GAY TRUTH

Governor Rick Perry of Texas   recently made waves  when he was asked whether he thought homosexuality is a disorder. He replied that he was not professionally qualified to pronounce on a medical or mental health question, and then added, “Whether or not you feel compelled to follow a particular lifestyle or not, you have the ability to decide not to do that . . . I may have the genetic coding that I'm inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way.” As you might expect, this answer—which many millions of Americans might honestly have given—caused a bit of a ruckus. If you wonder whether you would feel confident giving Perry’s answer, or have doubts whether it is even a defensible answer to give, you should read Robert R. Reilly’s latest book,  Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything . This is a very important book, and Ignatius Press should be commended for pub...

In his new book,  Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything ,  Robert Reilly poses this question: “Is sodomy  reasonable ?” He believes this question can only be answered by enquiring into the Nature of sexual acts. He frames his arguments rejecting homosexual behavior, not persons, and same-sex marriage in terms of reason, Nature and the teleology of sex. Reilly’s thesis is that there are “two fundamental views of reality.” One views things as having a Nature that is teleological or ordered to “ends that inhere in their essence and make them what they are” and have “inbuilt purposes.” The other view sees things as having no Nature or ends in themselves, “but only what we make them to be according to our wills and desires.” The former view leads to the “primacy of reason,” and the latter inclines to the “primacy of will” which allows for anything. “This is what the same-sex marriage debate is really about - the Nature of reality it...