Ian Boyne, Contributor
THE CONFIRMATION last Tuesday of the first openly homosexual Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States has plunged the worldwide Anglican communion of over 77 million in a major crisis, and widens the schism in Christianity's second largest denomination.
The 62-45 vote by Bishops in the city of Minneapolis - synonymous with the world's most famous Bible-thumping Evangelist Billy Graham - for Gene Robinson led Conservative Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan to say in an emotion-charged speech at the Episcopal General Convention that the Episcopal church had "divided itself from millions of Anglicans throughout the world". Said the Bishop forcefully: "This body by wilfully confirming the election of a person sexually active outside of holy matrimony has departed from the historic faith and order of Jesus Christ. May God have mercy on this church."
IN JAMAICA
Here in Jamaica the Anglican Church has been quick to dissociate itself from its liberal sisters and brothers in Europe and America who are more "broad-minded" and "inclusive" than the Jamaican church can afford to be in a society which is literally violently opposed to homosexuality. The June issue of the Jamaica Churchman, official organ of the Anglican church in Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, has a lead headline on the Church's Stance on Homosexuality which said in its first paragraph that "news that a priest of the Church of England who openly admitted to being homosexual had been chosen to be the Bishop of Reading was received with shock and dismay by members of the diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands."
Even Anglican clerics who are not known to be conservatives are sounding like Fundamentalists in their condemnation of homosexuality and are quick to demonstrate evangelical zeal in distancing themselves from their errant colleagues abroad. These clerics and others know that it is almost impossible to have a reasoned, rational and dispassionate debate on homosexuality in Jamaica. Even among the intelligentsia, it is hard to find people who can bring their intellect and not just their emotions to bear on the issue. And yet there is no ethical issue in which reason and intellectual astuteness is called for more urgently than the homosexual debate.
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALS
Don't believe that it is just the narrow-minded, "fundamentalist-influenced homophobic people" who are driven by their emotions in the homosexual debate. Even among the intellectuals who are gay, I have never found anything resembling a serious attempt to philosophically ground homosexual practice. Perhaps because of the bigotry, prejudice and irrational opposition to which they have been exposed, many homosexuals have grown to be frighteningly intolerant, arrogant, dismissive and defensive. Any objection to their practice is labelled "homophobic" a catch-all word which dispenses with the need to reason.
JUSTIFYING HOMOSEXUALITY
Homosexuals seem to operate from the notion that their practice is right, acceptable and justified simply because it springs from their desire and "nature". In other words, homosexual feelings justify homosexual action. Ask the homosexual how he knows homosexual practice is not ethically wrong, and what would he say in reply? That, to quote a popular Third World song, "How can it be forbidden if it's love?" And how can a practice which is innate some would say inborn and genetic be wrong?
Yet thinking people are supposed to know that there has been a tradition in philosophy spanning thousands of years where humans were pitted against their nature, and the virtuous life was seen as one in which humans used their will to subdue their passional nature. The great philosophers saw human nature itself as an obstacle to the Good Life meaning the ethical life. They saw man's struggle essentially as the struggle to subdue a nature that is not automatically conformed to truth. The concept of using Nature as the pattern of morality does not have a long and honoured tradition in philosophical reflection.
The homosexual debate is overarchingly a debate about philosophy. You can't get away from that. Otherwise it's just your opinion against mine. Your prejudice against mine and your preference against mine. Or I kill you, chop you up or "bun you" if you are in the minority. It is time that we raise the homosexual debate on a higher plane than we are accustomed, both away from the level of our deejays and J-FLAG.
MORALITY AND ETHICS
The issue really comes down to asking a few basic questions: How do we determine morality? How do we know right from wrong? How do we establish ethics? And are there absolutes? The homosexual finds himself in a difficult position philosophically. If he is a secularist who rejects a transcendent reality (God) then he is likely to believe that ethics is socially grounded. That is, morality is determined by and derived from the social and cultural context, as there is no objective morality "out there". Morality is what a group of people determine to put it philosophically, morality is a social construct.
Now, if morality is a social construct and the majority of people in our context in Jamaica, and certainly in the developing world, have deemed homosexuality immoral and unacceptable behaviour, then on what basis does the homosexual deem it moral and acceptable? What gives the individual homosexual the right to determine morality when the voice of the people has spoken so clearly on this issue?
But the majority can be wrong, the homosexual might retort. In the past the majority felt that burning witches at the stake was right; that stronger states had the right to conquer and dominate weaker ones; that women were inferior to men; that slavery was acceptable, etcetera.
Some societies accepted that adulterers and sorcerers should be murdered, that cannibalism is okay and some even today accept the dreadfully painful female circumcision. Were and are these things right just because they are accepted by the majority? So the homosexual can reject the "tyranny of the majority". But what will he use to justify his conduct? The sovereignty of feelings; the sovereignty of desire. In his view, homosexuality is right simply because he feels that way; that that is his nature and to deny his nature would be inhuman and preposterous.
Yet, what about people who are naturally attracted to minors? Don't come with the argument, Mr. or Ms. Homosexual, that that would not involve consensual sex and, therefore, sex with minors is inherently immoral. Some would argue that a precocious 12 or 14-year-old could conceivably engage in consensual sex. It would be against the law but couldn't it be argued that it is not necessarily immoral? As a society we are revolted by the thought of a 12 or 14-year-old having sex with an adult in his 40s or 50 as well we should be. But if the homosexual rejects societal norms and mores as grounds for establishing morality, then how can he conveniently invoke that to condemn sex with minors?
TRANSCENDENT MORALITY
The issue really comes down to that of whether there is an objective, transcendent morality and what would be the authority for determining that. The homosexual depends on his feelings and desires what he sees as his nature as the determinant of his morality. And the Christian church depends on the Bible and church tradition to determine morality. It is absolutely clear and unequivocal to me that both the Bible and church tradition resolutely and stoutly condemn homosexual practice.
But the problem for the church is that since the 19th century and especially since the 20th century there has been increasing scepticism about the authority of the Bible coming from the church's own clergymen and women. And there is a general cynicism about authority in Western culture anyway, so appeals to church tradition are losing their grip on both the educated and uneducated. Our secularised culture, in which individualism is primary and the Information Revolution has buttressed this is the major philosophical force against the church's view.
The church, I predict, will increasingly cave in under the weight of secularism and liberalism. The church has already accepted so many tenets of the liberal culture and has been so short-sighted philosophically that it is now trying to close the gate when the horse has bolted long ago. As the Episcopal Canon Thomas Conley put it in a presentation in 2000 in the United States: "But what will happen to the church if we do ordain practising homosexuals to the priesthood allow and bless same-sex unions? The first question I hear on this issue is, 'do you think it is going to happen?' My response is yes. The reason is that homosexuality is here to stay. It is a reality of life and a reality of the church. It is not going away. The church will have to face it honestly and squarely. Reality cannot be ignored forever. There is an elephant in the room!"
THE PRICE OF FREEDOM
A libertarian culture, fed on the milk of permissiveness and nurtured on the view that we should "obey our thirst" and fulfil our desires, cannot hold back the floodgates of homosexuality and assorted sexual practices traditionally condemned as immoral.
As Peter Berkowitz says in the August/September issue of the scholarly journal Policy Review, in an essay on 'The Liberal Spirit in America', there is "an instability built into liberalism's fundamental moral premise. The naturally free and equal individual is a sovereign individual, since his freedom signifies that he is his own highest authority."
This is why arguments about the unnaturalness of homosexuality, or its assumedly minority status like left-handedness or its being contrary to nature or the Bible are dismissed by the homosexual sovereign who feels he needs only follow the desires of his sovereign heart.
Continues Berkowitz in his insightful essay: "Romantic love, in the era of freedom, comes to occupy the commanding position in the hearts of men and women. In a world in which one authoritative good after another loses its lustre, romantic love offers the hope of the transcendent in the here and now. Romantic love has its roots in the powerful push and pull of sexual desire."
So Bishop Gene Robinson will not abandon his male lover of many years. The problem for the Christian church, not just the Anglican Communion, is that it has lost the philosophical and cultural battle with modernism and post-modernism. I predict that increasingly the world will set the agenda for the church, and the church will be following, with some sections kicking and screaming, right along the path blazed by secular society.
The Lambeth Conference of 1998, with an overwhelming vote of 526 to 70 votes, reflecting more conservative forces of Anglicans in Africa, Asia and Latin America, rejected homosexuality as "incompatible with Scripture". But in an Anglican church which has over the years undercut biblical authority with its liberal readings of Scripture, the prohibition against homosexuality would seem strained.
Get accustomed to openly homosexual priests and bishops for you will be seeing more of them around as the church continues to lose ground.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can e-mail your comments to ianboyne@yahoo.com.
