What Contraception and Sodomy Have in Common
Vital Distinctions in Moral Theology
I. Introduction
Do the good! and Avoid evil! are the two moral imperatives given the faithful through the natural law, the Magisterium, and Divine Law. Through obedience to this dual admonition to seek sanctity and reject sin, the faithful cooperate with God’s plan of salvation. In His plan God’s activity is creation and redemption. Man’s activity results in God’s creation either being damned or glorified. What a man does is his contribution to the project of establishing what he is for all eternity.
Each of the two moral imperatives must be engaged in man’s life in the world. “Do the good,” is a relative command. “Avoid evil,” is an absolute command. Between birth and death man is given ample opportunity to obey these commands and thus be saved. Free will gives him the power to choose, but the power is dependent on the choice. Man’s free will is increased in choosing righteousness; it is diminished when he chooses sin. The saint is truly, fully, and eternally free as a son and heir of God. The sinner dies in perpetual slavery, bound forever to his sin, entirely incapable of asserting his will to happiness, which he falsely sought by disobedience to God on earth.
A man is able to do only so much good. His responsibility is limited by his very being. God alone can do all good. Man participates in the infinite goodness of God. It is divine grace and mercy which deigns to extend the infinite good of God to the finite man. Doing but a little good is rewarded with endless beatitude. In giving God His due, man receives infinitely more than is his due from God.
There is never an instance in which evil may be done. No sin is ever permissible, and none can be attributed to the divine will or imputed to the person of God. Sin belongs utterly to the world. Each man’s sins are uniquely his own. Although God gives the saved full portion of His life beyond their just desserts, the perdition of the damned is solely his own work and the fruit of his own demerits. Grace in its very being is a sharing in love; sin and its wages [which is] death are confined to the guilty soul and makes impossible any communion on earth or in Heaven.
Being, in keeping, with the divine will, is inherently good. God’s original creation received His benediction six times before he declared His work Very good! (cf. Genesis 1:1-31) This truth has been confused by many to mean that good attaches to the human person regardless of how he exercises his free will. It is a commonplace to hear a man’s sins related with the summary judgment, “But he’s a good person.” Man may have begun good, but original sin, concupiscence, and sinful actions disfigure that goodness in time and, potentially, destroy it for all eternity.
This divorce in the understanding of many between a man’s actions and his ontological state has resulted in a denial of the existence of sin; a misunderstanding of the nature of sin when it is acknowledged; a diminishment in the celebration of the Sacrament of Penance; a cultural mindset rejecting the possibility of damnation; and, ultimately, the refusal of many to positively seek the Kingdom of Heaven in righteousness. From brazenly indulging in sin to encouraging others in sin to maliciously attacking sanctity, individuals and the society at large have embarked on the journey toward utter moral depravity. Such a path is as old as Eden, but post-enlightenment man suffers not only from the pagan will to self-destruction, but also from the peculiar ill of the baptized who forget repentance – apostasy. A pagan in sin is in a deplorable state from which he can only rise; apostate Christians have fallen lower than Satan, have become salt without flavor, and in their wretched example are in peril of an eternal millstone. The state of Baptized Man falling back into sin is worse than when he knew nothing of salvation; indeed, seven devils have replaced the first [c.f. Matt. 12:43-45].
Any who doubt this description and estimation of man’s degenerating plight need only consider the modern proclivity not only to engage in sin, but to preach it, legitimize it, and in some cases mandate it. Married couples are encouraged to violate their Sacrament through contraception. Divorce is endemic to the point of being typical and thought well night-unto inevitable. And the national policies of the United States, Russia, and China have turned abortion into a form of “family planning”, economic stimulation, and legal obligation. The Church and the woefully small numbers of non-Catholics who dare decry this foul environment of license and demonic disobedience are alternately insulted, ignored, and imprisoned.
Perhaps nothing illustrates how entrenched the will to evil has become in mankind better than the juggernaut of the media, popular opinion, and legislative activism seeking to propagate homosexuality as a moral good. The not-so-subtle progression of the last forty years has taken us from a plea to tolerate sodomy - to decriminalizing sodomy - to encouraging sodomy - to assuming sodomy as an unremarkable human activity - to giving sodomy legal sanction on par with Holy Matrimony. A diabolically clever tactic to impose sodomy as a morally neutral element of human being has been to equate the state of homosexuality with the nebulous condition of race membership. This appeals to a bent toward sociology in the apologists for sodomy. Behaviorists among the advocates of sodomy would have us believe that the sin is no more to be criticized than other learned behaviors, such as how one learns speech from parents, socializing from peers, and taboos from society. Materialists of various stripes suggest that the inclination to sodomy is merely the physical manifestation of evolution, carried on the genes along with eye color, height, or the possibility of Down’s syndrome.
In each of these instances, the homosexual person is robbed of his humanity. He has no will in his condition. He indulges sodomy because of social conditioning or family psychology or biological disposition. He has no choice in how he manifests his intimate interactions with other persons. There is no moral element involved, for the causes of his nature are beyond his control.
Such must be the conclusion of the arguments advanced by those who insist that sodomy is natural and normal, without reference to the Creator’s will or the creature’s obligation to imitate His will. This utter inability to cooperate with the divine will or to effect the human will is the telltale symptom of sin. It is the slavery that comes from denying grace. It is the final separation of man from God, mankind, and life. It is sin’s wages fully reaped: the death and destruction of the man.
There is one other attempt to make homosexuality palatable as a human activity: the theological. Recognizing that free will is essential to the human person as a moral agent, shameless theologians, or charlatans making use of theology, proof-text Holy Scripture to support their desire to bring sin into the mainstream of the Faith. They would go so far as to aver that homosexuality is a true good, even a gift from God. Far from blaming God or anyone else for this proclivity to sin, these advocates of sodomy would thank the Lord for creating them in that way. Untold blasphemies against Jesus Christ Our Lord have been suggested in keeping with this depraved set of ideas [c.f. the abominable stage play, Corpus Christi, in which a gay man named "Joshua" recruits 12 gay disciples, engages in frequent sodomite acts, and is crucified at the play's end under the title "King of Queers"].
A variety of explanations accounts for this plague of words and deeds in defense of sodomy. An obvious one is that many desire the vice. Others indulge in other vices and find allies for themselves among sodomites. Certainly a large number of people are confused, both by the irrational rhetoric of the sexually licentious and by the urge to deal kindly with the sinners in their acquaintance. Political power and financial gain surely motivate many of those demanding the “right” to sodomy. It can not be discounted that these disparate groups and rationales have in common behind them, explicitly or unwittingly, the machinations of Satan. Not that these people necessarily desire allegiance with Satan, but he definitely desires them to preach and commit sin.
What follows is an examination of how homosexual advocacy attempts to normalize these sinful acts. That is contrasted with the initiative of God to bring grace to bear to effect His will to save all sinners. The counterpoint between man’s will in time and his final state in eternity forms the heart of this argument against sin and its advocacy. Homosexuality is not a matter of environment, genetics, or social policy, nor is it a morally neutral choice for human expression. It is an act of the will that, unrepentant, effects damnation and the complete degradation of the human being.
II. The Natural Aspects of Sexuality
There is a modern penchant for propagating confusion in matters of morality, particularly in regards to sexual morality. A popular (though never explained) aphorism is, “We all are sexual beings.” Either this is an entirely unhelpful platitude as meaningful as insisting that we all are living beings or spiritual beings or beings with appetites; or it is an assertion about man that reduces his identity to an exceedingly narrow aspect of his experience.
To describe mankind as “sexual” is to suggest that having sex makes the man, or that gender determines one’s psyche, actions, and sense of self. Given that most people most of the time are not having sex, it would appear that the notion, “We all are sexual beings,” is not referent to sexual activity. However, modernity’s shrill cries for the equality of the sexes seems to betray a disavowal of that charming saying, Vive la difference! If men and women are the same, then it seems odd that anyone finds it revelatory to claim that sex constitutes a defining element in human being.
A definition delimits, excludes, and distinguishes between things. Man as a sexual being either defines all things human as meaning sex, or sex as meaning nothing in practical terms. Man is a sexual being, a carbon being, an earthly being. O.K. So are petunias, manatees, and the neighbors’ cat. Stating the obvious is a peculiarly human attribute, true, but it is hardly useful as a tool in understanding the human.
What is really operative in the modern mindset is a mania for materialism. A description of man that begins and ends with sex completely preempts any discussion of the moral aspects of sexuality. The animals perhaps are free to do what comes naturally, but man without reference to the supernatural will gravitate toward things at which Mother Nature would blush – and then mercilessly punish her erring children.
It is curious how angry many become at the suggestion that AIDS is a judgment from God. Never considered, it seems, is how nature judges the unnatural. The wages of sins against nature meted out by nature are infertility, disease, physical deformity, sexual dysfunction, and indeed death – among many other things. Promiscuous, licentious, amoral people who disbelieve in the wrath of God must still contend with the fury of Mother Nature scorned.
Man is both physical and spiritual. A human being does not have a body and a soul; a human being is a body and a soul, an embodied spirit. It is true, and laughably obvious, that one can not discuss human being without acknowledging his physicality, including (but not obsessing on) his sexuality. It is far truer, however, to discuss human being beginning with that which is higher than the animals, definitive of his relationships with other people, and, most importantly, most like his creator, God.
