Making Gay Okay

I have just finished reading Making Gay Okay, by Robert R.Reilly, and published by Ignatius.  The subtitle is How Rationalizing Homosexual Behaviour is Changing Everything.

It is a compelling and very informative read. Part 1 is The Rationalization and How It Works. Reilly starts by describing the current culture war: the war that has as its goal that we should all approve of homosexual activity, and that is being waged with increasing vehemence as the gay agenda goes from strength to strength. Any dissent must be crushed. He then gives an overview of Natural Law as described by Aristotle, and describes how Rousseau turned that on its head. This philosophical tension, between the idea that we can know the truth of the meaning of human acts by inquiring into their nature, and in particular the end to which they are ordered (the telos), and the contrary idea that we can decide for ourselves what is good - this philosophical tension underlies the culture war.

Reilly's thesis is that the militant gay lobby needs to rationalize their behaviour, and to get everyone else to approve it, precisely because it is against the Natural Law, and at some level they know that.

He continues to advance his argument by looking at the nature of justice and how that applies in this case, and then he examines the Lessons from Biology about the telos of human sexual behaviour, and the harm that is done when sex is used contrary to that telos. This is heartbreaking stuff: one of the truths that gay activists acknowledge amongst themselves but decided the public should not know, is how harmful the gay lifestyle - as lived by many gay men - really is.

It should be noted that Reilly applies his Natural Law and Justice arguments equally to divorce and contraception, which he rightly sees as both wrong and as opening the door to the legitimisation of sodomy. Once you divorce sex from its innate meaning of procreation, you open the door to... well, anything, really.

He concludes this section with a chapter called Inventing Morality, which charts the series of legal cases in the US that gradually overturned the traditional moral prohibition on sodomy, and continued until same-sex marriages were declared to be equal to real marriages.

The second half of the book is called Marching Through the Institutions. This documents the relentless way in which the gay lobby, having won in the courts, proceeded to overturn the way we view homosexuality in psychiatry, and with regards to parenting; how they conquered the schools and the military, and are gradually overcoming the resistance of the Boy Scout movement, and have completely infiltrated US Foreign Policy.  This is all fascinating, if depressing reading. 

But perhaps the most important part is the first chapter in this section, which documents how militant activists got homosexuality removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. That is important because it provided the leverage for so much else. The declaration that homosexual behaviour was not a disorder, was a huge weapon in their armoury: and it flew in the face of the facts. Even sympathetic liberal psychiatrists were shocked at what had been done and how: 'the first time in the history of healthcare that a diagnosis or lack of diagnosis was decided by popular vote rather than scientific evidence.'

I should, perhaps, have mentioned earlier that one of the many strengths of the book is the research that has gone into it. The quotations are voluminous and referenced, and taken from many publications on both sides of the debate.

This is an important book on an important topic.  For anyone who thinks that legalising Gay Marriage is unimportant, it should serve as a wake-up call. SSM is not a neutral concept, still less is it about any meaningful equality. Rather it is a direct assault on traditional morality and the family, and therefore on society itself. 

The saddest part of the book is the wealth of statistics and quotations - from gay sources in many cases - detailing the depravity of those in the grip of the gay lifestyle at its worst. That is the other reason we must oppose this: it is doing those with homosexual tendencies terrible harm - and the gay lobby clearly wants to recruit more and more people, at younger and younger ages (when they are most likely to be confused about their sexuality), to the 'lifestyle' and convince them (against the evidence) that it is immutable.