ARTICLES

Anyone Can Become A Homosexual

THERE IS AN APPRENTICESHIP TO BE SERVED, HOWEVER

By Ralph McInerny

Then Yahweh said, "How great an outcry there is against Sodom and Gomorrah! How grievous is their sin! I propose to go down and see whether or not they have done all that is alleged in the outcry against them that has come up to me. I am determined to know." -- Genesis 18:20

In the Confessions, Augustine tells us how eagerly he embraced the Manichean doctrine according to which there were two coequal principles governing the world, one good, one evil. This enabled Augustine to blame his sins on the evil principle, on some cause outside his free will, and thus to obtain temporary relief from remorse of conscience -- from agenbite of inwit.

Almost a quarter-century ago the comedian Flip Wilson popularized the phrase, "The Devil made me do it." Some variation on that slogan -- my genes, my parents, my upbringing, my subconscious, whatever, made me do it -- is operative in most of our lives. My actions somehow are not my own; they are not what I do, but what is done to me. An act all of us will have to answer for is the one whereby we try to kid ourselves that we are not responsible for having done this or that.

One of the tragedies of our time is the tendency to encourage homosexuals in their self-deception. The homosexual movement is one sustained cry for exculpation, for a lost innocence. "God made me a homosexual, and it is simply my nature to engage in these degrading acts." So runs what may be called a depraved natural law defense of homosexuality. The way back to healthy and wholesome thinking about homosexual acts is the recognition that anyone might engage in them.

Chesterton's Father Brown was able to solve the mysteries he faced by imagining himself committing the crime, the crime that was also a sin. No sin was so horrible that he could not imagine himself committing it. Doubtless most men and women are so disgusted when they hear of what homosexuals do to one another that the thought of engaging in such activities themselves does not occur. No more does one normally contemplate grand larceny, adultery, or a sustained campaign to destroy another's reputation. One has to work up, or down, to big sins. There is an apprenticeship to be served, a character to be formed, perhaps through changes so subtle that we are unaware of what we are doing to ourselves, until one day the previously dreadful deed is no longer unimaginable, one is no longer indisposed to do it.

Anyone can do anything. I could become a homosexual and so could you. The Scriptures treat homosexuality both as a sin and as a punishment for sin, chiefly for the sin of turning away from God and failing to worship him. That is the sense of the famous passage in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans.

Are some people more susceptible than others to this vice? Even if this were so, it is important to acknowledge that everyone is susceptible to it and to every other vice. No doubt some are led into temptation and others are not; some find themselves in environments where such depravity is rampant. Autobiographical stories about English public schools suggest that they were proximate occasions of this particular sin. Hot-blooded adolescents might see members of their own gender as targets of opportunity when the appropriate objects of attraction are not around. The moral alternative is not coeducation and premarital sexual activity with members of the opposite gender. Chastity is required, and possible, in either situation.

The tendency to excuse and sanitize homosexual activity must be resisted, just as we should not romanticize infidelity, embezzling, or graverobbing. The greatest disservice we can do to one another is to encourage the rationalizing of behavior, in the sense of excusing ourselves, pretending we really aren't responsible for what we do, that it is our fate, and so on. Like the rest of us sinners, homosexuals need forgiveness, the grace to change, the encouragement to rise from the depths into which we have taken ourselves.

The Genesis passage continues with Abraham bargaining with Yahweh. "Are you really going to destroy the just man with the sinner?" He offers to find 50 to use as a bargaining chip to save to city. And the bid keeps dropping until Abraham gets it down to ten just men.

In the economy of salvation, there is only one man who can save us all.

This first appeared as an editorial in the Sept.-Oct. 1995 issue of Catholic Dossier.