THE ORIGINS OF SEXUAL PERVERSION
Written by Vladimir Moss
THE ORIGINS OF SEXUAL PERVERSION
There is no limit, no bottom to the abyss of carnal pleasures. Today – this far, tomorrow – further, and so on to loss of consciousness, to self-annihilation.
Archpriest Lev Lebedev.
In the sixth chapter of Genesis, we read the extraordinary story of how the “sons of God” (“angels” is the word in the original text of the Alexandrian Bible) seduced the “daughters of men”; from these unlawful unions came “giants”. Then there came the universal Flood which swept away the whole of mankind except Noah and his family. Much remains unclear about this story. And it is not indicated whether or not there is a direct causal connection between the unlawful unions and the Flood of Noah. But their close proximity is very suggestive…
The Apostle Jude appears to refer to this story, linking it with the sexual perversions of Sodom and Gomorrah: “The angels who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgement of the great day; as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities round about in a similar manner to these, having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire” (Jude 6-7). The Apostle Peter has a very similar passage in his second epistle (2.4-6).
The Lord Himself compared the period before the Flood to the period before His Second Coming. Both periods are marked by a sinister combination of apparent normality with profound abnormality: “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all” (Luke 17.26-27). The period we are living through now is very similar. Now, as then, men have begun to multiply on the earth, and now, as then, the condition of mankind, while relatively peaceful, is profoundly sinful, being manifested above all in the spread of sexual perversions of all kinds.
Sexual perversion may be defined as the diversion of sexual desire from a person of the opposite sex to a body of the opposite sex (rape, sadomasochism, paedophilia), or to a person of the same sex (homosexuality, paedophilia), or to an animal (bestiality), or to an inanimate thing (fetishism). Since perversions are unnatural, the penance for them is more severe than for fornication – but the same as for adultery. Thus the penance for adultery, sodomy and bestiality is fifteen years without communion, while for fornication it is seven years.
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However, before we discuss perversions as such, let us establish what is natural and what is not natural, perverted and unperverted, in man’s sexual nature.
Now the contemporary perverts and their champions argue that the sexual distinctions are not important and therefore can be “renegotiated”. However, according to the Holy Scriptures, the distinction – and the attraction - between male and female was there from the very beginning, even before the fall. When Eve was created out of the side of Adam, he said of her: “This is now bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh: and she shall be called woman [isha in Hebrew] because she was taken out of man [ish]”. Here he is acknowledging that they are of one flesh – in other words, that they are married – physically married. These words, as Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich writes, are “the foundation of, and the reason for, the mysterious attraction and union between man and woman”. They “have become,” writes St. Asterius of Amasea, “a common admission, spoken in the name of all men to all women, to the whole female sex. These words bind all the rest. For that which took place in the beginning in these first-created ones passed into the nature of their descendants.” “This is the origin,” writes Archpriest Lev Lebedev, “of the irresistible attraction of man to his ‘wife’ (the woman) as to the most necessary complement of his own nature. Union in love with the woman can be replaced only by union in love with God, which is immeasurably more profound. It is on such a union with God that monasticism is founded, which is why it does not lead to psychological complexes. But monasticism is not for everyone, it is the lot of special people, ‘who can accommodate’ this condition (Matthew 19.11-12). But for the majority the woman remains one of the most necessary conditions of a normal existence.”
Adam continues with the famous words which the Lord Jesus Christ, followed by the Apostle Paul, saw as the founding document of marriage: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be in one flesh."
Now it may be true, as St. Gregory of Nyssa argues, that the whole apparatus of sexual anatomical differences and sexual reproduction, being aspects of “the garments of skin” given to Adam and Eve after their fall, only came into being after the fall. If that is so, then sexual intercourse took place, as St. John of the Ladder points out, only after the fall, and could not have taken place in Paradise. But the fact remains that Adam was a man and Eve a woman already in Paradise, that they were married and of one flesh already in Paradise, and that even then they were attracted to each other in a natural, but sinless, unfallen manner. Thus St. Cyril of Alexandria writes of Adam's body before the fall that it “was not entirely free from concupiscence of the flesh”. For “while it was beyond corruption, it had indeed innate appetites, appetites for food and procreation. But the amazing thing was that his mind was not tyrannized by these tendencies. For he did freely what he wanted to do, seeing that his flesh was not yet subject to the passions consequent upon corruption.”
