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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
October 12, 2003
Continued
A column is not a book -- I often wish I had 100 000 words though I recognize that this would make it harder to meet my 2 p.m. deadline. But when one is writing from my position on different premises from those which have come to guide most public thinking in this country one needs space. For to make almost any point one must first kick away what most other pundits and probably most readers take for granted. Such as that "same-sex marriage" is an "equality issue" nothing more nor less. It is an assumption so glib that there is almost no way of speaking to it short of taking the person who holds it back to kindergarten and starting again. A column is instead a series of pot-shots and the best one can hope is for the lucky hit. One adjusts one's aim by trial and error. I have benefited from a great deal of reader mail both public and private on the subjects I've been pressing in my Sunday columns for the last several months. There is no apology to be made for my recent focus on homosexuality -- the issue is larger and more consequential than the advocates of "gay rights" want us to think. Moreover the Ontario court decision that created "same-sex marriage" in Canada is the source of this debate. They made homosexuality a public issue; I didn't. I have much sympathy for many homosexuals who have written to me blaming me for "obsessing" on this topic. Some of these letters were remarkably vicious and yet even in those I feel the pain when the private is made political. But I wouldn't have written a word on the subject had it not been made a consequential issue as much against my will as against that of many homosexuals. Against the frequent cheap charge of "homophobia" something needs to be said. Homosexuals are and have always been among the most impressive human beings. And the trial -- it is a trial -- of being homosexual in a culture that has been until recently quite unfriendly to homosexuals has been in every case of which I know central to their accomplishments. They have been what they have been partly in spite of being homosexual but more often rather because of being homosexual. Since I will not mention close friends dead or alive I will instead give a hugely famous historical example. What Michelangelo achieved could only have been achieved by a homosexual. This is not however an argument for encouraging homosexuality nor even for tolerating homosexual acts. Such notions are too glib shallow. It is instead an argument for appreciating homosexuals. Tolerance is an empty bag respect has something and love is real. Being homosexual by disposition can be and often has been intrinsic to the highest condition of being human. The struggle with homosexual desire has been one of the great creative forces in the history of our civilization. For the very reason that love and sexual desire so often work at cross-purposes. Likewise the struggle with heterosexual desire. The same Church that has taught through twenty centuries that homosexual acts are sinful has also taught that all heterosexual acts are sinful except those made sacramental through marriage. And the struggle against one's own lusts -- not merely the thunderstorms of sexual lust but the deeper longing of a man for intimacy with a woman or of a woman for intimacy with a man -- the terrible loneliness of the single person -- has been a creative force. The reader has perhaps noticed that I am a believing Christian. I know there is Christ I know there is somewhere to turn. I fully recognize because I was once an atheist myself how more terrible is the loneliness of those who do not believe who have nowhere to turn who cannot pray for strength against affliction and temptation. Who cannot even think of an argument against doing what they will to seize the animal comfort of sexual companionship. Not knowing God they cannot know any better. My own sins are worse -- not the sins of ignorance but the full wickedness of sinning in the knowledge of what I am doing and why it is wrong. Hence the two kinds of letters I have received from readers themselves homosexual. From those who believe and from those who do not. (And one of the believers was a Muslim whose own prayerful struggle "against my own being" ran precisely parallel to those of Christians.) >From one side complete incomprehension of what I have been saying almost always joined to ugly and personal remarks sometimes bordering on threats. >From the other real expressions of pain and yet seldom any moment of lashing out at me personally nor the kind of wilful misrepresentation of my position that I read in e.g. Janice Kennedy's column in this paper a week ago yesterday. For I have not attacked homosexuals. I have attacked the public celebration and encouragement of homosexuality. Homosexuals may have an emotional excuse for misunderstanding this; but the "gliberals" who have added homosexual activism to their own broad policy agenda have no such excuse. For they wantonly fail to distinguish between sin and sinner between the public and the private between desire and action between any number of truly distinguishable things that most people could distinguish and even take for granted until recently. In our society the project of de-civilization has necessarily taken the form of de-Christianization for ours was a consciously Christian society. And it has gone so far that many of the people who still consider themselves to be Christian now consciously reject what Christianity affirms -- in common more often than not with all the other religions that have lasted through centuries. The "homosexual agenda" is the current front line in that larger battle. It is the place where we currently have to make a stand hopeless as it may seem as we tried to stand previously against abortions and many other evils. It is a battle against the very devil as I firmly believe; of life against death. For what is human and good and creative against nihilism; against "the devil who can't procreate". It is a battle in the larger war which in the end will not be won without deploying our heaviest weapons -- truth justice charity. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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