Meanwhile, back in America, the Little Sisters of the Poor were preparing their legal briefs. The Roman Catholic order of nuns first came to America in 1868 and were welcomed in every city they entered.They now run about 30 homes for the needy across the country. They have, quite cruelly, been told they must comply with the ObamaCare mandate that all insurance coverage include contraceptives, sterilization procedures, morning-after pills. If they don't -- and of course they can't, being Catholic, and nuns -- they will face ruinous fines. The Supreme Court kindly granted them a temporary stay, but their case soon goes to court. The Justice Department brief, which reads like it was written by someone who just saw "Philomena," suggests the nuns are being ignorant and balky, all they have to do is sign a little, meaningless form and the problem will go away. The sisters don't see the form as meaningless; they know it's not. And so they fight, in a suit along with almost 500 Catholic nonprofit groups.
Freedom of Worship, 1943, Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), National Archives at College Park Everyone who says that would never have happened in the past is correct. It never, ever would have under normal American political leadership, Republican or Democratic. No one would've defied religious liberty like this.
The president has taken to saying he isn't ideological but this mandate -- his mandate -- is purely ideological.
It also is a violation of traditional civic courtesy, sympathy and spaciousness. The state doesn't tell serious religious groups to do it their way or they'll be ruined. You don't make the Little Sisters bow down to you.
This is the great political failure of progressivism: They always go too far. They always try to rub your face in it.
Peggy Noonan, "Meanwhile, Back in America..." The Wall Street Journal, February 1-2, 2014, A13
To the extent anyone is offering a good-faith criticism, it seems to apply to the narrow exceptions of sole proprietors in the wedding industry, such as florists, bakers, photographers and singers. Our view is that their speech and conduct is protected by the First Amendment, but do liberals really now believe that the very few vendors who object to working at same-sex weddings should be forced to participate in what they believe to be a moral wrong?
...Fining or otherwise coercing any small number of private citizens -- who aren't doing anyone real harm but entertain politically unacceptable thought -- is thuggish stuff.
"Liberal Intolerance, Round II," The Wall Street Journal, April 4-5, 2015, A12
καὶ ὃς ἂν κοιμηθῇ μετὰ ἄρσενος κοίτην γυναικός,
βδέλυγμα ἐποίησαν ἀμφότεροι· θανάτῳ θανατούσθωσαν,
ἔνοχοί εἰσιν.qui dormierit cum masculo coitu femineo
uterque operati sunt nefas morte moriantur
sit sanguis eorum super eos.If a man also lie with a male, as he lieth with a woman,
both of them have committed an abomination:
they shall surely be put to death;
their blood shall be upon them.Leviticus 20:13, male & female.
In the United States in 2014, people of religion and conscience are already facing the equivalent of a totalitarian government which will require them to adjure their faith (even as the Obama Administration seeks to "normalize" relations with Communist Cuba, under terms agreeable to the Castro dictatorship).
Where the public may have the impression that "gay rights" just means "live and let live" -- even while majorities in many places, including California, voted not to allow "gay marriage"; popular expressions now overturned by federal judges -- now gay rights, and the newly discovered civil right of gay marriage, mean taking Christians and rubbing their faces in practices that they consider to be immoral and repugnant. The purpose appears to be, not persuasion, but humiliation -- or extortion. This will not have the desired effect, and one is tempted to think that the backlash against homosexuality in Islām, Russia, and Africa may be a consequence.
At the very least, it is going to be time for civil disobedience, as everyone must ask whether they will serve God or Mammon [Matthew 6:24] and be obedient to God or to the Leviathan, which is a thing of Satan. A call for martyrdom may soon not be out of the question.
Ἐγκλινοβάραγγος (Enklinobarangus) [note]
In the Corona Virus epidemic of 2020, Democrat authorities in many American communities have been releasing criminals from prison and arresting Christians, having prohibited people from attending church. This is heaven for them. They have always wanted to do this anyway.
Τηλεπατητικός (Telepateticus)
ἄνδρες Ἀθηναῖοι, ἀσπάζομαι μὲν καὶ φιλῶ,
πείσομαι δὲ μᾶλλον τῷ θεῷ ἢ ὑμῖν.
Men of Athens, I am grateful and I am your friend,
but I will obey the god rather than you.Socrates, Plato's Apology of Socrates, 29d
Besides prejudice and discrimination because of ethnicity or race there is also discrimination because of religious beliefs. Much traditional discrimination against women and perhaps most discrimination against homosexuals is not necessarily predicated on beliefs about people's abilities or characteristics but on religious beliefs about the proper roles of the sexes and about the proper forms of sexual behavior. People may be becoming increasingly offended by the notion of separate roles in life for the sexes, and it has become quite common for gay rights advocates to bluntly call people who disapprove of homosexuality "bigots"; but the principle in these issues is different from those concerning ethnic stereotypes. The issue is often not one of matters of fact but of traditional moral beliefs about sex, usually based on religious moral commandments. The irony of recent, politically correct discourse is that strident "progressive" statements about gender roles or homosexuality often go with a reluctance to criticize Islām, or even accusations that criticism of Islām is the "hate speech" of "Islamophobia," even as attitudes and practices in conservative or fundamentalist Islām concerning gender roles or homosexuality may be harsh to ferocious.
Homosexuality (at least for males) is clearly and strongly prohibited by Leviticus 18:22, which says "Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is an abomination" (or "an outrage," "detestable," "loathsome" -- 
, tôʿēbhâh, from the verb 
, tiʿēbh, to loathe). The seriousness of the offense is later driven home at Leviticus 20:13 (quoted above), where it is ordered that the offending parties are to be put to death.
For some reason, I was long under the impression that Classical Islām was less worried about homosexuality than the Bible and that there is nothing in the Qurʾān itself comparable to Leviticus 18:22 or 12:13. But it turns out that I was wrong. Homosexuality is condemned in pretty explicit terms in the Qurʾān, as in the epigraph above, although a penalty does not seem to be mandated. Islāmic Law, based on the traditions of the Four Orthodox Schools, with some variations, condemns homosexuals to death, and this is enforced is several modern Muslim states -- homosexuals are currently hanged in Iran, with death also recommended by Islāmic jurists in Europe and elsewhere. While all of that is mainstream Islām, modern radical Islām has exhibited fierce intolerance of homosexuality. Meanwhile, all traditionalistic Islām has strongly endorsed public separation for the sexes, as well as concealment of the female figure, up to and including the face.
Some now say that it is merely an "interpretation" of Leviticus 18:22 to say that it condemns homosexuality, since to "lie with a man as one lies with a woman" is an ambiguous euphemism. However, if one is to be stoned to death for doing this, it must be pretty serious, and it is mysterious what other such grave offense this could be referring to.
While all these strictures may be regarded as remnants of archaic societies, there are plenty of Jews, Moslems, and Christians who take them at face value as direct and unavoidable commands from God, for which they will be called to account hereafter. For all we know, they might be right; and certainly no one accuses Jews or Moslems of being bigots because they think they are commanded by God not to eat pork [note].
An example of this involved radio personality Dr. Laura Schlessinger, whose planned television show some years ago generated some protest. Curiously, "Dr. Laura" changed her mind about homosexuality. I personally heard her say on the radio years ago that she didn't believe that God would give people homosexual desires without allowing them to act on them. I had heard that argument already. It is not a very good argument, since it could as easily be said that God would not give pedophiles a desire for children without allowing them to act on it [note]. Dr. Laura herself at some point evidently thought better of this, since her position now is strictly one of Biblical morality. This is what many gay political activists cannot accept. Even if Dr. Laura is willing to leave them alone to live whatever peaceful life they want, they now simply do not want to be judged as immoral -- and they attack this as "hate speech" that promotes gay-bashing violence.
Religious rules about diet or sexual behavior are often interpreted, not as necessarily accomplishing practical goods in life, but purely as signs of obedience to God, or as fulfilling a purpose for us that God has set beyond our comprehension. It is not unreasonable that abstention from homosexual or other sexual practices or separate spheres in life for men and women may be adopted purely as signs of obedience to God. Many aspects of such religious commands, of course, like forcing women, or anyone, into certain ways of life, or like putting homosexuals to death, violate the moral law as recognized here.
We therefore cannot have a general respect for all traditional or religious moral principles. Our question about these principles must be instead where we draw the line between what we must forbid as a matter of justice in public life and what we must respect as a matter of private choice as religious individuals govern their own affairs according to their beliefs. The answer is simple enough: Believers can adopt their religious rules, or any rules, for themselves if they wish, as matters of individual liberty and voluntary association; but if they try to impose their rules by force on us or others (including their own coreligionists, or their children [note]), we have every right to stop them; but if it is just that we don't like the way they live life because of these rules, we simply don't have to associate with them.
