A CHALLENGE FROM ANDREW SULLIVAN
"When I find an argument that does not imply that gays are somehow inferior beings, I'll be glad to read it."  This was a note I got from Andrew Sullivan (an honor!) the guy who inspired me to start this blog (and who was my main source of news for months last fall) when I wrote him pleading with him to lay off the gay marriage issue.
 
(A little background.  Andrew Sullivan is a brilliant and very prolific gay conservative blogger, probably the most popular in the business.  I discovered him about a year ago and got quite addicted, particularly at the time of the war.  His writing is reflective and high-quality on most subjects.  He is a supporter of gay marriage, which is fine, that's a quite understandable point of view.  Unfortunately, he gets very shrill on this issue, and when he gets a bee in his bonnet about some new development on this front, the blog becomes less enlightening to read.  In a way, I don't blame him-- I'm sure he really does feel that a lot of people consider him an "inferior being" for being gay, and I can imagine how that would hurt.  Let's see if I can convince him otherwise.)
 
To start off with, I should say that I write this as a Christian.  This is an issue in which you might as well have your colors flying from the start, since people will just be guessing what they are anyway. 
 
Just to ward off a certain interpretation of that opening, I should add that I do not think that Christians ought to be unanimous on this issue.  I'm not trying to impose my views on other Christians.  On the other hand, I think there are two things Christians should agree on.
 
First, think about the connotations of the word "faggot."  It is a term that refers to homosexuals, and non-homosexuals in order to insult them by comparing them to homosexuals, in a contemptuous fashion; as if these are people we should shun, or even beat up.  Now I believe there is something natural about the connotations of this word-- natural in the sense that you can't explain the word acquiring and retaining these connotations just through "socialization."  Something in us recoils against homosexual behavior.  This instinctive reaction can be socialized away; we can (and should) train ourselves to suppress it until it almost disappears.  But this takes effort.  Sadly enough, I don't think there's much room for doubt that homo sapiens has some built-in homophobia.
 
Anyway, every Christian should utterly oppose and condemn the word "faggot" and all its connotations.  Let's assume for the moment (just for the sake of argument, mind you) that homosexuality is a sin.  Does that justify us in holding homosexuals in contempt, in wanting to do violence to them, in having any of the attitudes that are contained in the word "faggot?"  Absolutely not.  Jesus embraced sinners, he ate with tax-collectors (greedy traitors, in the Jews' eyes) and accepted annointing by a prostitute.  He justified this in his own case by saying that it is they who are sick who are in need of a physician; but to us, he said "judge not that ye be not judged," "let he who is without sin cast the first stone."  A Christian must not hate or shun homosexuals; we must love and embrace homosexuals.  If homosexuality is not a sin, the argument applies a fortiori.
 
Second, the idea that homosexuality is unnatural and sinful must not be dismissed as "bigotry."  The word "bigot" is judgmental, mean and also, in a way, cowardly, since it is a way of condemning someone's views out of hand and thus avoiding an argument.  The other problem with the word "bigot" is that it suggests an extremely spurious parallel between gays and blacks-- spurious because the oppression of blacks by whites was a temporally and spatially local phenomenon, with discreet historical causes, and was based on an external and indisputably immutable characteristic (skin color) while homosexual behavior is a universal potentiality, and a tendency to condemn it is, if not universal, certainly not historically specific.  In giving civil rights to the blacks, we were reversing a specific historical wrong.  Moral and social equivalence between heterosexual and homosexual behavior would have to be created de novo.  I am not saying that we all have to bow before the great universal human tradition, and all dissent must be quashed.  I am saying that a belief or attitude as nearly universal as the traditional view of homosexuality must be treated with respect.
 
But all this is mere prelude.  Let's get to the point: is homosexuality a sin, or not? 
 
Well, I don't know.  And for my own personal sake, since I have no desire to engage in homosexual behavior, I don't need to know.  But for the sake of relations with others, I'll at least make a few speculative efforts.
 
Sexual relations are surely one of the most confusing areas of ethics.  It's an area, for example, where you can't apply the Golden Rule.  "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" upholds a traditional Christian moral stance on, say stealing ("steal not that you be not stolen from") or murder ("kill not that you be not killed") or lying ("lie not that you be not lied to") but would seem, taken literally, to suggest a perfect libertinism when it comes to sexuality, i.e. kiss anyone you wish would kiss you, and have sex with anyone whom you wish would have sex with you.  To put it another way, casual sex is a victimless sin, a sin in which no one is sinned against and both parties seem to benefit.  If you consider that marriage is, in practice, a human institution-- a piece of paper issued by a government somehow has the ability to transform fundamental moral realities-- the idea becomes stranger still.
 
When I see the gay marriage debates and try to think about them for myself-- when I think about it rationally-- the really compelling question is not "why should marriage not be extended to homosexuals?" but "why should marriage not be repealed from heterosexuals, too?"  Marriage is a scorched-earth policy-- I'll give up the right to sleep with anybody but you, if you give up the right to sleep with anybody but me.  It's a disarmament policy for people who are incorrigibly addicted to the vice of jealousy.  If only we could train ourselves to let go of this irrational impulse to feel personally wounded when someone we sometimes sleep with sleeps with someone else, we could all have much richer, more varied sexual lives, we could enjoy an abundance of sensuality and friendship, of "free love" as the saying goes, without tying ourselves down, without losing our freedom.  We could all live as gloriously as Byron!  This doesn't work well for individuals who want to pursue it because they are few and far between, but we're just failing to solve a coordination problem here.  If we could all make the switch from a scorched-earth (marriage) to a free-love policy, we would all be so much better off!
 
