Making Gay Okay Quotes

“Since the family is the irreducible core unit of cities or any other political order, one may say the same thing of marriage: it was established to render justice, to give each his due—in this case, what is due between husband and wife in the inimitably unique relationship that they form. Owing to the exceptional complementarity and procreative potential of a husband and a wife, the legal form for their relationship is likewise distinctive, and not replicable for other relationships that are neither complementary nor potentially reproductive.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“The magnitude of the injustice involved in the redefinition of marriage comes most clearly into view in regard to children, to whom justice is also owed. As Seana Sugrue writes, “The ability of same-sex couples to be parents depends crucially upon the state declaring that they possess such rights, and by extinguishing or redefining the rights of biological parents. With the rise of same-sex marriage, the obligations parents owed to their biological children are reduced to mere convention. This is true for everyone. Parents come to owe obligations to their children not because they are parents, but because they choose to be parents.”6 What is owed to children by right or Nature becomes optional by convention. This is a staggering loss for them.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“What is arbitrary is by definition tyrannical. It is based upon pure will, unguided by reason. Those who wish to base their freedom upon the supposed purposelessness of things, which obtains in the absence of Nature, should face the consequences of this view. What seems unmitigated freedom is, in fact, the foundation of tyranny.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“We have blinded ourselves to the connection between the abuse of sex and the dissolution of the American family, which can be seen in these results: as of 2010 those with children now represent only 20 percent of American households, according to the US Census Bureau;19 35 percent of children are in single-parent families; sexual crime is up more than 200 percent in public schools since 1994; there has been a precipitous rise in illegitimate births (now 40 percent of all births); 60 percent of African-American children are born out of wedlock; some 50 percent of marriages end in divorce;20 there are some one million abortions per year on average, or 55 million since 1973; and our culture has coarsened in brutal ways. Yet the misuse of sex has so corrupted our society that no one dares mention it as a principal cause of our debasement. As Justice Kennedy teaches, unassailable “private conduct between consenting adults” made under the inviolable “autonomy of self” is at the heart of liberty. But this cannot be right, particularly if it leads to self-destruction.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“Dr. Satinover: “What is known, from decades of research on family structure, studying literally thousands of children, is that every departure from the traditional, stable, mother-father family has severe detrimental effects upon children; and these effects persist not only into adulthood but into the next generation as well. In short, the central problem with mother-mother or father-father families is that they deliberately institute, and intend to keep in place indefinitely, a family structure known to be deficient in being obligatorily and permanently either fatherless or motherless.”6 An American College of Pediatricians paper from January 2012 seconded this judgment: “Clearly, apart from rare situations, depriving a child of one or both biological parents, as same-sex parenting requires in every case, is unhealthy.”7”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“For now, we excerpt this sentence from the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey ruling, in which the court opined that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Well, actually not. The universe is already here. It has already been defined for us; otherwise it would not be in existence. Our choice is not to make up the meaning of the universe but to discern its meaning and then either conform ourselves to it or revolt against it.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“it is through Nature that we come to understand the proper use of things. The enormous importance of this for our topic is that, since the ends of things are intrinsic to them, man does not get to make them up, but only to discover them through the use of his reason. He can then choose to conform his behavior to these ends in a life of virtue or to frustrate them in a life of vice. He can choose to become fully human or to dehumanize himself.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“In regard to justice, one might also ask: What of same-sex, heterosexual couples who live with and cherish each other, but who do not engage in homosexual acts? Are they less worthy of marriage? If the only thing that distinguishes them from homosexual couples is sodomitical behavior, and if only homosexual couples are to be extended the privilege of marriage, then something of special merit must obtain precisely to the act of sodomy itself. Why should sodomy be privileged in this way? Otherwise, why would marriage not be appropriate for chaste or heterosexual same-sex friendship? The tax advantages obtaining to an estate left by one spouse to another are great. Should they be only for lesbian and homosexual couples and not, say, for brothers, sisters, or others who may love each other and live together?”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“The choice today is revolt. Igor Stravinsky wrote, “The old original sin was one of knowledge, the new original sin is one of non-acknowledgment.” It is the refusal to acknowledge anything outside the operation of the human will—most especially the good toward which the soul is ordered. The good is what must ultimately inform human justice. Therefore, moral relativism is inimical to justice, as it removes the epistemological ground for knowing the good. As Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, wrote, “Everything that is relative presupposes the existence of something that is absolute, and is meaningful only when juxtaposed to something absolute.”4 What happens if the absolute is absent? If what is good is relative to something other than itself, then it is not the good but the expression of some other interest that only claims to be the good. Claims of “good” then become transparent masks for self-interest. This is the surest path back to barbarism and the brutal doctrine of “right is the rule of the stronger”. The regression is not accidental. Relativism inevitably concludes in nihilism, and the ultimate expression of nihilism is the supremacy of the will.