two legs bad

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Nov 19, 2004

Dom links a threnody from the Rainbow Sash Movement bewailing their having been denied communion at the Bishops' Meeting:

Homophobia promotes blindness. Denying Rainbow Sash members Holy Communion, for publicly witnessing their faith was grounded in homophobia.

Hatred. The only explanation. In today's American Spectator, James Bowman has some pertinent remarks, explaining how it is that public debate on the questions of sexuality has come to an impasse:

[To champions of the sexual revolution], their sexuality isn't a matter of what they do but of who they are. As they see it, their sexual "orientation" is as much a part of them as the color of their skin. Therefore, any sort of discrimination in the way the law treats them is as much a violation of their civil rights as racial discrimination is of the civil rights of black people and others against whom it is practiced. I think the analogy a false one for all sorts of reasons, but it is a subject, like that of abortion, on which reasoned discussion has become almost impossible. For once you accept the equation sexuality = identity, then any attempt by anybody anywhere to cling to such shreds and patches as remain today of the moralized view of sexuality that was universal up until 40 years ago becomes a threat to your very existence. It becomes easy to believe that those who would vote against your right to marry must also hate you, which in turn means that they are disposed to hurt or even kill you, or to look with indulgence on those who do.

Mark Steyn made a similar argument last year:

Language has been an important weapon in the gay movement's very swift advance. In the old days, there was "sodomy": an act. In the late 19th century, the word "homosexuality" was coined: a condition. A generation ago, the accepted term became "gay": an identity. Each formulation raises the stakes: one can object to and even criminalize an act; one is obligated to be sympathetic towards a condition; but once it's a fully-fledged 24/7 identity, like being Hispanic or Inuit, anything less than whole-hearted acceptance gets you marked down as a bigot.

But why is it that we drooling, Bible-brandishing bigots are not deemed worthy of refutation? Joseph Sobran puts it succinctly:

The enlightened don't owe the unenlightened a rational debate, because in their minds there are no real differences of opinion or philosophy, only differences of motives.