Now the Lord said that in the resurrection there will be no marrying, but that men and women will be like the angels. Granted: but does that mean the Lord Himself will no longer be a man, nor the Mother of God a woman? This seems profoundly counter to Christian intuition. Christ was born as a man of the male sex. And He has not ceased to be male since the resurrection. It may be that since there will be no marrying in the resurrection, but we shall be like the angels in heaven, we shall then have no secondary sexual characteristics, insofar as the need to continue the race through sexual reproduction will have disappeared. However, it runs counter to the intuition of Christians to argue that we will cease to be men and women in any significant sense. Rather, we see in Christ and the Virgin Mary, the new Adam and Eve, a real man and a real woman with no tendency towards “unisex”; indeed, they are the eternal types of real manliness and real femininity. There is therefore no reason to believe that the primary, essential differences between men and women will disappear in the resurrection.
Thus St. Jerome, in spite of his highly rigorist attitude to sexuality in general, insists that sexual differentiation will remain: “When it is said that they neither marry nor are given in marriage, the distinction of sex is shown to persist. For no one says of things which have no capacity for marriage, such as a stick or a stone, that they neither marry nor are given in marriage; but this may well be said of those who, while they can marry, yet abstain from doing so by their own virtue and by the grace of Christ. But if you will cavil at this and say, how shall we in that case be like the angels with whom there is neither male nor female, hear my answer in brief as follows. What the Lord promises is not the nature of angels, but their mode of life and their bliss. And therefore John the Baptist was called an angel even before he was beheaded, and all God’s holy men and virgins manifest in themselves, even in this world, the life of angels. When it is said: ‘Ye shall be like the angels’, likeness only is promised and not a change of nature.”
Now science has established that the intellectual and emotional differences between men and women may be related to hormonal differences and to different patterns of activity in the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Indeed, these hemispheral differences appear to complement each other rather like male and female. It is as if each individual man and woman were one half of a single bisexual organism, so that each man appears to be “missing” certain feminine qualities that would make him more whole, while each woman appears to be missing certain masculine qualities that would make her more whole.
Be that as it may, and whether or not such differences existed before the fall, the fall has accentuated and corrupted the differences between the sexes. Thus men tend to be crude, insensitive and boastful, and women – weak-willed, vain and easily led by all kinds of influences. But these fallen differences do not entail that in the beginning, before the fall, there was never meant to be any real and important difference. The restoration of the image of God in man involves, not the abolition of all sexual differences, but their return to their unfallen condition, not the abolition of sexuality but sexual integration. Thus men return to real masculinity together with those feminine qualities which fallen masculinity drives out; and vice-versa for women.
Again, modern medicine claims to be able to change men into women, and women into men. But sex-change operations appear to be far less successful than is commonly claimed. Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for John Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, said that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment, that sex change is “biologically impossible,” and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder. And the reason for that seems to be that while you can (up to a point) change a man’s (or a woman’s) secondary, external secondary characteristics, you cannot change his primary, internal sexuality. For sexuality is not as superficial and “negotiable” as the modernists would like us to believe. There is more to sexuality than meets the eye…
The deeper aspects of sexuality, even on the purely physical plane, appear to be immutable. Thus the male has an X and a Y chromosome, while the female has two X chromosomes – a fact of our sexual nature that can in no way be changed. As a scientific journalist writes: “Although men and women sometimes act like separate species, scientists have long assumed that – in terms of their DNA – they are more or less the same. But a new study has shown that the sexes really are quite different, reports Nature magazine, and it all comes down to the X chromosome. Women carry two X chromosomes; men, by contrast, have one X, inherited from their mothers, and one Y. The Y is an ‘eroded’ version of the X chromosome with fewer than 100 working genes. The X, by contrast, has more than 1000, and is able to deploy them more intricately. “Because women have two X chromosomes, one is inactive. But that doesn’t mean it’s entirely silent. The new research has revealed that up to 25 % of genes in the so-called inactive chromosome are actually switched on. In other words, women are getting ‘double doses’ of some genes. ‘The effect of these genes from the inactive X chromosome could explain some of the differences between men and women that are not attributable to sex hormones,’ said Laura Carrel of Pennsylvania State University. These could include emotional, behavioural and physical differences, including susceptibility to disease. Although the X contains only 4% of all human genes, it accounts for almost 10% of those inherited diseases that are caused by a single gene. These ‘X-lined’ disorders include colour blindness, haemophilia, various forms of mental retardation and Duchenne muscular dystrophy. With no ‘spare’ X to make up for genetic deficiencies, men are more vulnerable to ‘X-linked’ conditions.”
