Our Only World by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry [Berry, Wendell]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781619025226
Publisher: Counterpoint

Another way to categorize and isolate homosexuals from the general citizenry and the prerogatives of citizenship is to define homosexuality as a disease having a cause that can be discovered and removed or cured by some sort of therapy. This seems most promising as long-term job security for scientists and doctors. Ken Kesey once saw an inscription in a men’s room: “My mother made me a homosexual.” Under it somebody else had written: “If I gave her the yarn would she make me one?” My own speculation is that we will never do much better than that. We will discover that, like all the rest of us, homosexuals are made what they are by their mothers, their fathers, their genes, their germs, their upbringing and their education, by their friends and neighbors, their dwelling places, their time and its culture, by their economic and social status, their personal history, and by history.

Yet another such argument is that homosexuality is unnatural. If the nature in question is merely biological—the realm of the ape and the naked ape—that may prove too roomy and accommodating to be of much help. By the standard of that nature, monogamy is unnatural, an artifact of some cultures. If it is argued that homosexual marriage cannot be reproductive, is therefore unnatural and should be forbidden, must we not then argue that any childless marriage is unnatural and should be annulled?

Specifically human nature, by contrast, has always had a definition more complex and demanding than that of a naked ape. William Blake thought we are made human by being made in the image of God:

For mercy, pity, peace, and love

Is God our father dear;

And mercy, pity, peace, and love

Is man, his child and care.”

(Songs of Innocence, XX)

Are homosexuals capable of mercy, pity, peace, and love? Some certainly are, as some heterosexuals certainly are. To deny that distinction to homosexuals is to deny categorically that they are human, which is hardly a proper employment for mercy, pity, peace, and love. Oversimplified moral certainties—always requiring hostility, always potentially violent—isolate us from mercy, pity, peace, and love and leave us lonely and dangerous. The only perfect laws are absolute, but perfect laws are only approximately fitted to imperfect humans. That is why we have needed to think of mercy, and of the spirit, as opposed to the letter, of the law.

One may find the sexual practices of homosexuals to be unattractive or displeasing and therefore unnatural. But anything that can be done in that line by homosexuals can be done, and is done, by heterosexuals. Do we need a political remedy for this? Would conservative Christians like a small government bureau to inspect, approve, and certify their sexual behavior? Would they like a colorful tattoo, verifying government approval, on the rumps of lawfully copulating persons? We have the technology, after all, to monitor everybody’s sexual behavior, but so eager an interest in other people’s most private intimacy is both prurient and totalitarian.

The oddest of the strategies to condemn and isolate homosexuals

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