If one is to understand man, and by extension his sexuality, one begins with God. For man is made in God’s image and likeness. God has more to say about man’s identity than any amount of studying man, animals, and biochemistry can conceive.
God is love. God is good. God creates. These simple truths reveal the motive, the content, and the purpose governing man’s existence. Why God does anything is predicated on the divine attribute of charity. How He does His will flows from His infinite goodness. What He does is to offer being reflective of His own being, the highest form of that on earth being man, a corporal being endowed with a rational soul capable of knowing, embracing, and imitating the divine will.
Thus, man can love. Man can be good. Man can create. The natural basis for effecting the supernatural task of man imitating God is Holy Matrimony. Man and woman can will mutual love. They can do so in obedience to the moral law. Through that obedience, they cooperate with God in bringing forth new life like themselves able to be like God.
Man as a sexual being must be a moral being if he is not to do violence to his very being. In the very act of carnal knowledge, man must be endeavoring to know God, serve His will, and obey Him in love. Failing this, man is less a sexual being than a depraved being.
Either one is obeying God or one is sinning. Men and women are called to discern God’s will for them to cooperate with Him in procreation. The only licit context for this is within Holy Matrimony, whose primary purpose is to beget and raise children for the glory of God. Contraception, self abuse, coitus interruptus, and sodomy (in which heterosexuals can engage as well as homosexuals) deny the proper end of marriage, destroy the sanctity of the persons committing such acts, and degrade the human person. Far from assertions of sexuality and human being, these sins unmake the divine order of things. Man does not effect his being through sex, but through obeying God in all things.
Here one sees that the fundamental distinction in human sexuality is not heterosexual versus homosexual, but obedience versus disobedience. One can obey God’s will in many ways through heterosexual acts, but not in every instance. There is never an instance in which the divine will is obeyed through homosexual acts.
Furthermore, obedience to God’s will is a broader category than defining which acts of sex are licit and which are forbidden. Obeying God’s will can involve continence in married couples, the vow or promise of celibacy among those with religious vocations, and the responsibility to be fruitful and multiply for married couples. God’s will in love is not so much about what one must not do as it is hearkening to God’s call of what one is created to do in keeping with divine Providence. Some are called to be eunuchs for the Kingdom [Matt. 19:12]; some are called to raise up sons of God born not of flesh or the will of man, but the will of God; and some are called to help people the earth.
No one is ever called to thwart, deny, or eliminate God’s gift of life to men. There is no such thing as a sexual being or a sexual act not meant for the increase of life on earth with the goal of life in Heaven. Though there might be natural obstacles to fertility, none may ever impede the possibility of conception through action, inaction, or intent of the will. If one seeks to love one’s spouse through the conjugal act, then one must first love God – and His will to life – with one’s whole heart, whole mind, whole soul, and whole strength. Hatred of God’s will to life manifested by the use of latex or chemicals, the abuse of the physical act itself, or the refusal of the will to accept the nature and meaning of the marital bond for procreation, is gross disobedience, destructive of the human body and soul, and potentially damning.
III. Homosexuality as a Manifestation of Concupiscence
Perverse connections have been drawn between the current crusade to legalize and normalize homosexuality, and the civil rights movement of the 1940’s-60’s. Homosexuality, so goes this argument, is not to be discriminated against. The dignity of man requires that all people be treated equally regardless of their sexual behavior.
If immorality can be criminalized – such as theft, perjury, or fraud – then the only argument that can be sustained to justify the decriminalizing of sodomy is that issues of morality do not pertain to sex. It is merely a matter of the body and its consensual use. People go to jail because they violated someone’s rights. Homosexuals are expressing mutual love, harm no one, and do nothing different from what heterosexual couples do.
“We all are sexual beings” has a partner in its crime of refusing definition. “Consensual sex”, i.e. “What people do in their own bedrooms”, gives carte blanche to a whole host of behaviors that one prays would still be found deplorable by most people. Associations exist to legalize the sodomizing of boys by men, “marriages” between three or more people, and the practice of polygamy. One assumes that all of these are examples of “What people do in their own bedrooms”. Why should they be forbidden but homosexuality permitted?
Well, before that question is answered, one must ask for a definition of homosexuality. It is oddly appropriate that “gay rights” advocates attempt to co-opt the civil rights movement. Both suffer from an unwillingness or inability to define just whose rights are being defended.
Over the years certain people in the United States of America have been referred to as “darkies”, “niggers”, “colored people”, “persons of color”, “blacks”, and “African-Americans”. Efforts to define this class of people have made of them a mere 3/5 of a person, or have rendered anyone with 1/16 of his blood from a tainted source as a full member of the group. Although skin color plays a large role in determining this classification, the colors in question range from white enough to “pass” to skin so dark as to have a blue cast to it. Hispanics, some Caribbean islanders, and some Asians have skin colors that fall within this range, but are not considered part of this group. There is an “enlightened” understanding of this issue in which correcting past wrongs is sought, but no distinction is made between one member of this group who is a multimillionaire in the suburbs, another who is a middle-class professional in a small city, yet another who is incarcerated for gang activity in a big city inner-city, and a fourth living in third-world squalor in the rural Old South.
What makes a “black” person who he is has never been adequately discussed, much less defined. Is it skin color? Is it family of origin? Is it racial discrimination? Is it government description? Is it cultural? Is it because a rights organization says so? Is it some secret algorithm incorporating these and other considerations?
In a like manner, no one has explained what homosexuality is. Is it an inclination? Is it a set of actions? Is it one act? Is it a subculture? Is it being an effeminate man? Is it being a masculine woman? Where is the line between “effeminate” and “sensitive”, between “masculine” and “tom-boy”? Is it genetic? Is it learned? Is it a continuum or an absolute?
Because of this ambiguity, many would say that all the more we should not discriminate because of “sexual orientation”. There are so many factors involved that none can be blamed for why he is as he is. Aside from reducing the homosexual to a non-moral agent incapable of choosing whether or not and how to have sex, this leaves society in a state of confusion. What behavior is being protected by gay rights?
Is it the bathhouse scene where AIDS is being incubated in thousands of host organisms? Is it the media juggernaut recruiting our young people to tolerate, then celebrate, then adopt this “alternative lifestyle”? Is it the abomination of church and state recognizing a “marital union” between same-sex couples?
Oh, wait. We should not get so upset over “What people do in their own bedrooms”.
A person belonging to a racial group – whatever one can make that mean – has very little control over his inclusion therein. One’s skin color is not a matter of choice. It is the height of injustice to inflict punishment on someone because of a physical attribute.
Homosexuality, conversely, is a matter of willed decisions. Either one chooses to act on sexual temptations or not. Either one gives into impure thoughts or not. Either one elects to be identified with morally perilous behavior or not. When the choice is made to act immorally in a public setting, the family, the state, and/or the Church have a moral obligation to teach, to warn, and if need be to punish those who disobey the moral law.
And remember: what makes any sex act immoral is its disobedience to God’s will toward human increase through Holy Matrimony. Homosexual acts are unnatural in their use of sex toward sterile ends. Thus, there is no such thing as “marriage” between homosexuals, no context in which homosexual sex is ever licit. Homosexual acts deny the family, weaken the state, and offend God and His Church. Far from protecting people so that they can commit homosexual acts, it is the duty of charity to decry the acts, to define them as sins, and to lead their participants to repentance.
IV. Homosexuality as a Depraved Assertion of the Will
“Nature versus Nurture” is an age-old argument about the cause of homosexuality. Are homosexuals born or are they made? Does the homosexual become so over time, or does he discover his nature as it has existed from birth or before? Can one be homosexual and not know it? Can homosexuality be cured?
If indeed homosexuality is not a matter of moral choice, if one is merely born so, then there can be no talk of recruiting, accepting, or curing members of the group. Remove morality from sex and it does not matter how sex is engaged or with whom. Most people who adopt this position would ask only that parties involved in sexual acts be consenting adults.
Why consent and adulthood are so insisted upon is never fully explained. Inconsistency in this argument is betrayed in the existence of laws against adultery and statutory rape that are rarely enforced; the lamentations over teen pregnancy accompanied by the distribution of contraception to minors; and the warped homoeroticism marketed to youth in the mass media paralleled by the aforementioned refusal to prosecute statutory rapists in the face of near-hysteria over homosexual pedophilia. Where confusion reigns, Satan rules.
On the other hand, if homosexuality is a learned behavior, one influenced by environment, then the ranks of homosexuals would increase dependent on home life, societal taboos, and moral considerations. A lack of vigilance against sodomy by the Church with a concomitant offensive by social forces in favor of sodomy would result in rising numbers claiming affiliation with the homosexual “lifestyle”. A culture in keeping with Church teaching on the moral law would have few examples of homosexuality manifested, would experience repugnance at the notion that sodomy is normal, and would enact civil laws reflective of the moral law against acts of sodomy.
Modernity prides itself on its “enlightenment” regarding sexual morality. Many would maintain that a significant number of homosexuals are present in any population. Repression by Church and state sends homosexuals underground; tolerance allows “gays” to “come out of the closet”.
