Is She or Isn"t She?

 

The internet is percolating with claims that Brigitte Macron, the wife of French President Macron, is actually a man. Without rehashing it here, the evidence looks convincing; and the Elysee Palace has not seemed able yet to rebut it.

So what? 

Candace Owens calls this “the biggest scandal in the history of the world.” But why should anyone even care?

Because it leaves the President of France vulnerable to blackmail? But he is only vulnerable to blackmail if we care in the first place. A good argument for leaving the private lives of politicians private.

But perhaps there is something more. Why, after all, if it is true, did they feel the need to cover it up? 

It might be that the historic prohibition on homosexuality has a hidden logic to it; the same logic that until recently required segregation of the sexes in the workplace. Sexual attraction makes people do crazy things: like promoting a lover over a more competent but less sexy candidate, say. Or sacrificing the interests of your employer in order to get sexual favours from an attractive supplier or competitor.

Ask the many spy agencies who regularly use “honey traps.” 

Blackmail is only one possibility. 

Over time, as well, a “gay mafia” might form within an organization, or an orgiastic “hellfire club,” a cabal of lovers promoting one another’s interests in return for sexual favours; with each able to blackmail the others should they deviate from some group programme.

Which might explain how gay and transgender issues have become dominant in political discussions everywhere, despite gays being only a tiny fraction, perhaps one percent, of the general population. They may form a higher percentage at the top of the social pyramid, due to logrolling.

And it may be important to keep their sexuality secret, so the general public does not realize there is a cabal.

What other world leaders might secretly be gay?

What other world leaders might secretly be pedophiles?

Unicorns and Rainbows

 

Watching video of recent demonstrations in Ottawa for and against “LGBTQ rights,” there is no trouble distinguishing sides. I see that one of the pride protesters is dressed as a cartoonish furry pink unicorn, against the inevitable backdrop of rainbow flags and rainbow colours and pastel pink and blue trans flags. It looks a lot like Disneyland.

Which brings up an obvious thought, one I am amazed has not occurred to me before.

Before the era of trans and gay rights, what would be automatically evoked by cartoonish furry pink unicorns? By rainbows? By pastel pink and baby blue? For that matter, by men in whiteface painted extravagantly as women? Who would be the intended audience?

Children. Not knowing what it was all about, children would naturally be delighted, and drawn to such an exhibit. Clowns! Toys!

The whole gay thing has always been targeted at children. They have always been coming for the children, as the San Francisco Gay Choir recklessly blurted out in song some years ago.

Saudi Arabia has a reputation for suppressing gay rights. I lived there for some years, and a lot of foreign teachers I knew were there because it was a paradise for gay men. They could be open about it, find a partner every night, and nobody bothered them. One of my Arab students even did his class presentation on his gay lover. Nobody seemed to have any problem with it.

But one colleague was suddenly given 24 hours to leave the country. He had solicited a student.

In other words, the actual offense is not homosexual sex. It is grooming. This is no doubt why homosexuality has traditionally been banned in most cultures.

We have or some years been fed the fiction that people are born gay or trans. This is obviously untrue: if there were such a thing as a gay or trans gene, it would be bred out within a generation. Gays are made by sexual experiences in childhood or early adolescence; we are programmed to be deeply imprinted by our earliest sexual experiences. In ancient Greece, it went without saying that an adult gay man’s lover would be a “youth.”

It is only becoming more explicit that the fundamental “gay right” or “trans right” is pedophilia. Without this practice, given the natural operation of human sexuality, there will over time be no gay partners.

And finding partners is necessarily a grave problem for a gay.

It was all bound to come to a head, and now it has.

Uganda's Anti-Gay Law

 

Uganda has just made being openly homosexual illegal. Protests are pouring in that this is a violation of human rights.

It is not. 

Making public advocacy of homosexual sex illegal may be unkind, but it is not a violation of human rights. Any more than making public advocacy of sex outside marriage illegal, or banning pornography, would be. There is a human right to procreation, but not to recreational sex. Specific sexual acts can be prohibited. Rape is prohibited. Sex with a minor is prohibited. Incest is prohibited.

There may be a public interest in prohibiting homosexuality. For example, in a time of collapsing birth rates worldwide, a government might consider it important to impose such a measure to encourage heterosexuality and procreation. The dogma of the homosexual rights lobby is that homosexuals are “born this way,” and there is no possibility of social contagion. But this claim has never been proven, and seems improbable. A government might want to suppress homosexual propaganda, not only for the sake of population support, and for the benefit of unmarried women, but because an addiction to homosexual sex is unfortunate for the addict, just as becoming addicted to some drug would be. The vast majority of those a gay man is sexually attracted to will reject his advances. It cannot be easy to find a loving partner, or to experience constant unrequited love.

The Ugandan law seems especially concerned with the spread of disease, including AIDS. And this too is reasonable. It is simply true that homosexual sex is more likely to spread diseases than heterosexual sex. This might also justify a law against its promotion.

Milo on Vortex

 

Bombshell

Apostolic  Nuncio Vigano on the job.

The Catholic clerical abuse scandal just got worse.

Archbishop Carlo Vigano, former Papal Nuncio to the US, has publicly called for Pope Francis to resign, saying he knew about the allegations against Cardinal McCarrick, and actually lifted sanctions against him imposed by Benedict XVI. Worse, Francis then used McCarrick to advise him on making appointments in the US church.

Vatican Insider further reports that there are no plans at the Vatican to take further action regarding the scandals in the US. This is significant, because at the level of bishop, nobody in the US has the authority to do anything. Sanctioning or removing a bishop requires action from the Vatican. If this is true, nothing is going to be done.

To be fair to Pope Francis, what he reportedly knew about McCarrick did not involve accusations of child abuse, only of homosexual relations and of not acting decisively on abuse by others. Again to be fair, at its worst, child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy was no worse than among the general population. And again to be fair, all accounts are that the problem has already been drastically reduced by measures now in place. At what point does this become a witch hunt?

