OUR GAY FUTURE by David Warren

[David Virtue]

OUR GAY FUTURE

By David Warren
Ottawa Citizen
October 5, 2003

This week, for a change of pace, I'm going to write about homosexual
"marriage". My attentive reader will notice that I have written hardly
a word about this before. I have only written about things happening
AROUND this subject. Let us now turn our attention to the subject
itself.

And the first thing we see, upon looking into it, is this mysterious
phenomenon of homosexuality. The word can mean at least two things. It
can refer to a sexual attraction to members of the same sex, or it may
mean acting on that impulse. The distinction is crucial, at least in
the received Christian view. For one is not a sin, and the other is.
Having sexual desires of any kind cannot possibly be sinful -- when it
is something that happens to us, no matter how caused. It is only when
a person begins to act upon the impulse -- by, for instance, indulging
fantasy -- that he buys into the sin in his own right. And we are
fantastical creatures, we humans; we are always capable of more than we
assume.

It is important to make that clear, in further distinguishing sin from
sinner. For what I'm saying here, is that the distinction runs deep, as
the free human will runs deep, into nature. We are not irresponsible
for our acts, simply because we suffer bad impulses. And I have no
right to judge the homosexual, as I have no ability to understand him
from inside. His problem is with Christ, not me. My problem is with
Christ, not him.

Yet ideas have consequences; and acts also have consequences. Behind
the notion that homosexuality is sin is not only Christian doctrine,
nor also the doctrines of the other "great religions". Behind it is the
wealth of accumulated and applied human experience, growing through the
centuries. The Jews set themselves against the homosexuality that was
endemic in the ancient world around them; the pagan Romans set
themselves against the homosexual customs of the Greeks. In doing so
they were raising the standards of their societies; and not
incidentally, raising the status of their women.

Bear with me: this is important. No social order will long endure that
is founded on lies about the human condition. And one of the large
truths of that condition -- written not only in the Creator's
announcement to the ancient Hebrews that he "made them male and
female", but to be found in our experience of the creation itself, is
the incompleteness of man as man, and woman as woman.

For as Jews and pagan Romans alike learned, or realized more deeply
than before, the sexes are necessary to each other. There is a man's
way, and a woman's way, of being in the world, and we need each other
to be fully human. The society of men alone, or of women alone, easily
degenerates into savagery.

Our (traditional) institution of marriage has a long history, which may
be considered as a reflection of God's will, or as an adaptation to
nature. Same result, either way. The norm which emerged, and was
confirmed through success, emerged through many ages.

That norm was one man and one woman, vowing loyalty to each other
through thick and thin, in love and in obedience, till death. It is not
only the secure ground in which to raise children, it is even for the
childless the secure guarantee of a responsible social order. For a man
and a woman are by nature conceived to be a check and balance upon each
other, stronger together than they can be apart.

This point has to be driven home. Notwithstanding the nonsense that
feminism has taught, and the corresponding masculinist incitements and
reactions, the difference between a man and woman is vastly more
significant than the visible differences between their reproductive
organs. There may be hard cases to make bad law, but the reality both
broad and deep is two parts of one human nature.

We no longer have a Christian society, yet we could still wish to be,
if possible, fully human. We tolerate far more deviation from our 
social norms than our ancestors did; or than their ancestors did, in
every other human culture. We allow people to resist the mould. But
when we shatter the mould itself, we play with dissolution of
everything that makes us fully human.

In recognizing "homosexual marriage", and celebrating it as equal to
the "traditional" kind, we go decisively beyond toleration to
encouragement. We are wantonly creating a new social order, in which
men and women increasingly become detached from each other, and from
their mutual obligations.

We are, as those who have thought wisely about such things must know,
creating a society in which there will be far more homosexuals than
there are today, and all the unanticipated consequences of that will
emerge in succession, over time. This is not a possibility, but an
inevitability. For the truth, which we ignore, or pretend to ignore, is
that human beings do not become homosexual any more "naturally" (in the
organic sense), than they become heterosexuals. They grow within
societies, within families, within norms.

The long-established heterosexual norm took a long time to be
established. Once again, we must look back to the pre-Christian and
non-Hebrew ancient world, or look outside the West today, or into
prison wards, to find social orders in which male homosexuality is
"normal", in which it becomes the alternative bond of society. In all
such societies the position of women is radically different than in our
own; in all of them women are reduced to chattels -- and kept, if you
will, as breeding machines.

We make the grave mistake of assuming only one or two per cent of a
society is "naturally homosexual". That may well be a minimum for a
society in which homosexuality is discouraged, as was the case in our
own. The historical evidence makes it clear that this isn't the case
where homosexual relations of one kind or another are actually
encouraged.

The future to which we are now striving will obviously be extremely bad
news for women -- whether or not they grasp it yet. In some ways it may
be exhilarating for men; but finally, the progressive loss of our
ability to look a woman in the eye will diminish us men, too. For we,
also, will become less human.

END