Our Cultural Difficulty in Assessing Same-Sex Attraction

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 10, 2014

The plain fact of the matter is that talking intelligibly about homosexuality and gay marriage is extremely difficult in contemporary Western culture. Two recent news reports bear this out. The former President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, has strongly criticized the Church’s condemnation of homosexual acts, and a Catholic school in the American state of Washington is backing away from its previous firm stance against employees who enter gay marriages.

The attitudes expressed in both cases are understandable, but they are also wrong. They are understandable because most people now see homosexual behavior, including gay marriage, as a matter of equal rights. The argument runs like this: No one sexual orientation should be preferred, any more than a single height or eye color or race should be preferred. Right-handed people are not better than left-handed people just because lefties are in the minority, and there is nothing wrong with using your left hand instead of your right.

Thus Mary McAleese sped along the on-ramp to righteousness by stating: “I don’t like my Church’s attitude to gay people.” She even expressed the hope that Cardinal Keith O’Brien, who resigned because of homosexual sins with seminarians, would write the story of his life to provide encouragement to other homosexuals. Of course, when she added that she did not like the attitude expressed in the expression “love the sinner, hate the sin” (because nobody likes to be called a sinner), she muddied the waters considerably. Certainly she would approve that sentiment with, say, thieves and murderers. Unless she has lost even her culture's vestigial moral sense, she probably understands that those who commit serious sins and crimes need love, forgiveness and fresh hope. It is just that she does not believe homosexual activity is sinful.

The same is apparently true of the president and CEO of Eastside Catholic School near Seattle, Sr. Mary Tracy. This was the same school at which Mark Zmuda was fired after his same-sex wedding last Summer, apparently on the advice of Archbishop J. Peter Sartain. Four hundred students gathered to protest that decision. Now the part-time drama coach, Sephanie Merrow, has announced her impeding gay marriage, immediately seizing the highest possible moral ground: “I’m doing this to support the kids, and what the kids are trying to do is get to the Pope and change the Church.” Really? For the children? Ah well, Sister Tracy for her part has stated that the noble Ms. Merrow is welcome to stay on. She also said, “I look forward to the day where no individual loses their job because they married a person of the same sex.”

The point here is the same as with McAleese. One cannot imagine that Sister Tracy would say that she looks forward to the day when no active murderers or practicing thieves can lose their jobs as teachers in a Catholic school just because the Catholic Church regards homicide and stealing as immoral. Still less would she rush to welcome their continued employment when and if they came out of the closet that conceals breakers of the fifth and seventh commandments. No, the whole issue for Sister Tracy revolves around the fact that she does not think homosexual acts are morally wrong. As such, proponents of the homosexual lifestyle pose no moral threat to Catholic youth. (I should also note that there is a clear pattern of moral failure at this particular school, both in hiring and Catholic instruction, but that is a story for another day.)

A Complete Moral Analysis

Again, it is easy to see why so many people view the matter in this light. It is also interesting to note that everyone instinctively turns to the natural law to justify their decision that homosexual acts and gay marriage are morally acceptable. They actually get part of the natural law right. The natural law teaches that our biological traits and even our psychological or affective tendencies are morally neutral. It is not evil to be born with, or even to have experienced a previous conditioning toward, a particular tendency. Fairness demands equal treatment for people with different biological traits or natural inclinations.

And this is perfectly true. Fairness is an essential part of the natural law. It is also the most easily perceived part of it, and the part that children and young people most quickly recognize. The appeal to fairness is learned very early (and often selfishly, of course) as we grow up, because we all seek justifications for getting whatever it is we want that somebody else, at least in a similar situation, has. This runs riot, for example, among siblings. Under a properly mature guidance, this perception of the natural law develops into a well-formed moral sense.

But to stop here is to stop with what our own contemporary cultural fashions happen to incorporate as obvious. Where the McAleese-Tracy analysis breaks down is in assuming that all inclinations move us toward the good, so that it is always morally right to act in accordance with our inclinations. This difficulty ought to be clearer than it is because, despite the common acceptance of this assumption in sexual matters, everybody actually agrees that as a general proposition it is decidedly false. Very frequently, our inclinations are disordered in various ways, and the only moral response to them is resistance and the formation of counter-habits which can gradually minimize the harm they do. Our culture has simply lost its ability to recognize that same-sex attraction is a disordered inclination, much like greed or the tendency toward alcoholism or drug dependency or any sort of lust.

Same-sex attraction is both a heavy cross and a significant spiritual opportunity. This is something I made a special point of exploring sympathetically in Homosexuality: A Special Call to the Love of God and Man. But all disordered inclinations are crosses—and each of us has quite a few of them, both innate and conditioned, running the gamut from avarice to zenophobia. They are permitted by God in our fallen state because they provide an important opportunity to recognize our weakness and our need for God, and to grow in holiness by seeking our fulfillment not in ourselves but God, as He has created us to do. In fact, it is part and parcel of the human estate that we define ourselves in response to the inclinations we feel, chipping away at the bad ones and maximizing the good. In a nutshell, that is how we grow in perfection.

It is true that our given characteristics are morally neutral; but how we act in response to them is never morally neutral. The human person is inescapably a moral agent; this is the key to our dignity. So what McAleese and Tracy need to do is revisit the question of how we know that homosexual acts are immoral, which knowledge comes from a dispassionate analysis of our sexual design. Or, if we do not perceive that design, we can learn of it from Revelation. Either way, it follows that same-sex attraction must be morally resisted, from which it further follows that those who uphold the rightness of homosexual acts should be denied leadership positions in our churches and schools, from which it follows finally that it is absolutely essential to love the sinner and hate the sin.