The problem for us arises now where believing employers, or landlords, might not wish to employ, or rent to, those who evidently transgress their religious laws. From the Civil Rights Act of 1964 women have been included in anti-discrimination legislation, and homosexuals are now commonly included also (while paradoxically several States still outlaw homosexual and other "unnatural" sexual acts [no longer; the Supreme Court has struck down all these laws]). Many believe that the purpose of such laws is actually to assault religion, both by forcing believers to associate against the principles of their traditional sexual roles and by forcing them to accept homosexuals and associate with them as morally no different from anyone else. In a sense, they are right that their religion is being assaulted, since the laws do not allow them their proper liberties of association in the "ordinary commercial transactions" that the Supreme Court now regards as government business. The idea that people have a right not to be discriminated against by private individuals in private and voluntary transactions involves a fundamental and extremely dangerous confusion about the very nature of civil rights.
The moral law as presented here forbids both the judicial prohibition of mere sexual acts between competent (usually meaning, in this context, adult) persons and any attempt to abridge freedom of association by forcing people to accept homosexuality, or anything else, that may offend their private moral beliefs, whether religious or otherwise. When it comes to employment, we may feel certain that discrimination against women or homosexuals on religious grounds is deeply irrational, even offensive to our sense of the good (as a hortative), but it is, after all, the employers who pay the cost of that discrimination -- and they may be quite willing to pay it for the sake of obedience to God, even as Kosher eating or Moslem prayer imposes costs that seem burdensome to most non-Jews or non-Moslems. If we do not believe that somebody should be forced to work for a certain employer against their will, the same freedom of association allows that no employer should be forced to employ a certain person against their will. And if the employer happens to believe the Biblical command, "Everyone who does any of these detestable things -- such persons must be cut off from their people" (Leviticus 18:29), then it is a great moral wrong to force that employer to associate with someone in a way that will cause a breach of that command, when it does not involve any use of coercion, force, or fraud against anyone else.
An extreme example of the desire to judicially limit freedom of association based on religion, and to thereby restrict the free practice of religion, may be found in the following story:
Associated Press [Los Angeles Daily News, Saturday, February 11, 1995]:PHILADELPHIA -- Three large placards are posted on a tiny church in a rundown neighborhood. One says "All are Welcome," but a second, smaller one, adds that only those who have tested negative for the AIDS virus are welcome.
Bishop Nathan Giddings, leader of the 38-member Old Ship of Zion, said that people with AIDS aren't welcome in his congregation because "they suffer from a plague." Homosexuals aren't welcome either "because they have abandoned the way of the Lord."
Advocates fighting AIDS discrimination said they're troubled by the policy and are looking into possible remedies.
"They are causing a lot of harm with their signs," said Nan Feyler, executive direction of the Philadelphia-based AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania. "To have that kind of sentiment that's vilifying to people, especially in that neighborhood, it runs against the message we're trying to send."
However, Feyler said that because of the separation between church and state, Giddings' congregation in North Philadelphia does not fall under federal and state laws barring discrimination against people with the disease.
But Kevin Vaughan, executive direction of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, believes the church could be held accountable if it could be proved that Giddings excluded anyone with AIDS or HIV, which by laws is considered a disability. Vaughan said his group sent a letter to Giddings after reading about the church in Monday's Philadelphia Daily News.
Clearly, the "Old Ship of Zion" congregation, besides being mindful the of Biblical prohibition of homosexuality above, is also thinking of the passages requiring the isolation from the community of those with a "plague":
(Leviticus 13)
Leviticus 13:44: ἄνθρωπος λεπρός ἐστι· μιάνσει μιανεῖ αὐτὸν ὁ ἱερεύς, ἐν τῇ κεφαλῇ αὐτοῦ ἡ ἁφὴ αὐτοῦ. (45) Καὶ ὁ λεπρὸς ἐν ᾧ ἐστιν ἡ ἁφή, τὰ ἱμάτια αὐτοῦ ἔστω παραλελυμένα καὶ ἡ κεφαλὴ αὐτοῦ ἀκάλυπτος, καὶ περὶ τὸ στόμα αὐτοῦ περιβαλέσθω, καὶ ἀκάθαρτος κεκλήσεται· (46) πάσας τὰς ἡμέρας, ὅσας ἐὰν ᾖ ἐπ᾽ αὐτοῦ ἡ ἁφή, ακάθαρτος ὢν ἀκάθαρτος ἔσται, κεχωρισμένος καθήσεται, ἔξω τῆς παρεμβολῆς αὐτοῦ ἔσται ἡ διατριβή.
Leviticus 13:44: Quicumque ergo maculatus fuerit lepra, et separatus est ad arbitrium sacerdotis, (45) habebit vestimenta dissuta, caput nudum, os veste contectum, contaminatum ac sordidum se clamabit. (46) Omni tempore quo leprosus est et inmundus, solus habitabit extra castra.
Leviticus 13:44: He is a leprous man, he is unclean; the priest shall pronounce him utterly unclean; his plague is in his head. (45) And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, defiled and unclean. (46) All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.
Whether we approve of this or not, there is no doubt that Reverend Giddings takes his Old Testament seriously. Indeed, when the transmission of AIDS is largely associated with homosexual sex acts, Giddings' rejection of those with this "plague" more clearly relates to the rest of his moral convictions than did the original Biblical injunction, since it is hard to imagine what lepers, etc. could have done to have brought their disease upon themselves. Homosexual acts, however, especially the anal sex, often promiscuous, through which AIDS is most easily transmitted, qualify as "unclean" in both ancient ritual and modern hygenic senses. AIDS political activists hate to admit that this behavior was ever even imprudent, much less immoral.
The most troubling thing about the Associated Press story, on the other hand, is not Reverend Giddings' archaic religious attitude but that it is not "the separation between church and state" that enables this congregation to accept the members whom they wish: It is the separation between government and private life, or between political society and civil society, a much more fundamental, general, and important separation than that between church and state. Anti-discrimination laws only apply to business and commerce because of New Deal court decisions that, in effect, make businesses into branches of the government. This has already been applied to private clubs, which have been denied liquor licenses to force them to accept the kind of membership (women, minorities, etc.) that politicians and "civil rights" lawyers think they should have. If churches are to be branches of the government also, then there is certainly no form of private association that will truly be free of government regulation and control. Prosecuting people for practicing discrimination in friendships, dating, and marriage could not be far behind, as in politically correct Madison, Wisconsin, a woman has already been found guilty of practicing "homophobic" discrimination by refusing to accept a Lesbian woman who answered her advertisement for a roommate. Advertising for a roommate, it seems, means that, as part of business and commerce, one no longer has freedom of association in chosing the roommate.
Several cases in this regard have concerned the Boy Scouts of America, which requires scouts to profess a belief in God and will not accept openly homosexual scoutmasters. On March 23, 1998, two such cases were decided by the California Supreme Court, which held that the Boy Scouts were not businesses and so were not covered by the California Unruh "civil rights" law. The majority opinion was that, "The Boy Scouts is an expressive social organization whose primary function is the inculcation of values in its youth members." The plaintiffs had argued that the Boy Scouts were businesses "because the group has retail shops and licenses the use of its insignia" (Los Angeles Times, March 24, 1998). The Court has previously held that a private country club and a "nonprofit boys' club" were businesses. Since most churches have some form of business dealings, like retail shops, a general ruling that this makes such organizations businesses could be used to forbid religions to "discriminate" against those who do not profess their doctrinal or moral teachings.
The reaction of the plaintiffs and some politicians is instructive. One of the atheist twin boys in one suit said, "The Scouts taught us to stand up for what we believe in, no matter what people say, but I guess it was just a bunch of words to them." This seems to mean that the Scouts themselves cannot stand for anything, since they should, presumably, tolerate anything that this boy happens to believe. Indeed, he should stand up for anything he believes worthy, but there are plenty of other organizations, atheistic or "humanistic," where he will not be denying the principles upon which the organization was founded. The homosexual would-be scoutmaster, likewise said that, "What they have done is create a regulation that now makes it necessary for people to lie." Necessary for them to lie to do what? Belong to an organization with traditional religious moral standards? Why would this gentleman want to belong to such an organization in the first place? What he wants, indeed, is to force other people by law to stop morally condemning him.
