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The War on Norms
 Every
Sunday, at the Catholic churches I attend, we
say a brief prayer for our troops overseas. I can’t help wondering why
we don’t also pray for the people of the countries they occupy.  Even if the war is justified, they deserve consideration too.
This line of thinking doesn’t
stop there. It occurred to me today that although I regularly pray for my own
safety, I’m not in the habit of praying that I won’t hurt others.
It’s not as if I’m totally innocent and harmless. When we
confess that we are sinners, we are admitting not only that we offend God,
but that we may also pose dangers to other sinners too. One of these
dangers is giving scandal, which includes a bad example that may make it
harder for others to follow God’s way.
Giving scandal seems to be a
special fault of our generation, which is less concerned than its ancestors
about giving scandal to the young. The sexual revolution has taught us that
what consenting adults do is strictly their own business; if children follow the
bad example we set, that’s tough. Who is to say what’s
“bad,” anyway?
The other day a local radio pundit
of the liberal persuasion inveighed against Christians on the subject of
“gay rights.” He appealed to the Bible, though he didn’t
really seem to believe in it, or even to have reflected on it.
His argument was trite, but he
delivered it as if it were a novel and seminal idea: that “Jesus never
condemned homosexuals.” It follows that Christians who oppose
“gay rights” are, yes, un-Christian.
Well, in the first place, Jesus
didn’t come to condemn us; he came to redeem us. From what? From
our sins. And he had a pretty clear notion of what those sins were. He
sharply reminded the Samaritan woman who’d had five husbands that
the man she was currently living with wasn’t her husband; he told the
woman caught in adultery that he didn’t condemn her, but she should
“sin no more.”
![[Breaker quote: Is sin sinful?]](2005breakers/050222.gif) In
neither case did he use
the exculpatory phrase consenting adults. It was precisely what
these women were consenting to that was sinful. Neither of them disputed
that. But the liberal ethos would make these stories pointless.
Jesus isn’t recorded as
specifically condemning sodomy. He didn’t have to, any more than he
had to condemn pedophilia or writing bad checks. Every kind of sin has
countless variants, and this is where he tended to be severe. He taught that
mere anger is the seed of murder, and that merely looking at a woman
lustfully is the essence of adultery. Sin is in the heart before it takes the
form of action.
St. Paul, Christ’s most
eloquent apostle, does include sodomy in his by no means exhaustive list of
mortal sins, along with murder, slander, drunkenness, and so forth, not
because these are all of equal gravity for society, but because they are all
destructive to the soul. Human law may permit them, but God’s law is
another matter.
In the case of “gay
rights,” it’s not as if Christians have singled out homosexuality
for special obloquy. On the contrary, homosexual activists themselves have
made it an issue. Having taken the initiative, they are in no position to
complain of persecution when others merely resist their claims.
Those claims boil down to the
demand that sodomy be legally normalized as a matter of
justice; that any refusal to treat it as normal, even as eligible
for “marriage,” be taboo. The supposed right of homosexuals to
equal treatment, like so many so-called civil rights, is meant to trump
others’ moral convictions, property rights, and freedom of
association. Is this justice, or a war on ancient norms of human behavior?
Since the ancient Greek attitude
on this is often contrasted with the Christian one, it’s pertinent to
quote the wise scholar C.S. Lewis here: “It is untrue to say that the
Greeks thought sexual perversion innocent. The continual tittering of Plato is
really more evidential than the stern prohibition of Aristotle. Men titter thus
about what they regard as, at least, a peccadillo: the jokes
about drunkenness in Pickwick, far from proving that the
nineteenth-century English thought it innocent, prove the reverse. There is
an enormous difference of degree between the Greek view of
perversion and the Christian, but there is not opposition.”
We are all sinners; but nothing is
gained by pretending that sin isn’t sinful.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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