What Happens when the Gay Rights Movement Influences Laws

The movement to normalize homosexuality has seen one more institution, the U.S. Supreme Court, cave before it. On October 7, the Court refused to uphold the traditional definition of marriage as between a man and a woman, allowing lower court rulings overturning democratically enacted gay “marriage” bans in five states to stand. 

Many have been surprised by the speed with which the homosexual "rights" movement has steamrolled its opposition over the past few years, overturning common sense understandings of marriage, family, and sexual disorders that have been around, well, forever. Philosophy, psychiatry, and higher education in general were the first to capitulate to the gay lobby. Primary and secondary schools in many school districts followed, and are now mainstreaming homosexual relationships and behavior to their captive young audiences. The U.S. military is following orders from the Commander-in-Chief to allow openly homosexual men and women in its ranks. Even the Boy Scouts, whose leadership once demanded that their members be “morally straight,” have started to give way.   

One observer who is not surprised is Robert Reilly, who published a brilliant book earlier this year about the danger to the social contract posed by the modern homosexual rights movement. "Making Gay Okay" is both a practical primer that details each of these homosexual advances and a philosophical treatise explaining why, in his words, “rationalizing homosexual behavior is changing everything.” 

The long march of sexual progressives through America’s institutions began almost a half century ago with an assault on the practice of psychiatry, which then defined homosexuality as a “sexual deviation … toward sexual acts … performed under bizarre circumstances … with objects other than people of the opposite sex.” Reilly documents how Gay Liberation Front (how quaint that phrase sounds now) activists loudly disrupted APA meetings in the early seventies, finally getting their way in 1973, when homosexuality was delisted as a mental illness.

Unearthing new accounts of that effort, Reilly quotes lesbian activist Kay Lahusen as saying that the delisting “was always more of a political decision than a medical decision” and goes on to tell how by1987 the very word “homosexual” ceased to exist as a category. As he notes, “The victory was complete. The disorder had disappeared. No treatment required or welcome.” Psychiatry had been suborned.

In a sign of what was to come, as soon as homosexual activists had erased – at least within the discipline of psychiatry – the stigma associated with their behavior, they went on the offensive, portraying homosexual inclinations as a positive, even desirable, state of mind and homosexual practices as beneficial. On the state level, Reilly points out, these efforts focused on passing laws banning reparative therapy for adolescents. California, for example, in 2012 “prohibits mental health providers … from engaging in sexual reorientation change efforts … with a patient under 18 years of age.”

The homosexual movement claims that its members’ sexual preferences are an immutable characteristic, like race. Reilly defeats this claim by documenting, in copious detail, how many of those who have wished to change their orientation have successfully done so. He asks, “If it were immutable, where has this class been throughout thousands of years of recorded history?”

The undermining of science by the homosexual movement continued as it co-opted the discipline of psychology to its cause. Here the claim, first made by the movement and then repeated by complicit academics, is that same-sex parenting is as successful as parenting done by heterosexual couples. The evidence, as again ably summarized by Reilly, is that there are marked differences in outcomes, with children raised by a father and a mother doing far better than those raised by homosexual couples.

And so it goes with gay "rights" and education, gay "rights" and the Boy Scouts, and gay "rights" in the military. In each case, as Reilly shows, the radical homosexual movements has been successful at making serious inroads –sometimes by executive order, sometimes by infiltrating bureaucracies, sometimes by means of economic pressure – into institutions that were once free of their influence.

But Reilly, a true Renaissance man, is as much of a philosopher as he is a historian, and the most fascinating part of his book for me was his discussion of the spiritual consequences of the advance of the homosexual agenda. Don’t get me wrong: Reilly doesn’t quote scripture. He quotes Socrates, who, among other things, warned that the worst thing is the lie in the soul about what is.

Homosexual behavior is either immoral and deserves to be condemned, or it is moral and deserves to be applauded. It cannot be both.

The homosexual rights movement wants, indeed, demands, nothing less than our full-throated endorsement of their behavior. They demand that we agree that sodomy is a moral good, when it clearly is not.  

The Catholic Church teaching on homosexuality (which Reilly, who relies upon the Natural Law, does not quote) is based “on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered." They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.” (CCC 2357)

Yet American society is now being coerced into the lie that homosexual behavior is so morally admirable that we must publicly endorse and applaud homosexual marriage, and teach schoolchildren that it is morally laudable in the classroom. This, Reilly points out, is an invitation “into the double life of the big lie – to pretend that what is, is not and that what is not, is.” And we must all be required to repeat the lie, in our courts, in our schools, and in the halls of government, so that homosexuals can be propped up in their illusions. What illusion? In the words of Italian law professor Francisco D’Agostino, the “illusion that a more pervasive legalization of their existence can give homosexuals that interior balance whose lack they so clearly suffer.”

Reilly is at pains to point out that he has had good working relationships over the years with any number of colleagues who, he happened to find out, were homosexual. I am sure that, like me – and like the Church of which we are both members – he believes that those “men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies … must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.” (CCC, 2358)

I am sure that this disclaimer will not placate homosexual activists who are angry with Reilly for courageously saying what others will not: That the homosexual movement goes against nature, against science, against marriage, against the common good, and against the best interests of homosexuals themselves.

If you want to know the background of the cultural revolution that is now being carried out in America, read Robert Reilly’s book. Arm yourself with his arguments from science and the natural law. And then speak up.

It will not be Chinese militarism or ISIS terrorism that will bring American down. If it happens, it will be a result of our own unwillingness to defend the one indispensible institution, the one institution that has been the basis of American strength since the beginning: the natural family.

Steven W. Mosheris the President of the Population Research Institute and the author of Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits.