Homosexual Acts are Not Against the Natural Law

[Melchior_1]

But some people with same sex attraction struggle so much with celibacy that they end up falling into depression and abandoning their faith.

There’s a lot of things that a lot of people struggle with that can cause people to fall into depression, but that doesn’t mean they should still do it. Just because something “feels” natural or “feels” correct doesn’t make it right.

I have yet to see anything outside of emotional arguments to support what you’re saying.

Prodigal Son has a lot of great things to say, and a personal perspective. I’d give his posts another read.

 

[on_the_hill]

So why should “friends” of one gender be favoured over another?

What does friendship inherently have to do with physical attraction? Or physical attraction with friendship?

Why would physical attraction even be a feature of friendship, except when it pertains to a comprehensive union of mind, body and soul, which is what conjugal marriage essentially is?

Such a union is not limited to or by physical attraction since it must go far beyond mere physical attraction in order to be successful as a marriage.

A while back I took an online quiz that was drawn up by a psychologist sex researcher. I scored points as being partly bisexual–simply because I have male friends. His conclusion is that any same sex attraction at all, (e.g. my friends who are male) is characterized as having a physical, sexual component.

I fully refute his conclusion, of course.

I also disagree with the premise that people in gay relationships are entirely acting on self-interest. I cannot believe that procreation is the core of loving human relationships, and that absent the procreative element true love is not possible.

Think about it: the vast majority of us are heterosexual and we are defining true love as being that with which we are most comfortable and familiar and that in which we find our fulfillment. God gave us the means, God let us know what he would prefer, but God gave us the free will to do with it as we will.

 

[Joie_de_Vivre]

I wasn’t aware that the survey or the narrative was coerced. You might know something about it that I don’t. Perhaps you;'d like to share? On the same note, how do you know that the narratives are not real, genuine feedback? If it is, the potential to help these people are enormous. We just cannot ignore it.

If you are alluding to the placebo effect, yes. it is something that doctors couldn’t really explain. But you see sometimes it works. For those who think they have a problem and actually don’t , a placebo may be opportunistically used. Even for those with real problems, placebos have been reported to work too in some cases. That’s why it is a head scratcher. But since SSA is not a medical issue in itself, other venues should be explored to help them. Just leaving them be is not the right thing to do if they are genuinely in need of help and want to be helped.

And if there are groups such as Alcoholic Anonymous, gamblers anonymous that can help people who genuinely WANTS to be helped, approaching similar organizations for SSA can be profitable. Question is , do they want to be helped or do they prefer SSA activities? If SSAs don’t want to be helped because they enjoy what they do yet expect the Church to change its doctrine to suit them, I don’t see the value of such discussions. I can see where they can use the authority given to the Church to bind/loose to get them a get-out-of-jail card. Hence the politicking. Basically, they want the Church to declare SSA acts a non-sin via its authority vested in the Church to bind it in heaven. But why stop there? Declare abortion, adultery, you name it to be ok in heaven too.

For reparative therapy you have to come up with a narrative, if you don’t have one you’ll get told you have to if you want to get better and don’t you want to get better? That is emotional blackmail.

The issue is that it doesn’t actually work long term, they convince themselves they are “fixed” only the truth is they are engage in emotional repression which has a tendency to blow up in your face. See the founders of Exodus International of who 3/5 left to engage in “the gay lifestyle”. Later Alan Chamber started shutting down Exodus as “The majority of people that I have met, and I would say the majority meaning 99.9% of them have not experienced a change in their orientation”.

The problem is that SSA is not an addiction and treating it as such is simply not effective especially in people who were never promiscuous. Given that marriage is an inferior good to celibacy, the social construct nature of heterosexuality and its postlapsarian origin why should we even try to get them “fixed”, even if we could “fix” them, instead of supporting them in celibacy?

If you are going to use SSA wrong and use it completely as a euphemism for homosexuality why not just use the word homosexuality?

Complete your thought.