Were they in the closet because they were born homosexual and came out at the first safe opportunity? Were they leading heterosexual lives until they learned a new sexual “freedom” from an enlightened culture? Is a repressed homosexual who does not act on his inclination truly a homosexual? Can a person choose his sexuality depending on his circumstances?
Immigrants to the United States face an oft repeated dilemma: does one cling to the culture of the mother country or should one become an “American” as soon as possible? This raises questions about what constitutes culture, the nature of American citizenship, and how American culture might be defined. Is being an American a legal reality, a matter of postal address, or a state of mind expressive of convictions one holds about freedom and democracy? Americans have argued about this quandary since there has been America.
Regardless of how such dilemmas are resolved, or not, it is clear that being an “American” is a matter of volition unlike citizenship in any other nation. One can not choose to not be of Japanese descent if one’s ancestors on both sides of the family going back five generations all lived in Nagasaki. Americans, however, can choose to flavor their sense of heritage with ethnic considerations at remote removes from where they stand now.
An Irish-American’s great-grandparents may have fled the Famine, but he embraces their Celtic heritage as if he himself had just gotten off the boat. African-Americans rarely know from what geographic part of that huge continent their forebears came, much less what tribe or language group, but insist on a recognition of their long-lost homeland as part of their definition of self and a sense of place in America [editor's note: the author of this piece is himself an "African-American" - he knows whereof he speaks]. Hispanics yet observe national holidays of their countries of origin, wear traditional clothing, and maintain language and cultural customs in family and civic life as closely as possible to the manner in which they are practiced south of the border.
Being an “American” is far more a matter of citizenship than of ethnicity. An American citizen can celebrate or ignore the ethnicity of his ancestors, but he can do neither without an effort. An Englishman in York need think not at all about how to manifest who he is within his native culture. A New Yorker, however, might be “Sicilian” to his family, “Italian” to the clerk renewing his library card, “white” on the census form, and a “Yankee imperialist dog” on vacation in France.
The human person acting on his sexuality has some decisions to make as well. Will he heed God’s call to holiness? If so, he will discern a sexual life solely in the context of Holy Matrimony open to life. This person is analogous to the man who has received his ethnic heritage and sense of identity from his ancestors in their native place. He knows who he is, where he is from, and how he is to live: a child of God, begotten of water and the Spirit, called to perfection like unto God his Father.
Unfortunately, the United States of America acknowledges neither slave nor free, man nor woman, Greek nor Jew – and rejects God and His Church as the source of his identity. Thus, America and Americans are confused and confusing. America has abandoned the natural source of identity that comes with ethnicity, and has abandoned the supernatural source of identity that comes with the Faith. The United States does not recognize that they are God’s people, nor do they have a unified sense of what is meant when they say, “We the people…”
Homosexuals want sex without reference to life. Their actions reject and ignore their responsibility to God and His Church. They are joined in this dynamic by users of contraception, practitioners of self abuse, and supporters of divorce. These are moral stances not only within America, but they are embodied by America itself. America is a conglomeration of atomistic, individualistic, and hedonistic persons who can not and will not choose to be a people or to be people of God.
To the extent that other nations embrace the American antipathy for a received and communal morality (allied to a love for moral and legal positivism), those nations cease to be a people as well. A country that rejects communion in faith with God will find that they lose not only God, but their nationhood and themselves. Religious wars are not initiated by the faithful, but by the irreligious. Faithful Catholics do not assault faithful Catholics, but the faithless will attack anyone and everyone, including themselves.
Homosexuality is not the cause of the dissolution of nations and cultures; it is a symptom thereof. The nation or culture that rejects God will indulge homosexuality and innumerable other morally depraved acts. Homosexuality is not a choice, but the result of a choice to reject God. Homosexuality is predicated on the negative: it is from the will against life, against nature, against God. Homosexuality is a rejection of the good in order to do evil.
One can not fall into such depravity. One must assert oneself, one’s very being in that direction. Society might make homosexuality easy, but it can not make homosexuality necessary or inevitable. The homosexual is neither born so nor made to be so. The homosexual wills himself away from the source of birth, the power to create life, and the Author of true freedom.
V. The Ontology of the Homosexual
Sodomy is an outward sign of the auto-demolition of a culture. Any culture that sanctions, much less celebrates, sodomy has lost the will to live. It can not stand very long after immersing itself in such depravity. It is highly unlikely that sodomy is the only vice pursued by such a culture.
In a similar vein, the individual who submits his will to moral depravity will find destruction as well. The homosexual culture is replete with promiscuity, violence, drug abuse, mental illness, and disease. These are things that kill the body. Far more, however, is at stake.
A curious contradictory phenomenon occurs in verbal usage concerning “persons with disabilities”. On the one hand is the insistence that such persons are not defined by their disabilities, i.e., they are not disabled persons but persons with disabilities. Their sense of identity emphasizes their personhood rather than their physical state.
On the other hand is a peculiar estimation that they are not persons with disabilities, but “differently abled persons”. These are people with strengths different from those possessed by “able-bodied persons”. This mindset seeks to de-emphasize the idea that a “normal” person exists, instead assuming that all people have gifts to offer and weaknesses to overcome.
Thus, there are hearing-impaired people who refuse hearing aids and speech therapy, desiring the exclusive use of sign language. Parents of children with severe autism will take them into public places where problematic behavior is more likely to occur in an effort to treat them to ordinary life experiences. Provision was made by the Professional Golfers’ Association – in compliance with a court order – to change tournament rules to accommodate a handicapped golfer, sparking a rancorous debate amongst lawyers and sports fans.
Allowances must be made on earth to assist and to protect those disadvantaged by poverty or disability. Charity demands that such assistance be generously offered, and humility requires that it be gratefully received. If this is not acknowledged by the common sense of a culture, it is surely a matter of the sensus fidei within the Church.
Eagerness to ease the plight of our beleaguered brothers on earth should not blind us to our common call to strive for Heaven. There are no poor saints, no handicapped saints, no oppressed saints around the Throne of God. All such earthly ills are healed in Heaven. “Neither slave nor free, man nor woman, Greek nor Jew”, can be expanded to include “rich nor poor, athlete nor cripple, helper nor helpless”. One’s material possessions and physical attributes do not determine one’s salvation.
At the same time, Heaven has no place for “the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted ... murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars.” One’s body is neither damnable nor redeemable; it is the use of the body that is damned or saved. The body does not choose perdition or salvation, but the body is damned or glorified depending on how one chooses to use the body.
Some would argue that homosexuality is more than just sex. It is about commitment and mutual support and love. Leaving aside the recurring problem of a definition that defines nothing – “commitment”, “support”, and “love” say nothing about homosexuality that can not be said about marriage, siblings, and friends – another problem arises. Where in homosexuality is commitment to the Faith that condemns moral depravity? Where is the mutual support in sanctity that binds the faithful to help one another to remain pure in thought, word, and deed? Where is the love of God that would recoil in horror at offending the Divine Majesty by rejecting life, asserting man’s will over God’s, and committing abominations begging Heaven for vengeance?
Choosing to be homosexual by committing oneself to the “gay lifestyle” is akin to choosing to be blind, deaf, or lame. It is asserting a physical attribute or action as a moral identity, desiring a state not intended by God as one’s final state of being. It is accepting as one’s fundamental existence a disposition of the mind, a craving of the flesh, and an exercise of the will entirely at war with God’s design for creation, redemption, and beatitude for man. Everyone, it is to be hoped, would consider it a perversity transcending the absurd to ask to be blind, deaf, or lame for all eternity. To define oneself as being homosexual is to demand that one be refused the Beatific Vision, hear the wailings of the damned instead of the choirs of the heavenly hosts, and be shackled in the bonds of sin for all eternity.
This, far from the gifted state proponents of sexual license would have us believe it, is the final and ultimate negation of self out of which flows the will to homosexuality. Nothing is gained by this willfulness and all is lost. The homosexual ends possessing neither God nor his countless accomplices in sin nor himself.
It should be added that anyone morally “tolerant” of homosexuality, though not necessarily a practitioner thereof, receives the same judgment as the homosexual. One who receives the prophet because he is a prophet, receives the prophet’s reward [Matt. 10:41]; one who accedes to sin is willing sin, and receives the sinner’s punishment [Ezek. 3:18; Rom. 1:32]. One can not believe that homosexuality is good and believe that Christ speaks only the truth. They who believe that Christ lies about homosexuality are doing not Christ’s work, but the will of the father of lies. To will homosexuality for oneself or another is to will not salvation but condemnation.
But to the wicked, God says:
“What right have you to recite my statutes,
or to take my covenant on your lips?
For you hate discipline,
and you cast my words behind you.
If you see a thief, you are a friend to him;
and you keep company with adulterers.
“You give your mouth free rein for evil,
and your tongue frames deceit.
You sit and speak against your brother;
you slander your own mother’s son.
These things you have done and I have been silent;
you thought I was like yourself.
But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.”
Psalm 49:16-21
VI. Charity and Homosexuality
All sexual immorality is ultimately a matter of sinning against charity. The unchaste are also uncharitable. It is loving neither to God nor to neighbor to indulge in acts of disobedience to the divine will, oriented toward a creature rather than to the Creator, and willfully exclusive, either physically or mentally, of the increase of life.
