A lie, a rotten lie

It is possible, perhaps, to agree that homosexual activity is wicked, that it is one of the four sins which cry out to Heaven for vengeance (CCC 1867) , while still thinking there must be something healthy in the stable relationships between two men one encounters from time to time. Ronald G. Lee, a homosexual man who has returned to the Catholic faith is anxious to disabuse us.

I met Wyatt (not his real name) online. For five years he was in a disastrous same-sex relationship. His partner was unfaithful, and an alcoholic with drug problems. The relationship was something that would give Strindberg nightmares. When Vermont legalized same-sex "marriage," Wyatt saw it as one last chance to make their relationship work. He and his partner would fly to Vermont to get "married." This came to the attention of the local newspaper in his area, which did a story with photos of the wedding reception. In it, Wyatt and his partner were depicted as a loving couple who finally had a chance to celebrate their commitment publicly. Nothing was said about the drugs or the alcoholism or the infidelity. But the marriage was a failure and ended in flames a few months later. And the newspaper did not do a follow-up. In other words, the leading daily of one of America's largest cities printed a misleading story about a bad relationship, a story that probably persuaded more than one young man that someday he could be just as happy as Wyatt and his "partner." And that is the sad part.

But one very seldom reads about people like my friend Harry. Harry (not his real name) was a balding, middle-aged man with a potbelly. He was married, and had a couple of grown daughters. And he was unhappy. Harry persuaded himself that he was unhappy because he was gay. He divorced his wife, who is now married to someone else, his daughters are not speaking to him, and he is discovering that pudgy, bald, middle-aged men are not all that popular in gay bars. Somehow, Oprah forgot to mention that. Now Harry is taking anti-depressants in order to keep from killing himself.

If it disappears from OrthodoxyToday.org, the article was first published by the New Oxford Review in February 2006 and may still be available to purchase there.

The replacement in-laws

The Catholic World Report publishes a depressing interview with Mary Eberstadt, author of How the West Really Lost God.

For one, changing Western legal codes have made it easier for people to view “family” as an optional arrangement based on voluntary association, rather than as a permanent institution formed by elemental biological ties. Once upon a time, whoever was your sister-in-law remained your sister-in-law for life. Today she might be replaced at any time by other sisters-in-law or sister-in-law-type people, depending on her and your brother’s intentions. That’s a new and potent social fact. … From the very beginning, after all, the Church has stood as a sign of contradiction for so many things that pagans could have and Christians couldn’t: infanticide, artificial contraception, abortion, and the rest. And from the very beginning, insistence on that strict code has not only made some people hate the Church (though of course it has). It’s also made other people love the thing, including some of the finest converts in history. … We modern people have less familial experience than those who came before us. We have institutional substitutes for the family from cradle to grave, daycare to nursing homes. That’s part of why Western society is less religious than it used to be, I believe—because if it’s hard to be an atheist in a foxhole, it’s also hard to be one in the nursery, say, or when contemplating an open grave. The fact that so many Western people are alienated in different ways from these primal experiences is part of what’s going on in so-called secularization.

Where Cory Bernardi went wrong

Some 'marriages' are more equal than others

Poor old Cory Bernardi – that’s clearly where he went wrong. If he’d been in the ALP or the Greens, they’d have lauded his farsighted proclamation of the extension of the human right of marriage to everyone and everything on the planet.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times

In response to the imbecile thuggery of the modern progressives there are an awful lot of denunciatory articles, books, podcasts, blogposts ect ect ect.  I have read hardly any as good as Welcome to the Mental Ward by Anthony Esolen. 

A comic nightmare comes to mind.  I see a man jiggered and wired to a hundred machines, each jolting him at irregular intervals.  His cheek twitches, his head jerks, his fingers drum, his knee wobbles, his feet tap, his breath is interrupted with coughs, his blood runs hot and cold.  I invite him to leave that contraption, and take a walk with me over to a chapel nearby, and say a quiet prayer. “You can’t make me!” he cries.  “I’m free to choose!”