One Justice of the Court, Stanley Mosk, although concurring with the opinion on legal grounds, nevertheless expressed his opinion that the plaintiffs were worthy of being Scouts and that, "Regrettably, the situation will remain such until the law changes." In other words, Justice Mosk thinks it "regrettable" that a private organization should be able to exercise its own moral discretion. "There oughta be a law," was a sentiment echoed by some legislators, though they did not think it politically possible to pass such a law.
On August 5, 1999, the New Jersey Supreme Court, upholding a lower New Jersey court, unanimously decided that the Boy Scouts there violated a "public accommodations law" by excluding homosexuals. The opinions of the justices were that the disapproval of the Boy Scouts was mere "bigotry" and that "social science" has proven that homosexuality is not "immoral" because homosexuals can "contribute responsibly and positively to society." The justices do no seem to have heard of the principle that liberty allows people to do things for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reasons. Nor do they seem to understand that many people get their morality from the Bible. Whatever "social science" may or may not have done, its conclusions are not relevent to the legal issue. Clearly, the New Jersey justices are motivated by a belief that people should simply not be allowed, in any area of life, to "discriminate" on the basis of traditional religious beliefs or morality.
The New Jersey case went to the United States Supreme Court, which, although vulnerable to such dishonesty, is certainly no more radical than the Calfornia Supreme Court, and much less so than the New Jersey. On June 28, 2000, the Court overturned the New Jersey ruling. Only five Justices, however, upheld the right of private and voluntary association. The minority Justices were either seized with a sudden, and uncharacteristic, Tenth Amendment scruple, or agreed with the New Jersey holding that unfounded prejudices or a "habitual way of thinking" cannot be allowed to enjoy First Amendment protection.
Jon Davidson, an attorney for the "Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund," says, of the California case in the Los Angeles Times story, that, "Scouting has just cut themselves off from a supply of talented leaders by taking this view." So what? Don't Jewish organizations cut themselves off from talented Christians and Moslems? What business is it of Mr. Davidson (or the New Jersey Supreme Court) what principle a private organization uses as the basis of its association? The problem is that Mr. Davidson has undertaken a totalitarian project to force involuntary associations on people who hold religious and moral beliefs that he doesn't like. He and his cause have no more right to do that than the religious would have to stone him to death, as the Bible requires, for his practices. Both sides, instead, must observe the "live and let live" principles of voluntary association. But "gay rights" activists, who once merely wanted to be left alone to live their lives, now frequently use politics and the law to force their views and practices on others.
Similar issues occur in a decision of a panel of the United States 9th Circuit Court of Appeal on January 14, 1999 (reported in the Los Angeles Times on Friday, January 15, 1999). In a 2 to 1 ruling on a case from Alaska, the Court upheld the right of landlords to practice "discrimination" by refusing to rent to tenants, like unmarried couples, whose practices violate the landlords' religious beliefs. The decision overruled both the Alaska and the California Supreme Courts. The Court held that the right to free exercise of religion under the First Amendment outweighed other considerations. The contrary argument, from the California Supreme Court and from Paula Haley, the "executive director" of the oddly named "Alaska State Commission of Human Rights," is that nobody has the right to exercise their religious beliefs in economic transactions. In other words, when people try to make a living, they can be forced by the state to do so by violating their religious beliefs. This is a very bizarre conception of "human rights." It was also argued that allowing the landlords to apply their religious principles would involve a forbidden "establishment of religion" -- which seems to mean that if the state does not prohibit the application of religious principles in private transactions, this creates an established religion. In those terms, the only way to avoid establishing a religion would be to prohibit religious practice altogether -- which is likely to be the agenda of those who don't want to be "discriminated" against by any religious judgments in any context.
Although this is the correct finding, it is for the wrong reason. The discretion of the landlords is not a First Amendment issue but a Fifth Amendment issue. As in the case of the Philadelphia Church above, private association is not just protected by freedom of religion but more fundamentally by privacy and private property rights. Thus, the right of the landlords to rent to whom they please is protected by the "Takings" clause of the Fifth Amendment, "nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." Thus, landlords might be paid to rent to people they do not want to rent to, but they cannot simply be required to do so. The laws in question about renting involve unconstitutional "takings" of private property rights.
This decision is certain to be appealed to full 9th Circuit Court and then to the Supreme Court. Although the Supreme Court has somewhat expanded protections against "takings," it is unlikely that they would restore property rights so completely in a case like this. Instead, there is an excellent chance that the full 9th Circuit Court and even the Supreme Court will reverse the decision and hold, not just that the property can be "taken" for the public purpose of non-discrimination (a fully accepted practice at this point), but that religious scruples cannot be exercised in economic transactions. That is more consistent with the historic attack on privacy, private property, and freedom that really has continued with great regularity.
A major issue of the 2012 political season was the decision by the Obama Administration that some Catholic institutions, like schools and hospitals, whose purpose was not sufficiently or purely religious, would be required to provide birth control in the medical insurance they offered their employees. Since birth control is contrary to Catholic moral teaching, and it would also encompass the "morning after pill," which is an abortifacient, i.e. it induces an abortion, which is contrary to the moral convictions, not just of Catholics, of most conservative Christians and Orthodox Jews, this led to some controversy. Catholic leaders felt betrayed by the Administation, which had previously assured them, sometimes personally by the President, of its sympathy and sensitivity to Catholic scruples.
Congressman Darryll Issa (R-CA -- an Arab American; The Democrats arranged a press conference for Fluke to give her testimony, but they set it up, with the appropriate tables and chairs, to make it look like Congressional testimony. In the course of her statement, which was essentially criticism of Catholic doctrine and the assertion of a right to free medical care, she claimed that birth control had cost her in excess of $3,000 a year. She said that his imposed a financial hardship on 40% of the Law School's female students, many of whom were forced to go without contraception.
One immediate response to this was incredulity. No one believed that contraception, whether through birth control pills or prophylactics, could cost anything remotely like what Fluke said. And if it involved prophylactics, how often would one need to have sex to run up such a bill? What had Fluke been doing? And, of course, if she was using prophylactics, why did she need to be the one to pay for them?
The Democrats were immediately indignant that Fluke was being accused of promiscuity, prostitution, or something. And they decided that criticism of her was part of a general Republican, Catholic, and Conservative "war on women." Not only was Fluke being smeared, but if mandated health insurance does not cover birth control, we were told, this was the hateful oppression of women by taking away their right to birth control. Of course, interviews with "women's reproductive rights" advocates and activists, as in Fluke's testimony, almost always revealed their real feelings and complaints, which were simply hostility for the Catholic Church and its moral teachings.
The principles involved in all this warrant careful examination. One is the confusion in popular discourse about the meaning of insurance. Since insurance is about pooling risk, where most of the insured will actually not return with a claim, it is a mistake to call something "insurance" where there is not risk, but certainty. Birth control, which may be used by most adult women, is something in which there is certainty, not risk, which means that the discount of cost made possible by true insurance is vanishingly small -- i.e. what you pay in health insurance will closely match the simple retail cost of what is "insured."
What today is called "health insurance" is largely no more than a pre-paid contract for things, like routine doctor's visits, where there is more certainty than risk. Insurance companies, like Blue Cross, originally promoted this principle so that they could get paid in advance for medical care and thus secure an income stream and remove some risk from their business, giving them an income and the use of money that otherwise might only come to them later. There is actually little benefit in this to the patient, except the slight discount that the insurance company would pay for the use of the patient's money between payment and claim. Real insurance would be for things about which there is real risk, namely disease or injury. However, other distortions are introduced -- for instance, deals with drug companies for deeply discounted drug prescriptions, where the retail price of a drug may be hundreds of dollars but the price under "insurance" less than ten dollars. The economics of this situation warrants examination in its own right.
To the Left now, "insurance" means that all medical needs in perpetuity must be met, covered by only nominal payments on the part of the patient, or taxes on others. It is a "public good," defrayed by "society" at large. Thus, Sandra Fluke could not admit that birth control might be a trivial expense, or something that was not an appropriate matter of health insurance in the first place. Even the use of birth control medications for medical reasons, as for menstrual pain, if this would not be covered either by Catholic institutions, only raises the question why an employer or school is involved in health insurance in the first place. The only reason, as it happens, is that health insurance is taxed at lower rates as "benefits," while privately purchased health insurance does not received the same tax consideration. So all this is a function of the tax code, not of any intrinsic property of health care. Any real debate about those issues would only expose the socialist agenda of the Left, in which "rights" to health care, jobs, housing, vacations, pensions, etc. translates into the obligation of the government and "society," meaning those productive of taxes, to pay for them. The dismal record of Euro-socialism, not to mention the fate of the Soviet Union, although increasingly dire and evident to anyone keeping track of recent events, is something to which the American Left is blind with grim and stubborn determination. It can get political traction only with heated and deceptive rhetoric like the "war on women."