Thus the scientific evidence, taken as a whole, gives some support to St. Gregory’s view that secondary sexual characteristics were “added” to the original man after the fall. And since there will be no marriage in the resurrection, it follows, as St. Gregory writes, that these secondary characteristics will not exist in the Kingdom: “If the organs of marriage exist for the sake of marriage, when that function does not exist we shall need none of the organs for that function”. But the evidence also supports the position that there appears to be a deeper, primary level of sexuality that is “wired into” the brain and cannot be removed or changed, from which it follows that the attempt to remove or reverse or “renegotiate” sexuality is unnatural and perverse...
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Archpriest Lev Lebedev writes: “Individual people can hold themselves back at certain levels of this abyss, but as a tendency in the life of society it has no end. Just as society’s permissiveness or debauchery in the present world of various ‘pleasures’ has no limit. If, 40-50 years ago, one had said that male homosexuals or female lesbians would be officially registered as ‘conjugal’ pairs, then the reply would not even have been horror, but rather a friendly laugh. However, that is the reality now! In a series of western countries they are officially registered and ‘crowned’. What next? Perhaps there will follow a recognition of bestiality as one of the forms of ‘refined and elegant’ sex? And then?… ‘Progress’ is ‘progress’ because it strives for infinity…
“According to the just formulation of F.M. Dostoyevsky, ‘if God does not exist, then everything (!) is permitted’. In fact, if God does not exist, then the holiest ‘holy thing’, the idol of the highest value in existence is undoubtedly ‘pleasure’. Whatever it may consist of and for whoever it may be. If!
“But if God does exist? Then what? Then it is necessary to know what laws He placed in the nature of man and what man is ‘prescribed’ to do, what not, and why…
“But who is now trying to ‘free’ men from the commandments of God and ‘allow’ them the cult of ‘pleasure’? The medieval (and contemporary!) Templars represent ‘him’ in the form of a goat with a woman’s torso, sitting on the earth’s globe, with a five-pointed star on his goat’s forehead, and between his horns a torch, a symbol of ‘enlightenment’, ‘reason’. On one hand is written: ‘free’, and on the other ‘permit’. He is called ‘Baphomet’. He is an idol, one of the representations of the devil (Lucifer). He whispers into the ears of his worshippers the idea that he is ‘god’, but he lies, as always. He is a fallen creature of God and will be punished with eternal torments, where he will with special ‘pleasure’ mock those who, at his suggestion, serve ‘pleasure’ as an idol. But before that before the Second Coming of Christ, he will try to establish his dominion over the whole world with the help of his ‘son’ – the Antichrist. But he, in his turn, in order to gain dominion over men, will, among other methods, particularly strongly use sex. For sex, which turns people into voluntary animals, makes their manipulation very much easier, that is, it destroys the primordial structure of mankind, the nation and the state – the correct family, thereby as it were annihilating the ‘image of God’ in mankind.”
If we try and go deeper into the nature of this self-destructive tendency of modern society we come to concept of self-love (Greek: φιλαυτια), which, though spiritual in essence, is closely linked to the carnal sin of lust, in that the latter represents a corruption and redirection of man’s natural erotic feeling from the other to the self. The passionless delight in the other becomes a passionate desire for the other; “flesh of my flesh” becomes “flesh for my flesh”. As such, it is a devouring, egocentric force, the very opposite of love. Self-love is at the root, not only of lust, but also of all forms of perversion, insofar as perversion involves the utilization of another, who (or which) is seen as no more than an instrument for one’s pleasure (or pain). For perversion rejects a fully mutual personal relationship of love in favour of an impersonal relationship of use (or rather: abuse).
