Posted on 11/11/2015 3:08:52 AM PST by markomalley
Events of recent memory have left my head spinning in disbelief–”Caitlyn,” same-sex so-called “marriage,” three women “marrying” in South America, and, yes, “gay Catholics” and “chaste gay couples.” With me, you may wonder how all this has emerged in a short few decades of social upheaval.
I may have an answer: Society has constructed an unreal cultural landscape in which things that are not sexuality are passed off as sexuality.
Even a majority of Catholics are, perhaps unwittingly, swallowing this unreality, hook, line, and sinker.
The fabric of this false landscape is language–language that frames everyone and everything in a way that fundamentally relativizes the truth about human nature and God’s real plan for us and our sexuality. I’d assert that this process all started with a single word: homosexuality.
Think about it. By all accounts, the word “homosexuality,” used in contrast to its also-coined counterpart “heterosexuality,” is just about 150 years old. Before this time in human history, there was no such thing as the conceptual construct of “orientation.” Sexual attractions did not define the human person, and people did not presume to assail God’s plan for human sexuality by categorizing attractions in a way that reduces God’s plan to one mere possibility among an ever-growing number of other “identities” and so-called “sexualities.”
A Flash-Flood of Unreality
Fast-forward to the present. The 150-year-old crack in the dam has become a gaping fissure that allows modern minds and hearts to be flooded with some muddied and foul waters. Now everything is up for grabs because both our behaviors and our identities have become as fluid as the floodwater. Culture now grants us absolute permission to equivocate authentic sexuality with myriad counterfeits. This permission is safeguarded by coining even more terminology designed to protect the original insult to truth about sexuality, bringing about deeper and more deadly moral collapse.
This original “either/or-ing” of human sexuality–”orientation”–has made a mess of things. Now the meaning of God’s original plan for us is obscured and, worse, viewed as pure bigotry. Now it’s absolutely okay to be gay or straight or queer or genderfluid, or, or… Now we deal with sexual “minorities” who claim “erasure,” “homophobia,” and “othering” if you commit the cardinal social sin of … heteronormativity!
Now men who “feel” like women (and vice versa) must be affirmed rather than healed. Now men who know they are men are merely “cisgendered” out of relativistic respect for those who are “transgendered”–all because fluidity–not authentic sexuality–must be maintained at all costs. Now, even “gay sex” is treated as real sex rather than the unreal and aberrant mutual masturbation of deeply confused souls.
By saying all this, by the way, I’m the worst form of “hater”–worthy of condemnation and perhaps prosecution and imprisonment.
Let Sexuality Speak for Itself
Too often, we get caught up in the wrongness of the unreality without focusing on letting the reality–sexuality–speak for itself. It’s time to get back to basics–time to re-set the high bar of God’s plan as a high bar rather than as one mere “flavor” of sexual “identity” or “orientation” or behavior among many “okay” options. So, let’s answer this question: To what is sexuality ordered? In doing so, it should become crystal clear why homosexuality is not, in fact, sexuality. In the following assertions you’ll notice that I avoid using the terms “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” in favor of “same-sex attraction” and “sexuality,” for the sake of illuminating the reality of what is described by the terms.
Sexuality is ordered toward complementarity. This is so simple that even the youngest child “gets” this. There are two and only two sexual “identities”–man and woman, boys and girls. And they are made for each other. Complementarity is really “complete-mentarity.” As a man I do not possess what it means to be a woman, and vice versa. We complete each other. Same-sex attraction involves objective redundancy, not complementarity.
Sexuality is ordered toward total self-gift. Once we understand complementarity, we can understand that this “completion” necessarily involves a covenantal exchange of persons. Sexuality is not merely about an exchange of pleasure, or rights, or services, etc. It’s a gift of self that requires two things. First, self-mastery or self-possession. We cannot give what we do not possess. Second, a capacity to receive the other’s total self-gift. With SSA, “you cannot receive that which you already possess.” A man cannot receive a total self-gift of the person, body and soul, from another man. It’s impossible. The “ache” of sexual desire is the longing for completion that comes from the covenantal, personal exchange of man with woman.
Sexuality is ordered toward consummation. The mutual, complementary, total self-gift finds its fullest expression in the indissoluble unity of body and soul that takes place when husband and wife (not just sex-less “spouses” but male with female) come together in marital relations. With same-sex attraction, no such pathway toward consummation is even conceivable. Sexual acting out between two men or two women is brute parody of the reality of consummation.
Sexuality is ordered toward the good of permanence. The magnitude of the meaning of “consummation” cannot be exaggerated. There is no such thing, this side of Heaven, as a temporary “total self-gift.” The pathway to permanence arises precisely because a husband and wife (a man with a woman) are capable of willing the covenantal bond that can and must last for as long as they both shall live. It can and must find permanent expression (until death) in the mutual gift of self expressed fully in marital relations. Again, this is utterly inaccessible to two men or two women. Two people with SSA may say they “choose” permanence, but it’s an objectively “human-willed” and not “God-ordained” choice because they are incapable of “enfleshing” an authentic and total covenantal exchange of persons.
Sexuality is ordered toward the good of fidelity. Part of the “permanence” of total self-gift is the exclusivity of “forsaking all others.” Again, it’s irrational to suggest that someone can make a total self-gift to more than one person. Sexuality is ordered toward “the one.” Thus, another tenet of the unreal secular embrace of “orientation” is exposed here–namely, that sexuality is not concerned with any abstract or generic information about the kind of person that attracts you. Sexuality is about prayerfully discerning who the one real person might be with whom you can mutually make a covenantal self-gift. The abstraction of “orientation” is a distraction from the real purpose of sexuality. SSA again provides no avenue for the exclusivity that total self-gift requires.
