Another Voice

Matthew Parris

Wednesday, 14th January 2009

The gay lobby should rejoice at the Pope’s argument that God makes us the way we are

I have been puzzling during the winter holidays over Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas message. You may remember that it was interpreted as an attack on homosexuality, provoking the usual outrage. Most people, it seems, saw the response. Few bothered to study the message itself.

I have done so. Not only (as Roman Catholic spokesmen protested at the time) does the Pope never in fact mention homosexuality, it is far from clear he meant his remarks to be interpreted in any such light. Study the remarks themselves, for they present a picture troubling in a quite different way from that suggested by spokesmen for gay and transgender organisations. The address seems to betray a Church mind confused about the implications for morality of rival scientific theories, and plumping in its confusion for the variant most dangerous to church teaching.

In order (I believe) to take a swipe at an idea the Vatican finds immediately irritating — that women could be priests — the Pope has sided with arguments in medical and social science which, properly understood, present real difficulties for traditional Church morality in the longer term. He has undermined the belief that people can change. He has sided with those who suspect that people can’t — or not as much as required. I think he is right. But he is sawing off a branch on which Catholic ethics sit.

The question under scrutiny is to what extent a higher animal, human or otherwise, is the product either of its inherited genes, or of its environment and upbringing. Essentially this is the old nature vs nurture debate.

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David Lindsay

January 17th, 2009 4:24pm Report this comment

Until the very last sentence, you need hold no supernatural belief to accept that the story of the Wise Men happened exactly as recorded by Saint Matthew.

They first follow the natural world (the Star), which leads them to the Bible (the Prophets referred to by Herod’s advisors), which leads in turn to the Christ Child.

And so to the Pope. The gender theory lot are half right. Sex is not just what is between your legs. But nor is it just what is between your ears, either. Rather, it is written into every cell of the body. You can cut up the tissue any way you like. The chromosomes themselves cannot change.

People seeking this surgery obviously do need help. But that surgery itself cannot be the help that they really need. That is the Pope’s point. He is right. Most people know that he is right. They look at the world and see it: they follow the Star. Well, the Star leads to the Prophets, and the Prophets lead to the Christ Child.

And what of the Pope and homosexuality? What was he attacking? The idea that it is people, rather than acts, that are homosexual. That idea is not yet forty years old. It post-dates by several years our own humane and necessary decriminalisation of male homosexual acts between consenting adults in private. It is historically and cross-culturally illiterate, as well as totally unscientific.

And it was invented by and for pederasts (many also engaged in “transgender” activities) in a network of bars – such as the Stonewall Inn, a major centre of the abuse of boys – in the urban, coastal America of the early 1970s.

Weakened by the liberal hijacking of the name of Vatican II, we all know what happened next in the Catholic Church. She is only just beginning to recover. But the Pope has made it very obvious that She is recovering.

Deo gratias.

Edwin Tait

January 17th, 2009 6:42pm Report this comment

Jesus did not say that involuntary thoughts are as sinful as deeds. What he said was that "looking at a woman to lust after her" (which probably means with the deliberate intention of lusting) is the same as doing the deed. Even if you think I'm whitewashing what Jesus said, the fact is that this is how Christians have traditionally interpreted that particular saying. You are not responsible for your involuntary impulses and desires. You are responsible for the act of will by which you consent to such desires.

Furthermore, this article ignores the Christian doctrine of the Fall, which says that our nature has been affected by sin so that we do in fact have desires and predispositions that are not part of God's original creation. Thus, saying that gendered identity is part of the original order of creation does not commit one to saying the same thing about sexual orientation.

In short, Christian theology is a lot more complex than this article recognizes.

Nullius

January 20th, 2009 6:22pm Report this comment

It is clear that Mr Parris has not read Pinker's book - the whole point of which is that we are NOT "blank slates" (nor ghosts in the machine, nor pre-determined) - we are the result of a complex interaction between genes and environment.

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