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“was no way to differentiate between the two—the one being according to Nature and the other according to custom—because the word Nature was not available in the vocabulary of the prephilosophical world. Once discovered, this distinction enabled man to discern the difference between custom, which can be changed, and Nature, which cannot. Nature was internal to and inseparable from what a thing is; custom was external and separable.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“These mythopoeic accounts made no distinction between custom and Nature, or between convention (the way things happen) and Nature (the reason why they happen). A dog wagged its tail because that was the way of a dog. Egyptians painted their funeral caskets in bright colors because that was the way of the Egyptians. There”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“Before this discovery, ancient man was immersed in mythological portrayals of the world, the gods, and himself.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“The momentous discovery of Nature was the first product of Greek philosophy. Thoughtful persons first deduced the existence of Nature when they became aware of order in the universe. The regularity with which things happen could not be accounted for by random repetition and required explanation. All activity seems governed by a purpose, by ends to which things are designed to move.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“individual’s choice of sexual behavior—“equality and”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“If someone tries to appropriate human rights for something that applies to less than everyone, then you may be sure that they are undermining the very notion of human rights.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“What Mr. Comer had done by starting his Gay-Straight Alliance was directly to challenge the teachings and regulations of the Boy Scouts. In other words, rather than abide by the rules of the organization he had voluntarily joined, he insisted on his own rules to the extent that the Boy Scouts must be made to conform to them. That is Mr. Comer’s idea of justice: to conform others to his will.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“Socrates said that the worst thing a person could do was to lie in his soul about what is.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“In the Laws Plato makes clear that moral virtue in respect to sexual desire is not only necessary to the right order of the soul, but is at the heart of a well-ordered polis. The Athenian speaker says, I had an idea for reinforcing the law about the natural use of the intercourse which procreates children, abstaining from the male, not deliberately killing human progeny or “sowing in rocks and stones”, where it will never take root and be endowed with growth, abstaining too from all female soil in which you would not want what you have sown to grow. This law when it has become permanent and prevails—if it has rightly become dominant in other cases, just as it prevails now regarding intercourse with parents—confers innumerable benefits. In the first place, it has been made according to nature; also, it effects a debarment from erotic fury and insanity, all kinds of adultery and all excesses in drink and food, and it makes men truly affectionate to their own wives: other blessings also would ensue, in infinite number, if one could make sure of this law. (838-839)”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“Nature is also what enables one person to recognize another person as a human being. All human beings have a human Nature, which means that all human beings are fundamentally the same—and different from all other things—in their very essence, which is immutable. Hence every human soul is ordered to the same transcendent good, or end. This is what it means to be human. Both Socrates and Aristotle said that men’s souls are ordered to the same good and that therefore there is a single standard of justice that transcends the political order of any city. There should not be one standard of justice for Athenians and another for Spartans. There is only one justice, and it is the same at all times, everywhere, for everyone. As Aristotle wrote in the Rhetoric, “Universal law is the law of Nature. For there really is, as everyone to some extent divines, a natural justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or covenant with each other.”5”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“the logic behind this process of legitimization of homosexual behavior undercuts any objective standards by which we could judge the moral legitimacy of anything. This is the ultimate danger it poses—including to America’s political foundations.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“By a huge margin, AIDS gets more research money per patient than any other disease. Should those dying of other diseases blame their illnesses on this displacement of research funds? Should cigarette smokers who contract lung cancer blame their disease on those who failed to increase funds for cancer research? Since the necessity for self-justification requires the complicity of the whole culture, holdouts cannot be tolerated, because they are potential rebukes. The self-hatred, anger, and guilt that a person possessed of a functioning conscience would normally feel from doing wrong are redirected by the rationalization and projected upon society as a whole (if the society is healthy) or upon those in society who do not accept the rationalization. These latter are labeled homophobes, though it is they who become the objects of hatred. They are blamed for the misfortunes in homosexual life, which are no longer ascribable to the behavior that produces them, but to those who do not accept the behavior as moral, thus discomfiting its practitioners.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“But when morally disordered acts become the defining centerpiece of one’s life, vice can permanently pervert reason, and the inversion of reality becomes complete. The rationalization can turn into a prison from which one cannot escape.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“Dr. LeVay conducted a study of hypothalamic structures in men, which supposedly confirmed innate brain differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals, but he warned against misinterpreting his findings in a 1994 interview: “It’s important to stress what I didn’t find. I did not prove that homosexuality is genetic, or find a genetic cause for being gay. I didn’t show that gay men are born that way, the most common mistake people make in interpreting my work. Nor did I locate a gay center in the brain.”29”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything

“The central insight of classical Greek political philosophy is that the order of the city is the order of the soul writ large. If there is disorder in the city, it is because of disorder in the souls of its citizens. This is why virtue in the lives of the citizens is necessary for a well-ordered polis.”
― Robert R. Reilly, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything