and humanity of God’ are the true keys to human living and its ultimate destiny in eternal, not political, life.”8 This is no longer permitted speech

The problem with our civilization is that the moral convictions underlying its public order have been undermined to the point of near collapse. No doubt there are many fine families and individuals continuing to live very good lives in the United States and the Western world, and this is a cause for hope. But those are now “private” lives, based upon “personal” choices, and all choices are therefore equal. What has been lost from public discourse is the rhetoric with which to address what distinguishes the very goodness of their lives as essential to our survival as a republic from the public immorality that is bringing about its demise

Evidence of legal enforcement is present wherever the homosexual ethos has been publicly embraced. After all, what is the good of a rationalization if it cannot be made compulsory? A woman in Washington State was sued for refusing to arrange wedding flowers for a homosexual couple.9 An inn owner in Vermont paid a large fine in a dispute over hosting a lesbian wedding reception.10 A photography studio in New Mexico that refused to shoot a same-sex wedding was found guilty of “sexual orientation discrimination” and given a fine.11 A Hawaii judge found against a woman who refused to rent a room to a lesbian couple at her in-home bed and breakfast.12 An African-American woman lost her job at Toledo University because of her op-ed in the local newspaper disputing that the “gay rights” movement had anything to do with the civil rights struggles of African-Americans.13A friend from Great Britain reports that a police chaplain was removed from his post because he voiced his support for traditional marriage on his personal Internet blog. “Strathclyde Police say Rev. Brian Ross can believe in marriage in private if he so wishes, but he can’t express his opinions in public—not even when he’s ‘off duty’. It’s a breach of their equality and diversity policies, say the police.”14 This happened even before the law on same-sex marriage was changed by Parliament. Since then, a wealthy homosexual couple in Great Britain has already threatened to sue the Church of England to force it to perform same-sex weddings. Logically enough, Barrie Drewitt-Barlow said: “The only way forward for us now is to make a challenge in the courts against the church. It is a shame that we are forced to take Christians into a court to get them to recognise us. It upsets me because I want it so much—a big lavish ceremony, the whole works. . . . As much as people are saying this is a good thing I am still not getting what I want.”15 There are many such stories. There will be many more

Ultimately, of course, none of this is going to work because reality will always, if only eventually, win over unreality. Those involved in this effort, both homosexuals and their allies, are simply contributing to what Italian law professor Francisco D’Agostino calls the “illusion that a more pervasive legalization of their existence can give homosexuals that interior balance whose lack they so clearly suffer”.16 Unfortunately for them, as former lesbian Linda Jernigan said, “There is not a law that can bring you peace.” To repeat the quote at the beginning of this book from former lesbian Melinda Selmys, “A man may lie to himself very prettily, but he can never really escape from the knowledge that it is a lie.” Illusion will finally lead to disillusion, perhaps at the cost of the catastrophe that Bastiat predicted

Of course, we cannot blame homosexuals for all of this. As mentioned before, first came contraception and the embrace of no-fault divorce. Once sex was detached from diapers, the rest became more or less inevitable. If serial polygamy is okay, and contraceptive sex is okay, and abortion is okay, what could be wrong with a little sodomy? First, short-circuit the generative power of sex through contraception; then kill its accidental offspring; and finally celebrate its use in ways unfit for generation. Contraception used to be proscribed, then it was prescribed, and now has become almost obligatory in the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act, which proposes to penalize employers who do not provide it, along with abortifacients and sterilization procedures, to their employees with fines of $100 per worker per day. I only wish there were survivors from the 1930 Lambeth Conference—which first endorsed a limited use of contraceptives—who might be forced to attend the Gay Pride events and officiate at same-sex “marriages”, so they could dwell upon what they hath wrought. Just as there is no such thing as being a little bit pregnant, there is no such thing as a little compromise on moral principle, as the Boy Scouts will soon discover. If the ideology behind the Casey decision is correct, then the homosexual position is the right one. It substitutes the primacy of will for the primacy of reason. If we can make it all up as we go along, then there are no moral standards in Nature to distinguish between the use and the abuse of sex, only personal taste. The broad embrace of this view has opened the floodgates to a sexual dystopia. The problem with this inundation is that it threatens the very democracy that allows it

Evil is particularly contagious when it is institutionalized. The institutionalization of immorality leads to more moral disorder, not to its attenuation, and then to political disorder and eventual collapse. There is a kind of Gresham’s law of morals: just as bad currency drives out good currency, so bad morals drive out good morals. The Spectator provided a compelling example of this regarding legalized prostitution in the Netherlands: “Legalization has not been emancipation. It has instead resulted in the appalling, inhuman, or degrading treatment of women, because it declares the buying and selling of human flesh acceptable.”17 The institutionalization of homosexual marriage likewise declares sodomy acceptable, even sanctified. Similarly, it will make things worse, not better

