Robert Reilly has written MAKING GAY OKAY: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything (Ignatius Press, 2014). It is probably the most influential book I have read this year because it is influencing me in how I view the current controversy on this subject more than anything else I have read on it. Because I consider it so important I would like to take some time over the next few blogposts to review his exposition.
His thesis is very simple. He states that there are two fundamental views of reality. One is that Nature has ordered all things to fulfill certain inbuilt purposes. The other view is that we make our own purposes, according to our will and desires. Therefore, we can make everything, including ourselves, anything that we wish and that we have the power to do. The first view leads to the primacy of reason in human affairs; the second leads to the primacy of the will. The first does not allow for anything unnatural, such as same-sex marriage, while the second allows for anything. The same-sex marriage debate is really about the Nature of reality itself.
The homosexual movement seeks to have government and society affirm its lifestyle. The agenda is to create a society in which homosexual behavior is regarded as healthy, natural and normal. The goal is to provide true alternatives to historic marriage and to radically reorder society’s view of reality. In other words, sodomy is to become morally equivalent to the marital act and therefore should be taught as such and affirmed at every level of public life, even in elementary schools. What was hitherto considered a vice, a moral disorder, should now become a highly moral act. It should become normative as a standard of behavior, it should be sacramentalized. Therefore, active homosexuals should be ordained as priests and bishops and pastors should officiate at same-sex marriages. What used to be bad is now good. Tolerance has to be replaced by compulsory acceptance in order for rationalization to be secure. No one can dissent from this illusion in order for people who consider themselves victims to be justified in their behavior. Although they are only 2% of the population the homosexual lobby have dominated the discourse and set the agenda. If you disagree with them on moral grounds you are labeled homophobes. Freedom of speech goes by the board.
What do you think of Reilly’s thesis? How free are you to express your convictions about the present cultural trend toward accepting homosexual behavior as normative and healthy? How can you accept the homosexual as a neighbor you are to love and for whom Christ died, while at the same time regarding his sexual behavior as perverse?
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