Acts of sexual immorality of any kind are entirely incapable of establishing a communion of souls in love. What is asserted instead is the satisfaction of appetites, addiction to carnal pleasure, and participation in human relationships referent only to man and in denial of God. Charity’s greatest sign is the giving of life. Sexual immorality is essentially sterility – of body, of mind, and of soul. Such is decidedly not of God, not of God whose very being is love.
The person, heterosexual or homosexual, who predicates love on having sex is thoroughly in error. Love can be and must be expressed in a multitude of ways, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Were this not the case, filial piety, fraternal sympathy, and sanctity would be impossible. One loves one’s parents, friends, and God not primarily without sexual relations, but exclusively without sexual relations.
Within Holy Matrimony, conjugal love is expressed through sexual relations with the understanding, the desire, and the intent of cooperating with God in bringing new life into the world. Where this understanding, desire, and will are absent, sexual relations are illicit. Expression of conjugal love can and must take other forms. Those who insist that the conjugal bond is not sufficiently engaged without sex (as distinct from the conception of children) as its primary expression, lack imagination, limit their human interaction with their spouses, and probably are not praying.
Not every act of sex will result in conception, but every act of sex is for procreation. If couples are not trying to make babies, why is the sexual act being engaged? Surely, sex without mutual desire for love is forbidden. Equally inconceivable should be the thought of sex without a mutual desire for life.
God finds even the heavens wanting when He judges creation. The moral standard within Holy Matrimony is exceedingly high, befitting the sublime call of married couples to play such an integral role in creating life in the divine image. It sounds impossible – and so it is for man, but with God all things are possible.
Charity expressed by the Cross of Christ is the motivating force behind the conjugal bond. Christ giving up His body for His Bride the Church brings many children into being, adopted by God the Father through water and the Spirit. Husbands and wives, too, sharing the Cross, die to self as the two are made one, and give rise to new life offered for the glory of God the Father. This goal, not their affection on earth, is the purpose of their union. All marriages end with death. The fruit of holy marriages, children of God, have an eternal destiny. It is an inadequacy bordering on the insulting to reduce such an exquisite reality to the level of carnal desires.
If the heavens will be found wanting on Judgment Day, and married couples suffer nothing short of Calvary to effect God’s will in them, then the plight of the obstinate homosexual is most perilous. He is not open to life. He is disobedient to God. He craves human pleasure over pleasing God. What is to be done with him?
“Love your enemies, do good for those that hate you, bless those that curse you, and pray for those who abuse you” (St. Luke 6:27-28). It is not charitable to consign someone to hell through failing to warn him of his sin (see Ezekiel 3:16-21; 33:1-16). It is not kind to lead someone to believe that his depravity is somehow commendable (see St. Matthew 18:6-9). Such warnings are not for people who are inclined to agree at first (see St. Luke 5:31-32), but must be given whenever and to whomever they are needed (see 1 Timothy 1:8-10; 4:6-16; and 2 Timothy 4:1-5). In the end it matters not that the message is despised and the messenger reviled (see St. Matthew 5:11-12), only that God’s will is done (see St. John 17).
Those who claim to love God must also love their brothers beset by sin. The best expression of love for a sinner is to help free him from his sins. To know Christ and His righteousness requires sharing that knowledge. One can hardly say that he loves his brother while leaving his brother languishing in the ignorance of sin. Those who walk in the darkness of sin are in infinite need of charity expressed through the light of faith offered for the forgiveness of sins.
St. Augustine writes about the necessity of the faithful to draw the sinner out of sin – especially when the sinner refuses repentance. St. Paul tells of the compulsion in Christian charity to preach the Gospel, to proclaim forgiveness in Christ, and through that forgiveness to set aside the old ways of sin and take on newness in Christ. Jesus speaks of a zealous, passionate, burning desire for His Father’s house, to ignite the world in love, to offer Himself that the Kingdom may be established. Such sentiments must motivate the effort to bring sanctity to bear on matters of physical intimacy. The rejection of sin is but the prelude to embracing the law of love.
VII. Conclusion
Homosexuality is a veritably demonic inversion of the natural order. Where Holy Matrimony is the union of man and woman in communion with the divine will to bring forth life, homosexuality is the unnatural combination of two persons of the same sex in utter disobedience to God in the midst of acts entirely devoid of fertility. Homosexuality denies the supernatural orientation of man, is sterile on the natural level, and degrades man through its unnatural carnality.
One might be tempted to ask why anyone would choose to be homosexual. The fundamental answer lies in the rejection of the good, of the true, of the holy, in short, a rejection of the Faith. Once a person abandons sanctity, mediated by the Sacraments in the Church, he will find himself open to every temptation.
It is the mystery of iniquity why any one person chooses to succumb to a given sin. Only God knows the full motivations of the human heart. What is certain is that all sin flows from a proud, disobedient refusal to seek God and His good. The only defense against any and every sin is the humble submission to God with the whole of one’s heart, mind, soul, and strength.
The gravest ill of homosexuality is more profound than the fact that in itself it is an abomination. Homosexuality is so wrong and so evil because it is part of a larger and more insidious attack on Holy Matrimony and the divinely ordained order of things. Homosexuality represents the war of the evil against the holy.
Evil, however, can not conquer good. But good can yield to temptation, wallow in sin, and deny itself by becoming evil – unless the created good is wholly united to God’s infinite goodness. Alas! man can abandon the search for the good.
Holy Matrimony is in peril because man the modernist has denied its true end. This denial is most graphic among sodomites, but the first and worst culprits are men and women united in marriage. Where contraception is allowed, marriage is destroyed. If children are not the natural end of marriage, then sexual unions that accomplish the other, the secondary ends of marriage are made licit. If sex is not for making babies in heterosexual couples, then fornication will lead to abortion, recreational sex will include sodomy, and all will preclude the traditional and natural definition of marriage as fertile, permanent, and social.
Contraception begins a direct progression where marriage need not produce children, becomes fluid and indefinable, and a matter of private rather than communal concern. This utter rejection of the natural goods of marriage results in the impossibility of supernatural good being sought or received. To avoid evil is not necessarily to embrace good; to reject one good results in the final rejection of all good.
It is rationally impossible to maintain that sex can be a matter of recreation among heterosexual married couples, but not among sodomites and fornicators. Either sex is an absolute openness to God’s gift of life in the family, or it is a relative invitation to be accepted or rejected according to merely human considerations. Sex rendered sterile is either a moral evil or a relative good, and if it is a relative good it does not matter whether the source of sterility is a contraceptive intent, contraceptive devices, or acts of sodomy. The argument that sodomy is unnatural is met by the equal truth that the prevention of conception in the act of conceiving offends both nature and nature’s God. The whole of the moral order is ultimately denied by contraception and the contraceptive mentality.
Married couples differ from fornicators in their use of contraception in only one way: fornicators are consistent with or better than their morals, whereas married couples are hypocrites. For each day that a contracepting fornicator maintains his illicit relationship with his companion, he is treating her better than their morals deserve in their fraudulent imitation of marriage. A husband contracepting with his wife is treating her no better than a fornicator treats his mistress. Both relationships, hard experience and hard statistics strongly predict, will come to an unhappy end.
Political correctness in the world frowns on telling the truth about sodomy: promiscuity, disease, mental illness, child abuse, and offense against God’s Majesty. Another kind of political correctness forbids denouncing contraception for what it is: dehumanizing, deceitful, ineffective, medically perilous, and mortally sinful. Sodomy and contraception share a common principle: that sex is not a natural cooperation with divine grace in the context of Holy Matrimony for the purpose of increasing life both for earth and Heaven; but is instead a mere matter of physical pleasure among consenting parties – even children.
The divorce of the natural bond between man and woman from the supernatural reality mediated by the Church through her Sacraments has led to the woeful state of affairs self-inflicted upon modernity. Fornication, teen pregnancy, abortion, disease, self abuse, and divorce are the foul fruit spring from the tree of sexual “liberation” rooted in the depravity of married people abandoning fidelity to the divine order. If married people will not insist on the sanctity of the conjugal act, it is not to be expected that anyone else will come to the defense of human chastity.
Sins against nature have not become common ex nihilo. They are the corruption of the great good of Holy Matrimony. This wretched condition should not surprise anyone. It is the direct outgrowth of he half-millennium apostasy into which what once was Christendom has plunged itself. As G.K. Chesterton said, when the supernatural is rejected, one gets not the natural, but the unnatural.
What is wanted is not an offensive against homosexuality so much as a crusade in favor of Holy Matrimony and its purpose of life conforming to the divine image and likeness. The problem is less that people want to be homosexual than that they do not want to be married, they do not want to be holy, they do not want to be obedient to God, they do not want to be Catholic, they do not want to go to Heaven. Our goal is not to effect a society that merely rejects the abomination of homosexuality, but to establish a society that rejects depravity in favor of desiring only God’s will. Or to end as we began, our task is to avoid all evil by doing only good.
