Read the entire article hereThe Washington Post‘s culture critic, Philip Kennicott, recently took to the pages of his paper to note the “cognitive dissonance” between ingrained “habits of homophobia” in American culture, on the one hand, and a recognition that “overt bigotry is no longer acceptable in the public square,” on the other.
As an example of those who resolve this dissonance by holding fast to their homophobic prejudices, Kennicott cited Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York, who had remarked on the similarities between the Empire State’s recent re-definition of marriage and the kind of human engineering attempted by totalitarian states; NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez and I came into Mr. Kennicott’s line of fire for displaying similarly “virulent homophobic rhetoric” in articles defending Archbishop Dolan’s suggestion that, in the marriage debate, the totalitarian temptation was very much in play.
Philip Kennicott’s line of attack nicely demonstrates the truth of Oscar Wilde’s famous observation that the only way to rid oneself of temptation is to yield to it. For crying “homophobia” is a cheap calumny, a crypto-totalitarian bully’s smear that impresses no serious person.
But for charity’s sake, let’s assume here that Mr. Kennicott simply had a bad day and might actually be interested in the arguments of those he and others have dismissed as bigots. Perhaps I can illustrate the point Kennicott’s targets were making by reminding all parties to this dispute of what marriage under totalitarianism was like—a subject I happened to be discussing with a Polish couple who were preparing to mark their forty-seventh wedding anniversary when the Kennicott article appeared.
Under Polish Communism, Catholic couples—which is to say, just about everyone—got “married” twice. Because marriages in the Catholic Church were not recognized by the Communist state, believers had two “weddings.” The first was a civil procedure, carried out in a dingy bureaucratic office with a state (i.e., Communist-party) apparatchik presiding. The friends with whom I was discussing this inanity are, today, distinguished academics, a physicist and a musicologist. They remembered with some glee that, a half century before, they had treated the state “wedding” with such unrestrained if blithe contempt that the presiding apparatchik had had to admonish them to take the business at hand seriously—a warning from the über-nanny-state my friends declined to, well, take seriously.
The entire business was a farce, regarded as such by virtually all concerned. Some time later, my friends were married, in every meaningful sense of that term, in Wawel Cathedral by a Polish priest whom the world would later know as Pope John Paul II...
Commentary. This is another great piece by one of my favorite Catholic authors. Homosexualists like to use, and do indeed overuse, the ad homimen argument against those of us who do not consider same-sex unions real "marriages" nor accept the state's imposition of such as a vindication of a "civil right" for homosexual couples. There is no such objective right outside of the post-Modern narrative deviced by post-Modern "thinkers" who believe that deconstructing and redefining natural institutions create new "realities" that ought to be protected by law. Those of us who disagree they immediately label "bigots."
The bigotry runs the other way: it is a bigotry aimed at Christians and at the foundations of Western Civilization. It is a ventral hatred aimed against any person or institution daring enough to establish moral limits to human deviance. The are the bigots, not us.