As St. Maximus the Confessor teaches, in Hans Balthasar’s interpretation of his thought: “Two elements come together in the concept of φιλαυτια, which is the essential fault: egoism and carnal voluptuousness. To sin is to say no to the authority of God, it is ‘to wish to be a being-for-oneself’, and in consequence, for man it is to slide towards sensual pleasure. But in this double element there also lies hidden an internal contradiction of the sin which manifests itself immediately as its immanent chastisement. In sensual pleasure, the spirit seeks an egoistical substitute for its abandonment of God. But this abandonment itself isolates it egoistically instead of uniting it to the beloved. Voluptuousness ‘divides into a thousand pieces the unity of nature, and we who take part in this voluptuousness tear each other apart like ferocious beasts’.
“Φιλαυτια has even torn apart the one God into a multitude of idols as it has torn nature, and ‘to obtain a little more pleasure, it excites us against each other like animals’. This ‘deceiving and pernicious love’, this ‘cunning and tortuous voluptuousness’ ends by pitting our flesh: ‘the flesh of every man is a valley pitted and gnawed by the continuous waves of the passions’ and ends ‘in the disgust which overthrows the whole of this first affection’.”
There are many illustrations of the ferocious and deadly power of this fallen sexuality in the Old Testament. Thus we have the story of the Levite’s concubine, whose body he cut up in twelve pieces, literally “dividing the unity of nature into pieces” (Judges 19). Again, “the overthrow of the first affection” is illustrated by the story of the incestuous rape of David’s daughter by his first-born son Amnon. The sacred writer says that Amnon loved Themar and “was distressed even unto sickness” because of her. And yet, having raped her, “Amnon hated her with a very great hatred; for the hatred with which he hated her was greater than the love with which he had loved her” (II Kings 13.1,2,15).
For, writes St. Maximus, “the torment of suffering is intimately mixed with pleasure, even when it seems to be snuffed out by the violence of the impassioned pleasure of those who are possessed by it”. “Nature punishes those who seek to do violence to her to the extent that they deliver themselves to a way of life contrary to nature; they no longer have at their disposal all the forces of nature such as she had given to them originally; so here they are diminished in their integrity and thus chastised.” “Wishing to flee the painful sensation of grief, we hurl ourselves towards pleasure… and in forcing ourselves to soothe the wounds of grief by pleasure, we thereby confirm still more the sentence directed against themselves. For it is impossible to find a pleasure to which pain and grief are not attached.” “Man acquired an impulse to pleasure as a whole and an aversion to pain as a whole. He fought with all his strength to attain the one and struggled with all his might to avoid the other, thinking that in this way he could keep the two apart from each other, and that he could possess only the pleasure that is linked to self-love and be entirely without experience of pain, which was impossible. For he did not realize… that pleasure can never be received without pain; the distress caused by pain is contained within pleasure.”
This intimate connection between pleasure and pain means that perhaps the most characteristic of all the sexual perversions is sado-masochism. For here, as the philosopher Roger Scruton points out, “there is frequently an aspect of punishment: the sadist’s punishment of the other for failing to return his desire or for failing to play sincerely the role that the sadist has devised for him; the masochist’s desire for punishment, which relieves him of the burden of a culpable desire. The masochist may indeed receive the strokes of the whip as a kind of ‘permission’ – a reassurance that he is paying here and now for his sexual transgression, and that the claims of conscience have been satisfied.”
However, the most widespread perversion is homosexuality… The men of Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed, writes the Apostle Jude, because they went after “strange flesh” – that is, not flesh of the opposite sex, which would be natural, but flesh of the same sex, which is indeed “strange”. Therefore they “are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire” (Jude 7).
St. Paul sees the cause of homosexuality in the worship of the creature instead of the Creator, of which modern naturalism is another form: “When they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves, who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, Who is blessed forever. Amen. For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust (ορεξει) one towards another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet…” (Romans 1.21-26).