If life is sacred, then the means of generating it must also be sacred. If generation is intrinsic to the Nature of sex, then sex possesses immense significance. It is not a toy, or simply an amusement, or an item for sale. It is profoundly oriented to creation—creation emanating from union. It has a telos. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse said: “The human person is meant for love, and the human body cries out to be fruitful.”18 As stated earlier, the fruit is the incarnation of the love. If generation is artificially separated from it, sex lapses into insignificance and triviality. This denial leads to its desecration and is contemptuous of what human beings are meant to be

For everyone’s sake, it is essential to recover the sensibility underlying the prohibition against the desecration of sex. That it must be recovered is not simply the agenda of the religious right, but a deeply political concern for the future of freedom. That freedom is already imperiled by the effects of the sexual revolution: widespread divorce, single parenthood, cohabitation, child abuse, rampant pornography, and the promotion of homosexual acts and homosexual marriage. Sex is so important that its misuse has become the principal means for dismantling our culture and political order

We have blinded ourselves to the connection between the abuse of sex and the dissolution of the American family, which can be seen in these results: as of 2010 those with children now represent only 20 percent of American households, according to the US Census Bureau;19 35 percent of children are in single-parent families; sexual crime is up more than 200 percent in public schools since 1994; there has been a precipitous rise in illegitimate births (now 40 percent of all births); 60 percent of African-American children are born out of wedlock; some 50 percent of marriages end in divorce;20 there are some one million abortions per year on average, or 55 million since 1973; and our culture has coarsened in brutal ways. Yet the misuse of sex has so corrupted our society that no one dares mention it as a principal cause of our debasement. As Justice Kennedy teaches, unassailable “private conduct between consenting adults” made under the inviolable “autonomy of self” is at the heart of liberty. But this cannot be right, particularly if it leads to self-destruction

The reason is that the key to democracy is not free choice. As we know from the Weimar Republic, people can freely choose anything, even Hitler. The key, as our Founding Fathers knew, is virtue. Only a virtuous person is capable of rational consent because only a virtuous person’s reason is unclouded by the habitual rationalizations of vice. Vice inevitably infects the faculty of judgment. No matter how democratic their institutions, a morally enervated people cannot be free. And people who are enslaved to their passions inevitably become slaves to tyrants. Thus, our Founders predicated the success of democracy in America upon the virtue of the American people

Our culture no longer corners us into virtue, however, but impels us into vice. Almost every contemporary cultural signal militates against chastity, which is why the fabric of society is falling apart. The effort to construct a political order on Eros, of which homosexual marriage is simply the capstone, will end in the same way as Pentheus’ Thebes—in slavery, subjection, and destruction. A society that is no longer willing to guarantee the institution that is fundamental to its survival—marriage, the family—and that so loses a proper sense of the Founding principle of equality that it uses it to undermine the family will not long endure. Will we lament with Euripides’ Agave, “Dionysus has undone us. Too late I see it”

Fr. Schall’s diagnosis is tha

we would like to “free” ourselves from nature in order that we become what we “want” to be. And what we “want” to be must, logically, eliminate any sign that something in us is better made than what we ourselves could conjure up. This result is why so much of our contemporary life is taken up with ways of life that deny marriage, children, and seek to glorify ways of life that are intrinsically opposed to them. To achieve this latter goal of complete independence from God, we must lie to ourselves about what we are. . . . No one, Plato said, wants a “lie in his soul about the most important things.” But if we do want to replace God with our own definition of ourselves, we must lie to ourselves, deceive ourselves, about what we are. We must seek ourselves independently of what we ought to be. If we succeed in this endeavor, we will make ourselves into monsters and oddities.2

These remarks are flares in the night, distress signals, calls for moral rescue before a tsunami engulfs all memory of moral order. Signals have been sent. They still hang in the night sky, the last illumination before bearings are lost. In the darkness that descends, who will answer the cries for help? Will it be those who have been told to be less than men and women in marriage

Controversies about life, generation, and death are decisive for the fate of any civilization. Each distinction we erase makes it harder for us to see or make other distinctions. The ability to discriminate is, of course, essential to the ability to choose correctly. If we lose it, the change in our own moral character cannot help but profoundly change the character of our government. This is because, as Fr. Schall has written, “Where truth cannot be spoken, no one can reform his life.”22 With the loss of the possibility of virtue goes everything that depends upon it. A society can withstand any number of persons who try to advance their own moral disorders as public policy. But it cannot survive once it adopts and enforces the justification for those moral disorders as its own. This is what is at stake in the culture war. This is why everything is changing.

from the book Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything