The recent post by Soutenus got me thinking. I was going to reply in the combox, but the response was growing too long. Basically, I think there’s far to much confusion (and obsession) surrounding homosexuality in political and religious circles today. We need to step back and apply some reason. Let’s go back to basics. First, the church condemns homosexual acts, not homosexuality itself. That distinction is essential. No Catholic teaching supports those fundamentalist crazies who try to turn gay people into straight people. The challenge is for homosexual people to live chastely.
It is also key to note that our approach to homosexuality differs from the evangelicals. We do not simply appeal to scripture, especially not the infamous Old Testament injunctions against homosexual acts (remember the Israelites regarded the dietary and ritual impurity laws as equally important). That law has been fulfilled in Christ. But neither do we throw out the teachings pertaining to homosexual behavior. Instead, we appeal to the natural law, which tells us that sex involves the complete self-giving of one man and one woman, united in marriage, and that it is never licit to separate the unitive from the procreative act. When you think about it, although it was concerned with a different topic, the Church’s teachings on homosexual acts are fully contained in Humanae Vitae.
Given this background, let me repeat: why such fuss with homosexuality? We should be sexually-active unmarried heterosexuals to the same standard. We should be holding contracepting heterosexual couples to the same standard. And yet we don’t, do we, as Christians? And there are many, many, more vices out there than sexual sins, that Americans in particular tend to downplay. When was the last time you heard a condemnation of gluttony, for example?
As Eve Tushnet points out in her wonderful Commonweal essay on homosexuality and the Church, much of the anti-gay focus derives from a threatened masculinity:
Anxieties about homosexuality are often driven by anxieties about masculinity. A lot of men, whether consciously or subconsciously, view lesbians as women outside male control, and gay men as traitors and predators, denying their own masculinity and threatening the masculinity of other men. This attitude may be nonsense (how is your masculinity threatened because another guy thinks you’re attractive?), but it’s real. So any discussion of homosexuality taps into deep-seated fears about what it means to be a man, and whether differences between men and women are created by the culture to keep women subordinate. We’re willing to do all kinds of terrible things in order to attain or keep a valued social role, a narrative that makes us feel worthy. For many men, achieving manhood is a major part of their identity. Acceptance of homosexuality-a worldview in which men and women are interchangeable in their sexual and familial roles-can feel deeply threatening. And men whose social roles and sense of their own masculine identity are threatened do sometimes-this is shocking, I know-become irrational and violent.
She concludes that “The often vicious and violent anxiety about masculinity is one reason that the ways in which homosexuality is stigmatized in our culture look nothing like the ways we treat many other things Scripture calls vices.” I believe this explains much of the fuss about homosexuality in modern society. And this is cultural, not religious.
In sum, I do not oppose the Church’s teaching on homosexual activity. But I am not going to single out this activity for special moral attention while letting the sexual behavior of heterosexuals off the hook. And we should not refuse to accept people simply because we don’t approve of their beliefs or choices. But neither should we be silent on what the Church teaches, and I mean really teaches…
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