Rocks and hard places

Provoked by a gay Evangelical Christian blogger, a very nice woman, who accepts the traditional teaching about the immorality of her sexual desires, I have this to say:

Reading blogs like this, I sometimes feel like King Herod, who enjoyed hauling John the Baptist up from the dungeon to preach at him for his wicked ways, even though it left him puzzled. (Mk 6.20). You may feel similarly after I've added my two drachmas. Well, more than two. 

If the last 40+ year post-Stonewall years are any indication, the opposition between orthodox Christianity and the "LGBT" community (evidenced by Anon2478) is irreconcilable. Several decades ago, I chose my self-respect as a homosexual man over the teaching (the Catholic version in my case) that when I shared my heart and my body with a man I loved, it was actually something violent, a disfigured and sordid counterfeit that cut me off from God. On the contrary, even with all its human flaws and fallenness, making love keeps me from atheism. My thoughts in flagrante delicto :) are often "How can there NOT be a God?"  I fail to understand how gays or lesbians who accept the teaching can keep from loathing themselves or, as in my case, wear down their souls to the nub trying to avoid that feeling. 

But in the ensuing decades, tho I remain happily homo and well entrenched here in San Francisco's Castro, it became clear to me that there were far far more important issues facing us than the "LGBT" issue. After all, "we" are no more than 4% of the population. Plus, the very particular and historically constructed shape which this identity had taken --wedded to victimhood, submerged in leftist dogma and deeply ambivalent, at best, about manhood-- was part of a larger societal problem: the use of "equality" as a compulsive moral absolute, in the service of (Gramscianly conscious or not) dismantling Western culture and civilization.  

The history of labels and nomenclature exhibits this. First it was "gay", then "gay and lesbian", then "lesbian and gay" and eventually "LGBT", and even more letters in this alphabet-soup sexual Yugoslavia. The inclusion of the infinitesimally numbered T's --and who put that to a vote, by the way?--gave the game away: the commonality is not shared same-sex eros, but shared gender dysphoria. I'll pass, thank you very much.  

If you look at those churches, the Protestant Mainline for example, who have embraced their LGBT members, you'll see that this was only possible because they had previously chucked a lot of their historical identity and that afterwards, the process only accelerates. The LGBT agenda requires unconditional surrender; anything else is excoriated as "H8." (Anon2478 is quite typical: either embrace us completely or we will blame you for our deaths.) What do these dying churches really have to offer but "inclusion" in a club that no one is interested in joining? Aside from sentimentality, habit and vesture, I find less and less difference between them and Unitarians. Why would any intelligent and aware and self-confidently orthodox Christian church want to head off in that self-erasing direction?  

So I find myself in the post-Herodian position of valuing traditional Christianity as a historical bulwark of an embattled West --although increasingly turning traitor under guise of "social justice"--while finding it personally uninhabitable as a man who loves men and loves that about himself. 

Although your Protestant/Evangelical style is quite alien to this ex-RC, your deep attachment to your faith and your community is evident. I remember how that felt and I honor it and sympathize with your struggles. But I fear that you are in an inescapable quandry, a literal dilemma: The Scylla of a radically condemnatory religion on one side and the Charybdis of a deeply compromised "LGBT" socio-political movement on the other. 

And here endeth the Lesson.

PS. My response to another commentor who responded to me.

Just two thoughts.

First, condemning homosexuality does not at all require orthodox Christians to hate homosexual people, but I find it hard to see how it can avoid making orthodox Christian homosexual people hate themselves. 

(BTW, I regard the now fashionable use of “hate” –or “H8″, as the CA Prop 8 activists put it– and “hater” as a blanket dismissal of any belief or attitude unacceptable to the Left as yet one more rhetorical fraud, amounting to “Shut up.”) 

At least in the Catholic tradition, this condemnation is a side-effect of the combined Biblical and Natural Law focus on marriage and family as the sacramental value in human sexuality. Fornication, adultery, masturbation, contraception…all non marital-and-procreative uses of sex are beyond the Pale, homosexuality being just one of them. But what makes Christian rejection of homosexuality so problematic for homosexual people is that it does not condemn an occasional or even habitual behavior only, but it theologically pathologizes the only kind of eros that we know, root and branch. At least for modern people, this goes to a question of personal identity, not just bad behavior. 

So the choice–or dilemma, IMHO– is not between Christian H8ers vs crypto-Unitarian cultural submissives, but between the self-hatred that orthodox Christianity willy-nilly creates in homosexual people vs. the castrated, as you say, reduction of a 2000 year old civilization-founding Faith to gutless “inclusion”, for the sake of pleasing religion’s cultured despisers. 

Second thought. 

I don’t share your dichotomy between grubby Power and saintly “underground.” Although their styles and fields of action were outside the hierarchy’s, St Francis, St Ignatius and Mother Theresa were all fiercely attached to the “Papal Cathedra.” They are two sides to one coin. I might be a non-practicing Roman Catholic, but I’m no Anabaptist :)  

As for the Mainliners, am I alone in assessing their transformation as reducing them to conditionally tolerated chaplains to the triumphant secular religion of their social and political masters? To me, they merely echo the Liberal line, following every new egalitarian trend; when do they ever challenge it? 

I hesitated to comment here at all, since I have no “solutions” to offer. I appreciate your taking my rambling seriously and with gentlemanly courtesy.

---