How does forcing oneself to be celibate lead to self-flourishing? Don’t get me wrong. I do believe that some people with same-sex attraction may be called to celibacy just as some people with opposite sex attraction are called to celibacy. It depends on whether they can be happy that way.

But some people with same sex attraction struggle so much with celibacy that they end up falling into depression and abandoning their faith. It seems clear that the same would happen if we pressured every straight person into celibacy for religious reasons.

If following the Natural Law means respecting the regularities in nature that cause one to flourish, then you’ve got some explaining to do…

As someone who is not gay, but is trying to live a vocation of celibacy I have got to say that the Catholic Church today has so catastrophically failed to support celibacy that most Catholics labour under the heretical delusion that marriage is as good as celibacy. To be celibate does not mean that one needs to live a lonely and desolate life, see what I posted earlier by St. Gregory of Nazianzus, see also how Bl. Newman wrote of Ambrose St. John, and the great number of paired saints in the Church’s history.

A while back I took an online quiz that was drawn up by a psychologist sex researcher. I scored points as being partly bisexual–simply because I have male friends. His conclusion is that any same sex attraction at all, (e.g. my friends who are male) is characterized as having a physical, sexual component.

I fully refute his conclusion, of course.

I also disagree with the premise that people in gay relationships are entirely acting on self-interest. I cannot believe that procreation is the core of loving human relationships, and that absent the procreative element true love is not possible.

Think about it: the vast majority of us are heterosexual and we are defining true love as being that with which we are most comfortable and familiar and that in which we find our fulfillment. God gave us the means, God let us know what he would prefer, but God gave us the free will to do with it as we will.

True love does not require the procreative element because true love does not require sex at all.

 

[Tigg]

What makes you think that following the exterior design of the body is more noble than following the way you’re designed on the inside?
If so, we’re back at the beginning. How do you know that God didn’t make it that way on purpose? Why wouldn’t God want some people to be attracted to the same sex? What appears to be a contradiction to you may not be a contradiction to God. God’s ways are higher than your ways.

You bet they are but that doesn’t mean you may disregard the actual attributes of God which would include His inability to deceive us. You are the one speaking about God here, so let’s leave all the talk about biology and etiology aside. God gave us clear and concise moral instruction for salvation which is the end to which we are ordered. It is not rational to suggest He left out half the puzzle to figure out for ourselves.

According to St. Thomas, the natural law is “nothing else than the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law” (I-II.94). The eternal law is God’s wisdom, inasmuch as it is the directive norm of all movement and action. When God willed to give existence to creatures, He willed to ordain and direct them to an end.

Like all the rest of creation, man is destined by God to an end, and receives from Him a direction towards this end. This ordination is of a character in harmony with his free intelligent nature. In virtue of his intelligence and free will, man is master of his conduct. Unlike the things of the mere material world he can vary his action, act, or abstain from action, as he pleases. Yet he is not a lawless being in an ordered universe. In the very constitution of his nature, he too has a law laid down for him, reflecting that ordination and direction of all things, which is the eternal law. The rule, then, which God has prescribed for our conduct, is found in our nature itself. Those actions which conform with its tendencies, lead to our destined end, and are thereby constituted right and morally good; those at variance with our nature are wrong and immoral.

 

[Peter_Plato]

A while back I took an online quiz that was drawn up by a psychologist sex researcher. I scored points as being partly bisexual–simply because I have male friends. His conclusion is that any same sex attraction at all, (e.g. my friends who are male) is characterized as having a physical, sexual component.

I fully refute his conclusion, of course.

I also disagree with the premise that people in gay relationships are entirely acting on self-interest. **I cannot believe that procreation is the core of loving human relationships, and that absent the procreative element true love is not possible. **

Procreation, in a very general sense, is at the core of loving human relationships because it is, at ground, a desire to create and sustain the particular human relationship by embodying it in reality as a new life - a new human being. It is also, in a deliberate way, assenting to life going on as an independent reality by choosing procreation or more generally saying “yes” to the project of creating and carrying forward in time new human existents. Procreation requires a person to “get over” themselves and their own needs by calling those in the married state to love another as other - both their partner and the new life that is created.

