Gay Rights and Wrongs

A few interesting pieces.  A gay Catholic writes over at Mark Shea's blog.  Excerpts:

...Perhaps I am biased. But when a gay person, prior to the repeal of the DADT, could serve in the military and be discharged not for a sexual act, but the mere knowledge of their orientation being known, it seems unjust. It is my understanding that sexual activity by anyone, regardless of orientation, is (rightly) grounds for discharge, and that is the policy with DADT repealed. Whereas before, the policy even allowed knowledge of a homosexual orientation, even not acted upon, to be grounds for dismissal. Catholic dismay over the repeal of DADT, I have always found demoralizing, not simply because people opposed it, but no one was seriously trying to find a workable solution that dealt with their concerns, but was respectful to gays serving in uniform. No one wanted to upset “conservative” orthodoxy.

Similarly, it is my understanding that the knowledge that some young men are homosexual have prevented them from advancing in Boy Scouts. I see this is in a similar like. If homosexual acts are involved, my opinion is similar. But if someone happens to be a homosexual, I do not see why knowledge of this must be accompanied by negative consequences. And, similarly, I have not seen similar efforts to find a workable solution. Just a similar situation to DADT in that it was very politicized with the same battle lines drawn.

These two issues are often talked about in two ways. First, no one was a “right” to serve in the military. The primary goal is national defense and, it is said, it is the prerogative of military leaders to discriminate in anyway that keeps up safe. Secondly, Boy Scouts is a private organization, which is accorded the rights to make up rules as they see fit. If you don’t like those rules, it is said, don’t join or start another organization.

These are typical conservative arguments. But, to me, they miss the point. As a Catholic, and even more so, as someone who is gay, I see just another symptom of the pastoral failure toward homosexuals.

I see this is just another instance in which homosexuals are shut out, unless they are closeted and are lying about who they are. Sure, we are not reducible to our sexuality. We are living images of God. But, believe me, I speak from experience. It is very, very difficult when you are growing up as a gay teen and same-sex peers are always talking about the opposite sex, relationships, and such things, and it not to come out either by confession, or by inference from your silence or awkwardness in such situations, that you are gay. The only other way requires great acting skills or lying. And many, like me, decided that integrity and not lying was the high road.

So, I empathize deeply, when someone decides to join the military, or at the behest of their parents, ignorant of their child’s sexuality, they start scouting, and they feel they have to lie in order to excel. And what’s worse is that if that if their secret is ever discovered, it can mean punishment, and exclusion; and this is backed by Christians. I just don’t understand it. These are our brothers and sisters, many of whom are Christ’s lost sheep. We can’t make the truth less hard, but I feel that too many Catholics are making stumbling blocks that need not be...

And then on the related issue of the current gay rights movement and the culture wars spawned in part by the sexual revolution, Mark Steyn elegantly restates the point that if heterosexuals hadn't done so badly by the institution of marriage in the first place, the redefinition couldn't possibly have come so far, so fast. Excerpts:

Gay marriage? It came up at dinner Down Under this time last year, and the prominent Aussie politician on my right said matter-of-factly, “It’s not about expanding marriage, it’s about destroying marriage.”

That would be the most obvious explanation as to why the same societal groups who assured us in the Seventies that marriage was either (a) a “meaningless piece of paper” or (b) institutionalized rape are now insisting it’s a universal human right. They’ve figured out what, say, terrorist-turned-educator Bill Ayers did — that, when it comes to destroying core civilizational institutions, trying to blow them up is less effective than hollowing them out from within...

In the upper echelons of society, our elites practice what they don’t preach. Scrupulously nonjudgmental about everything except traditional Christian morality, they nevertheless lead lives in which, as Charles Murray documents in his book Coming Apart, marriage is still expected to be a lifelong commitment. It is easy to see moneyed gay newlyweds moving into such enclaves, and making a go of it. As the Most Reverend Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, said just before his enthronement the other day, “You see gay relationships that are just stunning in the quality of the relationship.” “Stunning”: What a fabulous endorsement! But, amongst the type of gay couple that gets to dine with the Archbishop of Canterbury, he’s probably right.

Lower down the socioeconomic scale, the quality gets more variable. One reason why conservative appeals to protect the sacred procreative essence of marriage have gone nowhere is because Americans are rapidly joining the Scandinavians in doing most of their procreating without benefit of clergy. Seventy percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, so are 53 percent of Hispanics (the “natural conservative constituency” du jour, according to every lavishly remunerated Republican consultant), and 70 percent of the offspring of poor white women. Over half the babies born to mothers under 30 are now “illegitimate” (to use a quaintly judgmental formulation). For the first three-and-a-half centuries of American settlement the bastardy rate (to be even quainter) was a flat line in the basement of the graph, stuck at 2 or 3 percent all the way to the eve of the Sixties. Today over 40 percent of American births are “non-marital,” which is significantly higher than Canada or Germany. “Stunning” upscale gays will join what’s left of the American family holed up in a chichi Green Zone, while beyond the perimeter the vast mounds of human rubble pile up remorselessly. The conservative defense of marriage rings hollow because for millions of families across this land the American marriage is hollow...

Entire new categories of crime have arisen in the wake of familial collapse, like the legions of adolescent daughters abused by Mom’s latest live-in boyfriend. Millions of children are now raised in transient households that make not just economic opportunity but even elementary character-formation all but impossible. In the absence of an agreed moral language to address this brave new world, Americans retreat to comforting euphemisms like “blended families,” notwithstanding that the familial Cuisinart seems to atomize at least as often as it blends.

Meanwhile, social mobility declines: Doctors who once married their nurses now marry their fellow doctors; lawyers who once married their secretaries now contract with fellow super-lawyers, like dynastic unions in medieval Europe. Underneath the self-insulating elite, millions of Americans are downwardly mobile: The family farmers and mill workers, the pioneers who hacked their way into the wilderness and built a township, could afford marriage and children; indeed, it was an economic benefit. For their descendants doing minimum-wage service jobs about to be rendered obsolete by technology, functioning families are a tougher act, and children an economic burden. The gays looked at contemporary marriage and called the traditionalists’ bluff...