A Response to the New Oxford Review (Part 4)

Sodom & the City of God

As a long-time reader of the magazine, I am willing to exonerate the editors of the NOR from a charge of hypocrisy or bigotry. I do not for a moment think they approve of beating those with same sex attractions with baseball bats or threatening chaste homosexuals with death by dropping. But when they say the word “fag,” I think of three seconds of free fall, ending in a splatter on concrete.
     If this is a chaste homosexual’s experience of the word “fag,” it should come as no surprise that those I consulted agreed unanimously that it would not inflame the soul with a passion for purity of heart. Rather, the word just rubs salt in old wounds and stirs up legitimate anger at real injustices.
     Words are living things, and contemporary experience matters much more than etymology in determining the meaning a word will have in contemporary culture. If one really wants to be lumped in with sort of characters I’ve described, then it makes perfect sense to use the word “fag.” But if one wants to make a principled defense of the Church’s respect for the human person and the human body, one should look for other words.
     Consider an etymological analogy. We are at the moment shopping for Iraqi leaders to replace Saddam. Suppose we hear of an expatriate Iraqi intellectual who wants to rename the country “The People’s Republic of Iraq.”
     Now it is perfectly plausible on etymological grounds to claim that this would be a democratic regime. After all, Abraham Lincoln called ours a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” And America is a republic. So one could make a good etymological case for calling America a “People’s Republic.” But if one examines contemporary usage, one finds that the countries which call themselves “People’s Republics” are either on or remarkably close to “the Axis of Evil.” We would have every justification in assuming that a man who wished to create a People’s Republic intended to brutally murder political opponents, practice wholesale slaughter of his own citizens, and act as a more or less permanent threat to world peace. And if he did not intend this then it would be foolish to use the phrase “People’s Republic” to describe his proposed government.
     I think it absolutely essential to oppose the “gay liberation” ideology which has gained so much influence in the last 30 years. But using the word “fag” to do so is like dropping a nuclear bomb on a military bunker that happens to be located in a residential neighborhood next to a hospital: it’ll destroy the target, but it’s going to cause an enormous amount of “collateral damage,” and it won’t help your reputation as a defender of human dignity.
     Of course, most of the time the word “fag” is little more than a gutter abuse word. The fifth grader who calls the third grader with spindly legs and glasses a “fag” is not showing Christian charity, but is not a monster, either. Even when the NOR took the liberty of saying that Fr. Keenan “doesn’t tell us whether or not he’s a fag” (Jul.-Aug. 2002, p. 14), I took it as sophomoric humor — which stretched the bounds of good taste, but was not worth a letter. But the NOR editors were not content to defend it as an exercise in adolescent wit. Instead, they argued that the word could make a serious point about chastity. And that argument is worth refuting, because the more seriously you use the word, the more destructive it becomes.

Copyright © 2003 by Ron Belgau