Homosexual love simply circumvents this need by espousing what essentially is indirect egoism - loving another person, not “as other,” but as a reflection of my self loving me back. It is egoism writ large into a relationship. Married life calls us beyond egoism to loving beyond our “self.” Homosexual love simply crowns self love by giving it a mutual ground. One ego loving another explicitly because a comprehensive union is NOT found “attractive.”

This, I think, is why living out a gay lifestyle is so difficult to accept on the part of many parents and grandparents. Basically, the person is declaring that the genealogical lineage stops here and that for no higher reason or purpose than “I am not attracted to persons of the other sex.” It appears, very much, to be a triumph of narcissism (what the delimited self “loves” or is attracted to) masquerading as robust and real self-forgetful love. There seems to be a complete failure to understand what is simply being cast away or, at least, commandeered for one’s own ends rather than for its intended and higher-than-can-possibly-be-imagined end - the power to create new life.

Think about it: the vast majority of us are heterosexual and we are defining true love as being that with which we are most comfortable and familiar and that in which we find our fulfillment. God gave us the means, God let us know what he would prefer, but God gave us the free will to do with it as we will.

So, are you claiming that being able “to do with it as we will” is as objectively good in God’s eyes and in terms of actual human flourishing than following the moral template set out by the omnibenevolent and omniscient Creator of all?

You seem to be missing or ignoring that “to do with it as we will” does not, in general, have a great track record as far as being the ultimate guiding principle in anyone’s life.

It certainly is not an instantiation of the highest love of all - self-forgetting and giving oneself totally to another as “other.” What it appears to be doing is replacing a holy and worthy love that calls individuals beyond themselves with a facsimile that has no such expectation, all the while pretending that the two “loves” are on equal footing merely to legitimize the substitution.

If homosexuals were honest, they would admit they don’t understand marriage AND that they do not subscribe to what is involved in married life and leave the institution alone, rather than try to dismantle it under the pretext that they understand and can live up to what marriage essentially is, all the while merely “playing” the caricature that they see as the role.

If it were the case that the homosexual lobby does, indeed “get” marriage, there would be no need to REDEFINE marriage, it would suffice simply to better understand and promote it fully. Notice THAT is not what the militant homosexuals want - they do not even want to give conjugal marriage proponents or the traditional marriage form a hearing in terms of trying to understand what marriage ACTUALLY is. They seek merely to mischaracterize it and slough off anyone with a different view as bigoted.

 

[DavidGonzalez]

There’s a lot of things that a lot of people struggle with that can cause people to fall into depression, but that doesn’t mean they should still do it. Just because something “feels” natural or “feels” correct doesn’t make it right.

I have yet to see anything outside of emotional arguments to support what you’re saying.

Prodigal Son has a lot of great things to say, and a personal perspective. I’d give his posts another read.

His point was that something is in accordance with the Natural Law if it’s found regularly in nature and leads to self-flourishing and happiness. Those are his words, not mine.

Homosexuality is found regularly in nature, even among animals. And he has yet to explain why forcing yourself to be celibate can cause so much misery if it’s supposed to be in accordance with his understanding of the Natural Law. I also have a personal perspective on this in the ministry I’m involved with.

If anything, I’m paying too much attention to what he has to say.

 

[Tigg]

Do you have any idea how unhappy and miserable gay Catholics become when they’re pressured if not threatened into living a celibate lifestyle? Many become so frustrated in fact that they leave the Church.

Which does not in any way relieve us of our obligation. We owe each other the truth.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Complete your thought.

How does forcing oneself to be celibate lead to self-flourishing? Don’t get me wrong. I do believe that some people with same-sex attraction may be called to celibacy just as some people with opposite sex attraction are called to celibacy. It depends on whether they can be happy that way.

But some people with same sex attraction struggle so much with celibacy that they end up falling into depression and abandoning their faith. It seems clear that the same would happen if we pressured every straight person into celibacy for religious reasons.

