Whats the difference between a Gay Pride Parade and Returned Soldiers Parade? Answer?
Imagine now a parade in honor of couples who have been married for thirty years. Here they come with their grown children, and some grandchildren too. They smile and wave to their neighbors. The wives are wearing decent dresses, the men are mostly in coats and ties. Old soldiers wear their uniforms, as do members of the Knights of Columbus, and the Shriners. Every once in a while the parade stops as the band plays, “O Promise Me,” and “Juanita,” and “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes,” and other old love songs. The grand marshal and mistress of the parade are old Mr. and Mrs. Santoro, who used to run a small grocery and candy store; they are riding high in an open carriage, ninety years young.
Nobody is naked. Nobody is near naked. Nobody is simulating sexual intercourse. Nobody is wearing leather underpants. Nobody is plying a whip. Nobody is engaging in the act in public. Nobody is flaunting porn. Nobody is singing obscenities. Nobody is promoting threesomes and foursomes. Nobody is preoccupied, in a pathetically puerile way, with the size and stamina of a body part. Nobody has made a poster mocking Jesus or the Pope or Mary or anyone. Nobody is doing anything that would embarrass a decent person. Nobody is doing anything that would make their fathers hang their heads in shame if they had to look at it. They are not insane.
This is no coincidence. The ordinary men and women have more or less integrated their sexual powers into the reality of human existence. They don't have to advert to what they do between the sheets, because that is not an end in itself. They don't have to assign arbitrary meanings to their favorite ways to derive bodily pleasure, because the meanings are already inherent in the acts: there are children and grandchildren to prove it. They don't have to insist upon the duration of their affection, because marriage by its very nature assumes permanence of duties: what a man and woman do with one another is oriented towards the time-transcending creature known as a human being, who will always have the same mother, always have the same father. Indeed, if one of the couples in the parade should call attention to their sexual habits, we would find it something of a profanation of the holy, a pollution of clear water, a small-minded reduction of the grand to the trivial. It would be as if someone had spray painted graffiti on a church or a town hall.
By contrast, the gay men must advert to what they do between the sheets, or in the bathhouses, or wherever, with whomever, in whatever permutations and combinations of human confusion, sin, and longing. That is because what they do has no inherent meaning, or its inherent meaning is not one we would enjoy considering in any sober fashion. What is it, in fact, to sow the seed of new life not in the haven of new life, but in the place of evacuation and disease and decay – in a sewer? That then explains the flagrant displays, the desperate (and childish, and sad) need to affirm the bizarre, the nudity, the raucousness, the distracting battery of one obscenity after another.
It is not sane.
Nobody is naked. Nobody is near naked. Nobody is simulating sexual intercourse. Nobody is wearing leather underpants. Nobody is plying a whip. Nobody is engaging in the act in public. Nobody is flaunting porn. Nobody is singing obscenities. Nobody is promoting threesomes and foursomes. Nobody is preoccupied, in a pathetically puerile way, with the size and stamina of a body part. Nobody has made a poster mocking Jesus or the Pope or Mary or anyone. Nobody is doing anything that would embarrass a decent person. Nobody is doing anything that would make their fathers hang their heads in shame if they had to look at it. They are not insane.
This is no coincidence. The ordinary men and women have more or less integrated their sexual powers into the reality of human existence. They don't have to advert to what they do between the sheets, because that is not an end in itself. They don't have to assign arbitrary meanings to their favorite ways to derive bodily pleasure, because the meanings are already inherent in the acts: there are children and grandchildren to prove it. They don't have to insist upon the duration of their affection, because marriage by its very nature assumes permanence of duties: what a man and woman do with one another is oriented towards the time-transcending creature known as a human being, who will always have the same mother, always have the same father. Indeed, if one of the couples in the parade should call attention to their sexual habits, we would find it something of a profanation of the holy, a pollution of clear water, a small-minded reduction of the grand to the trivial. It would be as if someone had spray painted graffiti on a church or a town hall.
By contrast, the gay men must advert to what they do between the sheets, or in the bathhouses, or wherever, with whomever, in whatever permutations and combinations of human confusion, sin, and longing. That is because what they do has no inherent meaning, or its inherent meaning is not one we would enjoy considering in any sober fashion. What is it, in fact, to sow the seed of new life not in the haven of new life, but in the place of evacuation and disease and decay – in a sewer? That then explains the flagrant displays, the desperate (and childish, and sad) need to affirm the bizarre, the nudity, the raucousness, the distracting battery of one obscenity after another.
It is not sane.