St. John Chrysostom comments: “Here he sets the pleasure according to nature, which they would have enjoyed with more sense of security and greater joy, and so have been far removed from shameful deeds. But they would not; which is why they are quite beyond the pale of pardon, and have insulted nature itself. And still more disgraceful than these is the women seeking these couplings, for they ought to have more sense of shame than men.… Then, having reproached the women first, he goes on to the men also, and says, ‘And likewise also the men leaving the natural use of the woman’ This is clear proof of the ultimate degree of corruption, when both sexes are abandoned. Both he who was called to be the instructor of the woman and she who was told to become a help like the man now behave as enemies to one another. Notice how deliberately Paul measures his words. For he does not say that they loved and desired (ηρασθησαν και επεθυμησαν) each other but that ‘they burned in their lust (εξεκαυθησαν εν τη ορεξει) for one another’! You see that the whole of desire (επιθυμιας) comes from an excess which cannot contain itself within its proper limits. For everything which transgresses God’s appointed laws lusts after monstrous things which are not normal. For just as many often abandon the desire for food and come to feed on earth and small stones, and others, possessed by excessive thirst, often long even for mire, so these also charged into this explosion of lawless love. But if you ask, where did this intensity of lust come from? [I answer:] it was from being abandoned by God. And why were they abandoned by God? Because of their lawlessness in abandoning Him: ‘men with men working that which is unseemly’. Do not, he means, because you have heard that they burned, suppose that the evil was only in desire. For the greater part of it came from their luxuriousness, which also kindled their lust into flame…. And he called it not lust, but that which is unseemly, and that rightly. For they both dishonoured nature, and trampled on the laws. And see the great confusion which fell out on both sides. For not only was the head turned downwards but the feet too were turned upwards, and they became enemies to themselves and to one another….
“It was meet that the two should be one, I mean the woman and the man. For ‘the two,’ it says, ‘shall be one flesh’. But this was effected by the desire for intercourse, which united the sexes to one another. This desire the devil first took away and then, having changed its direction, thereby divided the sexes from one another, and made the one to become two in opposition to the law of God. For it says, ‘the two shall be one flesh’; but he divided the one flesh into two: here then is one war. Again, these same two parts he provoked to war both against themselves and against one another. For even women abused women, and not men only. And the men stood against one another, and against the female sex, as happens in a battle by night. So you see a second and third war, and a fourth and fifth. And there is also another, for beside what has been mentioned they also behaved lawlessly against nature itself. For when the devil saw that it is this desire that, principally, draws the sexes together, he was bent on cutting through the tie, so as to destroy the race, not only by their not copulating lawfully, but also by their being stirred up to war, and in sedition against one another.”
Fr. Thomas Hopko writes: “An interpretation of this passage [Romans 1.21-29] that claims the apostle was right in forbidding acts ‘contrary to nature’, but was ignorant of the fact that many people are ‘by nature’ homosexual and therefore should act according to their God-given homosexuality, is unacceptable to Orthodox Christian faith. No one in Orthodox Christian tradition has ever interpreted this text in this way, nor can anyone do so, according to Orthodoxy, when they read the Bible as a whole. On the contrary, the biblical teaching is rather this: The fact that many people have sexual feelings and desires for persons of their own sex is among the most powerful proofs that human beings and life have been distorted by sin…”
Clearly, then, there is a difference in kind between natural heterosexual desire, fallen though it is, and unnatural homosexual desire. The one was implanted in nature by God from the beginning (according to St. Cyril of Alexandria, an uncorrupted form of sexual attraction was already present between Adam and Eve in paradise): the other is unnatural, and is incited by demonic forces outside human nature to which sinners give access through their idolatrous worship of creation. Like the demonic lust of “the sons of God” for the daughters of men in Genesis 6, homosexuality is a demonically inspired undermining of the natural order.
