Homosexuality is individual preferences above all morals
Image via WikipediaAs a political issue, the debates over homosexual rights represent a serious conceptual and moral issue.
By making sexual identity a public matter, the gay/lesbian/ bisexual/transgender movement fulfills Hannah Arendt's prophesy (in her book, The Human Condition) that traditionally private matters will become socialized in modernity.
On a deeper level, the prohomosexual lobby, which seeks equal legal rights to nonheterosexualmarriages and an end to all discrimination on sexual orientation and activities grounds, reflects James Davison Hunter's "progressive" mindset (in his book Culture Wars), which places personal individual preference above all objective and traditional moral standards and sees ethics as historically and personally relative.
This is contrasted, by Hunter, with the more conservative "orthodox" perspective that rejects homosexuality on traditional moral, religious, and natural-law grounds.
In contemporary U.S. politics, this takes the form of prohomosexuality in the liberal democrat party, the liberal mainline Protestant churches (and Reformed Judaism), and the liberal media and educational institutions.
The antihomosexual agenda groups include the Catholic and evangelical Churches, the Republican Party, and the conservative media and schools. Much of this public debate now coalesces on the issue of AIDS, a disease that affects male homosexuals disproportionately. Prohomosexual ideology argues that laws forbidding homosexuals to have legal marriages (and therefore shared health-care insurance), military privileges, and social acceptance are discriminatory and unjust.
Opponents of legal recognition of homosexuality argue the biblical denouncement of it as "an abomination to God" (Leviticus 18:22–30), the natural-law violation of its practice, the health consequences of its acceptance, and a fear of the decline of the traditional family and social fabric (not to mention for the Christian Right, covenant view of the wrath of God on a
civilization that affirms immoral conduct).
Like the abortion issue, the political furor over legalized homosexuality is extremely volatile, often compared to the slavery controversy preceding the American Civil War. Proponents of homosexual rights view their cause as the logical conclusion of egalitarian democracy.
Opponents see it as the moral decline of Western civilization, much like that which preceded the collapse of the Roman Empire. A complex social and psychological issue, it promises to continue as a prominent policy debate in the U.S.