If following the Natural Law means respecting the regularities in nature that cause one to flourish, then you’ve got some explaining to do…

OK, good. I think this means that you at least respect the rest of the argumentation I laid down, since you’ve identified the part where (admittedly) I just sort of gestured toward a framework for natural law. Here is how I, as a man who experiences same-sex attraction myself, would fill in that framework – though I warn you that I don’t have time to give a full and thorough argument:

First of all, your argument commits you to the claim that embracing homosexuality has better consequences than rejecting it. I’m not sure how you would support that claim. Now, you might find studies that say that “gay kids who are chaste are more likely to commit suicide” – these studies exist. But I’m pretty sure the group being studied are “gay kids” – that is, kids or young adults who self-identify as gay. They probably find these kids in LGBT help centers. This means that people like myself at age 20 – people who never defined as gay despite very strong attractions to men – don’t get counted. In sum, then, these studies don’t show that chaste gay people are more likely to commit suicide; rather, they show that chaste gay people *in a certain subpopulation *are more likely to commit suicide.

Where does that leave us? So far as I can tell, we have no evidence – one way or another – about whether gay people who abstain are more likely to be depressed or to kill themselves. Moreover, even supposing there were a connection, we do not know its cause. Gay kids could become more likely to be depressed/suicidal, in part, because they have been told that straight marriage / family life is impossible for them, or because they have been told that the single life must be bereft of deep friendships.

On this latter topic, by the way, I highly encourage you to peruse Joie’s list of 19 misunderstandings.

Does homosexual activity lead to human flourishing, then? The “gay sex is a way of avoiding depression” argument has been set to one side as unsatisfactory/incomplete. What other ways does gay sex lead to flourishing? Does it provide companionship, friendship, and joy? All these things can be found in chaste same-sex relationships. Does it make life seem easier and more enjoyable? So does fornication – not to mention bestiality and pornography – so this sort of enjoyment cannot constitute “flourishing”. Does it create or nourish other people’s lives, and contribute to the human community? No.

Does it lead to personal fulfillment? This is the central question, I think, and I acknowledge that it is harder to answer. Many people tell me that it does lead to personal fulfillment, and I take their opinions seriously. Many other people tell me it leads to restlessness, misery, and selfishness. I could “test” their claims by being in a gay relationship, but I think that would be quite unwise – and not just because I’m married. So how can I determine the answer?

My own method is objective observation. I watch carefully, and I wait to see evidence that gay relationships often involve the sort of monogamy, care, and creativity that straight marriages do. I don’t see the evidence, as of now. Gay men, at least, exhibit alarming tendencies toward promiscuity and objectification. I could tell you stories of some of the “inside view” I’ve gotten of these things, but I’d prefer not to. It’s disturbing. And meanwhile, I see only rather slim and equivocal evidence that anyone is finding the *sexual *aspect of gay relationships truly fulfilling.

So while friendships between gay men (or gay women) may contribute to flourishing, gay sex does not seem to. I’m open to evidence to the contrary, but again, I haven’t seen much.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

His point was that something is in accordance with the Natural Law if it’s found regularly in nature and leads to self-flourishing and happiness. Those are his words, not mine.

Not so! I call foul!

I said that natural law theory is about regularities in nature and their relationship to flourishing. Some regularities do lead to flourishing; these are goods. Some regularities do not lead to flourishing: these are defects. I propose that we know homosexuality is a defect BECAUSE we do not observe people flourishing *through *homosexual activity.

Homosexuality is found regularly in nature, even among animals. And he has yet to explain why forcing yourself to be celibate can cause so much misery if it’s supposed to be in accordance with his understanding of the Natural Law. I also have a personal perspective on this in the ministry I’m involved with.

You have yet to prove that forcing oneself to be celibate is associated with more misery than a homosexual way of living, though.