Father Lawrence C. Smith
Sacerdos vagus
17 September 2003
The Impression of Christ’s Wounds on the flesh of St. Francis of Assisi
I. Introduction
Do the good! and Avoid evil! are the two moral imperatives given the faithful through the natural law, the Magisterium, and Divine Law. Through obedience to this dual admonition to seek sanctity and reject sin, the faithful cooperate with God’s plan of salvation. In His plan God’s activity is creation and redemption. Man’s activity results in God’s creation either being damned or glorified. What a man does is his contribution to the project of establishing what he is for all eternity.
Each of the two moral imperatives must be engaged in man’s life in the world. “Do the good,” is a relative command. “Avoid evil,” is an absolute command. Between birth and death man is given ample opportunity to obey these commands and thus be saved. Free will gives him the power to choose, but the power is dependent on the choice. Man’s free will is increased in choosing righteousness; it is diminished when he chooses sin. The saint is truly, fully, and eternally free as a son and heir of God. The sinner dies in perpetual slavery, bound forever to his sin, entirely incapable of asserting his will to happiness, which he falsely sought by disobedience to God on earth.
A man is able to do only so much good. His responsibility is limited by his very being. God alone can do all good. Man participates in the infinite goodness of God. It is divine grace and mercy which deigns to extend the infinite good of God to the finite man. Doing but a little good is rewarded with endless beatitude. In giving God His due, man receives infinitely more than is his due from God.
There is never an instance in which evil may be done. No sin is ever permissible, and none can be attributed to the divine will or imputed to the person of God. Sin belongs utterly to the world. Each man’s sins are uniquely his own. Although God gives the saved full portion of His life beyond their just desserts, the perdition of the damned is solely his own work and the fruit of his own demerits. Grace in its very being is a sharing in love; sin and its wages [which is] death are confined to the guilty soul and makes impossible any communion on earth or in Heaven.
Being, in keeping, with the divine will, is inherently good. God’s original creation received His benediction six times before he declared His work Very good! (cf. Genesis 1:1-31) This truth has been confused by many to mean that good attaches to the human person regardless of how he exercises his free will. It is a commonplace to hear a man’s sins related with the summary judgment, “But he’s a good person.” Man may have begun good, but original sin, concupiscence, and sinful actions disfigure that goodness in time and, potentially, destroy it for all eternity.
This divorce in the understanding of many between a man’s actions and his ontological state has resulted in a denial of the existence of sin; a misunderstanding of the nature of sin when it is acknowledged; a diminishment in the celebration of the Sacrament of Penance; a cultural mindset rejecting the possibility of damnation; and, ultimately, the refusal of many to positively seek the Kingdom of Heaven in righteousness. From brazenly indulging in sin to encouraging others in sin to maliciously attacking sanctity, individuals and the society at large have embarked on the journey toward utter moral depravity. Such a path is as old as Eden, but post-enlightenment man suffers not only from the pagan will to self-destruction, but also from the peculiar ill of the baptized who forget repentance – apostasy. A pagan in sin is in a deplorable state from which he can only rise; apostate Christians have fallen lower than Satan, have become salt without flavor, and in their wretched example are in peril of an eternal millstone. The state of Baptized Man falling back into sin is worse than when he knew nothing of salvation; indeed, seven devils have replaced the first [c.f. Matt. 12:43-45].
Any who doubt this description and estimation of man’s degenerating plight need only consider the modern proclivity not only to engage in sin, but to preach it, legitimize it, and in some cases mandate it. Married couples are encouraged to violate their Sacrament through contraception. Divorce is endemic to the point of being typical and thought well night-unto inevitable. And the national policies of the United States, Russia, and China have turned abortion into a form of “family planning”, economic stimulation, and legal obligation. The Church and the woefully small numbers of non-Catholics who dare decry this foul environment of license and demonic disobedience are alternately insulted, ignored, and imprisoned.
Perhaps nothing illustrates how entrenched the will to evil has become in mankind better than the juggernaut of the media, popular opinion, and legislative activism seeking to propagate homosexuality as a moral good. The not-so-subtle progression of the last forty years has taken us from a plea to tolerate sodomy - to decriminalizing sodomy - to encouraging sodomy - to assuming sodomy as an unremarkable human activity - to giving sodomy legal sanction on par with Holy Matrimony. A diabolically clever tactic to impose sodomy as a morally neutral element of human being has been to equate the state of homosexuality with the nebulous condition of race membership. This appeals to a bent toward sociology in the apologists for sodomy. Behaviorists among the advocates of sodomy would have us believe that the sin is no more to be criticized than other learned behaviors, such as how one learns speech from parents, socializing from peers, and taboos from society. Materialists of various stripes suggest that the inclination to sodomy is merely the physical manifestation of evolution, carried on the genes along with eye color, height, or the possibility of Down’s syndrome.
In each of these instances, the homosexual person is robbed of his humanity. He has no will in his condition. He indulges sodomy because of social conditioning or family psychology or biological disposition. He has no choice in how he manifests his intimate interactions with other persons. There is no moral element involved, for the causes of his nature are beyond his control.
Such must be the conclusion of the arguments advanced by those who insist that sodomy is natural and normal, without reference to the Creator’s will or the creature’s obligation to imitate His will. This utter inability to cooperate with the divine will or to effect the human will is the telltale symptom of sin. It is the slavery that comes from denying grace. It is the final separation of man from God, mankind, and life. It is sin’s wages fully reaped: the death and destruction of the man.
There is one other attempt to make homosexuality palatable as a human activity: the theological. Recognizing that free will is essential to the human person as a moral agent, shameless theologians, or charlatans making use of theology, proof-text Holy Scripture to support their desire to bring sin into the mainstream of the Faith. They would go so far as to aver that homosexuality is a true good, even a gift from God. Far from blaming God or anyone else for this proclivity to sin, these advocates of sodomy would thank the Lord for creating them in that way. Untold blasphemies against Jesus Christ Our Lord have been suggested in keeping with this depraved set of ideas [c.f. the abominable stage play, Corpus Christi, in which a gay man named "Joshua" recruits 12 gay disciples, engages in frequent sodomite acts, and is crucified at the play's end under the title "King of Queers"].
A variety of explanations accounts for this plague of words and deeds in defense of sodomy. An obvious one is that many desire the vice. Others indulge in other vices and find allies for themselves among sodomites. Certainly a large number of people are confused, both by the irrational rhetoric of the sexually licentious and by the urge to deal kindly with the sinners in their acquaintance. Political power and financial gain surely motivate many of those demanding the “right” to sodomy. It can not be discounted that these disparate groups and rationales have in common behind them, explicitly or unwittingly, the machinations of Satan. Not that these people necessarily desire allegiance with Satan, but he definitely desires them to preach and commit sin.
What follows is an examination of how homosexual advocacy attempts to normalize these sinful acts. That is contrasted with the initiative of God to bring grace to bear to effect His will to save all sinners. The counterpoint between man’s will in time and his final state in eternity forms the heart of this argument against sin and its advocacy. Homosexuality is not a matter of environment, genetics, or social policy, nor is it a morally neutral choice for human expression. It is an act of the will that, unrepentant, effects damnation and the complete degradation of the human being.
II. The Natural Aspects of Sexuality
There is a modern penchant for propagating confusion in matters of morality, particularly in regards to sexual morality. A popular (though never explained) aphorism is, “We all are sexual beings.” Either this is an entirely unhelpful platitude as meaningful as insisting that we all are living beings or spiritual beings or beings with appetites; or it is an assertion about man that reduces his identity to an exceedingly narrow aspect of his experience.
To describe mankind as “sexual” is to suggest that having sex makes the man, or that gender determines one’s psyche, actions, and sense of self. Given that most people most of the time are not having sex, it would appear that the notion, “We all are sexual beings,” is not referent to sexual activity. However, modernity’s shrill cries for the equality of the sexes seems to betray a disavowal of that charming saying, Vive la difference! If men and women are the same, then it seems odd that anyone finds it revelatory to claim that sex constitutes a defining element in human being.
A definition delimits, excludes, and distinguishes between things. Man as a sexual being either defines all things human as meaning sex, or sex as meaning nothing in practical terms. Man is a sexual being, a carbon being, an earthly being. O.K. So are petunias, manatees, and the neighbors’ cat. Stating the obvious is a peculiarly human attribute, true, but it is hardly useful as a tool in understanding the human.
What is really operative in the modern mindset is a mania for materialism. A description of man that begins and ends with sex completely preempts any discussion of the moral aspects of sexuality. The animals perhaps are free to do what comes naturally, but man without reference to the supernatural will gravitate toward things at which Mother Nature would blush – and then mercilessly punish her erring children.
It is curious how angry many become at the suggestion that AIDS is a judgment from God. Never considered, it seems, is how nature judges the unnatural. The wages of sins against nature meted out by nature are infertility, disease, physical deformity, sexual dysfunction, and indeed death – among many other things. Promiscuous, licentious, amoral people who disbelieve in the wrath of God must still contend with the fury of Mother Nature scorned.
Man is both physical and spiritual. A human being does not have a body and a soul; a human being is a body and a soul, an embodied spirit. It is true, and laughably obvious, that one can not discuss human being without acknowledging his physicality, including (but not obsessing on) his sexuality. It is far truer, however, to discuss human being beginning with that which is higher than the animals, definitive of his relationships with other people, and, most importantly, most like his creator, God.
