Part IV: Homosexual Acts Do Hurt Others

(Editor's Note, Bill and I have been discussing homosexuality and the problem of faith for the last few posts. So I encourage you to read Welcome Bill I LBGT Agenda II  and Welcome Bill II The Problem of Faith And Welcome Bill III: Same Sex Attraction is not a Sin . Susan Fox)

"However, we do not accept the ACT of homosexuality any more than we accept married contraceptive sex or masturbation." (Susan Fox)

Bill's response: It all comes down to what you believe. You believe these acts are against the will of God and sinful. I believe that, if they don't hurt or negatively impact anyone else, then they are a private and personal matter with which neither I nor anyone else should have a problem. 

Bill and I are continuing our conversation.

Dear Bill,

I have known and befriended several young men who are dead now from AIDS. These were beautiful young men, made in the image and likeness of God, but weak in one serious area of their lives -- their sexuality. One was studying to be a doctor in Virginia. One worked at the San Francisco Examiner. Their lives were destroyed by a disease spread by their so-called "loving" partner in acts of homosexuality. I don't even know if they realized that their "so-called" loving partners weren't loving at all. They were simply using them for their own pleasure.

Homosexual Acts Do Hurt Others

Homosexual acts do indeed hurt and negatively impact others, starting with the person engaging in the act, the person sharing the act, and the rest of society  -- innocent wives, whose husbands engage in homosexual acts, and then cause their wives to die of some disease, innocent girls who have to share the ladies room with a man in California who thinks he's a woman (it's the law now), the wife who dies of cervical cancer, a cancer that you can only get if you or your spouse is promiscuous. 

Here is just one web site giving you the medical facts related to various homosexual acts. Homosexual acts are probably the most dangerous acts any human being can engage in if they wish to live long  healthy lives. Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do

Time and again, the diseases spread by this activity advance into the non-gay community as well. So there is no possibility that these acts are not hurting other people even from a medical viewpoint.

I remember watching some horrible British drama some years ago about an 18th century couple. He had fooled around before marriage and gotten syphilis. But the wife didn't know it. They were so in love, but the love they shared resulted in repeated miscarriages, and finally the woman got sick as well and as she lay dying she understood that great love she had for her husband was killing her, and had killed all of their children.  It was a very depressing show, just like watching my friends die in their 20s from AIDs.

Sin Spreads

"Sin creates a proclivity to sin; it engenders vice by repetition of the same acts. This results in perverse inclinations which cloud conscience and corrupt the concrete judgement of good and evil. Thus sin tends to reproduce itself and reinforce itself, but it cannot destroy the moral sense at its root." (Catechism of the Catholic Church  #1865)

Translation: Sin leads to more evil and also blinds the person committing the sin to the reality of evil.

How does a person become gay? Someone introduces him to the activity. How does a person learn to masturbate? He looks at pornography, reads a book or someone shares it with him. How does a person begin to gossip? He finds someone who likes to gossip and they begin the habit together. Evil is not committed in a vacuum. It spreads. How many men began homosexual acts with men and then moved to sharing it with innocent children? The children grow up and then victimize other children in the same manner. 

One's parents could be responsible for some evil one regularly commits. Child sacrifice was part of family life in many ancient cultures. I remember when they found a beautiful young girl  frozen in the mountains in South America. Hundreds of years old, she was dressed beautifully and she had some flowers in her stomach that would dull her senses so she would not fight her own death. She had been placed there on the mountain by her own family as a sacrifice to their gods. She was probably told she was special, but still that doesn't mean much when you freeze to death at the age of nine, does it? But she didn't die in a vacuum. Other little girls in her family and culture were killed in the same manner for generations until Christianity changed the family's practice.

Virtue Inspires Hope and Self-Sacrifice

Alternatively, a parent committing an act of virtue can inspire hope and self-sacrifice in the child. My father died when I was four years old. My parents had friends -- another married couple with a little girl my age. I remember right after my father died we went to visit this family and they really harassed my mother for not smoking. Both husband and wife smoked. I remember watching anxiously because I loved my mother. But she refused to take a single puff. When I was growing up I wasn't even tempted to start smoking. That steadfastness she showed really impressed me.

When I married at age 30, I was a virgin bride thanks to my mother. She lived a virtuous single life for 14 years while I was growing up, age 4 to 18 (then she remarried). She never had men over for sleepovers, never went to men's houses for the same. As a result, I had a safe and secure childhood. Contrast that with when I roomed with two other girls in a house, and I never knew when I would find a drunk man sleeping in our bathroom in the morning. I couldn't lock my door so I put a chair under the doorknob at night. I had a cat box in my closet so I would not have to leave my room during the night to let my cat out! It was a frightening experience for a young woman caused by acts that my roommates probably thought would not harm anyone else. Eventually, after a one night stand, one roommate got pregnant, and guess who else suffered? Her baby. She was killed by her mother.  I moved out when I could.