There are two separate issues here: child sex abuse, and sexually active clergy. I think in the end they are linked, so that you cannot effectively address the one without also addressing the other. Pope Francis might believe otherwise. Francis may see no great issue with clergy being sexually active, and hence also with being sexually active homosexuals.

I have outlined why I think it is an important issue. Once people start becoming priests not out of religious interests, but for the gay culture and the hookup opportunites, it corrupts the seminaries and forces a culture of deceit that will drive out all good applicants. The people may still have the sacraments, but they have lost all moral guidance from the clergy. And where do the good men, who are genuinely called to the priesthood, go?

For the past few generations, as the West has been falling apart culturally and morally, Catholics have at least been able to rely on the Vatican to speak with moral authority: on John Paul II, on Benedict XVI, and, if with less force, on Paul VI. Now the modern moral anbiguity seems to have penetrated even the Vatican.

Help! I'm Being Oppressed!

It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: --
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.

I just watched video of a rally at Wilfrid Laurier University in which a few dozen students and faculty condemned the school administration for its failure to support “or even recognize the existence of” transgender students. This, weirdly, while the rest of us have been condemning the school administration for trying to deprive Lindsay Shepherd of her right of free speech in the name of transgender rights.

It is, for me, a bit of an epiphany. I begin to see what is going on here.

To understand things clearly, one must understand that “The left,” broadly, is the party and the program of the bureaucrats and the professions. And they think like bureaucrats. They have no fixed principles. They do not really give a damn about transgender rights, or women's rights, or immigrants, or anything else. Their prime concern is to keep the system in place which gives them their privileges and their power: the bureaucracy.

If this or that group complains, and sounds upset, the automatic response of the bureaucracy is to appease. Dramatic or decisive action is never in the best interests of a bureaucrat. It makes you a target. The natural strategy is, whenever anyone threatens to get disruptive, to try to buy them off. Not their money; no principles involved.

People who often engage with the bureaucracy learn how the game works. Threaten to make a loud noise, to go to the papers or to the streets, sound angry, and you get stuff.

This makes the left look strident and upset. But it is not really the left; it is their various client groups. Nor are the client groups really upset. This is just how the system works. They have, over time, been trained to act this way. Make a big noise, and you get what you want. And the bureaucracy is, at the same time, provided with cover: they are helping the “disadvantaged” and “oppressed.”

Recently, we have seen that there is no real ideology, no particular rhyme or reason, to what groups come under the leftist client umbrella. It is just whoever sounds really upset.

And so you see, for example, the strange current coalition between Islam and feminists. As recently as a year ago, the feminists and the Muslims were the opposite ends of the spectrum. Feminists were demanding international action on female genital mutilation; Saudi Arabia was the real enemy; women who wore burkhas were oppressed; and so forth. But once the Muslims, or some Muslims, conveyed clearly the impression that they were very upset over something, the bureaucracy responded promptly by giving them stuff. They quickly came under the umbrella as one more client group.

Now, however, we may have come to a crisis point. Until perhaps two weeks ago, it was always the safest course to give in to the demands of the LGBT lobby, or Black Lives Matter, or feminists, no matter how bizarre; and so they threw Lindsay Shepherd to the wolves. But now they are increasingly caught between a rock and a hard place. Too many different groups have learned how the system works; and their various non-negotiable demands are increasingly irreconcilable.

The insistence of the gay lobby, that they are “born this way,” for example, has never been reconcilable with the feminist system that “gender is a construct.” Nor is it reconcilable with the new idea that you can change your gender. If you can change your gender, can you also change your race? Logically, yes. So then what happens to the idea that certain races are oppressed? No need any more for affirmative action: just declare yourself a member of the preferred race. Both feminism and the gay lobby are irreconcilable with Islam. Support for immigration and illegal immigration is not compatible with support for the working poor as a grievance group, leading notably to the rise of Trumpism. Support for large-scale immigration is not compatible with the interests of African Americans. The contradictions of this appeasement approach are becoming obvious and insupportable.

It always had within it the seeds of its destruction. It is Danegeld. It inevitably leads to more of the very thing it seeks to avoid, social strife and hostility to the establishment and the system.

Perhaps, then, it is deserved. Poetic justice.

Of Lust, Pride, and Other Deadly Sins

The subtle dignity of a Gay Pride parade.

A piece by Graham Thompson in the National Post and in the Edmonton Journal (and Calgary Herald) condemns some Wildrose Party members as “intolerant,” “homophobic,” and “bigoted”--Thompson’s words—for objecting to a party functionary marching in Edmonton’s “Gay Pride” parade. To be more precise, the Wildrose Legislative and Outreach Assistant, Cody Johnston, had sent out a post on Facebook asking party members to support him in a “Pride Run” for the “Institute for Sexual Minority Studies.”

Members objected that this gave the public impression that the Wildrose Party supports such things. I do not know if they used intemperate language. If so, no examples seem to have been publicly offered. The worst Johnston has offered to the public as examples are “What kind of crap is this that you’re mailing out in the name of the Wildrose party?” and “Do not give the viewers the impression that this is Wildrose approved.”

Party leader Brian Jean has since spoken out: “There is no place for hate and that kind of speech within our party. There just isn’t.”

Hate speech?

Problem. This demonstrates that the average person cannot tell the difference between tolerance and active support. If you are not prepared to openly support a position, you are now intolerant.

As the Catholic Register put it recently:

Most people today equate tolerance with approval. Therefore, when many demand or ask for “tolerance” what they really demand is approval.

Bad news for Canadian Christians still reticent about converting to Islam.

Amsterdam does itself proud.

Or anyone concerned about freedom of thought in Canada.

Both homosexual sex and pride, both promoted by such parades, are sins—not only to Christians, but to just about anybody, of any religion. So, leaving aside homosexuality, is lust. Some people currently may be of the opinion that there is nothing sinful about either lust, homosexual sex or pride, that traditional morality is in error here, but they have no business demanding that everyone else think the same. They are free to make those arguments, so long as they do so in their own name. And so long as they respect the absolute right of others to disagree.

This has nothing to do with whether homosexuals should be discriminated against by the state because of their preference for homosexual sex. A moral person would have no difficulty in accepting that this is a private matter, and the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation. But that is not the issue here. The very point of the “pride” parade is to refuse to keep such things private, and to demand public endorsement.

For a party leader, public official, or party functionary to march in such a parade really ought to be offensive to most Canadians, including “homosexual” Canadians. If our instincts are now the opposite, so much the worse for our cities of the plain.

ChristianMingle

The Washington Times reports that “ChristianMingle.com,” an online dating web site, has just lost a lawsuit in the California courts for discriminating against gays. By not mentioning them. It must now change its interface and service to allow homosexuals to use it as well, and just as easily as heterosexuals: “men seeking men,” say, or “women seeking women,” have to be listed categories.

The ruling, the story adds, also applies to the company's companion sites, CatholicMingle, AdventistSinglesConnection, and BlackSingles.com. All must become fully and equally accessible to gays.

Wait a minute. Did you get that? BlackSingles is okay, but it must cater to gays. It is illegal to target a site to heterosexuals, but no problem targeting one by race?

This implies some kind of special privilege being extended to homosexuals, not any concenr with “equality.”

Indeed, what about the many exclusive sites for homosexuals for dating connections? It is also okay, it seems, to discriminate against heterosexuals, but not homosexuals.

Why all these special privileges for gays?

And why do gays—the ones who launched the lawsuit, at least—care? It is not as if, in a free market, anyone is particularly inconvenienced by a proprietor who chooses, for whatever reason, not to serve a particular clientele. There are always competitors who will—or if not, there's a beautiful business opportunity helpfully left wide open for some member of the excluded community.

So this thing, and this kind of thing generally, cannot be there to help gays—or blacks, or women.

It is there, and always there, to punish some other group; to discriminate against small business owners, or Christians, or heterosexuals. Some groups always MUST be served, other groups not. It aslo helps the ins stay in, and keeps the outs out, generally, by raising regulatory barriers to anyone entering a new business.

In this case, I presume the real point is to punish Christians for saying homosexual sex is wrong. They are quite pointedly, and in plain violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, taking away conscience rights from anyone with traditional moral sensibilities: Christian, yes, but also even Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, animist, or Confucian.

That's the First Amendment. As in fundamental. A fundamental human right. In favour of a newly-invented imagined human right to homosexual sex. And not just a right to homosexual sex, but to be generally aided and supported in its pursuit.

And behind that, the real subtext must be something else. Homosexuals are only about 3% of the population, by best estimates. Why are their concerns, even if legitimate, so prominent?

The real target is conventional morality itself. And what is generally offensive about conventional morality is its condemnation of casual sex more broadly. Hence, a Christian dating sight becomes a target.

The scarlet letter here, the real issue, is “A” – for Abortion.

Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash

Showing our gay pride.

I see a sad disconnect in the coverage of the Orlando massacre. I see worse coming.

When jihadists—good term; call them jihadists; although it is wrong to think that “jihad” per se is the problem—slammed two large planes into the Twin Towers, Jerry Falwell said this was because we had endorsed homosexuality and feminism. Almost everyone took him to task over this as a terrible thing to say. Yet to me, his comment was overwhelmingly likely to be correct. Plain good sense. Why does anyone else think they ran those planes into those towers? Because America supports Israel? Just because they hate anyone who is not Muslim?

I was married for a time to a Muslim woman from Pakistan. She referred to Europe and North America as “the wicked West.” I did not particularly appreciate this; but she was apparently expressing the common Muslim view. We were and are wicked, because we have gone all in for sexual immorality—notably, feminism and homosexuality. Loose women, gay men. Not a problem for her, from one perspective. Heck, she was here for the sexual immorality. She just wanted a piece of it. I, on the other hand, was not deeply interested in being wicked. And so, eventually, we parted company. Divergent interests.

But I digress. Given that you think promiscuous sex is genuinely immoral, she—and the plane bombers—were of course right. The West is wicked. We are wicked. 

It would not be so disturbign, either, if we kept it to ourselves. But instesd, we make insistent demands that the rest of the world, including the Muslim world, becomee as immoral as we are: that they endorse feminism, end the segregation of the sexes, allow women to bare much of their flesh, and end “disccrimination” against gays. That's being aggressively evil, and a declaration of war.

President Obama, in his speech in reaction to the Orlando mass shooting, did not mention Islam. Although the killer took the trouble to phone 911 and say that he was doing this in the name of ISIS, Obama explained earnestly “I've directed that we must spare no effort to determine what—if any—inspiration or association this killer may have had with terrorist groups.” But he did say, in reaction to events, that we all need “the strength and courage to change.” I'm guessing he did not mean to convert to Islam, but to double down on our public endorsement and support of the gay lifestyle. Especially since he described the gay nightclub as “more than a nightclub—it is a place of solidarity and empowerment where people have come together to raise awareness, to speak their minds, and to advocate for their civil rights.”

An author in the National Review—more or less at the opposite end of the Amerian political spectrum—is less inclined to avoid mentioning Islam. He points out that a popular and influential sharia manual, Reliance of the Traveller, says “Kill the one who sodomizes and the one who lets it be done to him.”

Seems to me we have a bit of a problem here. It is not just a case of two ships passing in the night, completely oblivious to the other's concerns. It is more a case of two locomotives heading full tilt towards each other on the same tracks.

Obama does not mention the religion, for good reason. He is effectively saying that nobody has a right to be a Muslim. He is condemning a tenet of sharia law as beyond the pale in American society, in liberal democracy, in the land of civil rights. Doesn't sound so good when stated baldly.

From the Muslim point of view, whose advice are you going to take on proper morality: God's, or the US President's? The necessary answer is that Obama and all Western secularists speak for Satan.

The voices on the right are at least a little better; they do at least acknowledge the issue. Thats a start. But they do it only to target Islam as the enemy. They do not appreciate that Muslims might have a case. They are simply the Other, and must be defeated.

But if you are an honourable Muslim man, and Satan personified comes knocking at your door making demands, what is the moral reaction?

Christians might be inclind to simply prepare for martyrdom. Islam does mot share that ethic.

In all of this, from the Muslim perspective, I'm afraid the West, and not ISIS or Al-Qaeda, has been the aggressor. I mentioned the demands—going far back—that Saudi Arabia, for example, change its attitudes towards women. There were many calls—have others forgotten?—well before 9-11 for American and the US to intervene in Afghanistan, to overthrow the Taliban government, in the name of rights for women. Demands by international organizations claiming some sort of jurisdiction, as well.

If being homosexual is declared a human right, as it now has been in the US and Canada, that must mean, by the logic of human rights, that no country or government can legitimately act against it. For if they can, they can also act against the human rights of Jews, say, or against freedom of speech, and so forth. The entire concept of human rights is then violated—among other things, the legal basis for the existence of the United States. In principle, any laws anywhere against sodomy now cannot be tolerated.

Problem here for liberal democracy, even without Islam in the picture. By the doctrine of human rights, one already has the right to freedom of conscience, and of religion. It is right there in the First Amendment, in American terms. That means one has the prior right to believe that sodomy is immoral, and even that those who commit sodomy ouught to be put to death. Given the new notion that any word spoken against homosexuality is hate speech directed against an identifiable group, one no longer haas a right to freedom of religion. Any religion: sodomy is understood to be immoral not just by Islam, and Christianity, but also Judiams, Buddhism, and, I expect, any known moral code.

We already, then, have two locomotives heading towards eachother down the track. We have total war to the death already declared. Gun bans would do nothing, or worse than nothing. Trump's plan to ban all Muslims from entering the US might offer a kind of temporary, partial relief. But even if this seems honourable, what about Americans who are already Muslim?

There are over a billion Muslims I n the world, even leaving aside Christians or Buddhists. We are going to have to live together. Time to deal with it.

It does not seem to me to be desirable, in any case that either side be wiped out. We need both religion, and liberalism. In fact, we need religion even to have liberalism: that's the fountain from which it sprang. Liberalism, conversely, is there to protect our freedom to have religion.

We need to stop both trains. Unfortunately, the Orlndo massacre and Obama's speech following it both instead turned up the throttle.

At base, this is a mistake made by the libdem side. By the doctrines of liberal democracy, as well as of Christiainty, where it came from, crime and sin are two very different things. Recall, if you will, that Jesus was executed as a criminal. By libdem principles, a state is justified in making a thing a crime if and only if it is a violation of another human party's rights. Outside this sphere, society has no say. Therefore, by liberal democratic doctrine, society has no obvious justification for making sodomy illegal. Sin is a different matter. One can sin against nature, or against God.

This is already difficult for Islam to accept. It does not see the same distinction between sin and crime that Christianity makes. In Islam, government is there to enforce the moral law. If it is not doing so, government is not doing its job.

But liberal democracy has now gone much further, by itself confusing legality with morality, encouraging Muslim misunderstanding. Rather than just being content to remove laws against sodomy, they have decided to declare being homosexual a human right, giving it a moral standing. They have allowed gay marriage, a public and civil endorsement of a sin. They have legally required recognition of gay marriage; nobody is allowed, then, to dissent from the practice. Or refuse to cater it. It is possibly illegal now for anyone to speak against sodomy.

Instead we have Gay Pride parades: two deadly sins for the price of one. Sodomy is not only legal: it is publicly celebrated. Talk about sending a message to Muslims in the Middle East.

Now we even have mandatory unisex washrooms. That obviously requires a violation of conscience for any Muslim woman. And asking everyone to use the washroom designated for their biological sex, given that the washroom facilities are comparable, is not even an inconvenience to anyone. It sure looks like deliberate provocation towards anyone with conventional moral beliefs on sexual matters of any sort.

Female promiscuity is another, parallel, and older issue here. We would say “feminism”; but the real issue, as Muslims would rightly see it, is female promiscuity. It is one thing, and perhaps tolerable, to have no laws against it. It is something else to celebrate it, and make it a crime to speak against it. That is making it a crime to be a good Muslim.

Before the Sixties, there was no Islamic terrorism to speak of, because there was no conflict between Islam and the West and these moral issues.

The West changed, Islam did not.

Of course, now I am going to be charged with discrimination against homosexuals. I adamantly reject the charge, on the initial grounds that there is no such thing as a homosexual. It is profoundly dehumanizing to identify people by their sexual preferences. “Homosexuals” were invented towards the end of the nineteenth century. Very Victorian concept, too. Before thet, there were just people, and they could freely choose to indulge or not indulge in this or that particular sexual act with this or that person. Has that really changed? Let us grant that not everybody is even inclined to indulge in homosexual sex. Most of us would reject it if offered. So it is a sin attractive to only a few. Is that unfair? God knows. It does not obviously lead to a moral right to homosexual sex. Some of us are also more inclined than others to steal things—kleptomania, to use the common term. That does not give them the moral right to steal. Some are inclined to have sex with the boss's wife. That does not give us a right to it. Even if she is willing.

The calculation is simple. If sodomy harms no one, then there is no need to make it illegal. At the same time, there is no need to elevate or to advertise the act.

An LBGT Breakthrough in the Philippines

Filipino transvestite

Apparently there has been a great breakthrough for the LBGT community in the Philippines. This article appeared recently in the UK's Daily Mail: “Transgender politician is poised to become the first LGBT politician in staunchly Catholic Philippines where same-sex marriage is illegal.”

Where do I begin?

Apparently most Brits, or Canadians, or Americans, have no idea. The truth is, transvestitism is far more acceptable in public in the Philippines than in Britain, Canada, or the US, and always has been. Just turn on the TV. A lot of top performers in the Philippines are transvestites of the most campish sort. Or take a trip downtown in any largeish Filipino city, and not see at least one transvestite.

You will not often see transvestites walking alone in broad daylight in Britian. Canada, or the US, outside “pride” parades. They would, I presume, risk being spat upon, or beaten up. No such fear in the Philippines, even though the overall crime rate is much higher. You want to dress like a woman, it's your own damned business.

Filipino transvestite being awarded "Miss Queen International" title.

This highlights a crucial difference between Calvinism and Catholicism. Being ignorant of religion generally, the secular public of Britain, Canada, and the US do not understand. This leads, in turn, to a lot of prejudice, and a lot of lousy policy.

Homosexual sex is, of course, in Catholicism, sinful. So is refusing to accept one's natural sexual identity. But then, a lot of things are sinful in Catholicism. The ultimate result is, we are all sinners.

For Calvinists, by contrast, to call someone a sinner is to condemn them to hell. You are either saved, or not saved, by divine fiat, and there is nothing you can do about it. If you are saved, you will not sin; you cannot sin; whatever you do is not a sin. God has preordained it. You are born with a white hat, or a black hat. So wear a bra once, as a man, and, if it is acknowledged as a sin, you are doomed to the outer darkness.

There used to be a pop song back in the Seventies, a Christian crossover hit, with the lyrics “Never been a sinner/ I never sinned./ I have a friend in Jesus.” Sounds good to a Calvinist. To a Catholic, sounds more like Lucifer. It is the sin of pride.

To a Catholic, denying that you have committed sin is the biggest sin. Therefore, it is anathema to Catholics to say that transvestitism is not sinful. On the other hand, sin is not that big a deal; we all sin, and the key to everything is forgiveness. Why do you think Jesus died on a cross? You do not condemn, but you do not say it is right.

In practice, a far more comfortable way to live life as a transvestite than in Britain or North America, either forty years ago when crossdressing was sinful, or now, when everyone has to publicly say it is a good thing.

No doubt it is true that no transsexual has ever before been elected to the Philippines congress. This is no evidence of popular resistance to the idea: transvestites are, after all, a miniscule proportion of the population, perhaps 0.03%. It is far more likely no qualified transvestite has ever stood before. If a political party representing the interests of the LGBT community has never elected a member, this too is unsurprising in the real world. When you represent a special interest group that is going to be about 0.03% of the population in any constituency in which you run, why would you ever expect to be elected?

Filipino transvestite

Especially since the Philippines has lots of real problems. One of the big ones appears in the article, but is not even commented on. You will note that Geraldine Roman has not, in fact, been elected. Nevertheless, the writer of the piece can and does take it as a foregone conclusion that she will be. Why? Because she is the scion of the “big family” in the area. She is inheriting her mother's seat.

There is a real problem: behind the mask of democracy, the Philippines is still a thoroughly feudal state, and Filipinos feel they owe their vote to their seigneural master. But this, apparently, is “progressive” so long as that master wears a chemise.

When was the ruling class not effeminate?

The Philippines's official entrant in the Miss Universe 2015 competition. Yes, she is a transvestite.

Before we go, one other thing. The headline assumes that not recognizing same-sex marriage is some sort of discrimination against gays. It has no more to do with discrimination against gays than what the Philippine president ate for breakfast this morning. It is a question of definition: what is marriage? The intolerance is obvious, surely: if you do not conform and think in lock-step with me, you are a bigot. It is a paradox, but a typical position on the left.

The Scarlet Letter "A"

Courtesy Wesley Fryer.

Let us be clear about how we got here. The culture wars probably began with the issue of abortion. It is hard to keep a civil veneer on public discourse when half the population believes the other half is guilty of mass murder. How polite can you afford to be?

Despite that, perhaps surprisingly, virtually all of the vitriol seems to come from the ones suspected of mass murder. As I've noted before in this space, the modern left seems to hate the modern right, but the modern right does not seem to hate the modern left.

These are the visible effects of human conscience. Conscience is real. You can run, but you can't hide.

In their hearts, the advocates of abortion know they are wrong. You don't use euphemisms like "women's health" or "reproductive health" or "pro-choice" if you are proud of what you are doing. So, to try to escape their guilt, like the ancient Hebrews, they scapegoat. Blame someone else for something, and it distracts, at least briefly, that persistent inner voice from its nagging. And of course, the ideal people to scapegoat are those suspected of harbouring, even secretly, condemnatory thoughts towards those advocating unrestricted abortion.

This aggression will get worse and worse, because nothing they can do will ever make their conscience clear. Except, of course, turning and facing the pursuing angel, accepting that abortion is wrong, and accepting their guilt about that.

Hence the growing hostility to religion, to Christianity in particular, and to Catholicism in particular particular. Catholicism is paying for its brave stance that abortion is wrong. Back in the seventies, it seemed the only voice holding firm on this. There was bound to be hell to pay.

Hence the current aggressive support for homosexuality. It makes little sense, except on these grounds. Apparently only about one to three percent of the population is homosexual in inclinations; how else could homosexual issues, and quite trivial homosexual issues like gay marriage, so dominate the social agenda? “Homosexuality” itself is quite probably a social construct, a modern invention: earlier times and other places have never heard of such a thing as a homosexual, as opposed to homosexual sex acts. The notion of “discrimination against homosexuals (transgenders, etc, etc.--the list of new sexual identities keeps growing year by year),” is clearly a social construct. It exists only as a club to beat up conventional morality and anyone who clings to it. They're the bad people, not me. All I want to do is not have children.

Hence the current hysteria about pedophilia, although it may be past its peak. It seemed useful, at first, as another club with which to beat the Catholic Church. But only so long as it seemed possible to associate pedophilia with the Catholic Church. Before this connection was made, pedophilia was well on its way to general public acceptance, like homosexuality. But being seen as Catholic killed it. And the concern with pedophiles has become awkward over time as it has become clearer that it is more common outside than inside the Catholic Church, more common among women than men, and more common among gays than straight men. Damned reality. It looked so good for a while. What better way to deflect guilt for killing your own children than by condemning others for abusing children? Of course I care about children. Look at how severely I want to punish pedophiles!

Feminism is certainly and most obviously about abortion. What are its favourite rallying cries? “A woman's right to choose!” “My body, my self!” “Reproductive freedom!” All just code words for abortion. This bit about equal pay for equal work is just political cover. The original meaning of “a liberated woman” was perfectly clear, to those whose memory is long enough. It means a woman freely available for sex.

Feeling a little queasy yet? Courtesy Elvert Barnes.

The bit about equality of the sexes in general was just cover. The last thing feminists ever wanted was equality. This became obvious by the Eighties, with so-called “difference feminism.” None of feminism's battles since has been about equal treatment. To move back to female privilege was so fast it caused whiplash.

What the feminists always wanted was sex. Lots of sex, Sex without children. Sex without guilt. And so, of course, did their male supporters. Making the whole transition terribly smooth for everyone. At least, everyone over the age of eighteen or twenty, who had no moral core.

Postmodernism is also based on abortion. As a matter of fact, the first time I ever heard a clearly postmodern argument, back in 1972, it was in defense of abortion. If your conscience is troubling you, it is an obvious reaction to claim that there is, after all, in the end no truth and no difference between good and evil. It is just like the kid caught with his hands in the cookie jar, insisting that “nobody did it.” There, now everything is okay. If there is no right and wrong, and there are no cookies, what possible difference, at this point, can it make?

What? It still makes a difference to you? My, aren't you being judgmental! Okay, there is no right and wrong, but it is still wrong to be judgmental. Somehow.

Islamism is based on abortion, too, in a different way. It is a predictable and actually rather reasonable defense against abortionism and the other anti-moral and anti-religious doctrines abortion has spawned, by a traditionalist, moralist, and religious culture that now feels directly threatened. I think it is right to say: no abortion would have meant no 9/11, no al Qaeda, no Taliban, no ISIS.

This pervasive Western sense of guilt over abortion will, in the end, if there is no u-turn coming up in the road, destroy Western civilization finally and utterly.

In the meantime, there will be no peace for anyone.

Because this is so, the best thing those of us who give a damn can do is to keep the focus on the issue of abortion. Anything else is likely to be a red herring, allowing the left to distract its and everyone's attention from the real issue. It is important, in the end, to their own spiritual well-being as well as to the general snowballing into hell to make them face those tiny dismembered bodies.

Michael Coren Swims the English Channel

That was then ...

The time has come, The Walrus says, to speak of Michael Coren. He has raised much fuss, in Canada and abroad, by recently converting from Catholicism to Anglicanism on the issue of homosexuality. He has now explained his position in The Walrus.

I know how he feels. He is a part of literary Toronto. It is, in the end, a small place, and it would be socially terribly difficult to maintain Catholic teaching on the matter, surrounded by gay friends and colleagues. This, I think, the call of the world, is Coren's bottom line, and it shows in the way he begins and ends his Walrus piece. He as much as admits it in so many words at one point, in a backhanded way: “A mingling of income, self-perception, and reputation made it difficult to say what I truly felt.” (Was that really then, or is that now?) I, too, have gay friends and colleagues, whom I dearly love—in, I guess I have to add, the true, non-sexual sense. It is a painful issue, in the current social climate.

But that is not, in the end, an excuse. We are all tempted by the world. We must not succumb, even if our social life, or indeed our livelihood, might suffer. And any of Coren's other justifications are unconvincing.

He begins with the profoundly non-Catholic argument that “times change.” Later, he refers to opposition to homosexual sex as “outdated.” As he must, as a former Catholic, know, that holds no holy water. Eternal truth, faith and morals, cannot change, or else it was never truth. As Coren himself has pointed out in a recent interview, the Catholic Church simply cannot change its teaching on homosexuality, for this reason.

What Coren really seems to be saying here is that the social costs of maintaining the Catholic teaching on homosexuality are getting too high.

His second argument is that fellow Catholics have been unkind to him over the issue. This is irrelevant for a couple of reasons. First, since it came after his conversion on gay marriage, it cannot be a reason for it. Second, it is ad hominem. Truth is truth, quite apart from whether the person saying it is rude or gentle about it.

His third argument is that Catholicism has elevated homosexuality to an importance it does not deserve.

... this is now.

This seems completely disingenuous. It is not the Catholic Church that has been saying for the past several decades that homosexuality is important. It is the homosexuals, along with the secular society. If you consult the Catechism of the Catholic Church, you find homosexuality listed there right along with masturbation, fornication, and adultery. No worse, and no better. All four are wrong. But probably all Catholics have good friends who are guilty of at least one of these things, given the great improbability that they are not guilty of them themselves. Pope Francis sought to make the same point in his famous “Who am I to judge?” interview. So who exactly is pulling homosexuality out of the mix as some sort of poster child, and why? It is not the Church. Looks like it is Coren, for one, in his current conversion.

In any case, Coren is guilty of a big honking non sequitor. The claim that homosexuality is a relatively minor sin, does not mean it is not a sin.

As I pointed out fairly recently on this blog, most Christians would have no problem with homosexual civil unions that gave homosexuals the same rights as married couples. Many would have no problem with gay marriage as a legal matter. I have myself been in favour of gay marriage for much longer than, say, Barack Obama. This is not the issue. The issue is saying that homosexual sex is morally okay. And, beyond that, not even permitting anyone to say it is not okay. That is where we are heading now. And, frankly, if its advocates really thought themselves that it was okay, they would not feel any need for this third, profoundly radical, demand.