This is proved by the many cases in which people who have been led to think that they are homosexual, but return quickly and joyfully to the natural order once they have been freed from the unnatural power that controlled them. While supporters of homosexuality mock this evidence, it is actually very important in demonstrating that homosexuality is by no means natural. Thus Robert Epstein writes: “In a landmark study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in October 2003, [Robert L.] Spitzer interviewed 200 men and women who once considered themselves homosexuals but who had lived their lives as heterosexuals for at least five years. Most of the participants had undergone some form of reorientation therapy. In addition to determining whether such therapy actually worked, Spitzer wanted to know just how dramatically people could alter their orientation. To his surprise, most of his subjects not only reported living long-term (more than 10 years) as heterosexuals, they also declared that they had experienced ‘changes in sexual attraction, fantasy and desire’ consistent with heterosexuality. The changes were clear for both sexes…”
A vivid example of such a “conversion” is the following true story related by the present writer’s wife, Mrs. Olga Moss. (The names of the people in the story have been changed.) “This took place some years after the war, after I had graduated from Amsterdam university, had married and was living in England with my first husband. I had a schoolfriend who was a real macho man, good at sport and so on. He had a younger brother called Pieter who was quite the opposite: tall and slim, with a sensitive nature, studying history in Leiden. Because of the sharp contrast with his brother, many of his student friends started to suggest to Pieter that he was a homosexual. And when he listened to them talking about falling in love, and how their pulses would race, and their heart would beat, at the sight of certain girls, Pieter, who had never experienced what they were describing, thought: ‘Maybe I am a homosexual’. As a result, he made himself vulnerable to the advances of other men, and entered into a relationship.
“He then wrote me a letter from Holland telling me his story, and said: ‘Maybe you don’t want to know me any more.’ I replied: ‘Of course I want to know you. But this is against the Law of God [Pieter was a believer], it is an abomination in His sight, and you must fight against it. We all suffer from various temptations and sins. But we must not give in to them, but must control them. We must not say: “Because I’m made that way, I can act that way.” For example, if we are kleptomaniacs, we cannot just give in to the temptation to steal. And if we have a violent temper, we cannot just give in to our temper and be violent.’ Pieter fell into a depression, and went to his parents’ town to throw himself off a bridge near his parents’ home.
However, by Divine Providence, his father decided to go for a walk in that area, something he never normally did. Approaching the bridge, he recognized his son standing on the edge, as if he was about to throw himself in. He called out: ‘Pieter!’, Pieter stopped, and turning to his father, put his arms around him and sobbed: ‘I was about to commit suicide because I’m a homosexual.’ His father was deeply shocked; he took him home, but didn’t want to speak to his son again. Some time later, Pieter’s father was dying. Pieter was the only one of his three sons who was in Holland. He sat next to his bed in hospital, keeping watch. He fell asleep and had an extraordinary vision. He saw a great and evil angel trying to throw him onto the ground. Pieter struggled to free himself, knowing that it was essential that he did not fall. But this angel was far stronger than him. Suddenly, however, the angel let go. Pieter woke up and felt himself completely cured of his homosexuality. He bent over to his father to tell him the news, but his father had died…
“A little later, Pieter went to Ireland for his Ph.D. studies in history, and met a Spanish student called Pilar who was also working for her Ph.D. They fell in love. Returning to Holland via London airport, Pieter phoned me up at 5 in the morning to tell me excitedly: ‘Olga, Olga, I’ve fallen in love. My pulse is racing, my heart is fluttering. She’s beautiful, has lovely eyes and voice,’ etc., etc. I was very sleepy and could hardly take it all in. But I was very happy for him. A little later Pilar came to Holland – they were going to get engaged there and then get married in Spain. She was going to leave the Roman Catholic church, and he the Protestant church in order to join the Orthodox Church to which I belong. Then followed the happiest weeks of his life preparing for the engagement and wedding. She came over before Pascha, but unknown to us was carrying the Legionnaires’ disease, which she had caught in Spain. He was infected, and fell very ill on Great Friday. 24 hours later he was dead. The death was so rapid that an autopsy was ordered. It revealed that Pieter had been deficient in a certain sexual hormone. Pilar went back to Spain, and Pieter was buried next to his father…”
Although this story constitutes no more than anecdotal evidence, it strongly suggests three things: (1) that a low level of normal libido may make a man vulnerable to homosexuality even when he is in fact heterosexual; (2) that environmental influences – the suggestions of schoolfriends and peers – may also dispose a man to the sin if he does not actively resist them; but that (3) the main agent of homosexuality is demonic, the demon of homosexuality.