Sexuality is ordered toward the good of children. Finally, sexuality offers the human person the possibility of “imaging” God’s love and likeness in a unique way–through pro-creation, creating “with” God. This is not merely about raising children (though the “education” of children is certainly just as much a primary end here as is procreation), but about raising up children with God. Our “consummation” of covenantal self-gift is, like the Blessed Trinity’s own, fruitful, moving beyond the “selves” of husband and wife and toward an immortal form of “consummation”–a child. In Heaven, by God’s design and plan, there will be one lasting fruit of earthly marital union: our children. Same-sex attraction obviously is utterly sterile, not in any way ordered toward this immensely meaningful finality of authentic sexuality.
Let’s Get Real
Neither same-sex attraction nor the coined term “homosexuality” can rightly be considered either a form of, or a participation in, real sexuality. The reality that is same-sex attraction exists in total opposition to the reality that is sexuality. Perhaps this is why one finds this sentence in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Sexuality is ordered toward the conjugal love of a man and a woman. (CCC 2360)
Maybe this is also why the next paragraph in the Catechism (CCC 2361) quotes a crucial phrase from St. John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio (FC 11):
Sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is not something simply biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. It is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and woman commit themselves totally to one another until death.
More important: Can we all pray that more people will stop cooperating in the failed social experiment of homosexuality, heterosexuality, orientation, etc.? The only “truly human” way to “real-ize” (as in make real) our sexuality is when it is properly ordered toward marital love.
By all accounts, the word "homosexuality," used in contrast to its also-coined counterpart "heterosexuality," is just about 150 years old.
Before this time in human history, there was no such thing as the conceptual construct of "orientation."
Sexual attractions did not define the human person, and people did not presume to assail God's plan for human sexuality by categorizing attractions in a way that reduces God's plan to one mere possibility among an ever-growing number of other "identities" and so-called "sexualities."
Every writer considers at least once in his career, something he has written is SO profound, the entire world needs to hear or read his words he constructed just so
Deacon Jim Russell has come close
So much of today's social turmoil has been invented in relatively recent times
The problem is in the educational process of children
If they are taught gorebull warming is a science and it is offered as if it has been a science since Noah, the children grow to voting adulthood and a myth becomes a law
Good article, Deacon Jim Russell
And next, can we ditch “gender”?
He has stated on numerous occasions that PC is killing us and should be done away with
PC is language and if we think about it ... we incorporate words and ideas into our thought processes because we hear .. over and over .. a word repeated and it BECOMES part of common language
We no longer have to explain the phrase .. we can jump right in on a discussion or argument regarding "global warming", but the phrase is maybe 20 years old
Call it what you will. It has been around forever. It is not going away
But it should never be celebrated. That is when societies crumble It needs to be practiced in private if practiced at all. The closet was not a bad thing. Hide your shame homos.
Plus let’s stop calling it “gay”, there is nothing happy about it.
Yep, that is why I say that come late next year, it will be the start of the end of the “PC” nonsense.
The big thing left out is the Media is owned by the most evil men on the planet. We should find out the real owners of all of the alphabet stations and Hollywood studios and name them here so we can petition and yes, harass them into stopping this nonsense.
They have compartmentalized themselves into this tiny faction of people that ... if they weren't getting paid for it, they just might be normal human beings we could have a beer with
Did you here what came from the ABC compartment last night ?
"Media" sounds so large and all encompassing, but only the EFFECTS of media or from media are so
Media, in and of itself is a tiny entity
I haven’t followed all of Donald Trump’s public appearances. Does he always say “sex” rather than “gender” and “homosexual” or “sodomite” rather than “gay”?
That would certainly be a good sign!
Well, no.
But we can start using that word correctly.
Which means that few people would ever use it ... which is fine.
The term homosexuality is an oxymoron? Sounds good to me.
Very good insights.
God made man and woman for a reason. The anus is for emptying the body of waste, not for intercourse. The anus is not a sex organ. Homosexuals are suffering from a mental disorder. End of story.
“stop calling it “gayâ€, “
Reminds me of a line spoken by George Kennedy in Clint Eastwood’s “Eiger Sanction” movie-
“He looks like he could change a nine dollar bill with threes.”
I.e., queer.
There’s something to this thesis. While same-sex perversion is expressed in a sexual idiom, it is less about sex — procreation — than it is about rank indulgence and self-gratification. Maybe a more appropriate description would be homocarnality.
Which is not to say that there isn’t a heterosexual {heterocarnal?) equivalent.
What the writer says is true, but it’s almost a fantasy in light of the mass divorce we’ve seen. “Gee, where did all this homo stuff come from?” I’ve contended for a long time that it walked through a door the divorcees dynamited open.
You can’t destroy the home of children and expect Satan to give a pass. All this writer’s talk means nothing without real marital fidelity.
When opposites combine, a new third element emerges that is uniquely itself and yet somehow also part of each. Red and yellow will make orange but red plus red gives no new meaning visually. Same sex removes the artistic/divine element from relationship. The two equations are just not the same product in different flavors it seems but more like 1 plus 1 equals 3, which is magical vs. 1 times 1 equals 1 which is mundane.
you’re too smart for me. always have been :)
i think i get what you’re saying.
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