I'm being somewhat facetious here, but I would still say that, looking at matter from a point of view at once rational and (since "the human heart has its own reasons which reason knows not of") romantic, marriage seems like a distant second-best.  "Utilitarian" justifications of marriage (it's good for "stability") always sound like reducing the institution to a form of sordid social engineering.
 
Yet at the end of the day, my brief jousts at free love (I had some success as a fickle-hearted romancer for a while), though they were bewitchingly wonderful and a perennial nostalgia for them will probably always haunt me, had a strange way of conspiring to hint at an eventual fruition in marriage.  I don't understand it.  I don't know how to explain it-- and that's the point.  Love's power to bind a man to a woman (the only variation I have personal experience with, anyway) is something inscrutable, something that can't be reasoned out, it must come as a form of revelation in a moment of that supreme spiritual ecstasy, second only to the saints' in the embrace of God, that we call being in love.  It is a conviction that cannot be articulated in rational, but only in the sacred language of a universal human tradition-- when every other verbal expression is exhausted, the phrase "I want to marry you!" trails with it the clouds of glory of a universal human tradition, and thus alone seems to suffice.  No matter how keenly aware one is that marriage ends up being a decline for most people, no matter how often one has secretly disdained one's elders who have been yoked into it, one's love life has a strange way by which all the lines converge to a point...
 
Anyway, my point is that to my mind the rational arguments for marriage all fall short, the romantic urge points towards marriage but at the same time resists it, and in the end my own belief in marriage is based on tradition, and on the experiences of my own heart which, while I don't fully understand them, have taught me to feel the pull of that tradition from underneath.  There are times when a freethinker should be open-minded enough to admit that he is at his wits' end, and his best chances of finding the truth lie in letting go of the prickly pretense of pure, proud intellectual independence, and in dissolving in the great collective intelligence that flows up from the ages-- in short, in embracing tradition.
 
I've been verbose, forgive me.  But my point is that, since my reasons for believing in marriage are purely traditional, the fact that homosexual marriage has no place whatsoever in the traditions of any society in human history is a decisive argument against it.  If you say, "don't just believe tradition, use your own reason," you take away my grounds for believing in marriage at all.
 
Am I to be allowed to believe this?  Are my protestations that Christians must embrace and love homosexuals to be dismissed as hypocrisy because I am unable to take this last step and accept gay marriage?
 
The reason someone might say "yes" is that, as long as sex without marriage is frowned upon or forbidden, forbidding marriage to a certain group is to deny them sex, and to say that some people are, from birth, morally, though not physically, obliged to be lifelong celibates is pretty harsh.
 
Now Sullivan and others may dismiss this as bigoted know-nothingism, but I consider the "from birth" part to be debatable.  Sullivan, no doubt, could, and has, put a lot of links on his blog to places where I could find out that science has "proven" that homosexuality is innate, e.g. genetic.  The problem with this is that this issue is so politicized that I don't think any science on the subject undertaken just now could be trusted by the public.  There's a huge incentive for people to come up with bogus studies showing that homosexuality is genetic, as the cultural elite would prefer, and anyone who came out with a study showing that homosexuality was a result of the way kids were raised (as one of my gay friends believes) would thereby commit professional suicide (as Sullivan should know, if he thinks about it, since he would be part of the chorus finishing such people off.)
 
But that doesn't really matter, because even if gayness is not innate, it is certainly not a choice in the usual sense.  To put it differently, even if (as some would say-- this is not to endorse the view myself) a "cure" is possible and desirable, we don't have one.  So are some people condemned to lifelong celibacy?  Or is sex outside marriage permissible for homosexuals, since they don't have the marriage option?  To back gay marriage is, in a way, an appealing out, but, as I explained before, it goes against my intellectual scruples, since all my evidence that marriage is a spiritual reality rather than a legal construct comes from a strictly heterosexual context, and in saying that such a thing as gay marriage can exist I would be defying thousands of years of human tradition on the basis of no evidence whatsoever.  Again, to return to my earlier point, I don't know.  Maybe this is something I'm not called on to know.
 
I believe that Christians should treat homosexuals with love, with understanding, with acceptance, as much as we can.  I personally have had a number of good gay friends and count myself fortunate for it.  I think we should teach our children to suppress any natural repugnance for gays that they may have.  I hope all this is worth something to Andrew Sullivan and others, and that they can believe it.  I don't think they are "somehow inferior beings."  I am sympathetic to their aspirations.  But having considered the issue, the evidence suggests to me (not that I'm certain or dogmatic about it, but it's my best, good-faith effort) that the entity they desire be recognized-- a state of gay marriage-- is not a possibility (except, of course, as a legal construct).  Beyond that, I can only hope for Christian tolerance from everyone concerned, and move on.