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The idea that homosexuality has a biological base in human nature has been based mainly on the hypothesis that there is a “gay gene”. However, “no one has yet identified a particular gay gene,” writes Robert Kunzig.
Linda Bowles puts it more bluntly: “The truth is this: There is no ‘gay’ gene. The scientific search for a biological basis for homosexuality has been a complete failure. Highly touted studies, including the study of the brains of 35 male cadavers by Simon LeVay (1991) and the heralded study of 40 pairs of homosexual brothers by Dean Hamer (1993), have not stood up to rigorous scientific scrutiny.
“The widely respected Dr. Joel Gelertner of Yale University in an article in Science made this observation about various studies trying to link genes with complex human behavior. ‘All were announced with great fanfare; all were greeted unsceptically in the popular press; all are now in disrepute.’
“Studies of identical twins are especially revealing. Identical twins, unlike fraternal twins, have precisely the same genetic makeup. If same-sex orientation were genetically determined, one could expect identical twins to always have the same sexual orientation. Dozens of studies prove they do not. Almost all scientists who have studies human development agree that environmental influences and life experiences play a significant role in essentially all complex human behaviors, including sexual mindsets.
“The bottom line is this: No child is born to be a homosexual. Homosexuals are made, and they can be unmade. This is the truth that more psychiatrists and psychologists need to acknowledge. This is the truth that the American people need to know, parents of young children need to heed, and politicians need to understand.”
“By their fruits ye shall know them”: that homosexuality is evil and unnatural is proved by its destructive fruits. Thus it is destructive from a medical point of view (because it spreads AIDS), from a psychological point of view (because it creates no stable, satisfying bonds), from a demographic point of view (because it brings down the birth-rate and makes societies older), from a social point of view (because it is divisive, dividing “straights” against “gays” and men against women), and from a political point of view (because it undermines the foundation of the State, which is the family).
Let us look first at some of the psychological and social effects.
“In their book The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop, David McWhirter and Andrew Mattison found that of the 156 couples they studied, 75 percent of the partners learned within five years that for the relationship to survive, cheating had to be tolerated, as long as one or the other did not become emotionally involved with the other sex partner. In her book The Mendola Report, lesbian Mary Mendola conducted a nationwide survey of approximately 400 homosexual couples. She, too, found that homosexuals distinguish between sexual and emotional exclusivity. Indeed, just 26 percent of homosexuals believe commitment is paramount in a marriage-type relationship. This translates to an almost unfathomable degree of sleeping around. A recent Amsterdam study found that men in homosexual relationships cheat with an average of eight partners a year. Others have found that the average homosexual has between 100 and 500 sexual partners over his or her lifetime. One study showed that 28 percent have had 1,000 or more sex partners, with another study placing the percentage between 10 and 16 percent. While adultery is certainly a factor in traditional marriages, it is comparatively rare. In fact, studies on matrimony place the male fidelity rate between 75 and 80 percent and that of females between 85 and 90 percent. The reason is simple: Unlike homosexual relationships, emotional and sexual fidelity within matrimony are inexorably linked and always have been by definition. To extend the concept of marriage to a situation wherein fidelity is not the norm would not only cheapen the institution, but it would have disastrous consequences for children. Simply put, a marriage is not a marriage without total exclusivity.”
Let us also look briefly at the political effects of homosexuality.
A permissive attitude towards homosexuality is not only a mortal sin in the eyes of God and has profoundly evil consequences for private and public morality and happiness: it is also incompatible with any understanding of the State that is based on the natural order. This is because the State is based on the family, and is designed to protect the family and its continuation and multiplication down the generations, whereas homosexuality, for obvious reasons, cuts short the timespan of the single-sex “family” to one generation. Therefore the State that legalizes homosexuality and discourages or downgrades natural, heterosexual marriage and childbirth will first undergo a process of rapid aging (this is already happening in many western societies), and then will eventually simply die out - unless it adopts unnatural, artificial (and often immoral) methods of acquiring children, such as kidnapping, accelerated immigration, genetic experimentation and surrogate motherhood.