If one is to understand man, and by extension his sexuality, one begins with God. For man is made in God’s image and likeness. God has more to say about man’s identity than any amount of studying man, animals, and biochemistry can conceive.
God is love. God is good. God creates. These simple truths reveal the motive, the content, and the purpose governing man’s existence. Why God does anything is predicated on the divine attribute of charity. How He does His will flows from His infinite goodness. What He does is to offer being reflective of His own being, the highest form of that on earth being man, a corporal being endowed with a rational soul capable of knowing, embracing, and imitating the divine will.
Thus, man can love. Man can be good. Man can create. The natural basis for effecting the supernatural task of man imitating God is Holy Matrimony. Man and woman can will mutual love. They can do so in obedience to the moral law. Through that obedience, they cooperate with God in bringing forth new life like themselves able to be like God.
Man as a sexual being must be a moral being if he is not to do violence to his very being. In the very act of carnal knowledge, man must be endeavoring to know God, serve His will, and obey Him in love. Failing this, man is less a sexual being than a depraved being.
Either one is obeying God or one is sinning. Men and women are called to discern God’s will for them to cooperate with Him in procreation. The only licit context for this is within Holy Matrimony, whose primary purpose is to beget and raise children for the glory of God. Contraception, self abuse, coitus interruptus, and sodomy (in which heterosexuals can engage as well as homosexuals) deny the proper end of marriage, destroy the sanctity of the persons committing such acts, and degrade the human person. Far from assertions of sexuality and human being, these sins unmake the divine order of things. Man does not effect his being through sex, but through obeying God in all things.
Here one sees that the fundamental distinction in human sexuality is not heterosexual versus homosexual, but obedience versus disobedience. One can obey God’s will in many ways through heterosexual acts, but not in every instance. There is never an instance in which the divine will is obeyed through homosexual acts.
Furthermore, obedience to God’s will is a broader category than defining which acts of sex are licit and which are forbidden. Obeying God’s will can involve continence in married couples, the vow or promise of celibacy among those with religious vocations, and the responsibility to be fruitful and multiply for married couples. God’s will in love is not so much about what one must not do as it is hearkening to God’s call of what one is created to do in keeping with divine Providence. Some are called to be eunuchs for the Kingdom [Matt. 19:12]; some are called to raise up sons of God born not of flesh or the will of man, but the will of God; and some are called to help people the earth.
No one is ever called to thwart, deny, or eliminate God’s gift of life to men. There is no such thing as a sexual being or a sexual act not meant for the increase of life on earth with the goal of life in Heaven. Though there might be natural obstacles to fertility, none may ever impede the possibility of conception through action, inaction, or intent of the will. If one seeks to love one’s spouse through the conjugal act, then one must first love God – and His will to life – with one’s whole heart, whole mind, whole soul, and whole strength. Hatred of God’s will to life manifested by the use of latex or chemicals, the abuse of the physical act itself, or the refusal of the will to accept the nature and meaning of the marital bond for procreation, is gross disobedience, destructive of the human body and soul, and potentially damning.
III. Homosexuality as a Manifestation of Concupiscence
Perverse connections have been drawn between the current crusade to legalize and normalize homosexuality, and the civil rights movement of the 1940’s-60’s. Homosexuality, so goes this argument, is not to be discriminated against. The dignity of man requires that all people be treated equally regardless of their sexual behavior.
If immorality can be criminalized – such as theft, perjury, or fraud – then the only argument that can be sustained to justify the decriminalizing of sodomy is that issues of morality do not pertain to sex. It is merely a matter of the body and its consensual use. People go to jail because they violated someone’s rights. Homosexuals are expressing mutual love, harm no one, and do nothing different from what heterosexual couples do.
“We all are sexual beings” has a partner in its crime of refusing definition. “Consensual sex”, i.e. “What people do in their own bedrooms”, gives carte blanche to a whole host of behaviors that one prays would still be found deplorable by most people. Associations exist to legalize the sodomizing of boys by men, “marriages” between three or more people, and the practice of polygamy. One assumes that all of these are examples of “What people do in their own bedrooms”. Why should they be forbidden but homosexuality permitted?
Well, before that question is answered, one must ask for a definition of homosexuality. It is oddly appropriate that “gay rights” advocates attempt to co-opt the civil rights movement. Both suffer from an unwillingness or inability to define just whose rights are being defended.
Over the years certain people in the United States of America have been referred to as “darkies”, “niggers”, “colored people”, “persons of color”, “blacks”, and “African-Americans”. Efforts to define this class of people have made of them a mere 3/5 of a person, or have rendered anyone with 1/16 of his blood from a tainted source as a full member of the group. Although skin color plays a large role in determining this classification, the colors in question range from white enough to “pass” to skin so dark as to have a blue cast to it. Hispanics, some Caribbean islanders, and some Asians have skin colors that fall within this range, but are not considered part of this group. There is an “enlightened” understanding of this issue in which correcting past wrongs is sought, but no distinction is made between one member of this group who is a multimillionaire in the suburbs, another who is a middle-class professional in a small city, yet another who is incarcerated for gang activity in a big city inner-city, and a fourth living in third-world squalor in the rural Old South.
What makes a “black” person who he is has never been adequately discussed, much less defined. Is it skin color? Is it family of origin? Is it racial discrimination? Is it government description? Is it cultural? Is it because a rights organization says so? Is it some secret algorithm incorporating these and other considerations?
In a like manner, no one has explained what homosexuality is. Is it an inclination? Is it a set of actions? Is it one act? Is it a subculture? Is it being an effeminate man? Is it being a masculine woman? Where is the line between “effeminate” and “sensitive”, between “masculine” and “tom-boy”? Is it genetic? Is it learned? Is it a continuum or an absolute?
Because of this ambiguity, many would say that all the more we should not discriminate because of “sexual orientation”. There are so many factors involved that none can be blamed for why he is as he is. Aside from reducing the homosexual to a non-moral agent incapable of choosing whether or not and how to have sex, this leaves society in a state of confusion. What behavior is being protected by gay rights?
Is it the bathhouse scene where AIDS is being incubated in thousands of host organisms? Is it the media juggernaut recruiting our young people to tolerate, then celebrate, then adopt this “alternative lifestyle”? Is it the abomination of church and state recognizing a “marital union” between same-sex couples?
Oh, wait. We should not get so upset over “What people do in their own bedrooms”.
A person belonging to a racial group – whatever one can make that mean – has very little control over his inclusion therein. One’s skin color is not a matter of choice. It is the height of injustice to inflict punishment on someone because of a physical attribute.
Homosexuality, conversely, is a matter of willed decisions. Either one chooses to act on sexual temptations or not. Either one gives into impure thoughts or not. Either one elects to be identified with morally perilous behavior or not. When the choice is made to act immorally in a public setting, the family, the state, and/or the Church have a moral obligation to teach, to warn, and if need be to punish those who disobey the moral law.
And remember: what makes any sex act immoral is its disobedience to God’s will toward human increase through Holy Matrimony. Homosexual acts are unnatural in their use of sex toward sterile ends. Thus, there is no such thing as “marriage” between homosexuals, no context in which homosexual sex is ever licit. Homosexual acts deny the family, weaken the state, and offend God and His Church. Far from protecting people so that they can commit homosexual acts, it is the duty of charity to decry the acts, to define them as sins, and to lead their participants to repentance.
IV. Homosexuality as a Depraved Assertion of the Will
“Nature versus Nurture” is an age-old argument about the cause of homosexuality. Are homosexuals born or are they made? Does the homosexual become so over time, or does he discover his nature as it has existed from birth or before? Can one be homosexual and not know it? Can homosexuality be cured?
If indeed homosexuality is not a matter of moral choice, if one is merely born so, then there can be no talk of recruiting, accepting, or curing members of the group. Remove morality from sex and it does not matter how sex is engaged or with whom. Most people who adopt this position would ask only that parties involved in sexual acts be consenting adults.
Why consent and adulthood are so insisted upon is never fully explained. Inconsistency in this argument is betrayed in the existence of laws against adultery and statutory rape that are rarely enforced; the lamentations over teen pregnancy accompanied by the distribution of contraception to minors; and the warped homoeroticism marketed to youth in the mass media paralleled by the aforementioned refusal to prosecute statutory rapists in the face of near-hysteria over homosexual pedophilia. Where confusion reigns, Satan rules.
On the other hand, if homosexuality is a learned behavior, one influenced by environment, then the ranks of homosexuals would increase dependent on home life, societal taboos, and moral considerations. A lack of vigilance against sodomy by the Church with a concomitant offensive by social forces in favor of sodomy would result in rising numbers claiming affiliation with the homosexual “lifestyle”. A culture in keeping with Church teaching on the moral law would have few examples of homosexuality manifested, would experience repugnance at the notion that sodomy is normal, and would enact civil laws reflective of the moral law against acts of sodomy.
Modernity prides itself on its “enlightenment” regarding sexual morality. Many would maintain that a significant number of homosexuals are present in any population. Repression by Church and state sends homosexuals underground; tolerance allows “gays” to “come out of the closet”.
