Elf Sternberg

Christopher Roberts, a Roman Catholic deacon, recently penned an explanation of why it's okay to take gay people at face value as unalterably gay while still condemning them to a life of celibacy, deceit, or general unhappiness. He writes:

Most any result of the Fall — having Down’s Syndrome or Aspergers, having a short temper or being greedy — can be like this. Substitute any disability, sin, proclivity or “thorn in the flesh” in the above paragraph, and you can imagine cases where somebody matured, embraced the necessary asceticism, and turned their weakness or woundedness to spiritual profit.

This is the point where I felt a deep stab of nausea, because I immediately recognized this thought process. Greg Egan, famously neuro-atypical himself, wrote of this passionately when he wrote the novel Distress.

What's the first thing you can do for people you don't agree with? Offer to heal them. Convince them they're sick and then hold out the hope of relief. The power of medical science is about to go hyperbolic, but what is the endpoint of 'health?' Whoever successfully claims the right to define the distinction between health and disease claims the right to define everything.

They get to define what a "baseline" human being is. They get to define what Adam and Eve were like, and decide which deviations from that baseline are worthy of intervention and which ones are not. They impose on those who are "too far" beyond the baseline a special burden: either conform or live with disapproval, excommunication, and banishment.

Roberts may be a priest, but the horror of demanding everyone who's gay or lesbian or in any way not gender-conforming to a life without the unique affection and physical sweetness of sexual skin-on-skin love. The brain is a part of the body and inevitably the physical manifestation, infrastructure, and organizational basis of the mind and the soul, and to assert that a simple variation in the body exiles someone from living a full and joyful life is cruel. Father Roberts is actually trying to refute God by disapproving of some people who God created and in whom the light of God is visible.

Father Roberts' is approving not of a lifestyle, but of a deathstyle. The slow, agonizing death of one's soul when one surrenders to the unending pressure of their society and "maturely embraces the necessary asceticism."

To Hell with that variety of Catholicism.

Judge Vaughn Walker, the judge in the current Proposition 8 case, is gay.

There are going to be accusations from just about the entire right-wing world that this was a set-up, that the judge is biased and the processes designed to make them look stupid. Never mind that they did that to themselves. Never mind that not a single person going before the court on behalf of Proposition 8 could actually make a case for there being anything wrong with homosexual marriage, that several of Proposition 8's own presentations made Proposition 8 look bad, that one of the defendants actually wrote in opposition to Prop 8 just two years earlier, and another wrote in opposition to the initiative process being used to take power away from minorities. The first said he "no longer believed" what he had published twelve months prior, and the second argued that homosexuals don't constitute "a minority." (This is why you're hearing the phrase "homosexual acts" so often these days; it's a lawyerly attempt by the right to redefine homosexuality as something you do, rather than an identity.)

Proposition 8 Tracker has an email from the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) claiming that the bias is "so big and obvious" that the Supremes will have no choice but to slap it down.

It's sort-of a shame this happened this way. It'll distract from the incredibly poor and ugly arguments that the pro-8 side put up.

You have to feel the love from former Concerned "Woman" for America and modern-day Christian Culture Warrior Matt Barber, who objects to the group GOProud (a more activist flavor of the Log Cabin Republicans) being invited to the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conferencence:

It boils down to this: there is nothing "conservative" about one man violently cramming his penis into another man's lower intestine and calling it 'love.' Or two women awkwardly mimicking natural procreative relations or raising a child together in an intentionally fatherless home. This does not mean that people practicing those and other immoral (and changeable) behaviors cannot think and act conservatively on other issues like lowering taxes, cutting government spending, ending abortion, etc. But let's be honest: the "proud" in GOProud is not about pride in opposing the death tax, or defending the right to bear arms; it's about proudly embracing sinful homosexual behavior – and that is hardly a conservative value.

He then goes on to quote Russel Kirk's famous (if you're a conservative) quote that society must be governed by men and women with a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions of justice an honor.

Kirk seems to be his bludgeon, so let's look closely. Kirk was a conservative intellectual, and a brilliant one, and one of his best works, and one of his last, was The Politics of Prudence, published in 1993. (Note, it's the Politics of Prudence, not Prudery.)

Kirk's "Ten Principles of Conservatism" are worth reading, especially if you're a liberal, because they are supposedly the principles upon which modern conservatism is based. If they are, then Barber and his ilk are no conservatives.

Barber would dearly love to use the government to allow his passions to run freely: the passion to punish others for their private activities. Kirk says, "The conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions." Kirk fears human passions when coupled with power; Barber embraces his passions backed by power.

Barber would love to stamp out one kind of diversity. Kirk says, "Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems." When Barber and his ilk write that homosexuals have the same rights as heterosexuals, to marry someone of the opposite six, they are engaging in a narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism.

Barber appeals to Kirk's call for "an enduring moral order," and "adherence to custom, convention, and continuity." You know, I can understand that appeal. What I can't understand is how homosexuality per se, which has always existed, threatens these things. A moral order is not one which denigrates and abuses our fellow man for their private activities, nor confuses a personal distaste for custom and continuity.

Barber would be well to recall Kirk's final say:

There exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order. The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. The conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy "change is the means of our preservation.")

...

The thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects.

Kirk understood that communities, like individuals, like organisms, must adapt or die to the ever-changing landscape around it. Our fundamental humanity demands that we recognize that homosexuals exist, and there isn't much we can do about that that wouldn't be henious and self-defeating. It is a conservative value to find ways to live together, respectful of our private needs and public faces. Barber, by putting forth only a violent description of what can be and often is a loving act, betrays his conservative values in favor of older and darker impulses.