Yet when my mother vacuumed she often became frustrated and said, "Darn!"  Later in life, I picked up the habit of swearing also -- even took the Lord's name in vain.  One time I went to see Pope John Paul II in Los Angeles. I was pregnant with my son. I dropped my glasses on the ground, and they broke and I said, "F__k!"  Now when I first dropped my glasses, the large crowd around me was very sympathetic. They had begun to gather around me, and try to help me pick up my glasses. But as soon as I swore, they all withdrew from me. I had a private habit of evil speech that spilled out into the public, and you could see the effect immediately. Thank God I have largely overcome that habit, but in my mind occasionally I still say, "Darn."  And I realized the reason why I don't even think it's a sin -- even now -- is because my mother, who was wholly good, used the expression when I was a child. 

Contraception Is Not A Private Act 

People who are married and using contraception probably think it is a private act that affects no one but themselves. Yet contraception causes breast cancer, it turns the wife into an instant commodity without responsibility, and it even pollutes our streams and causes sexual deformities in the fish! I remember visiting one  woman, who was living with a man, but wanted to return to the Catholic Church. She explained to me why she couldn't. When she was validly married to her husband, a Catholic priest told them they could use contraception (Rebellion, pride = sin). So they used contraception. (Easy Way, Disobedience = sin) The husband gradually began to treat the wife like a commodity instead of a person (Loss of Charity = sin), and they divorced. She could not support herself so she was forced to live with another man. She was a very unhappy person. 

When I worked for the San Francisco Examiner, they did a very honest expose on homosexuality.  One gay man interviewed said that he fell in love in high school with a man, and it was quite romantic. But now he realized the lifestyle was just abuse -- group sex, violence, no romance. He said with great regret that he could have been a husband and a father, but his sexuality had been diverted -- wasted in this manner with other men. He was not a happy man.

The Catholic Catechism lists "sins that cry to heaven." These include "The blood of Abel (spilling of innocent blood), the sin of Sodomites (homosexuality), the cry of the people oppressed in Egypt, the cry of the foreigner, the widow and the orphan, injustice to the wage earner."  

Personal Sin Leads to Social Sin

Further the Church states: "Sin is a personal act." But we are responsible for the sins committed by others when we cooperate in them, including by participating directly in them, by ordering, praising or approving them, by not disclosing or hindering them when we are obliged to do so and by protecting evil-doers. (Catechism of the Catholic Church #1868) 

"Thus sin makes men accomplices of one another and causes concupiscence, violence, and injustice to reign among them. Sins give rise to social situations and institutions that are contrary to the divine goodness. 'Structures of sin' are the expression and effect of personal sins. They lead their victims to do evil in their turn (gays turn other men and youth into gays). In an analogous sense, they constitute a 'social sin.'" (CCC #457)

So you have the Man Boy Love Association. This is social sin. It is not private. It is evil and it spreads. Do you think all those people caught in the Church's sex abuse scandal were happy? They must have suffered immense personal anguish in the midst of their crimes.

Show Forth The Image of God!

All this sin is very depressing. What is the opposite?
"The vocation of humanity is to show forth the image of God and be transformed into the image of the Father's only Son." (CCC #1877) Wow, I get to look like Jesus on the inside.  I get to be the hands and feet of Jesus in the world. That is a great calling.

And the Catechism further states that this vocation is communal in nature. "The human person needs to live in society." And by living our calling to show forth the image of God, we serve the common good. We help transform society.

Christ Changed Civilizations

I mentioned the child sacrifice in ancient cultures. But did you know that my ancestors were just thieves and marauders? Yes, I am descended from Vikings. And then Christianity was spread to the Scandinavian countries and all my ancestors and their descendants behaved differently. We stopped stealing (a social sin). I was married on the feast of St. Bridget. She was a married woman who slept on the floor with her husband as a means of fasting, and they both spent their lives helping the poor.  Actually, the practice of generosity and charity is very deeply ingrained in my Norwegian family going back to at least my great, great grandparents, and including the current generation of Americans and Norwegians. This is all thanks to the introduction of Catholicism into Scandinavia.

The first bishop of Seattle, Bishop A.M. Blanchet, witnessed the Indians whopping and hollering, and committing brutal murders with great gaiety of heart. It was the mid-1800s in Eastern Washington (big diocese geographically). But he never lost faith in the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest "because it cannot be doubted that when the Indians will understand the seriousness of the crime of homicide, they will avoid committing it," he wrote in his journals. 

He merely felt he had a job to do as a missionary: "As they learn to know God -- that will inspire their horror of these

terrible crimes that they now commit so easily." It worked.
Many Northwest Indians became Catholic, and changed their behavior drastically. They were once committing one of the "sins that cry to heaven:" "The blood of Abel." Now they make the sign of the cross. 

A liberal television station recently filmed an Indian ceremony on the beach. They expected lots of pagan practices, but when it came time to eat the meal, the leader began,"In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit." Television reporters were not prepared for that. Yep, those heathens were Catholic, all right. They shut down the camera recording right after, "In the Name of the Father..."

So unfortunately there are no private and personal matters that do not spill out into society and harm it. It is not a matter of my belief. It is a matter of observation. Open your eyes. There are consequences to every sin. 

I really encourage you to read Lawrence's response to this same question, The LGBT AGENDA: Why We Care When Others are Doing "I have no idea what":  Please forgive him if he sounds a little sarcastic. He's really a great big teddy bear. He is NOT speaking about any gay person individually but the movement that results from the "sin that cries to heaven." 
God bless you. Susan Fox