Rod Dreher:
Sex, especially homosexuality, is a big deal because how one comes down on those related questions has a lot to do with how you view the authority of Scripture and Tradition. There's a reason why the churches today are breaking apart over homosexuality, and it has to do with the plain fact that there can be no compromise on this issue, as it goes to the heart of how believers understand ourselves, our relationship to God, and to the nature of truth. This stuff matters. It matters a lot. If you are a gay person, you know how much it matters to you. Why should anybody be surprised that it matters to traditional Christians, and for reasons that go far beyond any supposed anti-gay animus? Trads believe we do not have the right to ignore the clear and continuing teaching of Scripture and the Church because it strikes our contemporaries in this post-Christian society as correct. If you think about it, what's really surprising is not that people like us object, but that intelligent folks among us believe that the case for the licitness of homosexuality, which is something accepted pretty much only in the West, and even then it's controversial (in the US) outside of cultural elite circles, is so natural and obvious that 2,000 years of Christian moral tradition should be obviated without a fuss.
If homosexuality is legitimized -- as distinct from being tolerated, which I generally support -- then it represents the culmination of the sexual revolution, the goal of which was to make individual desire the sole legitimate arbiter in defining sexual truth. It is to lock in, and, on a legal front, to codify, a purely contractual, nihilistic view of human sexuality. I believe this would be a profound distortion of what it means to be fully human. And I fully expect to lose this argument in the main, because even most conservatives today don't fully grasp how the logic of what we've already conceded as a result of being modern leads to this end.
Damon Linker:
Among many other things, Christian scripture and tradition affirm the legitimacy of slavery, claim that the Jews are cursed for killing Jesus, and assert that one must give away all of one's belongings and even learn to hate one's own family before following Christ. These are just a few of the matters on which contemporary Christians, including orthodox Christians like Rod, feel quite comfortable breaking with, or explaining away, scripture and tradition. And it's a good thing, too, because it shows that they're willing to think for themselves about important moral issues and to use their minds to separate out what is enduringly true in scripture and tradition from the unexamined prejudices that shape and distort everything touched by human hands, very much including received religious norms, practices, and beliefs. The issue, then, is to determine why so many contemporary Christians have decided that the teaching on homosexuality -- but not the teachings on slavery, Jews, and the most stringent requirements of becoming a disciple of Christ -- deserves to be preserved.
Andrew:
With Catholics, the obvious counterpoint is civil divorce. Catholics do not recognize such divorces within the church nor the second and third marriages that follow them (leaving aside the rank hypocrisy of the annulment scam). But they are prepared to live in a civil society that allows for it as a civil secular matter, just as they live easily with infertile married couples, or post-menopausal couples getting married. Until Rod explains why homosexuals as such represent a unique threat, even while they make up a tiny section of society, his singling out of gays in order to uphold his views of natural law in the civil law will look and smell like animus, not reason.
[...] It is Rod's self-evident panic at the thought of such an integration that has made some of us sit up and take note. There is some lurking fear that if this form of being human is recognized as equal in the civil sphere, let alone the sacred one, then the entire edifice of heterosexuality and marriage and family will somehow be destroyed or undermined. I do not believe that in any way. And I don't think it's possible to believe that without, at some level, engaging in homophobia - literally an irrational and exaggerated fear that the gay somehow always obliterates the straight, or that 2 percent somehow always controls the fate of 98 percent. This is where paranoia and panic take over. It is where homophobia most feels like anti-Semitism.
"But I say to you, Fear not - Let not the fear of man make you act the hypocrite,"
—Wesley's Notes on the Bible
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