Thank you Mike for your kind words. The idea of homosexuality and it's heretofore normative counterpart, heterosexuality, were inventions of the fledgling social sciences coming out of Germany in the late 1800's. These were secular, enlightened and purely scientific attempts at categorizing people based on their sexual proclivities. Obviously at the time, heterosexuality was held up as the norm and "good" and all deviations from that norm were deemed pathologies to be treated psychologically, criminalized or at the very least pushed to the fringes of respectable society. There was no appeal to natural law, religion or even tradition in these new categories, rather and as was their wont, the German psychologists and their American students sought to give a scientific and methodical explanation both for the categories and their varied treatments. In their attempt to normalize heterosexuality and pathologize homosexuality they failed miserably. They unmoored themselves from religion and natural law, which had said that right sex was for marriage which in turn was for the purpose of procreating and fostering the next generation. Any deviation from the natural norm then was, according to Christian teaching, a result of giving in to the universal human nature which we are all susceptible to (read the maxim: "There but for the Grace of God go I"). Instead the social sciences claimed that sex was a result of individual passions and marriage was an expression of romance and a vehicle for fulfillment and happiness. They believed that heterosexual expressions of that passion were "good" or normative and all others "bad" or aberrations. In the end they couldn't explain why they categorized these passions as they did i.e. hetero=good, homo=bad other than through a gut feeling or gag reflex and the history of the 20th Century then is a radical deconstruction of these categories and a normalization not just of homosexuality but of all sexual desires, moving in whichever direction the individual passion might take them. Modern psychology drills into us that in order to be truly human, actualized or fulfilled we must give expression to our sexual desires and passions, no matter what they are. Wundt, Freud and James while no Christian moralists themselves, would still be appalled.mike wrote:Thanks for sharing that, HK. I appreciate your tone and your frankness, and I believe you are probably correct in your opinions about modern expressions of sexual identity. I'd be interested in what else you have to say about it.
In their attempt then to create a scientific bulwark against sexual deviation they not only failed but accidentally created the vehicle for its normalization. What they did achieve though then was a radical rethinking of humans and their sexual expression. Up until the 1800's we had always appealed to natural law and a vague Christian understanding of human nature; that meant then specifically for the person inclined to the same-sex, that their desires or orientation, as we might say today, no more defined them than did their attraction to certain books, fashions or occupations. What we did categorize then were people's actions; persons engaging in homosexual actions were deemed sodomites not because their actions were fundamentally who they were but because they had transgressed certain moral and civil codes, engaged in the act of sodomy and rejected the Christo-normative purpose of procreative sex. This may strike we post-moderns as "ostrich in the sand" type behavior i.e. ignoring the true source of actions, but the pre-moderns, steeped in the Christian tradition, rightly recognized that that both desires and actions are transient, mutable and a poor way to define people. Christian teaching and living in reality shows us that desires can change, grow in intensity, become deadened or desensitized and that in the end, to define ourselves by the desires that come in and out of our life, is to set ourselves adrift and subject ourselves to the whims of circumstance and poor decisions. Likewise we are taught that actions, while laden with consequences both spiritually and materially, are also redeemable and absolutely do not define us. Christ died to redeem us from those very actions so then to define ourselves by them is to essentially reject what Christ has done for us.
That's all I have time for right now, do let me know if I'm being to "rambly".