Underlying political and moral principles of this debate are even more significant. One is the tendency of politics in modern democracies to promise the removal of the consequences of one's actions. Thus, if bad things happen to you because of your own imprudence, politicians can made that go away. The Welfare State will provide an income, medical care, etc., even if your behavior had made obtaining a job, or preserving your health, unlikely. After all, the imprudent, the lazy, the wreckless, the violent, the self-destructive, etc., are truly merely unlucky, by having been born with the wrong character or in the wrong circumstances. John Rawls would say that "fairness" requires social arrangements that would satisfy anyone who could not predict, behind a "veil of ignorance," what kinds of personal or cultural endowments they would be born into. Thus, given the possibility that we might be born Ethiopian peasants, we would endorse the idea that wealthy and successful countries should pay enough to lift the Ethiopians to an equal level of welfare.
The moral hazard of this is palpable. If anyone can demand equal welfare regardless of their own actions, then there is no reason why anyone should bother to be prudent in the first place. All incentive for living a conscientious and responsible life is removed. Even more, the promise of politicans to remove the disabilities of imprudence is usually accompanied by a positive denigration or condemnation of the prudent. After all, we don't want the imprudent to feel bad in comparison to the prudent. So the natural rewards of prudence must be characterized as the result of "privilege," unfair advantage, exploitation, or theft. If we add a Cargo Cult economics into the mix, then the prudent have no more claim on wealth, and no more credit for its production, than anyone else. The hard working Korean who expects to enjoy the fruits of his labor is at least selfish, and at worst a criminal -- in short, a Marxist class enemy. Thus, the moral hazard works inward from both ends, reward the imprudent and to insult, demean, and condemn the prudent. The logical result of this is a society of resentment, envy, and poverty, in which all productive efforts and instincts are destroyed by relentless political and legal attack, such as we see developing most fully in Greece at the moment (Spring 2013), with France and California not far behind.
In relation to the "reproductive justice" of people like Sandra Fluke, the principle is that no sexual behavior is bad or should have adverse consequences. Thus, no one is at fault for diseases spread by promiscuity; and no one (except men) should be troubled by unwanted pregnancies, which a woman ought to be able to terminate at any time for any reason, perhaps even after birth. But there is another prinicple involved even apart from the erasure of the consequences of actions. The Left does not like the distinction between postive and negative rights. Thus if I have a right to free speech, or a right to any sexual behavior between consenting adults, I also have a positive right that imposes a duty on others, not only to pay for the mitigation of any adverse consequences of all of this, but to subsidize my behaviors in the first place. Thus, if you do not pay for the way I wish to exercize my free speech, my political activities, or my sex life, you are denying me my rights altogether. In other words, negative rights are worthless unless I have a positive right to make you pay for their exercise. Of course, this is one way that Marxists could dismiss the negative rights of "bourgeois democracy" and substitute a totalitarian police state where everyone, in principle, had a positive right to all goods and benefits. Of course, we cannot then allow just anyone to exercise all those old bourgeois rights, like free speech, smoking, firearms ownership, or political opposition. That's all fascism, which is beyond the pale. Class, race, and gender enemies are people whose rights, wishes, freedom, and even existence need not be respected.
In the face of the socialist sophistry, vicious antipathy to religion, moral perversity, and closet (or open) Marxism of Democrats, "progressives," and other Lefists, the Republican Party rose in resolution, power, and fury... No, just kidding. It was more like the French at the Maginot Line. To the "war on women," A war on religion and conscience is evident in other recent events. At Florida Atlantic University, a student, Ryan Rotela, was suspended for refusing to participate in a class assignment for an "Intercultural Communications" class. He was instructed to write "Jesus" on a piece of paper, place it on the floor, and step on it. In Edo Period Japan, something of the sort was required of the Japanese to demonstrate that they were not Christians. Otherwise they might be tortured to death. Fortunately without the dangers of such sanctions, yet, Mr. Rotela refused to step on the name of Jesus. But sanctions there were, until word of the incident got out. Then it turned out that the professor who oversaw the class, Dr. Deandre Poole, was actually unaffiliated with the University but happened to be the chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party. Why he was doing this, or why the University thought they could get away with it, remains unclear. There is a operative priniciple, however, which is that insulting and offending Christians in public life is perfectly acceptable, even while anything offensive to, say, Islām is already regarded by the elite as the "hate crime" of "Islamophobia." Stuff like this has been going on for years, and there have even been cases where schools have told children that they were not allowed to pray before their meals, because, of course, prayer is not allowed in school. While the courts have, so far, upheld the right of students to pray on their own time; the mentality demonstrated by these incidents is alarming and chilling. It is hard to understand how anyone with half a brain could try and implement such policies, but in fact one will never be disappointed in underestimating the intelligence, or overestimating the viciousness, of such people.
Even attacks on Catholic morality more direct than that of Sandra Fluke are to be seen. At George Washington University, some homosexual students requested of the University that Father Greg Shaffer of the Newman Center "be removed for creating an environment hostile to gays." Father Schaffer, it seems, had condemned homosexual acts as "unnatural and immoral" and had counseled gay students to remain celibate. It was possible that the "Office for Diversity and Inclusion" would not regard such diverse sentiments, teachings, and advice as something that the "diversity and inclusion" of the University would want to "include" on its campus. One wonders if similar advice from Islāmic ʿulamā' would pose a similar problem. Nevertheless, despite the outrageous nature of the request, the principle involved again warrants careful examination. The forces of totalitarian political correctness want religious objections to homosexuality to be simply silenced. But "progressive" lack of undertanding of, or antipathy to, free speech and religious conscience is not something idiosyncratic or isolated. It is a trend -- promoted by prestigious academics and, even worse, law professors. While the courts have had little patience with such things to date, there is no difficulty in imaging that the "progessive" views of the increasingly intolerant cultural, political, and legal elite will soon work their way into a significant presence, if not dominance, in the courts. It is not difficult to see a dark night of tyranny lying ahead.
לִפְנֵי־שֶׁבֶר גָּאוֺן וְלִפְנֵי כִשָּׁלֹון גֹּבַהּ רוּחַ׃ πρὸ συντριβῆς ἡγεῖται ὕβρις,
πρὸ δὲ πτώματος κακοφροσύνη.
Contritionem praecedit superbia, et ante ruinam exaltatur spiritus.
Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs 16:18
הַכָּרַת פְּנֵיהֶם עָנְתָה בָּם וְחַטָּאתָם כִּסְדֹם
הִגִּידוּ לֹא כִחֵדוּ אוֺי
לְנַפְשָׁם כִּי־ גָמְלָוּ לָהֶם רָעָה׃ καὶ ἡ αἰσχύνη τοῦ προσώπου αὐτῶν ἀντέστη αὐτοῖς·
Agnitio vultus eorum respondit eis; The look on their countenance witnesses against them, Isaiah 3:9
SENATOR MARSHA BLACKBURN: “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?”...
JUDGE KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: “No, I can’t.”
BLACKBORN: “You can’t?”
JACKSON: “Not in this context -- I’m not a biologist.”
Senate Hearing on Jackson's nomination to the Supreme Court, March 22, 2022; but Jackson made a mistake. In political correctness, "gender" is unrelated to biology, and so asking a biologist to define "woman" would be irrelevant. A "woman" is whoever says they are a "woman." Theoretical treatments of homsexuality and "gender identity" can be addressed, at least, at three different levels:
Of course, that is not where things stand in terms of present politics. There are people who want to take children, even very young children (as young as 4, or even 2, or at birth), and persuade them that they have a different "gender identity" than that "assigned" at birth. This leads, not just to strong drugs to "block" puberty, and the influsions of hormones from the "opposite gender," but to actual surgery to alter or remove primary or secondary sex characteristics from children and adolescents. In other words: castration, mastectomy, etc.
This is morally repugnant and, for doctors, in violation of the Hypocratic Oath. It involves the mutilation of healthy bodies and the administraton of drugs for "off label," unapproved, and mostly unresearched purposes, for essentially ideological reasons, backed up by flimsy pseudo-science. Indeed, if children are neutered before puberty, which seems to be the ideal, they may never experience sexual climax, let alone anything like a normal sex life. And whatever is done, the child will usually be sterile, something that a child might not be able to even understand. The contempt of some activists for "breeders" and fertility may reveal the motivation for the whole business.