Coren's next argument is that homosexual orientation is more central to the homosexual's identity than alcohol is to the alcoholic, or adultery to the adulterer, and therefore cannot be treated as parallel. But this is surely a straw man: the Church does not condemn homosexual identity, but only homosexual sex acts. It condemns it in the same way it condemns heterosexual sex outside of marriage, remembering that not all heterosexuals will ever marry, or heterosexual sex among the clergy. Is homosexuality then more a part of a homosexual's identity than heterosexuality is of a heterosexual's identity? Is that some new kind of equality?

His next claim is that homosexuals are “born that way.” He combines this with a jibe that Christians tend to deny this. Another straw man, surely. The Catholic Catechism points out, correctly, that we do not know the true roots of homosexuality—it does not deny the possibility that it is inborn. But that is of no relevance. Having a temptation to sin, inborn or otherwise, obviously does not absolve one of the sin. If there were no temptation, no one would ever sin.

To be fair, Coren's deeper point is that it is “theologically dubious” that God would create some people with an inborn tendency to sin. Yet how is this case any different from, say, causing some people to be born into a rich family, remembering that “blessed are the poor”? Or letting them, innocent, be born into an oppressive regime like Nazi Germany, or a libertine one like North American today, where temptations to sin are bound to be greater? We have here no more than one more formulation of the old Problem of Evil; we need not get into it here, for it has been addressed so often. It is remarkable if Coren has spent his entire spiritual life to now without having to deal with it.

Coren then accuses Catholics or Catholicism of “dishonesty” or “hypocrisy” because, he estimates, one third to one half of Catholic priests are gay, “and by no means are they all celibate.”

First, we can eliminate from his complaint any “gay” Catholic priests who remain celibate. In this case, being “gay” is of no consequence. So the “one third to one half” estimate is a red herring twice over. For the rest, no doubt there are some gay priests who violate their vows; does this discredit the Catholic Church? Has the Catholic Church declared somewhere that Catholics, lay or clergy, are sinless? Actually, just the reverse: Catholics say we are all sinners.

Coren then claims, tiresomely, that Bible scholars are coming to a “new understanding” of scripture suggesting that the prohibitions of homosexuality there found are not really prohibitions of homosexuality.

This is no doubt partly true; although on the evidence of Coren's own exegesis said new understandings do require a pretty supple imagination. In order for Protestant denominations to justify dropping their historical opposition to homosexual sex, after all, their theological supporters and operatives must indeed reinterpret scripture somehow. This is an ever-present temptation, in the face of our own perceived present wants and needs; notoriously, even the Devil can quote scripture to his purposes.

To prevent rationalizing one's way to any sort of immoral behaviour or theological error as convenience demands it, Catholicism precludes this gambit. You learn something in two thousand years or so. We are not free to reinterpret scripture at will. We are obliged to understand it broadly in the same way the Church has always understood it. We need to consult the church fathers. It is relevant, therefore, that, in addition to the obvious meaning of the actual words of the New Testament, theologians and Church councils all the way back to the Didache clearly understood homosexual sex to be forbidden. No fudge here, lads.

Coren's next claim is a familiar one, that “love” requires the acceptance of homosexual sex. This relies on a gross though common materialism, which equates love with the sex act. Enough said there.

In the end, if you will pardon the phrase—it seems impossible to avoid double entendres on this subject--I suspect that Coren has been terminally frightened by the very rapid success of the current and growing anti-Catholic pogroms. Can't blame him too much for that: he is right out there. Things are moving so quickly that, in just the past few days, we have seen the bizarre anomaly of a small private bakery in Northern Ireland being convicted and fined for refusing to bake a cake expressly celebrating gay marriage--in a jurisdiction in which gay marriage is illegal.

They are coming for the Catholics. Coren sees this. He does not want to be home on that dark night when the knock comes on the door. 

Let Them Bake Cake

Daniel O'Connell, the Great Emancipator

The good old “turn the other cheek” quote from the Sermon on the Mount has, predictably, surfaced as advice to Christians on the recent controversy over the RFRA in Indiana. It always does; usually in the mouths of Christianity's opponents. Someone is saying that, in the spirit of Jesus's words, true Christians, now required by law to bake cakes for gay weddings in violation of their consciences, should instead bake two, the second one presumably for free.

Now—this leaves us with a bit of a dilemma. As atheists are the first to insist, atheists can be just as moral as the religious; there is nothing about being religious that automatically makes you more righteous. Yep; agreed. Any properly Catechised Christian could tell you the same. That is just the same as saying that morality is objective, and binding on everyone.

But it follows that there are no special rules that Christians must follow and atheists need not. If it is a moral obligation to turn the other cheek when someone hits you, or to walk two miles when required to walk one, this obligation is equally binding on both atheists and Christians; not on Christians alone.

So the proper question is not whether Christians are or should be doing it in this case, but who is doing it, and who is not. Who here is going to the mattresses in defence of their claims, and who is not?

On that one, you decide.

But let's also dig a little deeper here. I think it is evident to conscience, which is innate, that in ordinary circumstances, neither Christians nor atheists in truth have a moral obligation to “turn the other cheek” when attacked. This goes well beyond the golden rule. Doing unto others as we would have them do unto us does not mean we should subjugate our interests, much less our moral judgements, to theirs, but that we should treat the two equally. The right to self-defence (not to mention freedom of conscience) is inherent and self-evident. We can forgive them, or not, later.

Jesus was not, therefore, laying down a general moral requirement. He was, instead, more or less self-evidently, offering practical advice, or speaking of one particular situation.

It is therefore best to examine the context. To whom was he speaking, and in what situation?

The Sermon on the Mount indeed begins with a precise enumeration of whom it is addressed to: the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, the persecuted, the powerless (Matthew 5:2-11—“the Beatitudes”).

