Why Is Gay Not Okay?

Eschatology and Eucharistic Adoration Fr. Robert Barron on Hans Urs von Bal...

Why Is Gay Not Okay?

Left: Meredith Greenberg holds hands with her partner, Leora Pearlman, as Mayor Steven Fulop of Jersey City, N.J., presides over their wedding in Jersey City Oct. 21, 2013. (CNS photo/Shannon Stapleton, Reuters). Right: People demonstrate outside the Supreme Court building in Washington in this photo from late March 2013, when the court heard oral arguments in two same-sex marriage cases. (CNS photo/Nancy Phelan Wiechec)

Why Is Gay Not Okay? | Carl E. Olson | Catholic World Report

“Compassion does not trump truth,” says Robert R. Reilly, “And the truth is becoming harder to tell.”

Scholar and author Robert R. Reilly was Senior Advisor for Information Strategy (2002-2006) for the U.S. Secretary of Defense, after which he taught at National Defense University. He was the director of the Voice of America from 2001 to 2002, and served in the White House as a Special Assistant to the President from 1983 to 1985. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and the Claremont Graduate University, and has written widely on “war of ideas" issues, foreign policy, and classical music. His previous books and monographs include Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis, and The Prospects and Perils of Catholic-Muslim Dialogue.

His new book, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything, was published recently by Ignatius Press. It has been praised as “magnificent, a real achievement” (Austin Ruse, President, Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute) and described as “a rare tour de force on a defining question of our time” (Dr. Robert Royal, President, Faith & Reason Institute). Reilly recently corresponded with Carl E. Olson, editor of Catholic World Report, about his new book and its approach and arguments.

CWR: Right at the start, you make the connection between contraception and same-sex marriage, writing in the Introduction that the “progression from the one to the other was logically inescapable.” What are the main points of that progression? How unique is the “capstone” of same-sex marriage; that is, how uncharted are the waters that have now flooded society?

Reilly: The key is separating sex from diapers. Once you consciously subvert the procreative power of sex with contraception, there is a very slippery slope—more like a cliff, actually—down to the moral pigpen where sex is simply a form of degraded entertainment. You try to grab the pleasure from the act, while denying the thing toward which the act is essentially ordered.

So it is perfectly logical to go from contraception to abortion (so those whose contraception has failed are not “penalized”) to the celebration of sodomy as the basis of marriage. Homosexuals can easily pose the question, “if you endorse contracepted heterosexual acts, what could possibly be wrong with our acts which don’t even have to be contracepted?”

The logic of the situation makes it very easy to see where this is going next—polygamy and polyandry. In fact, a Federal District Court has already taken a step in this direction in respect to Utah’s laws against polygamy. When we allow homosexual acts to serve as the basis for “marriage,” anything goes.

CWR: Your thesis, as you noted, “is very simple: There are two fundamental views of reality.” What are those two views of reality? And if the thesis is simple, why is it so difficult for people to either comprehend it or to explain it themselves?

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