Beyond that, there is the preposterous claim that persons simply deciding that they are the opposite sex actually are the opposite sex, for all practical and legal purposes. Apart from the absurdity of the "men can have babies" slogan, and the dehumanization of women as "birthing persons" or "menstruating persons," this has led to (biologically male) rapists being placed in women's prisons, where they proceed to have intercourse with female prisoners, getting them pregnant, or even to continue their career of crime by raping them. This has led to embarrassing scandals for the ideologues -- those who have the moral maturity (not many) to be embarrassed.
"Gender," however, is a grammatical term; and even English has four genders: masculine, feminine, neuter, and common -- although this really only survives among pronouns. The remnant in English is of what even now are extensive gender systems in, say, French or German. Gender in Arabic, of course, is protected by the political immunity of ʾIslām from criticism. Other languages have many genders. For instance, Swahili has 18 "noun classes," which traditionally had been called "genders," until, I suppose, someone decided that this was too confusing.
As with rapists, males have been allowed to participate in women's athletics, sometimes with minimal hormone therapy, despite having larger body size and strength, having undergone male puberty, and frequently without any surgery, which means that women are confronted with male genitals in the women's private areas, rest rooms and locker rooms. Women who have objected to this have simply been vilified in the media -- even though sometimes the "trans-women" appearing in women's locker rooms have turned out to be registered sex offenders, who claim to be "women" just so that they can expose themselves to women and girls. This abuse is actually protected by law in California, where the lunatics have been running the asylum for a long time, if not elsewhere.
Thus, the "gender identity" movement results in discrimination, and sometimes actual violence, against women, with an overtone of real misogyny -- in the face of which establishment feminism, as we might imagine, is silent. All of this is an outrage, despite "trans" activists claiming that opponents want to kill them in an actual genocide of "trans" people. This is absurd.
There have been (cosmetic) sex changes for decades, and RuPaul has been a drag queen celebrity for a very long time, without anyone worrying about it very much. Of much longer standing for the general moral questions around homosexuality is the issue of prudence. Morality, properly, protects the rights of others and essentially limits the pursuit of one's own self-interest. Prudence, however, is essentially about self-interest. Prudence is not an obligation (although some think so), but failing to observe it is foolish and dangerous. Also, if imprudent behavior (like drunk driving) endangers others, then a properly moral issue arises.
The confusion of morality and prudence arises in many contexts. If you obey God just to avoid Hell, or you avoid murder just to avoid jail, this is not morally laudable. You are just pursuing your own self-interest. In the early days of AIDS, there was a slogan that "all are innocent." This was a way to deflect blame away from homosexuals for being responsible for their own disease. But, in terms of prudence, they were responsible for their own disease. Promiscuous sex has always been imprudent, and the gay bathhouse of anonymous, promiscuous sex was a kind of culmination of such imprudence. When the only danger was the likes of syphilis or gonorrhea, antibiotics were an easy remedy -- except that often women (who wisely frequented no such bath houses) might not be able to tell they were infected (by promiscuous or bi-sexual men). But things got worse with herpes, which was incurable, and then AIDS, which was deadly.
Thus the mantra became "safe sex," except that "safe sex" was often a hassle and unsatisfying, for which the only prudent remedy was faithful monogamy. To many, this was contrary to the "gay lifestyle." It became legal issue when infected people might have unprotected sex without telling their partner. This was made or regarded as illegal in many jurisdictions, equivalent to deadly assault. However, even today, there is still a strong temptation to protect irresponsible actors from such legal sanctions. We should ask why.
This is part of a general moral problem in modern society. People do not want to be held responsible for: (1) irresponsible behavior by which they are damaging themselves, and (2) irresponsible people do not want to be held accountable for behavior that damages others. Thus, the general feeling is that prudent behavior is a drag, interfering with the hedonism that is the goal of modern social evolution. The politcal remedy for this is: (1) use government programs to remedy or prevent the damage that irresponsible people do to themselves, and (2) exempt people from the moral or legal consequences that irresponsible behavior may inflict on others.
That AIDS victims were "innocent," despite irresponsibly promiscuous behavior, was an early example of this problem; but it is not unique. We also see it in laws about seat belts and motorcycle helmets. The argument with them is not just that people are being protected from themselves, but that the public is being protected from the medical costs that irresponsible people impose on the public. However, there is a hidden premise there. When did the public become responsible for the medical bills of imprudent people? This has surreptitiously snuck into public policy, as part on the ongoing movement to create socialism in America. We also see this in the requirement of ObamaCare to require people to buy medical insurance, despite the unprecedented nature of such a thing in federal law.
The traditional remedy for the medical bills of imprudent people was always: (1) that they do have catastrophic care medical insurance, (2) that they are thrown onto the good will of charitable hospitals, which actually do still exist, although it is a dying idea (pushed out by socialism), and (3) leave people to face the consequences of their imprudence. The latter, of course, is intolerable for people who like to chant, "Health care is a human right." In that case, however, the government must assume to right to govern your behavior, lest your imprudence impose costs on the public. Seat belts were just the first step.
Can such a government then outlaw unprotected and so "unsafe" sex? If you catch AIDS in a bathhouse, would the government then have the right to treat your disease in a prison hospital, lest you sin again against the public purse? Something like this was once done. Amerian soldiers were once courtmarshalled for catching venereal diseases. The United States Government once required the City of New Orleans to shut down its tolerated red-light district, "Storyville," lest soldiers based nearby be tempted to frequent its offerings. Because of Storyville, the State of Louisiana never had a residential Segregation law: White madams had enough political influence that they successfully protected their practice of "passing" as part-black, which attracted more (presumably racist) customers.
Thus, the confusion of prudence with morality spins out into serious political and legal questions and consequences. The "innocent" AIDS victims were just the tip of the iceburg.
We don't need to rely just on Aristotle for that. In Darwinian Evolution, all that matters for "survival" in the long run is reproduction. Homosexuality is not an effective technique for reproduction. Of course, no Darwinian, as such, would place a moral or normative valence on this, so a Darwinian law on "crimes against nature" would not pass muster.
But anything that would damage the reproductive prospects of humans, let alone children, would give a biologist pause -- and any biologist should be offended by claims that "trans" women are real women just as much as women born with female genitals. Philosophers, indeed, should be offended by claims that "gender" is "socially constructed" to the extent that sex is only arbitrarily "assigned" at birth. Of course, as we know, give a philosopher enough paper, and they can prove anything: so we cannot rely on academic philosophers for common sense, or informed scientific knowledge, in these matters.
At the same time, all biologists and academic philosophers are subject to the current totalitarian political orthodoxy of their schools. Philosophers may be more vulnerable than others, perhaps even than English departments, to fashionable ideology -- for while English professors may simply be stone ignorant, academic philosophers have all the tools of centuries of sophistry at hand. But speaking out on "gender" or "trans" issues can result in sanctions against them up to and including firing. Even at a Catholic university (Marquette, specifically), people have been fired for voicing opposition to "gay marriage," despite Catholic doctrine itself being opposed to it.
Thus, not everyone has the courage to make themselves a political target of the activists, who tend to dominate bloated "educational" administration these days. Indeed, schools are rapidly hiring activists and creating administrative departments just to enforce political orthodoxy. All this is part of the self-destruction of American education, whose personal and economic value is declining steadily, and where many prospective male students realize that the modern school is a "hostile environment" for men. Thus, the last time more men than women graduated from college was 1981; and the present population of college students is only 40% men. Since women avoid mating down in status, this leaves very few men in the relationship pool for college educated women. Such high status men are aware of that and have the choice of any, or all, such women.
Whatever religious people do in their own lives, of course, as long as they don't bother others with it (or victimize minors), is their own business. However, this is not good enough for modern totalitarian ideology. A woman is being prosecuted in Finland just for voicing Christian principles about homosexuality. She has already been acquitted once, but the prosecution appealed to a higher court, which is not something allowed in American law -- once you're found not guilty, that's it.
In the United States and other Anglophone countries, at the same time, there are erosions of free speech wherever activists can get away with it. As already noted on this page, a Colorado baker has been sued over his unwillingness to bake cakes for "gay" weddings or "gender reassignment" celebrations. Despite one case already going all the way to the Supreme Court, activists continue harrassing him with additional legal actions. Fortunately, organizations that defend religious liberty defend him.