Were they in the closet because they were born homosexual and came out at the first safe opportunity? Were they leading heterosexual lives until they learned a new sexual “freedom” from an enlightened culture? Is a repressed homosexual who does not act on his inclination truly a homosexual? Can a person choose his sexuality depending on his circumstances?
Immigrants to the United States face an oft repeated dilemma: does one cling to the culture of the mother country or should one become an “American” as soon as possible? This raises questions about what constitutes culture, the nature of American citizenship, and how American culture might be defined. Is being an American a legal reality, a matter of postal address, or a state of mind expressive of convictions one holds about freedom and democracy? Americans have argued about this quandary since there has been America.
Regardless of how such dilemmas are resolved, or not, it is clear that being an “American” is a matter of volition unlike citizenship in any other nation. One can not choose to not be of Japanese descent if one’s ancestors on both sides of the family going back five generations all lived in Nagasaki. Americans, however, can choose to flavor their sense of heritage with ethnic considerations at remote removes from where they stand now.
An Irish-American’s great-grandparents may have fled the Famine, but he embraces their Celtic heritage as if he himself had just gotten off the boat. African-Americans rarely know from what geographic part of that huge continent their forebears came, much less what tribe or language group, but insist on a recognition of their long-lost homeland as part of their definition of self and a sense of place in America [editor's note: the author of this piece is himself an "African-American" - he knows whereof he speaks]. Hispanics yet observe national holidays of their countries of origin, wear traditional clothing, and maintain language and cultural customs in family and civic life as closely as possible to the manner in which they are practiced south of the border.
Being an “American” is far more a matter of citizenship than of ethnicity. An American citizen can celebrate or ignore the ethnicity of his ancestors, but he can do neither without an effort. An Englishman in York need think not at all about how to manifest who he is within his native culture. A New Yorker, however, might be “Sicilian” to his family, “Italian” to the clerk renewing his library card, “white” on the census form, and a “Yankee imperialist dog” on vacation in France.
The human person acting on his sexuality has some decisions to make as well. Will he heed God’s call to holiness? If so, he will discern a sexual life solely in the context of Holy Matrimony open to life. This person is analogous to the man who has received his ethnic heritage and sense of identity from his ancestors in their native place. He knows who he is, where he is from, and how he is to live: a child of God, begotten of water and the Spirit, called to perfection like unto God his Father.
Unfortunately, the United States of America acknowledges neither slave nor free, man nor woman, Greek nor Jew – and rejects God and His Church as the source of his identity. Thus, America and Americans are confused and confusing. America has abandoned the natural source of identity that comes with ethnicity, and has abandoned the supernatural source of identity that comes with the Faith. The United States does not recognize that they are God’s people, nor do they have a unified sense of what is meant when they say, “We the people…”
Homosexuals want sex without reference to life. Their actions reject and ignore their responsibility to God and His Church. They are joined in this dynamic by users of contraception, practitioners of self abuse, and supporters of divorce. These are moral stances not only within America, but they are embodied by America itself. America is a conglomeration of atomistic, individualistic, and hedonistic persons who can not and will not choose to be a people or to be people of God.
To the extent that other nations embrace the American antipathy for a received and communal morality (allied to a love for moral and legal positivism), those nations cease to be a people as well. A country that rejects communion in faith with God will find that they lose not only God, but their nationhood and themselves. Religious wars are not initiated by the faithful, but by the irreligious. Faithful Catholics do not assault faithful Catholics, but the faithless will attack anyone and everyone, including themselves.
Homosexuality is not the cause of the dissolution of nations and cultures; it is a symptom thereof. The nation or culture that rejects God will indulge homosexuality and innumerable other morally depraved acts. Homosexuality is not a choice, but the result of a choice to reject God. Homosexuality is predicated on the negative: it is from the will against life, against nature, against God. Homosexuality is a rejection of the good in order to do evil.
One can not fall into such depravity. One must assert oneself, one’s very being in that direction. Society might make homosexuality easy, but it can not make homosexuality necessary or inevitable. The homosexual is neither born so nor made to be so. The homosexual wills himself away from the source of birth, the power to create life, and the Author of true freedom.
V. The Ontology of the Homosexual
Sodomy is an outward sign of the auto-demolition of a culture. Any culture that sanctions, much less celebrates, sodomy has lost the will to live. It can not stand very long after immersing itself in such depravity. It is highly unlikely that sodomy is the only vice pursued by such a culture.
In a similar vein, the individual who submits his will to moral depravity will find destruction as well. The homosexual culture is replete with promiscuity, violence, drug abuse, mental illness, and disease. These are things that kill the body. Far more, however, is at stake.
A curious contradictory phenomenon occurs in verbal usage concerning “persons with disabilities”. On the one hand is the insistence that such persons are not defined by their disabilities, i.e., they are not disabled persons but persons with disabilities. Their sense of identity emphasizes their personhood rather than their physical state.
On the other hand is a peculiar estimation that they are not persons with disabilities, but “differently abled persons”. These are people with strengths different from those possessed by “able-bodied persons”. This mindset seeks to de-emphasize the idea that a “normal” person exists, instead assuming that all people have gifts to offer and weaknesses to overcome.
Thus, there are hearing-impaired people who refuse hearing aids and speech therapy, desiring the exclusive use of sign language. Parents of children with severe autism will take them into public places where problematic behavior is more likely to occur in an effort to treat them to ordinary life experiences. Provision was made by the Professional Golfers’ Association – in compliance with a court order – to change tournament rules to accommodate a handicapped golfer, sparking a rancorous debate amongst lawyers and sports fans.
Allowances must be made on earth to assist and to protect those disadvantaged by poverty or disability. Charity demands that such assistance be generously offered, and humility requires that it be gratefully received. If this is not acknowledged by the common sense of a culture, it is surely a matter of the sensus fidei within the Church.
Eagerness to ease the plight of our beleaguered brothers on earth should not blind us to our common call to strive for Heaven. There are no poor saints, no handicapped saints, no oppressed saints around the Throne of God. All such earthly ills are healed in Heaven. “Neither slave nor free, man nor woman, Greek nor Jew”, can be expanded to include “rich nor poor, athlete nor cripple, helper nor helpless”. One’s material possessions and physical attributes do not determine one’s salvation.
At the same time, Heaven has no place for “the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted ... murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars.” One’s body is neither damnable nor redeemable; it is the use of the body that is damned or saved. The body does not choose perdition or salvation, but the body is damned or glorified depending on how one chooses to use the body.
Some would argue that homosexuality is more than just sex. It is about commitment and mutual support and love. Leaving aside the recurring problem of a definition that defines nothing – “commitment”, “support”, and “love” say nothing about homosexuality that can not be said about marriage, siblings, and friends – another problem arises. Where in homosexuality is commitment to the Faith that condemns moral depravity? Where is the mutual support in sanctity that binds the faithful to help one another to remain pure in thought, word, and deed? Where is the love of God that would recoil in horror at offending the Divine Majesty by rejecting life, asserting man’s will over God’s, and committing abominations begging Heaven for vengeance?
Choosing to be homosexual by committing oneself to the “gay lifestyle” is akin to choosing to be blind, deaf, or lame. It is asserting a physical attribute or action as a moral identity, desiring a state not intended by God as one’s final state of being. It is accepting as one’s fundamental existence a disposition of the mind, a craving of the flesh, and an exercise of the will entirely at war with God’s design for creation, redemption, and beatitude for man. Everyone, it is to be hoped, would consider it a perversity transcending the absurd to ask to be blind, deaf, or lame for all eternity. To define oneself as being homosexual is to demand that one be refused the Beatific Vision, hear the wailings of the damned instead of the choirs of the heavenly hosts, and be shackled in the bonds of sin for all eternity.
This, far from the gifted state proponents of sexual license would have us believe it, is the final and ultimate negation of self out of which flows the will to homosexuality. Nothing is gained by this willfulness and all is lost. The homosexual ends possessing neither God nor his countless accomplices in sin nor himself.
It should be added that anyone morally “tolerant” of homosexuality, though not necessarily a practitioner thereof, receives the same judgment as the homosexual. One who receives the prophet because he is a prophet, receives the prophet’s reward [Matt. 10:41]; one who accedes to sin is willing sin, and receives the sinner’s punishment [Ezek. 3:18; Rom. 1:32]. One can not believe that homosexuality is good and believe that Christ speaks only the truth. They who believe that Christ lies about homosexuality are doing not Christ’s work, but the will of the father of lies. To will homosexuality for oneself or another is to will not salvation but condemnation.
But to the wicked, God says:
“What right have you to recite my statutes,
or to take my covenant on your lips?
For you hate discipline,
and you cast my words behind you.
If you see a thief, you are a friend to him;
and you keep company with adulterers.
“You give your mouth free rein for evil,
and your tongue frames deceit.
You sit and speak against your brother;
you slander your own mother’s son.
These things you have done and I have been silent;
you thought I was like yourself.
But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you.”
Psalm 49:16-21
VI. Charity and Homosexuality
All sexual immorality is ultimately a matter of sinning against charity. The unchaste are also uncharitable. It is loving neither to God nor to neighbor to indulge in acts of disobedience to the divine will, oriented toward a creature rather than to the Creator, and willfully exclusive, either physically or mentally, of the increase of life.
