Why good people don’t support sexual perversions

Conservatives have been taking a lot of flack over the past few decades for an “intolerant” stance on sexuality–including both homosexuality and promiscuous heterosexuality–and to be quite honest they’re losing the battle.  In this writer’s opinion, they’re losing for more than one reason, but particularly due to one: that they’re incapable of explaining the concept of evil to reasonable people.  As such, this writer has undertaken the task of presenting the concept of evil as it relates to sexual perversions, borrowing heavily from C.S. Lewis’s modern ethical masterpiece “Mere Christianity.”

So what is evil?  Well, without even determining exactly what moral codes are, we can understand that good exists independently of evil, but that evil’s existence is completely dependent upon good.  For instance, no person–regardless of how many times they’ve watched The Fifth Element–could possibly believe that an act of evil is committed purely for evil’s sake.  The pursuit of sexual satisfaction, financial stability, and peace are all good things, but if they’re pursued through rape, cheating, or killing all your political rivals, then the pursuit of those good things becomes evil.  Simply put, evil can only exist if good things are pursued the wrong way.  Even acts of cruelty are committed by people seeking some sort of tangibly good–yet wrongly pursued–effect, be it sexual satisfaction or a feeling of “justice.”

Taking it one step further, though, the fact that humans can tell the difference between evil and good indicates that an understanding of good and evil exists beyond our instincts (since moral nature isn’t just rationality).  After all, nowhere in the world does an “opposite morality” exist.  Nowhere in the darkest corners of Africa is a man praised for stealing from his friends, breaking his word, or running away in battle. All moral codes run in the same direction, albeit some distinctions between whom we extend kindness to and what we tolerate.  But even these distinctions are never completely contradictory in nature, just differences in application of the same moral code.  And it would be considered silly to suggest that differences in application of a uniform morality are a statement to the nonexistence of morality altogether.

But anyway, when someone’s behavior does run against the law within all of us, that evil behavior is generally rationalized by the offender by using one of the other universally recognizable morals, displaying that we know what good and bad are, and that we all appeal to the same unchangeable ideals of good when justifying our actions and arguing with one another.  After all, evil isn’t committed only by mad Nazi scientists: it’s committed by people who have an ideal they want to achieve illegitimately.  Even the followers of totalitarian and oppressive regimes and the unspeakable atrocities they commit see their support as being for some sort of “good” end result.  The good guys, on the other hand, pursue good things the right way.  As such, it should also be understood that “wanting the same things” doesn’t mean that everyone is a good guy, and that people who don’t confirm this are incapable of determining who good guys and bad guys are.

So then if we all have an understanding of what “good” is–that it’s an intrinsic law rather than an opinion–and that evil is simply a perversion thereof, then all perversions of good cease to simply be differences in taste and become something much deeper, sharing the same bed with all other forms of evil, and being dangerous and unhealthy. The good news is that recognizing these perversions is simpler than one could expect.  C.S. Lewis once stated that “We called sadism a sexual perversion; but you must first have the idea of a normal sexuality before you can talk of its being perverted; and you can see which is the perversion, because you can explain the perverted from the normal, and cannot explain the normal from the perverted.” This is true of homosexuality, as you cannot explain sexuality strictly through a homosexual lens: it is completely dependent upon normal and moral heterosexual intercourse for its explanation.  And the reason why is that it is a perversion of what sexuality is intended to be.

So although many have been branded as intolerant and stuffy because they recognize proper and improper methods of pleasure, when a grander picture of evil is understood there is no other way to classify perversions such as homosexuality and bestiality than by placing them alongside other intolerable evils.  To do otherwise would be to unravel the entire concept of immorality as it relates to proper and improper methods of pursuit of good qualities.  As such, sexual perversions aren’t just differences in taste, they’re perversions of good–just like all the other perversions that we suffer from today.

And as mentioned in this writer’s previous essay, legitimizing one form of sexual perversion essentially legitimizes the rest, since legitimizing and protecting one form of unnatural (”natural” meaning originally intended) sexual expression leads to the protection and legitimization of other perversions as well.  You simply can’t tell a pedophile or a necrophiliac that they’re sick when you’ve told other people that sex isn’t for the act it was intended to be.  And if you can see the damage caused by improper methods of sexual pursuit–straight as well as others–then you can see what “qualities” come from it: abandoned children and poverty-stricken single mothers, incurable diseases, wives neglected for pornography, lives cut short, broken families, molested children, intense shame and loss of self-worth, and loss of trust and cohesion between what would have been harmonious genders.  There is an intended and righteous use of sexuality, and it is between a man and a woman in the institution of marriage.  One cannot deny that if all sexual pursuit existed within these God-given boundaries, the world would be drastically less painful.  Call that stance cold and intolerant, if you can.

And this is what makes perversions wrong: all evils are perversions of intended good, and they destroy not just our relationships with each other, but also our relationship with the Supreme Being whom we rebel against, who gave us not only a yearning for moral nature, but also the immutable moral code we live by and quarrel with each other about applying.

In conclusion, though, it’s important for those on the Right to not simply pick on homosexuals when there are so many people within the church who pursue sexuality illegitimately.  Even though homosexuality is easier to recognize than an unmarried couple having sex out of wedlock (and thus an easier target), both groups are in the same camp as far as morality is concerned; and until the day when people recognize this, no serious progress will be made and Christians will continue to look like fools.  Get the log out of your own eye before going after the speck in your brother’s, a certain man named Jesus would say, whom people claim to worship as their God, but can’t wait to decide for themselves which of His truths to follow.  So before Christians tackle the perversion of homosexuality, they should consider making unmarried cohabitation of opposite genders and the sale of pornography illegal, divorce severely restricted to cases of adultery and physical abuse, and abandonment of your family to be worthy of massive fines and jail time. Stop picking on only homosexuals.  Get the precedents first.

And for goodness sake, learn how to talk about evil.

This entry was posted on 23. July 2009 at 17:45 and is filed under philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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