At the same time, polling seems to show that young fools, many of them, want the misuse of pronouns to be a criminal offense. This goes along with the ideological hostility of the Left for free speech. This now is pervasive, not just in colleges, but in all of "education."
Thus, there is definitely a movement, very conspicuous in the United States, to persecute Christians. This has involved prosecution of anti-abortions activists for things that are either not illegal or that are never prosecuted when the acts are done by rioters or left-wing activists. At universities, again, simply voicing religous teachings about homosexuality, marriage, or "gender identity" can result in hostile actions from the authorites, not to mention provoking mobs of fanatics. The vandalism of churches is steadily increasing, as it is steadily ignored or downplayed by all levels of government.
A curious aspect to this is that ʾIslām is never treated the same way, despite serious social conservativism in Islamic Law and in the customs of Muslims and Muslim immigrants. This is, of course, because political correctness prohibits Muslims being hassled about anything concerning their religion. That would be Islamophobia. So far, Muslims are generally content enough to accept this protection and have done nothing to help defend Christians, let alone Jews, against religious persecution. This is short-sighted. The immunity enjoyed by ʾIslām will not last, and eventually the activists will come after Muslims.
Cracks have already been showing. In Octobr, 2022, Muslim parents in Dearborn, Michigan, stormed a school board meeting in protest over pornography and explicit gender ideology matters being featured in Dearborn elementary schools. Previously, protesting parents, especially in Virginia, have been smeared by the FBI as "terrorists." Calling Muslim parents "terrorists," however, will be severely Islamophobic. So the whole smear campaign -- on the part of the Federal Government, no less -- will break down if the Muslim parents keep it up.
There was also a protest by Muslim parents in Maryland, in July 2023, where the Montgomery County Public Schools were going to use sex and gender propaganda even for Kindergarten children, without allowing parents an "opt out" option for their children. The parents are also suing.
Board "chairwoman" Lynne Harris claimed that the parents were promoting "hatred" toward the "LGBTQ community." She said that exempting children from the gender propaganda was the same as saying, "Here’s another reason to hate another person." In other words, Muslim religious beliefs about sexuality represented "ignorance and hate," which she was not going to allow "in our community." How about that? ʾIslām is "ignorance and hate"! She must not have gotten the memo about "Islamophobia."
Thus, Muslims are now being warned by the Left that they are being "used" by "white supremacists." But most can see what is happening, and it doesn't help when Leftists decide to insult them, as Hollywood now insults movie audiences for hating their movies. I hope Muslims do keep up their protests.
Whether they do or not, Christians and Orthodox Jews must realize that their government and the elite ruling class has turned against them, with all the weapons that their communist education has provided them. It is Diocletian all over again in America, and Christians must face the fact that harrassment, prosecution, prison, or martyrdom are not off the table. We have learned that the FBI, again, has targeted Catholics who like the Latin Mass as possible "terrorists." Inserting agent provocateurs into Catholic groups comes next.
God's Not Dead, Pure Flix Entertainment, Red Entertainment Group, 2014
Τηλεπατητικός (Telepateticus)
[Matthew 19:4] And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, [5] And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? [6] Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
The victors have dropped their conciliatory stance. Bubonic plague-level hysteria surged through the media, academia and mega-corporate America in March after Indiana passed a law -- modeled on the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 -- that would enable religious believers to opt out of universally applicable laws under some circumstances...
...the phrase "persecution of Christians" might be more apt. It would be nice if states passed religious freedom laws that both protected gays and lesbians from discrimination in day-to-day transactions and accommodated people whose beliefs recognize traditional man-woman marriage -- as Utah did last month. But in today's mood of vengeful triumphalism among the progressive elites who rule public opinion, don't count on many compromises. Charlotte Allen, "Modern Sin: Holding On to Your Belief," The Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2015, A11, boldface added Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.
Hillary Clinton, Apirl 23, 2015, Women's World Summit, color added There are already legal martyrs, at least, to the faith. Elaine Huguenin, who has a photography business, declined to photograph a "lesbian commitment ceremony" and was prosecuted under the "civil rights" laws of New Mexico. In upholding her conviction, the New Mexico Supreme Court said that her loss of religious freedom was the "price of citizenship." The appeal of this case, Elane Photography v. Willock, to the United State Supreme Court was declined for review.
, Îsā, is Arabic for "Jesus," the family being Lebanese members of the Antiochian Orthodox Church) held hearings on the matter. The Democrats, however, wanted to shift the narrative for their own purposes. They wanted Issa's committee to take testimony from a Georgetown University Law School student, Sandra Fluke. Fluke was an activist with an organization at Georgetown, "Law Students for Reproductive Justice." The University is a Catholic institution, and Fluke had long agitated against Catholic opposition to birth control, abortion, etc. It was even suggested that she attended Georgetown specifically to attack Catholic positions on these issues and organize students against them. The Democrats wanted her to testify about her right to have birth control paid for in her health insurance. Issa did not consider this relevant to the issue before the committee, which was whether institutions of religious affiliations, even if their primary mission is not religious, can be forced to violate their moral principles. After a fashion, of course, it was relevant, since Fluke and the Democrats believe that they have a right to have all health related matters paid for by others, even when the others have moral and religious objections.
the Republicans simply never countered with accusations of a Democrat "war on religion" or a "war on conscience." Not even uninhibited personalities like Rush Limbaugh thought to use these characterizations. Yet conservatives are well aware of leftists assaults on religion and have written extensively about it. And even if they thought that a "war on religion" would appeal to too narrow a base, a "war on conscience" could be made into a electric issue for anyone. The Democrats had shoved Obamacare down the country's throat, and now they wanted to make people of conscience pay for the sexual behavior of other people, to which they have moral objections. Nor do we hear Republicans explaining the moral hazard of the Welfare State. The silence on all this was deafening. And absolutely inexplicable.
τὴν δὲ ἁμαρτίαν αὐτῶν ὡς Σοδόμων ἀνήγγειλαν καὶ ἐνεφάνισαν.
οὐαὶ τῇ ψυχῇ αὐτῶν, διότι βεβούλευνται βουλὴν πονηρὰν καθ᾽ ἑαυτῶν.
et peccatum suum quasi Sodoma prædicaverunt, nec absconderunt.
Væ animæ eorum, quoniam reddita sunt eis mala.
And they declare their sin as Sodom; They do not hide it.
Woe to their soul! For they have brought evil upon themselves.
Summary
Part of this mess is the systematic confusion of "sex" with "gender." I have already commented on this elsewhere. This leads even sensible people into false statements. Thus Dave Chapelle famously said, "Gender is real," when he meant, "Sexual dimorphism is real." There are indeed just two biological sexes, with some genetic and developmental problems of rare "intersexed" people, who sometimes need surgery just to prevent deadly complications. Complications, however, are not unfamiliar with "sex reassignment" surgeries.
And everyone took female impersonators mostly for what they were: An act. Meanwhile, few seemed worried either about such practices as we see in The Lazy Crossdresser [Charles Anders, Greenery Press, 2015], especially in San Francisco. Mutilating children, however, and allowing men to beat women (sometimes literally; some woman have been badly injured by "trans" women althetes) in sports is something very different. Men who take estrogen and are feminized, without surgery, have simply been called "she-males" -- it is a genre of pornography. This was more honest than what we see now.
And, with the addition of principles from religion: There are a couple of features relevant to that. One is that many religions are dense with ritual restrictions around sex, which involves pollution. There is not a lot of that in Christianity, but there definitely is in Orthodox Judaism and ʾIslām. Otherwise, especially for theistic religions, there is the principle that God creates things for a purpose, which thus may amplify any other sense that things have natural purposes. To the normative principle that may attend secular teleology is then added the imperative content of Divine commands. God wants people to act in certain ways, and he prohibits other kinds of actions. Whatever the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were doing, it did not turn out well for them.
Degrees of Obligation in ʾIslāmic Law Obligatory 
wājib Postive,
ImperativeRecommended 
mandūb Postive,
HortativePermissbile, Indifferent 
mubāḥ Indicative Represensible, Discouraged 
makrūh Negative,
HortativeProhibited 
ḥarām Negative,
ImperativeCopyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
Religious Morality and Discrimination, Note 1;
The War on Religion and ConscienceIn the Corona Virus epidemic of 2020, Democrat authorities in many American communities have been releasing criminals from prison and arresting Christians, having prohibited people from attending church. This is heaven for them. They have always wanted to do this anyway.
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| Freedom of Worship, 1943, Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), National Archives at College Park |
I can hardly wait for them to pull this stuff on Muslims.
Other recent examples of such a travesty have been the prosecution of 70-year-old Barronelle Stutzman, a florist in Washington State who declined to make flower arrangements for a gay wedding, and who is now under a "permanent injunction" to serve same-sex weddings. Jack Phillips was a Denver baker who declined to make a wedding cake for a gay wedding, and who was actually threatened with jail time for his "civil rights" violation. He says he will make no more wedding cakes, period.
In Washington State also, Aaron and Melissa Klein also refused to make a wedding cake for a lesbian wedding, and have been been threatened, by an administrative law judge no less, with a fine of $135,000, even though gay weddings weren't even legal in Washington when their supposed "offense" took place. The fine can be imposed with assent of the State "labor commisioner," who, of course, has no more real judicial authority than an administrative law judge. Donald and Evelyn Knapp have been ordered to perform gay weddings in their wedding chapel, with the threat of 180 days in jail and a $1000 fine for each "civil rights" offense, which means every day that they don't do it. The Knapp's are ordained ministers, but the city of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, has decided that their wedding chapel is a business, not a church, and that they cannot discriminate against gay weddings, after the Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals threw out Idaho's law restricting marriages to those between men and women.
We thus see a further, grave corruption in the very idea of civil rights, which is now further used as an instrument of tyranny and slavery -- a pretext for expanding the power of the state, even a totalitarian state, rather than a defense against the state. The "gay rights" movement, far from being a plea to be left alone, to live and let live, has now been exposed as an engine to impose a militant homosexual ideology on everyone. A recent movie, God's Not Dead, examined the assault on religious students at American universities, but it did not get into these monstrous and disgraceful "civil rights" prosecutions. As in the credits for the movie, the rights of religious people have been defended by the Alliance Defending Freedom.
The absolute political clumsiness and stupidity of the Republicans is evident in the circumstance that, even as Democrats run around screaming about a "war on women" because they want to force religious people to pay for birth control and abortions, the Republicans still, even after the 2012 election, have failed to identify the "war on religion" and the "war on conscience" that the Democrats are clearly engaging in. It is even the rare commentator who notes that "gay marriage" has become an open attack on Christianity -- while, for the moment, leaving Judaism and Islām alone. One wonders what it is going to take before people begin speaking the truth in public life.
In 2022 religion is still under constant attack and in constant peril. The Supreme Court has allowed anti-religious actions and lawsuits to continue and prevail. "Gay" activists and atheists continue to harrass Christian businesses, but not, of course, Muslim or even Jewish ones. And we never hear from socially conservative Muslims in defense of their Christian brethren. To them, the political alliance with the Left is more important than their religion, apparently.
And when they become men, they fancy boys [παιδεραστοῦσι], and naturally do not trouble about marriage and having children [παιδοποιίας], but by the law [ὑπὸ τοῦ νόμου] they are required [ἀναγκάζονται]; they find it enough themselves to live unmarried together.
Plato, "Symposium," 192a-b, after W.H.D. Rouse, Great Dialogues of Plato [A Mentor Classic, 1956, p.88] and W.R.M. Lamb, Plato III, Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias [Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1925, 1991, p.142-143]
Pu Songling (1640-1715), "Cut Sleeve," Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, translated and edited by John Minford [Penguin Books, 2006, pp.275-276]
A FEW YEARS BACK, I happened to be on a radio show with Gore Vidal, who, for some reason, assumed I was gay. During the off-air banter, another guest began talking about her newborn. The great man of letters gave me a conspiritorial twinkle and sighed wearily, "Breeders!"
Mark Steyn, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, Don't Say You Weren't Warned [Regenary Publishing, 2014, p.309]
Researchers working at Portland University's prestigious School for Inclusion and Justice for 2SLGBTQQIA++ Persons estimate that the acronym for the LGBTQ+ community could wrap around the earth three times by the year 2022. "At the current rate of expansion, we could see the 2SLGBTQQIAA++ community's acronym wrap around the equator by sometime later this year," said the school's head researcher, Dr. Marvin Frankfurter. "As more and more people join the ranks of the marginalized, invent new identities and genders and pronouns, we are rapidly approaching a situation where the acronym can circle the earth three times by the end of next year."
"And we think this is a good thing. The more oppressed people there are, the better."
Dr. Frankfurter warned, however, that Earth may not have enough space to contain the entire acronym, and we will soon have to seek out a new solar system, terraform the planets there, and create a 2SLGBTQQIAA++ alliance to unite all oppressed peoples in the 'verse, "by force if necessary."
At publishing time, horrified leftists had suddenly realized the acronym would cover every single person on earth, making the 2SLGBTQQIAA++ community not special at all. The Babylon Bee, October 7th, 2021 We should also be aware that religion alone was not used in the West in the moral condemnation of homosexuality. Laws against homosexuality did not cite Leviticus. Homosexuality and other "unnatural" sexual acts were "crimes against nature." This would include what is now called "sodomy," i.e. anal sex; but all "unnatural" acts, such as oral sex, were typically also called "sodomy." We might suspect that attempts to construct secular reasons to condemn homosexuality and sodomy were ultimately motivated by religion, but the effort was consistent with the Catholic doctrine, at least, that morality as such has a rational basis and can be rationally justified. The notion of "crimes against nature" thus came to be founded in a dense body of traditional moral doctrine, going back to Aristotle.
Two features get us most of the way to a rational moral condemnation of homosexuality. First is the Aristotelian principle that natural objects possess final causes, i.e. intrinsic purposes. This is part of Aristotle's theory of causality, in which things are produced by "efficient" causes, i.e. what we now call causes in general, but also have by their nature intrinsic purposes, called "entelechies," i.e. the "end within." The traditional example was the acorn, which contains "within" the end of the oak tree into which the acorn would grow. We now know that the acorn actually contains DNA, which codes, by way of efficient causes, the growth of the oak tree. Thus, the duality of cause and purpose has been lost in the modern scientific evaluation of nature, in which there are no final causes and no natural objects possess intrinsic purposes.
Second is the principle that intrinsic purposes are normative. Part of this goes back to Aristotle, for whom that at which "all things aim" is the "good." Thus, everything with a purpose, which is everything, has a "good" in relation to its own end. To Aristotle is added the adage of St. Thomas, that "the good is to be done," i.e. a good end imposes a moral duty to fulfill the purpose. While Aristotle's point may be well taken, however, this cannot be used, as St. Thomas does, to posit a moral duty. In the first place, many activities have purposes, and the purpose may even be called "good" in relation to the activity, but both activity and purpose may in themselves be morally wrongful. Thus, there is the profession of contract killing, and a contract killer, a "hit man," may even be "good" at what he does, exciting, in some cases, even aesthetic admiration; but this does not mean that the profession or its activities are morally acceptable, let alone a moral duty.
In larger terms, most ethics, ancient and modern, including that of Aristotle and St. Thomas, fails to distinguish between moral and non-moral value, such as discussed here as the polynomic theory of value. Thus, there are moral goods, like honesty, and non-moral goods, like a good pizza. One has a moral duty, an imperative, to be honest; but a good pizza is only a hortative good, something that we would like to see, for which we may strive, and where we may urge others likewise, but is rather ridiculous as a matter of moral duties. At best, one may undertake a contractual duty, as a chef or restaurateur, to do one's best in producing a good pizza.
In the course of nature, the genitals would seem to have a fairly clear natural function. Their use in heterosexual sex has the characteristic consequence of producing offspring. This is not surprising in terms of Darwinian Evolution, where the success of a species consists in its ability to reproduce. Aristotle thus also would have no difficulty identifying the natural purpose of genitals, together with the judgment that the purpose is a good, not only in relation to the essence of genitals, but in general.
If St. Thomas then makes the use of genitals and their natural purpose normative, he must encouner a couple of difficulties. One is that not all "natural" sex and reproduction are going to be morally acceptable for him, but only what takes place in sanctioned relationships. It is not clear why such scruples override an imperative to reproduce, and we certainly find no such inhibitions elsewhere in nature. Also, and more severely, the religion of St. Thomas values, indeed exalts, celibacy, in which the natural use of the genitals is altogether suppressed. It is going to take a bit of sophistry to provide for celibacy in such a theory as has just been recounted.