If you are in a situation in which you are oppressed and abused, as here, it is almost certainly futile to fight back. The same considerations apply as in the doctrine of just war: if there is no reasonable chance of winning, one does not resort to arms, because worse harm would only come of it. Jesus makes the same judgement later when he first instructs his disciples to go out and buy swords (Luke 22:36), and then, when he is taken in the Garden of Gethsemane, forbids then to use them (Luke 22:51). Wer have the right of resistance; nevertheless, resistance in some circumstances is futile.

His advice here is plainly for such situations. Saint Augustine points out an interesting detail in Matthew's account. Jesus says, to quote the phrase in full, “if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Why the right cheek specifically?

I challenge you, right now, to try slapping the person nearest to you on their right cheek. I expect that they will escape with little harm.

If, like almost everyone, you are right-handed, you will find it difficult to do. A blow with the right hand will fall on the left cheek. For the right cheek, you will need to slap them with your weak hand. Odd, isn't it?

Unless, that, is, you show your victim, as the idiom goes, the back of your hand. A backhand blow—a deliberate insult. A blow given only by a superior to an inferior.

If not that, the assailant might be attacking backhand with a stick or a whip in his hand.

Now, imagine receiving such a blow, then turning the left cheek to your attacker.

Surely this is a clear example of passive resistance. By turning the other cheek, asking for a straight blow, you are implicitly declaring yourself an equal, in a way that would be awkward for the assailant to respond to. You are shaming him.

St, Francis in later years.

Jesus goes on to say “if anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well.”

In ancient Judea, a poor man would have only two articles of clothing: his tunic, and his cloak. Handing both over would leave him standing naked before his tormentor—making a public scene that would be calculated to shame him. Similarly, when St. Francis's father pursued him to a church, demanding he return his inheritance over his plan to leave the family business, Francis stripped himself naked in front of the bishop, and handed back even his clothes. Touche.

Jesus next advises “if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.”

Who exactly can force you to go one mile? This seems to be a reference to impressment by the Roman authority. By law, any civilian could be required by any Roman soldier to carry his burden for him for one mile. Simon of Cyrene was so impressed on the road to Calvary. But this was a maximum, not a minimum; soldiers could not require more than this. Accordingly, continuing to carry the burden for an extra mile was actually putting the soldier in violation of the law, perhaps to his peril. Imagine being caught by your superior in this situation, and having to claim that the Jewish civilian insisted on carrying the pack twice as far of his own free will. Right--who was going to believe that?

Jesus's advice is indeed extremely wise, given any situation in which conventional resistance is futile. The early Christians proved the thesis, managing with it to take over a Roman Empire originally bent on their destruction.

Daniel O'Connell, in the first half of the nineteenth century, grasped the same New Testament principle, and used it to force England to give the Irish, and Catholics, political and legal equality throughout the Empire. He had a great deal to do with giving Canada and other colonies self-government as well.

Mohandas Gandhi picked up the same concept of passive resistance in India--without properly crediting O'Connell, but properly crediting Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount. It led to the peaceful independence of India, and probably had a great deal to do with the independence, soon after, of all the European colonial possessions.

Martin Luther King Jr. tried it in the US South, and it worked again to wipe out segregation and discrimination.

But what this doctrine definitely is not is a demand to play dead in the presence of evil. That would simply be cowardice, and completely immoral.

Nor is it called for in the current struggle, involving the various RFR Acts in the US. The religious, after all, still have a vote, and quite possibly majority support. That means they still have conventional means to resist. To start baking extra cakes at their own expense now would therefore only be servile. That would be more like the Uncle Toms, the native Irish converts to Anglicanism, the kapos of the death camps, or the Sanhedrin.

Would such a display of docility attract some to the faith? I doubt it. There would be very little that was attractive about it.

The Denial of Service to Gays

In all the excitement and outrage about the Indiana RFR Act, and the deeply troubling possibility that gays might find themselves constrained in their choice of wedding caterer, nobody seems to have noticed that a far more serious and consequential form of anti-gay discrimination is still raging unchecked--both far more widespread and far more painful to LBGTs than the conceivable denial of prompt pizza delivery for their nuptials.

It is the endemic denial of sexual services.

It has come to our horrified attention that the great majority of men--in fact, by some estimates, ninety-nine percent—actually will, when asked politely, refuse to have sex with gay men; and the same might be said, if it were permissible to criticise women, of most women with regards to their lesbian sisters.

Painful as it doubtless must be to have to phone twice to find a wedding planner, there really is no comparison here. The denial of love—actual love—must have real and almost daily consequences for the average gay. Given that only one percent of men will agree to gay sex--let alone gay marriage—the LBGT choice of love partners is obviously severely constrained, as is their chance at joys and pleasures of life that straight people can simply take for granted.

I hope that those who truly care about human rights and human equality will not rest on their laurels with this current victory in forcing Indiana to blot out previously recognized rights of conscience, but will get right on the far greater problem, and swiftly frame legislation everywhere that will oblige us all not to discriminate in this regard, on religious grounds or for any other spurious and dishonourable reason. Human dignity and human equality demands it; and, after all, freedom of association and freedom of conscience having now been utterly dispensed with in US law, there is nothing any longer to stop us. We have no excuse.

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.

Phil Robertson and Homosexuality

Looks like this one is non-controversial: practically everyone thinks A&E is off their nut, right?

I would fault Robertson for citing only sexual sins; this is the kind of faulty focus Pope Francis has been speaking out against.

But if one is no longer permitted to say that homosexuality is a sin, this is tantamount to prohibiting all religion. All religions say it is.

I think we may be witnessing a turning point in American culture. Political correctness may have finally overreached itself. It may now become more fashionable to publicly stand up to it and refuse to apologize. It could then die quickly.

Here's a great summary of the entire controversy so far.