A Response to the New Oxford Review (Part 3)

Sodom & the City of God

I did not accept this because it felt spiffy emotionally: to the degree that I allowed myself to be swayed by emotion, the decision seemed crazy. I accepted it because I believed it to be true, and I strove to obey it because I did not believe the command to be optional.
     This is often the way in the spiritual life. Screwtape tells his protégé that “Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s [Christ’s] will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
     My hormones, of course, contributed to the emotional cloud which sought to distract me from the truth; but unless memory greatly deceives me, I was much more distracted by anger at the way that Christians treated homosexuality.
     I first encountered the words “fag” and “faggot” on the elementary school playground. The words did, indeed, carry some hint of weakness or effeminacy, and certainly a strong element of stigma. However, the latter sense far outweighed the former. It is likely that the vast majority of those who were called a “fag” at some point on the elementary school playground did not develop homosexual attractions. The word served primarily to express the speaker’s desire to bully, not to put forward an allegation based on any evidence that the person being teased actually was a homosexual. It thus fell into the general class of abuse words with “nerd,” “dork,” “jerk,” “bastard,” and various unprintable equivalents. Indeed, the word “bastard” is particularly apropos because it has a clear etymology, and yet in contemporary usage it is far more likely to express the speaker’s contempt than to say that the person attacked was born out of wedlock.
     In any case, at this stage, I had no clue about what a homosexual was, let alone that I would develop same-sex attractions. But I did know that a particularly effective method of abusing a classmate was to call them a “fag.”
     The NOR editors say, “St. Paul said of active homosexuals that they commit ‘shameful’ acts (Rom. 1:27). By definition, what’s shameful deserves shaming. So there may be times when uttering a word that shames is called for.” I agree, up to a point. However, in the course of writing this article, I have spoken about it with more than a dozen chaste same-sex attracted men. Some of these men did have sex with other men before choosing chastity; others did not. But each and every one of them agrees that people who used the word “fag” did not help them to embrace chastity. Unless the NOR editors can produce a comparable sample of chaste homosexuals who will testify to the word’s efficacy in advertising chastity, then their case dies on purely utilitarian grounds. But I believe I can go further and explain why these chaste men objected to the word “fag.”
     When I was in the eighth grade, a boy who was suspected of being a “faggot” was beaten up by five other boys with baseball bats. In this case, there were no allegations that the victim was involved in homosexual activity, though his attackers did believe that he had homosexual attractions (based on rather equivocal evidence). His attackers shamed and brutalized him for a temptation to sin which he may not have felt, or which he may have resisted.
     The ringleader in this incident claimed that because the Bible condemned homosexuality, his attack was justified — even that it was unjust for him to be punished for it. However, the Bible also condemns fornication, and he had sex with several girlfriends during the time I knew him. To my knowledge, none of his Christian friends (myself included) called him on his hypocrisy. And the blatant hypocrisy of this supposedly Christian boy who beat up “fags” and slept with his girlfriends gave me an excuse to wonder whether perhaps the Church’s opposition to homosexuality were based on nothing more than this kind of prejudice and nausea writ large.
     Indeed, many who give no thought to either the Bible or the Church still feel great antipathy towards homosexuals. During my junior year in college, my roommate “borrowed” my diary and showed it to some of his friends, including someone I’ll call Goliath, who was on the football team. One night, I returned late to the dorm, and found Goliath in the lounge, drunk. “Hey, faggot,” he said, having discovered my same sex attractions from my diary. “Do you know what we do to faggots around here?” I didn’t bother to ask whether there was a special discount for chastity, for Goliath (who made no pretence of Christian practice) brought home a different girl every weekend. I just started to back away. “Do you want to take a spill off the balcony?” From the balcony, it was a 100 foot drop to concrete. I ran (literally) to a friend’s room on another floor and stayed there until I could arrange to move to another dorm.
     According to the Church “it is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church’s pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others which endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” 1986, #10). I, who know how ugly attitudes towards “fags” can get, am deeply thankful for the Church’s unwavering defense of my human dignity.

Copyright © 2003 by Ron Belgau