Review of Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior is Changing Everything

Review of Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior is Changing Everything. Robert Reilly. Ignatius Press, 2014.

Robert Reilly has tackled head-on the drastic change in our society ongoing for the past several years; in fact, one could say that he has collided with this issue by exposing the rationale of its leaders in collusion with the current national administration, pushing the “gay” agenda to its present position as being accepted as an alternative normality. Who would have thought a generation ago that such a horror and contradiction to Nature as “gay marriage” would ever become lawful in a society that we all believed was based on Christian principles?

Reilly approaches his touchy subject from the point of view of fundamental views of reality. He says that there are two: One is that things have a Nature (note the capitalization of the word) that is ordered to ends that inhere in their essence and make them what they are. Stated more simply, things have inbuilt purposes. The other view states that things do not have inbuilt purposes and that we can make them what we want them to be according to our wills and desires. This includes humans. The first view is based on the primacy of REASON; the second view is based on the primacy of WILL.

Western philosophy going back to ancient Greece, primarily the thinking of Plato and Aristotle, holds that Nature is rational. There is order in the universe and everything has a purpose. What is, is something – a man, a woman, a human, a monkey, a chicken, etc., created to be that thing and for a particular purpose.

The author holds that the opposite view – the one which turns Nature on its head – results from the thinking of Rousseau who claimed that man is a product of himself, not of the family. To this revolutionary thinker the basic unit of any society is the individual, not the family. The individual can do and be whatever he wills to the detriment of himself, his fellow men and the society in which he lives. In fact, Rousseau encouraged the families of his time to let their children loose in the woods to raise themselves according to their desires. No rules, let nature take its course. We all know that the hideous result of his thinking resulted in the upheaval in France in 1789. We are mistaken if we think that that twisted and wrong philosophy is not still alive and well. Ours is a revolutionary world, and what could be more backwards than “gay” marriage?

This convoluted thinking has manifested itself in Marxism, which makes man “free” with no obligations because the state takes care of his needs. (We know by our study of history that such a state actually enslaves; it does not free.) In today’s world there are thinkers like the whacko Melissa Harris-Perry, an MSNBC-TV commentator, Obama sidekick, and (I am embarrassed to say) part time instructor at my alma mater, Tulane University, who claimed, “We have to break through our kind of private idea that our kids belong to their parents or their families, and recognize that kids belong to their communities.” (Does this remind you of Hillary Clinton’s view that “it takes a village” to raise a child?) This echoes Rousseau’s thinking that it is the common good that counts, not what is objectively right or wrong. Who decides what the common good is?

This philosophy exists in all spheres, music, art, architecture, and the social life of man himself. A striking example of how far this idiotic philosophy takes us is in the “music” of composer John Cage whose most famous “work” is entitled 4’ 23” during which performance he sits silently with his instrument on the stage for exactly that period of time and then gets up and walks off. Anyone falling for this blatant stupidity deserves to have his time wasted so foolishly. These two examples serve as markers for how very turned-upside-down the revolutionary thinking has taken us. The stage has been set by the revisionary culture to make sodomic “marriage” acceptable.

Reilly’s book is very well researched and organized, with copious footnotes and statistics. He is a prolific author who has written on many topics, including music, the theater and religion; so his interests are widespread.

What is the Object of Marriage?

Never in the history of the civilized world has marriage been defined as anything but the joining of a man and a woman in wedlock, either sacramentally, as the Catholic Church teaches, or civilly, by the authority of a representative of a civil entity. That is not to say that the proclivity toward homosexuality is something novel, but it has always been something to hide, something no parents would wish for their child. That the sexes are “opposite” simply means that their anatomical structure is such that together, joined in marriage, their fleshly union has the ability to produce children. This is the generative purpose of the sexual union in marriage. The unitive purpose does what it says: it unites the couple to each other (and only to each other in the bond of matrimony) so that they express their love in such a way that children are the products of this special kind of love. It is logical, natural, and it has worked for thousands of years. So, to say that a male and a male or a female and a female can marry is a contradiction of the laws of Nature.