The problems with all this will otherwise be obvious. Even if natural objects have purposes, and biology itself sometimes seems twisted in sophistry to avoid such language, this cannot be normative. Biological organs often have more than one function, and Evolution itself depends on the transfer of organs, tissues, or molecules from one use or function to another (e.g. the humble keratin proteins consitute skin, scales, feathers, horn, hooves, fur, hair, fingernails, claws, etc.). Genitals themselves have a conspicuous effect over and above reproduction, which is pleasure, and this figures in human evolution, not just as the spasm of the moment, but in order to enhance pair bonds, which provide for the greater security of offspring.
Now, at this website, moral duty itself is posited in terms of a modified principle from Kant or John Stuart Mill that actions are morally acceptable as long as they do not violate the innocent, competent will of others, or, in the absence of innocence or competence, substitute justice (where wrongful actions must be stopped or punished) or their own self-interest (in the incompetent) instead. In these terms, sexual acts between consenting (competent) adults are morally acceptable, and homosexuality or "unnatural" sexual acts do not create a moral problem.
As is common in ethics, however, moral and prudential questions are not always distinguished. Thus, when the AIDS epidemic got going in the 1980's, a favorite slogan was that all sufferers were "victims," whose innocence apparently obliged everyone else to pay for their treatment, or for the research to find a cure for the disease. An unwillingness to stop all other research and devote every resource to AIDS was taken as a sign of "homophobia." There was little sense in this that the promiscuous lifestyle of many homosexuals had itself contributed to the development and spread of the epidemic, meaning that they were to some degree responsible for the problem. And while bathhouses and other venues eventually were shut down, as public health hazzards, the claim seemed to survive that the lifestyle itself was above criticism, as long as it was conducted in terms of "safe sex." That promiscuity as such might have been imprudent was lost in the now familiar approach that the moral acceptablity of "unnatural" sexual practices not only implied their prudence also, but that practitioners had a right to their lifestyle for which others might be obliged to pay, if necessary. This principle would later be enlarged in the Sandra Fluke controversey, in which my right to be left alone to my own follies nevertheless means that others have a duty to pay for them.
In the end, one returns, whether in Aristotelian or in Darwinian terms, to the purposes of sexual organs. Some homosexuals are positively derisive of "breeders," i.e. people who have children; and this is clearly conformable to the modern decline in birthrates and the failure of industrial societies to maintain their populations through reproduction alone. "Yuppies" (young urban professionals) became "Dinks" (dual income, no kids), and various countries and communities are thrown back on immigration, often of people with very different cultural values and practices, to maintain their workforces. On the other hand, the cause célèbre of marriage and of reproduction through artificial insemination or host mothers is evidence of a trend among some homosexuals to recreate the nuclear family of heterosexual couples. There is some irony in this, in a day when what is "natural" is used to promote, or condemn, certain kinds of food, medicine, cosmetics, clothing, etc., while "artificial" forms of reproduction, simply in order to avoid actual sex between opposite sexes, is clearly unnatural in a sense beyond the imaginations of Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas. Thus, if modern culture is going to use the concept of the "natural," consistency or clarity requires some debugging, as well as serious questions about the status of reproduction in modern society.
At the same time, the good faith of some activists may be called into question, as in the following excerpt from a speech by the feminist and lesbian Masha (Maria Alexandrovna) Gessen:
This curious rant seems to show real hostility towards marriage, with the determination to destroy the institution for others, by means of claiming it, after a fashion, for herself. Thus, the religious who believe that homosexuals are not simply asking to be left alone, and to enjoy the security of their own bedrooms and bodies, but are launching attacks on traditional institutions, with the goal of destroying traditional and religious life for everyone, are often handed some evidence of this suspicion.
One might beg forgiveness for the reflection that the revival of militant Islām may not be surprising as a "natural" reaction, far beyond the discontent of Christians, to these manifestations. Thus, when the Believers, Meanwhile, Left has had shifting views about Vladimir Putin's Russia. When Putin offered asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, exposing more evils of American imperialism, and outing secret agents whose lives were endangered (when the Left has gone on for years about the "outing" of non-agent Valerie Plame), he was a hero. Later, when the Democrats wanted to blame Putin for the election of Donald Trump, he was a villain, with whom any dealings whatsoever, even ordinary diplomatic exchanges, were "treason."
Lost in the shuffle was that Putin had outlawed outward displays of, or "propaganda" for, homosexuality. The Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill recently (21 July 2013) called the legalization of homosexual marriage "a very dangerous sign of the apocalypse." Various Islamic authories, in Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere, call for death to homosexuals, sometimes with impunity in jurisdictions that have laws against "hate speech."
As with Islām, one can only sympathize as the politically correct are torn between their love of the enemies of America and their discomfort at the morally illiberal and intolerant, if not murderous, attitudes of these enemies. Of course, if gay rights are not too much to abandon to defeat America, we might realize that the real enemy of the Left is capitalism and liberal democracy, not harsh attitudes about homosexuality. After all, Fidel Castro consistently persecuted homosexuals for decades, with scarcely a blip in the adoration of the Left for him, and for the enduring Castro regime in Cuba.
Gay activists might consider again that their best course is to ask to be left alone, not to demand more than tolerance from others, and to avoid tyring to use the law to force the moral acceptance of others for their lifestyle. They have mistakenly drifted into the totalitarian mindset that anything but whole-hearted assent to their cause is the equivalent of a political crime. Harrassing Christians in this way is safe enough, since most Christians will not respond violently. But we know that Muslim bakers are no more willing to bake for gay weddings than Christians. Perhaps it is telling that gay activists have not targeted them, when they know that the reaction might be very different.
I am actually not aware of the Bible prohibiting pederasty. Also, Leviticus does not bother to prohibit a woman to "lie with another woman as with a man." Why pederasty is overlooked should be a matter of some interesting inquiry (and it would certainly comfort to those who actually advocate pederasty, like the late beat poet Allen Ginsberg). The failure to prohibit lesbianism, however, does not seem like an oversight, since the passage on homosexuality is immediately followed by one prohibiting bestiality for both men and women. This makes it look like lesbianism simply didn't matter. What women do with each other, especially in the privacy of a polygamous household, does not compromise their fertility or the legitimacy of their children. The modern idea that lesbians simply would not marry would not have been relevant in an ancient world where marriage could have little to do with love or sexual attraction. When Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium says that homosexual men make the best husbands, we know we are dealing with very different expectations. Marriage and children fulfill the duty to one's ancestors. Sexual attraction is nice, but not essential. Sexual "orientation" is not relevant.
Religious Morality and Discrimination, Note 2;
Secular Condemnations of Homosexuality
Light and dark,
Hot and cool,
Dry and moist,
So it goes,
True counterpoint
Of 
Yin and Yang.
Illicit trysts
Twixt men and women
Were once thought foul;
How much the fouler reeks
The passion of the Cut Sleeve [斷袖, duànxiù],
Of Half-Eaten Peach [分桃, fēntáo],
Of love twixt man and man!
Only the mighiest warrior
Can penetrate that tiny bird-crack!
That narrow grotto
Leads to no Peach Blossom Spring [桃花源, Táohuā Yuán]:
Surely the fisherman
Poled up it by mistake!
Our hero forsakes
The play of Clouds and Rain [雲雨, yúnyǔ],
Turns away from
The true way
Of human consummation,
Preferring the up and down
Of manual masturbation,
Yin and Yang
Widdershins,
Everything
Topsy-turvy.
He abandons the Flowery Pool [華池, huáchí],
For a phony tale
Of enlightened
Sublimation of desire.
On the Grassless Terrain
Of the Barbarian Grotto,
The One-Eyed Marshal
Leads the charge.
Tethering Red Hare [赤兔馬, chìtùmǎ; a famous horse]
To the Rear Gate of the Barracks,
The General
Thrusts his halberd...
This nefarious pestle
Should be snapped off
At its root!
Should be blocked up
For ever!
It's a no-brainer that we should have the right to marry. But I also think, equally, that it's a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. [applause] So, that causes my brain some trouble and part of why it causes me trouble is because fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we're going to do with marriage when we get there. You know, because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change. And that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change and it should change and again, I don't think it should exist. [address to Sydney Writer's Festival, Sydney, Australia, 19 May 2012]
, come, "gay liberation" and other liberties would receive short shrift, as in Iran, and without the superfluous considerations of Aristotelian ethics. Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmad-i-Nejad told a New York audience (at Columbia University, as I recall) that there are "no homosexuals in Iran." They are, of course, hanged -- often from construction cranes. Turkey has not gone as far; but there are no more "Gay Pride" parades in the country.
Religious Morality and Discrimination, Note 3
, to the Sodomites
