Christianity and Homosexuality

No comment.

Like most Christians, I have little interest in the issue of the ethics of homosexuality. Judge not; let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Anyone who believes Christianity or Catholicism is especially hostile to homosexuality should visit the Philippines. It is an overwhelmingly, and devoutly, Catholic nation, 90% Christian and 80% Catholic, but homosexuality is quite open. Effeminate transvestites are everywhere. Nobody cares.

To be clear, homosexuality is immoral. But then, so is adultery, so is fornication, so is masturbation, so is lusting after a woman in your heart. Someone else’s sex life is still no business of mine, and it is immoral in turn to be too interested in it. Homosexuals have nothing to fear from the Catholic Church.

Accordingly, it is also no problem for Catholics, or Christians, if homosexuality is legal. Morality and law are two different things, and making the immoral illegal can be a mistake. It is not just that it is a terribly blunt instrument: if one does what is right out of fear of civil punishment, one has done nothing moral. True free will has been removed, and without free will there are no moral acts. So any law that seeks to eliminate immorality is eliminating morality just as surely.

So there need be no problem for homosexuals here. But what is happening in the West right now is something quite different from making homosexuality legal. Instead, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction, it has been declared, often unilaterally by the courts, to be a human right.

This is a big problem. For everyone.

First, while Christians have no problem tolerating it, Christians cannot simply decide homosexual sex (as opposed to having homosexual preferences) is perfectly moral after all. Homosexuality is clearly condemned in the Bible, in both the Old and New Testaments. Since Christianity holds that the Bible is the word of God, Christians cannot pick and choose. If God says homosexuality is wrong, the case is closed, whether or not we understand the reasons why. You stop listening to God, and you are no longer following your religion. Not to mention going to Hell and stuff.

Some will point to the fact that we no longer stone adulterers, etc, etc, as evidence that these things can change. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Stoning adulterers, etc, etc, is part of the Mosaic Law, which is to say, the Old Covenant given to Moses. The Old Covenant, for Christians, is superseded by the New. This is why we no longer circumcise ourselves, or keep kosher, or celebrate the Lord’s Day on Saturday. But homosexuality is clearly condemned in the New Testament as well as the Old, and by the early Church Fathers. No fudge factor here: it is part of the New Covenant.

Therefore, Christians cannot accept that there is nothing wrong with homosexual sex without discarding their religion itself. The same is true of Judaism and Islam.

Setting up a human right to homosexual sex (again as opposed to having homosexual urges) and to protection from discrimination on that basis, therefore creates a basic conflict in the doctrine of human rights: between this new right to lack of discrimination on the grounds of homosexual sex and the right to freedom of conscience and of religion.

I suspect that those who are promoting the idea of a right to homosexual sex are doing this largely if not entirely out of hostility to religion, knowingly hoping to eliminate freedom of religion. However, the threat to religion is actually secondary. The more direct threat is to the doctrine of human rights itself, as this new right makes it self-contradictory. Anyone who believes in human rights, as well as anyone themselves religious, must therefore be opposed to this new supposed inalienable right to sex. We must, in other words, recognize that people have the moral right to disapprove of homosexual sex, and the right to act on this disapproval, including the right to pass laws against it. The issue is only whether such laws are advisable.

Are they? Possibly.

The claim to an inalienable right to homosexual sex is based on two premises: first, that homosexuality is involuntary, that people are just “born that way,” on the analogy of sex, ethnicity, class, or skin colour; and, second, that homosexual sex is a “victimless crime,” that it harms no one. Both of these things must be true to justify a right to homosexual sex: being inborn is not enough. Pedophilia is also currently claimed to be inborn, yet nobody presumes an inalienable right to sex with children. Some believe that a tendency to alcoholism is at least partly genetic. Yet nobody is defending an inalienable right to alcohol.

But even this first premise, that homosexuality is inborn, is unproven.

Indeed, if people are born homosexual, Darwin must have been wrong on a fundamental point: natural selection. Since homosexuals tend in the nature of things not to breed, any homosexual gene must be selected out of the gene pool muy pronto: in a generation or two. Some theorize instead that a hormone imbalance in utero during pregnancy can cause homosexuality. This does not solve the problem, only obscure it: natural selection should breed out mothers with said hormone imbalance just as surely, if not just as quickly.

It more or less follows that people are not born homosexual. Yet even if they were, it is a leap to assume that, because someone is born with homosexual urges, they must have homosexual sex. After all, anywhere else we do not presume such a right: we can and do control our sexual urges as a matter of fundamental morality, as well as self-preservation. The fact that I feel powerfully attracted to one particular gorgeous redhead does not give me the right to have sex with her. 

And what if I have urges to rob a bank?

Now, to the second point: does homosexuality harm no one? Actually, it is clear that homosexual sex harms homosexuals. The body isn’t designed for it. As a result, gays are far more likely to contract sexually-transmitted diseases of all kinds. The bottom line is that the average life expectancy of a self-identified gay man is twenty years less than that of a straight man--even when you leave AIDS out of the equation. Seventy-five percent of self-identified gay men carry at least one sexually transmitted disease, apart from AIDS. (Thomas Schmidt, Straight and Narrow? (Downer’s Gove, Ill.: Inter-Varsity Press, 1995).

So, while both parties may consent, homosexual sex is a bad idea, and if one party entices the other party into it, he is for all intents and purposes an assailant, and the other a victim. 

But if nobody enticed anybody, there would be no homosexual sex.

Now let’s consider another troubling possibility. If homosexuality is not inborn, how does one become homosexual? The obvious likelihood is that one is introduced to it by another who already has that preference. Our early sexual experiences may well be influential, even definitive. This was always understood as the essential nature of homosexual encounters up to quite modern times: that they were a question of an older, mature man seducing a young adolescent. Maybe that is no longer the case; maybe it is just politically incorrect any more to say so.

A homosexual who seduces a young non-homosexual into the lifestyle is doing the latter a clear injustice. You can kind of see why a just God would object.