By: Paul Murano – April, 2014
This is a very important column if you happen to be a fan of clarity. It is about an issue that has been purposefully obscured by those pushing an agenda to justify a lifestyle. The confusion has become so pervasive and widespread, even to the point of being dispersed within this newspaper (The Valley Patriot). Therefore, it is important to break through the fog to offer moral clarity on the question of homosexuality.
First, what the issue is not.
a) It is not about judging persons. It is about judging acts. Degree of culpability always depends on level of knowledge and free consent, which only God can properly judge. However, as any friend or parent knows, loving persons means condemning bad behavior for the sake of the loved one.
b) It is not about feelings, attractions, or desires. Moral questions deal with voluntary behavior, not involuntary movements of emotion or desire.
Disordered acts relating to the sensual appetites such as bulimia, alcoholism, and pedophilia are objectively wrong regardless of whether individuals involved were born with the propensity or have acquired it by habit. These acts violate the nature and dignity of the human person. The same principle applies to homosexual acts. Sodomy is intrinsically evil and can never be condoned regardless of the propensity’s origin or the difficulty it may pose in some to control.
There are two common practices of psychological manipulation that are meant to influence public sentiment regarding this moral issue. The first is to make it personal and to tell of how wonderful or normal the persons involved are in other areas of their lives. This information is completely irrelevant. Let me repeat. If you are a wonderful neighbor, son or daughter, athlete, teacher, or Nobel Prize winner – none of this is relevant to the moral question of homosexuality or any moral act.
No amount of wonderfulness or normality in other areas of life, pleasant personality or skill in one’s profession, can ever make evil acts good.
The other tactic used to confuse people is to equate one’s desires with personal identity. For centuries the term “homosexual” has been an adjective for describing behavior. Political motives have shifted it to becoming a noun to label persons.
This manipulation of language is irresponsible and injurious to the delicate psyche of youth that might find themselves confused by experiencing such feelings.
No wise or humble person would ever equate disordered attraction with identity, or demand acceptance of unnatural behavior.
Clearing away the debris meant to obscure the issue enables us to see the one moral question: Are sexual acts between persons of the same sex natural and good? This ethical question demands first a teleological one: What is the purpose of the sexual reproductive organs? No one is offended if we ask the same question about the respiratory or digestive organs. In fact, pondering the latter makes it clear that acts like bulimia are objectively disordered. What, then, is the natural order of reproductive cells? Are male bodies naturally designed to sexually unite with each other? Are female bodies? Do the futile attempts to do so have potentiality for new life? Since acts of sodomy by their nature neither seal love nor give life, they are dead acts. Acts that attempt to separate pleasure from purpose and love from life, whether they are between people of the same or opposite sex, violate human nature and dignity and are by definition objectively abusive.
To summarize, the ethical question of homosexuality is not about same-sex attraction. Involuntary desire is not a moral issue. It is not about judging the worth or guilt of persons. It is about acts. The extremes of condoning homosexual behavior and hating those that engage in it are the two evils to avoid. Both extremes display cowardice. The moral question remains only this: Are homosexual acts in accord with the order of human nature as contributing to the flourishing of the individual, family and society? If the answer is no, then those who struggle with such disordered inclinations need love, not displaced compassion. We all have disordered inclinations due to the fall and are all in need of each other’s support. It is truly irresponsible to label people according to their feelings and to condone so called “same-sex marriage”. Such formal cooperation with evil shares in its guilt.