Surely you don’t encounter many people like myself in your ministry: reasonably well-adjusted people who have strong inclinations toward the same sex, but aren’t particularly bothered by them. Maybe that is the Church’s fault, I dunno. But it’s not the fault of the DOCTRINE. I accept the doctrine, and I’m still not troubled by my SSA.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

One more thing, David, a quote from Joie:

As someone who is not gay, but is trying to live a vocation of celibacy I have got to say that the Catholic Church today has catastrophically failed to support celibacy …

Perhaps this is why the people in your ministry are so miserable.

 

[Melchior_1]

Homosexuality is found regularly in nature, even among animals.

I wouldn’t compare ourselves to other animals, since some of them eat their young. Lets stick with humans, for now.

I’m aware of the ministry that you are involved with, and I understand why being involved in such a ministry you would start to think of ways how people could feel more welcome.

For eleven years I have volunteered in high school youth ministry. Of course I want kids to feel welcome, to have them feel loved. Some of the kids that show up, they have lived lives in a certain fashion, society tells these kids that sex before marriage is fine, and artificial birth control is also fine - so they’ve been doing this. These kids become young adults, and they continue.

It’d be easy for me to say “there’s nothing wrong with what you are doing”, even more-so than the case with your ministry. I’m dealing with people who consent to sexual intercourse with the opposite sex - plain ol’ heterosexual sex - so I don’t need to be concerned with this whole natural law discussion. Biologically, these kids are using everything as it should be. Should I condone these acts? Should I condone their pre-marital sex and say “that’s fine, that’s moral - continue doing this” because I want to make them feel more loved and welcome? because it’s a young man and young woman having consensual sex. When a 17 year old says they’re taking the pill so they don’t get pregnant with their boyfriend, do I tell her “keep on taking the pill, that’s morally fine”?

 

[Peter_Plato]

The issue is that it doesn’t actually work long term, they convince themselves they are “fixed” only the truth is they are engage in emotional repression which has a tendency to blow up in your face. See the founders of Exodus International of who 3/5 left to engage in “the gay lifestyle”. Later Alan Chamber started shutting down Exodus as “The majority of people that I have met, and I would say the majority meaning 99.9% of them have not experienced a change in their orientation”.

The problem is that SSA is not an addiction and treating it as such is simply not effective especially in people who were never promiscuous. Given that marriage is an inferior good to celibacy, the social construct nature of heterosexuality and its postlapsarian origin why should we even try to get them “fixed”, even if we could “fix” them, instead of supporting them in celibacy?

If you are going to use SSA wrong and use it completely as a euphemism for homosexuality why not just use the word homosexuality?

As someone who is not gay, but is trying to live a vocation of celibacy I have got to say that the Catholic Church today has so catastrophically failed to support celibacy that most Catholics labour under the heretical delusion that marriage is as good as celibacy. To be celibate does not mean that one needs to live a lonely and desolate life, see what I posted earlier by St. Gregory of Nazianzus, see also how Bl. Newman wrote of Ambrose St. John, and the great number of paired saints in the Church’s history.

True love does not require the procreative element because true love does not require sex at all.

There is something really odd in this view about “not supporting celibacy” as if the good of a celibate life lies in the fact of celibacy. That isn’t it at all. A person may choose a celibate life for the sake of pursuing a life of heroic virtue, but what makes that life a “higher calling” is NOT that it is celibate but that it is entirely focused on living out the higher virtues.

In other words, the life is not heroic BECAUSE it is celibate. Celibacy or not is entirely forgotten if the life is, indeed, a virtuous one. It is not as if the person has to keep reminding themselves that their “giving up” sex is what has made their life virtuous because that isn’t what has.

In fact, if you want to insist otherwise, then it is you who are treating sex as an addiction and further insisting that the person’s heroism requires bolstering from time to time by being reminded that they are being heroic BECAUSE they have given up sex – similar to the manner in which smokers or alcoholics need to be encouraged to continue giving up their pet addiction by being reminded that overcoming their addiction was such a laudible act to begin with.