Acts of sexual immorality of any kind are entirely incapable of establishing a communion of souls in love. What is asserted instead is the satisfaction of appetites, addiction to carnal pleasure, and participation in human relationships referent only to man and in denial of God. Charity’s greatest sign is the giving of life. Sexual immorality is essentially sterility – of body, of mind, and of soul. Such is decidedly not of God, not of God whose very being is love.
The person, heterosexual or homosexual, who predicates love on having sex is thoroughly in error. Love can be and must be expressed in a multitude of ways, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Were this not the case, filial piety, fraternal sympathy, and sanctity would be impossible. One loves one’s parents, friends, and God not primarily without sexual relations, but exclusively without sexual relations.
Within Holy Matrimony, conjugal love is expressed through sexual relations with the understanding, the desire, and the intent of cooperating with God in bringing new life into the world. Where this understanding, desire, and will are absent, sexual relations are illicit. Expression of conjugal love can and must take other forms. Those who insist that the conjugal bond is not sufficiently engaged without sex (as distinct from the conception of children) as its primary expression, lack imagination, limit their human interaction with their spouses, and probably are not praying.
Not every act of sex will result in conception, but every act of sex is for procreation. If couples are not trying to make babies, why is the sexual act being engaged? Surely, sex without mutual desire for love is forbidden. Equally inconceivable should be the thought of sex without a mutual desire for life.
God finds even the heavens wanting when He judges creation. The moral standard within Holy Matrimony is exceedingly high, befitting the sublime call of married couples to play such an integral role in creating life in the divine image. It sounds impossible – and so it is for man, but with God all things are possible.
Charity expressed by the Cross of Christ is the motivating force behind the conjugal bond. Christ giving up His body for His Bride the Church brings many children into being, adopted by God the Father through water and the Spirit. Husbands and wives, too, sharing the Cross, die to self as the two are made one, and give rise to new life offered for the glory of God the Father. This goal, not their affection on earth, is the purpose of their union. All marriages end with death. The fruit of holy marriages, children of God, have an eternal destiny. It is an inadequacy bordering on the insulting to reduce such an exquisite reality to the level of carnal desires.
If the heavens will be found wanting on Judgment Day, and married couples suffer nothing short of Calvary to effect God’s will in them, then the plight of the obstinate homosexual is most perilous. He is not open to life. He is disobedient to God. He craves human pleasure over pleasing God. What is to be done with him?
“Love your enemies, do good for those that hate you, bless those that curse you, and pray for those who abuse you” (St. Luke 6:27-28). It is not charitable to consign someone to hell through failing to warn him of his sin (see Ezekiel 3:16-21; 33:1-16). It is not kind to lead someone to believe that his depravity is somehow commendable (see St. Matthew 18:6-9). Such warnings are not for people who are inclined to agree at first (see St. Luke 5:31-32), but must be given whenever and to whomever they are needed (see 1 Timothy 1:8-10; 4:6-16; and 2 Timothy 4:1-5). In the end it matters not that the message is despised and the messenger reviled (see St. Matthew 5:11-12), only that God’s will is done (see St. John 17).
Those who claim to love God must also love their brothers beset by sin. The best expression of love for a sinner is to help free him from his sins. To know Christ and His righteousness requires sharing that knowledge. One can hardly say that he loves his brother while leaving his brother languishing in the ignorance of sin. Those who walk in the darkness of sin are in infinite need of charity expressed through the light of faith offered for the forgiveness of sins.
St. Augustine writes about the necessity of the faithful to draw the sinner out of sin – especially when the sinner refuses repentance. St. Paul tells of the compulsion in Christian charity to preach the Gospel, to proclaim forgiveness in Christ, and through that forgiveness to set aside the old ways of sin and take on newness in Christ. Jesus speaks of a zealous, passionate, burning desire for His Father’s house, to ignite the world in love, to offer Himself that the Kingdom may be established. Such sentiments must motivate the effort to bring sanctity to bear on matters of physical intimacy. The rejection of sin is but the prelude to embracing the law of love.
VII. Conclusion
Homosexuality is a veritably demonic inversion of the natural order. Where Holy Matrimony is the union of man and woman in communion with the divine will to bring forth life, homosexuality is the unnatural combination of two persons of the same sex in utter disobedience to God in the midst of acts entirely devoid of fertility. Homosexuality denies the supernatural orientation of man, is sterile on the natural level, and degrades man through its unnatural carnality.
One might be tempted to ask why anyone would choose to be homosexual. The fundamental answer lies in the rejection of the good, of the true, of the holy, in short, a rejection of the Faith. Once a person abandons sanctity, mediated by the Sacraments in the Church, he will find himself open to every temptation.
It is the mystery of iniquity why any one person chooses to succumb to a given sin. Only God knows the full motivations of the human heart. What is certain is that all sin flows from a proud, disobedient refusal to seek God and His good. The only defense against any and every sin is the humble submission to God with the whole of one’s heart, mind, soul, and strength.
The gravest ill of homosexuality is more profound than the fact that in itself it is an abomination. Homosexuality is so wrong and so evil because it is part of a larger and more insidious attack on Holy Matrimony and the divinely ordained order of things. Homosexuality represents the war of the evil against the holy.
Evil, however, can not conquer good. But good can yield to temptation, wallow in sin, and deny itself by becoming evil – unless the created good is wholly united to God’s infinite goodness. Alas! man can abandon the search for the good.
Holy Matrimony is in peril because man the modernist has denied its true end. This denial is most graphic among sodomites, but the first and worst culprits are men and women united in marriage. Where contraception is allowed, marriage is destroyed. If children are not the natural end of marriage, then sexual unions that accomplish the other, the secondary ends of marriage are made licit. If sex is not for making babies in heterosexual couples, then fornication will lead to abortion, recreational sex will include sodomy, and all will preclude the traditional and natural definition of marriage as fertile, permanent, and social.
Contraception begins a direct progression where marriage need not produce children, becomes fluid and indefinable, and a matter of private rather than communal concern. This utter rejection of the natural goods of marriage results in the impossibility of supernatural good being sought or received. To avoid evil is not necessarily to embrace good; to reject one good results in the final rejection of all good.
It is rationally impossible to maintain that sex can be a matter of recreation among heterosexual married couples, but not among sodomites and fornicators. Either sex is an absolute openness to God’s gift of life in the family, or it is a relative invitation to be accepted or rejected according to merely human considerations. Sex rendered sterile is either a moral evil or a relative good, and if it is a relative good it does not matter whether the source of sterility is a contraceptive intent, contraceptive devices, or acts of sodomy. The argument that sodomy is unnatural is met by the equal truth that the prevention of conception in the act of conceiving offends both nature and nature’s God. The whole of the moral order is ultimately denied by contraception and the contraceptive mentality.
Married couples differ from fornicators in their use of contraception in only one way: fornicators are consistent with or better than their morals, whereas married couples are hypocrites. For each day that a contracepting fornicator maintains his illicit relationship with his companion, he is treating her better than their morals deserve in their fraudulent imitation of marriage. A husband contracepting with his wife is treating her no better than a fornicator treats his mistress. Both relationships, hard experience and hard statistics strongly predict, will come to an unhappy end.
Political correctness in the world frowns on telling the truth about sodomy: promiscuity, disease, mental illness, child abuse, and offense against God’s Majesty. Another kind of political correctness forbids denouncing contraception for what it is: dehumanizing, deceitful, ineffective, medically perilous, and mortally sinful. Sodomy and contraception share a common principle: that sex is not a natural cooperation with divine grace in the context of Holy Matrimony for the purpose of increasing life both for earth and Heaven; but is instead a mere matter of physical pleasure among consenting parties – even children.
The divorce of the natural bond between man and woman from the supernatural reality mediated by the Church through her Sacraments has led to the woeful state of affairs self-inflicted upon modernity. Fornication, teen pregnancy, abortion, disease, self abuse, and divorce are the foul fruit spring from the tree of sexual “liberation” rooted in the depravity of married people abandoning fidelity to the divine order. If married people will not insist on the sanctity of the conjugal act, it is not to be expected that anyone else will come to the defense of human chastity.
Sins against nature have not become common ex nihilo. They are the corruption of the great good of Holy Matrimony. This wretched condition should not surprise anyone. It is the direct outgrowth of he half-millennium apostasy into which what once was Christendom has plunged itself. As G.K. Chesterton said, when the supernatural is rejected, one gets not the natural, but the unnatural.
What is wanted is not an offensive against homosexuality so much as a crusade in favor of Holy Matrimony and its purpose of life conforming to the divine image and likeness. The problem is less that people want to be homosexual than that they do not want to be married, they do not want to be holy, they do not want to be obedient to God, they do not want to be Catholic, they do not want to go to Heaven. Our goal is not to effect a society that merely rejects the abomination of homosexuality, but to establish a society that rejects depravity in favor of desiring only God’s will. Or to end as we began, our task is to avoid all evil by doing only good.
Father Lawrence C. Smith
Sacerdos vagus
17 September 2003
The Impression of Christ’s Wounds on the flesh of St. Francis of Assisi
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