Finally, Michael Hanby explores the philosophical-anthropological significance of the legalization of homosexuality and the new sexual technologies: “We must first understand that the sexual revolution is, at bottom, the technological revolution and its perpetual war against natural limits applied externally to the body and internally to our self-understanding. Just as feminism has as its practical outworking, if not its theoretical core, the technological conquest of the female body—”biology is not destiny,” so the saying goes—so too same-sex marriage has as its condition of possibility the technological mastery of procreation, without which it would have remained permanently unimaginable.
“Opponents of same-sex marriage have not always perceived this clearly. They maintain that partisans of ‘marriage equality’ redefine marriage as an affective union which makes the birth and rearing of children incidental to its meaning, a result of the de-coupling of sex and procreation in the aftermath of The Pill. But this is only half true. Since married couples normally can and typically do have children, same-sex unions must retain in principle some form of the intrinsic connection between marriage, procreation and childrearing if they are really to be counted as marriage and to be truly ‘equal’ in the eyes of society and the law. This can only be done by technological means. And so the argument for marriage as an affective union has been buttressed time and again in the courts by the claim that assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), surrogacy, and the like eliminate any relevant difference between a married man and woman and a same-sex couple, from which it is but a short step to the conclusion that the state has an obligation to secure same-sex couples’ rights and access to these technologies as a condition of their genuine equality.
“Yet if this is true, it follows that no great weight attaches to natural motherhood and fatherhood and that being born to a father and mother is inessential to what it means to be human, or even to the meaning of childhood and family.
“To accept same-sex unions as ‘marriage’ is thus to commit officially to the proposition that there is no meaningful difference between a married man and woman conceiving a child naturally, two women conceiving a child with the aid of donor semen and IVF, or two men employing a surrogate to have a child together, though in the latter cases only one of the legally recognized parents can (presently) contribute to the child’s hereditary endowment and hope for a family resemblance. By recognizing same-sex ‘marriages’ the state also determines once and for all that ARTs are not merely a remedy for infertility but a normative form of reproduction equivalent to natural procreation, and indeed it has been suggested in some cases that ARTs are an improvement upon nature. Yet if this is true, it follows that no great weight attaches to natural motherhood and fatherhood and that being born to a father and mother is inessential to what it means to be human, or even to the meaning of childhood and family. These are not fundamentally ‘natural’ phenomena integral to human identity and social welfare but mere accidents of biology overlaid with social conventions that can be replaced by ‘functionally equivalent’ roles without loss…”
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This leads us, finally, to consider perhaps the profoundest and most frightening aspect of the modern sexual revolution and its legitimization of sexual perversion: the loss of the concept of fatherhood, with the consequent loss of the concept of God the Father. In gay marriages, a child is brought up with two fathers and no mother, or with two mothers and no father. Apart from any other psychological disturbances this kind of deprivation – some would say: child molestation - may cause, one must be the loss of the concept of fatherhood and/or motherhood.
The Lord taught us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer to “Our Father”, and He called Himself “the Son of God” and “the Son of Man”. The whole Gospel is imbued with the love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father. And yet the central dogma of the Holy Trinity, the dogmas of the Incarnation, and the Life and Death of Christ in obedience to His Father, and finally the dogma of the adoption of Christians as sons of the Father in His Only-Begotten Son and of our holy Mother, the Church – all these become incomprehensible, or at least less vivid, less real for a person who has been brought up without real, natural family life – that is, with a biological father and a biological mother.
Just as the democratic revolution has weakened the consciousness of kingship and civil obedience in the people, so has the sexual revolution weakened the concept of fatherhood and sonship. Thus the sexual revolution not only destroys morality: it also destroys the Christian dogmatic consciousness… Therefore as Lot fled from the burning of Sodom, it is time for us to “flee to the mountains”, to the saints and to the Kingdom on high. There we will find refuge and strength. For just as the Lord “delivered righteous Lot, who was oppressed by the filthy conduct of the wicked (for that righteous man, dwelling among them, tormented his righteous soul from day to day by seeing and hearing their lawless deeds)”, so “the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgement” (II Peter 2.7-9).
May 23 / June 5, 2015.