Intelligent laws

You know how some people can get. Last week I argued that homosexuality is wrong because the practice is a design fault, that male and female are a product of intelligent design but that male-male and female-female aren’t. One of the responses I received personally was that I’m ‘healthily homophobic’ (‘homophobia’ means having an irrational hatred or fear of homosexuals or homosexuality). The comment was meant as a sarcastic put-down, implying that I’m narrow-minded in my opinion—in short that I’m prejudiced and somehow anti- human rights. I’m nothing of the sort, and that statement says far more about the person that made it than it does about me. My view is a rational judgement, i.e., the end result of a considered opinion. I gave reasons for my belief and because of those reasons in fact consider any stand against homosexuality to be truly a sign of health.

However, I am not against homosexuals, only homosexuality, so here I want to develop my argument. Homosexuality should not be illegal—I argued that it is wrong, not that it is criminal. If two consenting adults want to be gay in their private lives, in the quiet and security of their own homes, then I still think that they are wrong, but it’s OK with me: they have the right to do what they wish in private. Gays should not be hated, hounded or hunted. I agree with the apostle Paul who argues that wrongness brings its own punishment. What I’m against is a public stance that either explicitly or implicitly accepts homosexuality as any kind of normal. In particular I was responding to the worldwide movement to allow homosexual marriage and cower any dissenting voices into silence.

When I was growing up, as a teenager in high school, there was still a lot of public censorship. I was as interested in music then as I am now, and often songs were banned from the radio and TV because they were considered sexually explicit or praising drugs or racist or whatever. For me that was a good thing, and I didn’t consider it anti- human rights. If a song was banned from airplay it didn’t mean that you couldn’t buy it and hear it if you wanted to. There was, for example, a song called Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus that sold very well—I think it even got to number one on the charts—but it couldn’t be played on the radio. That didn’t stop any students or lawyers or grannies from buying it. What the ban did do—and this I think was important—was send a public message that some things are not encouraged for public consumption, that there are and should be some limits to what we do in public and therefore accept as normal and everyday. These days you can hear five- and six-year-olds repeating word-for-word each and any offensive and sick act that they hear on the radio or watch on Channel O.

Public censorship was largely destroyed in the name of supporting individual rights, and it has led to our current global flood of pornography and our ‘anything-goes’ society. In the same way, I believe that the surge towards homosexual marriage in the name of championing human rights is also wrong, and that, if allowed, the very fabric of human societies will change in seen and unforeseen ways, and not for the better. I won’t say that marriage is a sacrament, a holy act (just as I won’t argue that intelligent design is another form of creationism) but, given that we comprise both men and women, it is at least a logical institution; however, as I argued last week, I don’t see any logic in homosexuality. Allowing homosexuals or witches or even lovers of kwaito to do what they want to in private (as long as they don’t interfere with or harm anyone else) is one thing which I certainly don’t object to, but placing homosexuality alongside heterosexual unions as just another version of human marriage, and supporting it by changing public laws, is quite another. I just don’t think it’s an intelligent thing to do.