Often the homosexual spokesmen, including the President, will argue from the point of view of “justice” and “rights” using the argument that it is as unjust to discriminate against them as a class as it would be to discriminate against racial or national categories. A Black person was born and will remain Black all his life; a Mexican person is born and will always have his Mexican ancestry, even if he changes nationality. A “gay” person is born a man or a woman and wants to define himself or herself as the opposite sex at some point, but he or she remains the gender God gave him or her forever. The argument that they are a “class” does not hold. In his book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama had the audacity (pardon the pun) to claim that the Constitution rejected absolute Truth because it could lead to tyranny. Why then did our Founding Fathers claim in the Declaration “We hold these truths to be self-evident…?” Since the President is a moral relativist, Absolute Truth and the Natural Law mean nothing to him.

The real injustice with sodomic “marriage” comes from the fact that children of these couples are denied a real father or a real mother. They grow up with a void in their lives because of it. Mr. Reilly names several children who were raised in such households who felt and knew that something was missing. Imagine a boy being raised by two lesbians; where is his male role model? They are taught to live a lie and perpetrate a fraud, certainly an unjust thing to do to a child.

As an aside, I read recently in a local newspaper the account of two lesbians having chosen to become parents through in vitro fertilization of one of the women. They selected donor #380 (from a catalog?). The company they dealt with for the donor sperm mistakenly sent them a vial from donor #330. Small mistake, no? After all, a 3 and an 8 could easily be mistaken for one another. It so happens that donor #330 was African-American. The ladies are Caucasian. Now they don’t want their two-year-old little child because he is Black! This is a perfect example of the awful injustice to the child.

The Biology of it All

What is amazing in all of this silly “acceptance of our diversity” is that there is never a discussion of the health dangers of the homosexual lifestyle. The very activities these folks engage in are germ-spreading and risky to the health of both “partners.” One would have to read for himself the particulars (which I personally find stomach-turning, blood-curdling and mind-blowing), but it is evident in the statistics that their very unnatural acts lead to shorter lifespans (about 20 years shorter than heterosexuals), due to malignancies peculiar to their practices, an alphabet soup of other serious sexually transmitted diseases not found in the general population, a high rate of drug use — dangerous stuff, like crystal meth, and high suicide rates. Much of this is due not just to their specific activities, but also to the fact that homosexual men, in particular, are unusually promiscuous, some claiming to have had 500 to 1000 “partners” in their lifetime. This is not rare. One John Rechy boasts that he has had encounters with as many as 7,000 men in his life. Indeed, a new and exciting activity has become popular in recent years. Referred to as “bug-chasing,” some men actively seek out partners they know to be infected with HIV or AIDS itself because it makes the quest “more thrilling and dangerous.” Where is the rationality (or even basic intelligence) in that? Yet government entities ignore these dangers and focus on eliminating smoking, Big Macs and soft drinks!

Since they are not by their own admission particularly monogamous, why the clamor for “homosexual (so-called) marriage?” Many activists have admitted that their aim is actually to do away with marriage altogether. Perhaps their intention is to make marriage so meaningless that it disappears?

This, of course, is not love, which is the basis for true marriage — a man and a woman faithful to each other throughout life, the product of their love being their own children. Anonymous sex is absent love; therefore can never be called “marriage.” This condition is obviously disordered and can never be considered normal.

Making the Irrational Moral

The author points out that our rights reside in and derive from the “Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” This is the justification in the Declaration of Independence for our existence as a nation. Yet, Mr. Reilly does not blame the homosexuals themselves for the convoluted thinking that has placed homosexuality on an equal footing with other causes for equal rights for specific groups, such as Blacks and women. He calls it “just another cause celebre that is the logical consequence of the loss of objective reality — a loss that is transforming the right to life into death (abortion), liberty into license, and the pursuit of happiness into hedonism.” These immoralities have been legalized from the Supreme Court down through the lesser courts. They have made what was once criminal into the “new morality.”

Throughout the history of English law, sodomy was a crime. Even as recently as 1986, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the State of Alabama’s law against sodomy by claiming that the “Constitution does not confer a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy.”