I will note that Jesus had his priorities in order because he pointed out that the merit in “following” him – the merit that would be rewarded – was in giving up “mother, father, sisters, brothers and children” for the sake of following him. In other words, that which is truly valuable in life in order to labour for the KIngdom. Notice he didn’t even mention giving up sex as an act which carries with it special merit. The truly significant loss in a celibate life are those relationships which would have been carried forward in married life, not the fact that sex wasn’t to be had.

The distortion isn’t in the Church. The Church recognizes that having or not having sex, in itself, isn’t that huge a deal. It is our culture that makes it the ultimate good. Merely because the Church doesn’t follow suit and treat it as if it were by pretending that giving up sex is the ultimate sacrifice anyone can possibly make does not mean the Church has “catastrophically failed.” It has only “catastrophically failed” if we accept the premise that sex is the ultimate sacrifice and that celibacy is the highest calling because those who choose the celibate life have made the ultimate sacrifice possible.

The Church, rightly, merely smiles at that misconceived suggestion and reminds us that we should get on with our real and important mission of being Christ to the world rather than being so self-absorbed as to require that kind of fawning and narcissistic self-reassurance.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

The distortion isn’t in the Church. The Church recognizes that having or not having sex, in itself, isn’t that huge a deal. It is our culture that makes it the ultimate good. Merely because the Church doesn’t follow suit and treat it as if it were by pretending that giving up sex is the ultimate sacrifice anyone can possibly make does not mean the Church has “catastrophically failed.” It has only “catastrophically failed” if we accept the premise that sex is the ultimate sacrifice and that celibacy is the highest calling because those who choose the celibate life have made the ultimate sacrifice possible.

Yes, but…

Peter, you need to understand that people with SSA are specifically under attack in this culture. It DOES require some level of heroism to stand against the powers and principalities that are at work here. It’s not that chastity, on its own, is the heroism. The heroism, rather, is the courage to stand up for one’s conviction that right is right and wrong is wrong, when the battlefield of right and wrong is a group of people who are fighting over your own body.

Make no mistake: the ideology of homosexuality lays claim to my body. It does not lay claim to the bodies of straight people in the same way. No one is offended when a straight person merely says how they would like to handle their own body. But if I admit my SSA, and say I choose chastity and/or marriage, people ARE offended. Their offense is like a way of trying to claim my body for their own confusion. Those who stand against the tide are fought over; their very existence is a outrage to those who have subsumed their identity under the rainbow flag.

 

[fpt]

Homosexual acts are* against the Natural Law of the dual humanity, of the marriage and of the conjugal act.* That is truism and it is a catholic truth. The homosexual acts are unnatural, immoral and morally wrong, and thus sinful if your are christians.
*
The homosexual orientation is a natural disorder and not sinful, if no sexual act.* Only, the fact of practicing the homosexuals acts and the fact of being in favor of the doctrine of the naturality and of the normality of those acts is morally wrong, and thus sinful for christians.

 

[DavidGonzalez]

Not so! I call foul!

I said that natural law theory is about regularities in nature and their relationship to flourishing. Some regularities do lead to flourishing; these are goods.

Dude, that’s exactly how I described what you said. Don’t be the boy who cried foul

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Dude, that’s exactly how I described what you said. Don’t be the boy who cried foul

But you seemed to say that a trait’s existence in nature implied that God desired it to exist in nature. Hence your appeal to animals.

 

[fpt]

The homosexual acts are against the meta structure of the union of bodies. They are against the natural constitution of humanity, of the marriage and of the conjugal act. The human sexuation is designed and conceived in and for the sexual alterity and the sexual complementarity. The body of woman is done for the body of man. The body of man is done for the body of woman. The soul of woman is done for the soul of man. The soul of man is done for the soul of woman. The heart of woman is done for the heart of man. The heart of man is done for the heart of woman.

 

[fpt]

In reason of the effects of the original sin, of the mystery of Evil, of the mystery of iniquity, of free will of each one, of the liberty of each one, of the responsibility of each one, the homosexual orientation and co is difficult to understand, in the details with all the subtleties. Why? What for? How? What is it?

 

[Peter_Plato]

Yes, but…

Peter, you need to understand that people with SSA are specifically under attack in this culture. It DOES require some level of heroism to stand against the powers and principalities that are at work here. It’s not that chastity, on its own, is the heroism. The heroism, rather, is the courage to stand up for one’s conviction that right is right and wrong is wrong, when the battlefield of right and wrong is a group of people who are fighting over your own body.

Make no mistake: the ideology of homosexuality lays claim to my body. It does not lay claim to the bodies of straight people in the same way. No one is offended when a straight person merely says how they would like to handle their own body. But if I admit my SSA, and say I choose chastity and/or marriage, people ARE offended. Their offense is like a way of trying to claim my body for their own confusion. Those who stand against the tide are fought over; their very existence is a outrage to those who have subsumed their identity under the rainbow flag.

The presumption seems to be that an individual has sole jurisdiction over their own body as if God and humanity at large ought to have no (name removed by moderator)ut in terms of why human bodies exist to begin with. I don’t think it is a sustainable proposition to claim that a person’s body is their’s and their’s alone to do with as they will.

Any one individual human’s body was endowed to them by their progenitors and God. It is a gift of sorts, but not one that comes free and clear of all encumbrances. The “expectation” on the part of each human by humanity at large and God is that we use this individual body responsibly to further the larger cause of humanity by generating new human beings or, minimally, provide a valid accounting for why we choose not to.

Furthering the Kingdom is just such an account because working for the eternal good of others is chosen over the creation, nurturing and forming of human beings to perpetuate human life on Earth. However, the temporal and mutual pleasure fulfillment of two same-sexed individuals merely to provide each other with sustained pleasure fulfillment just seems to be lacking in this respect. It seems to be a case of choosing to forego the larger purpose for sexuality in order to refocus that larger potential onto the narrow and shortsighted aims of two individuals rendering completely null the purpose for which we have sex organs to begin with.

While it may be true that sex, like eating, is a pleasurable activity, when we wrongly identify pleasure with purpose, things begin to go askew. Eating merely for pleasure results in ill-health and gluttony because identifying pleasure or satisfaction as the end or goal of eating creates an incorrect set of expectations for how food is to be used by our bodies. Ditto with sex.

It is a misconception to claim that sex is unitive – it often isn’t AND on its own it isn’t. It is one aspect of the comprehensive union of mind, body and soul that is the end of marriage, but sex isn’t the unitive aspect, love is. Sex does not bring about love. Love will result in sex as an aspect of the comprehensive union that is a marriage between a complementary pair of human beings, but merely having sex does not make the union comprehensive.

Eating is an aspect of a comprehensive activity which has sustaining a human being in existence as its end or telos. That does not entail that merely eating – whatever and whenever – will bring about the end good of keeping a human being alive. As well, all the other aspects of good health must be respected and carried out – good nutrition, proper exercise, healthy lifestyle – in order for eating to be of actual benefit.

That is what is puzzling about same sex activity, especially when it is promoted as on par with, or a proper substitute for, marriage. It must completely dismantle what the purpose of marriage is to begin with in order to propose same sex union as a plausible substitute. It would be like proposing that human beings, if they so choose, can gorge on chewing gum and soft drink to keep the population “alive and healthy,” but then deceptively construct a contrived scaffolding of tubal nutrition and hydration to “fill in” for the absence or complete lack of a proper diet.

 

[Jaaanosik]

David,
there are two types of God’s laws essentially. The Natural moral law and the Revealed law.
The Revealed law is a word from God as we got it from the Bible. The Natural law is based on our deduction and logic capabilities.
The Revealed law has higher priority.
A good example is “You shall not commit adultery.” The Natural law tells us it’s good to procreate but the Revealed law clarifies it that it’s OK to do it only in the marriage.
The Revealed law tell us that the marriage is between a man and a wife and that the sex is not OK outside of the marriage.
The homosexual couples do not have the marriage therefore their acts are outside of the marriage and they are not OK.
Any justification of homosexual acts goes against the Revealed law, God’s words.