Reversing Thousands of Years of Moral Teaching

A total reversal of the perennial understanding of marriage and the laws governing it took place in 2003 with the Lawrence v. Texas ruling overturning a Texas statute forbidding two persons of the same sex to engage in sexual conduct. (Note — “sexual conduct,” not “marriage.”) This decision effectively divorced the law from morality. Using the term “autonomy of self,” Justice Kennedy effectively made each person his own arbiter of the law, thus creating his own moral order. This is judicial activism at its finest (or worst). It was this ruling that let the cat out of the bag with sodomitic relations, just as had been done earlier with contraception and abortion. The author goes into the sad history of both these topics in this chapter “Inventing Morality.”

Today we can see the results of the 2003 ruling in Texas, where almost every day we read of the SCOTUS striking down marriage laws in one state after another. Reilly quotes Saint Irenaeus in his book Against Heresies (A. D. 180): “Thinking against nature, you will become foolish. And if you persist you will fall into insanity.”

Marching Through the Institutions

The above is the title of part two of Reilly’s book. In this section he shows how, one by one, institutions that have previously and perennially been seen from the point of view of Natural Law and basic logic are falling one by one into the twisted thinking of the Rousseauian ideology.

The first to fall was science. Not so long ago homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder. Once seen as a source of objective truth, this particular science has been used to justify and even to promote this behavior. Politically powerful homosexuals enlisted their equally powerful friends to campaign against this designation. This demand was not inspired by scientific inquiry; it was demanded using “storm-trooper tactics” by the activists. In fact, the founders of the militant organization ACT-UP admitted that they created a “truly fascist organization” using tactics they learned by reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf. They struck intently and surgically into whatever institutions they believed stood in their way. The sad and shocking truth is that the psychiatrist responsible for striking the pertinent words from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Dr. John P. Spiegel, president-elect of the APA in 1973 lived a double life. He led a respectable family life with wife, children and grandchildren, all the while taking on homosexual lovers throughout his life and career. It was he who, single-handedly, and spurred on by the boldness of ACT-UP, enabled the homosexual agenda to invade medical science by removing the phrase that called it a disordered condition. Amazing. By 1975, both the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association declared that “being gay is as healthy as being straight.” Science by fiat; no research necessary!

Other Categories Invaded by the Homosexual Agenda

The author discusses the same tactics used to invade other institutions basic to the functioning of our country, primarily education with its LGBT “studies.” Teaching about “two mommies” and “two daddies” is part of the elementary school curriculum in many public schools. The military is vital to the defense of the nation. We all remember President Clinton’s “Don’t ask; don’t tell” policy. That is a thing of the past with openly homosexual men and women serving together. What will this do to the morale of the “straights?” Others include the Boy Scout fiasco, same-sex parenting, and even our nation’s foreign policy. Homosexuals are in hundreds of our embassies overseas, an insult to Moslem and Christian countries. They actually fly the rainbow flag and “celebrate gay pride days” in the face of their host countries. Thank you, Mr. Obama, for exporting depravity.

To quote Mr. Reilly again, “The United States government has officially embraced this culture in its foreign policy. The light from the City on the Hill is casting a very dark shadow.”

Sadly and frighteningly, Robert Reilly’s conclusion to this twisted view of the way things should really be is that this total breakdown in morals will be the ruin of our country. With no traditional values based on the Natural Law, sex has taken over — first contraception, then no-fault divorce, then abortion, and now the capstone of homosexual “marriage.” “The moral convictions underlying our public order have been undermined to the point of near collapse.” A page or two later, he shortens this thought into a little zinger: “Once sex was detached from diapers, the rest became more or less inevitable.” Those Americans following the Natural Law and their own religious and moral convictions are being penalized to accommodate the “new” thinking; this is both illogical and unconstitutional.

Statistics

The Appendix of the book is called “Disease and Mortality.” In it the author lists several pages of scary statistics pertaining to homosexuals and their unsanitary practices, while pointing out that they actually affect the whole of society. These statistics are biological and medical, and I cannot go into them in these pages. Making Gay Okay is well worth the read if you care about someone with this disorder and if you have concerns for the future of our country. Its moral collapse is upon us.