News
Featured Image
 Shutterstock.com

Editor's Note: Robert R. Reilly, former senior advisor for information strategy for the U.S. Secretary of Defense and special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, spoke to LifeSiteNews about his newest book, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything, published by Ignatius Press. The full interview is below and our report on the interview is here.

If it is said that “two people become one flesh when they get married,” how does the Supreme Court deal with the fact that two men can’t become one? Does the Supreme Court think that they become one with each other?

This is part of the judicial shell game that has allowed the courts to substitute homosexual “marriage” for marriage. But one has to ask the question: How can homosexuals consummate a marriage and, if they can’t, how can it be a marriage? This is a key issue because, for many hundreds of years, common law held that a marriage must be consummated in order to be valid. If it were not consummated, it could be declared a nullity. Consummation meant then, and has always meant, vaginal intercourse. It could not possibly have meant sodomy because sodomy was a crime in common law. Sodomy was forbidden in all of the American colonies and, until fairly recently, in all 50 states.

How did the courts get around this? Simply by ignoring it. How do they get away with it? Unfortunately, American culture some time ago separated sex from diapers. The essential procreative side of sex has been suppressed. Once this has been done, there is no reason even to require that sex be unitive. This crazy logic led the Massachusetts Supreme Court in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health to declare that the act of consummation is irrelevant to marriage. This goes against more than a 1000 years of jurisprudence. Only unitive sex can be generative, and generative sex has to be unitive. Once you deny this and remove it from marriage, the whole thing falls apart and sex becomes a toy or an emotive outlet. Anything can then be called marriage. But sex apart from the unitive and generative is obviously not spousal.

How did our current situation in America around homosexuality and same-sex “marriage” develop? And what are your suggestions to get us back to normalcy?

The most immediate cause was the sexual revolution in the 1960s that separated sex from diapers. If heterosexuals can rationalize their sexual misbehavior, why can’t homosexuals rationalize theirs? The deeper cause has been the overthrow of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” as a source of moral meaning. We no longer have to respect the inbuilt purposes in Nature because we deny that they exist. We pretend that we get to make up our own purposes. Reality is based upon our will and power, not upon what is. We do this to satisfy our appetites. We don’t want to conform to reality; we want reality to conform to us. Therefore, we rationalize our sexual misbehavior by turning evil into good. (To illustrate these two fundamentally different views of reality, I use Aristotle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the book.)

We saw two totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century that were based upon variations of this belief in the will to power and the denial of the laws of nature. If reality is based upon will, then the person with the strongest will gets to rule. This ineluctably leads to tyranny. Those two ideologies eventually crashed and burned, as all such denials of reality eventually do. The problem is that they created a huge amount of damage in the interim.

This new ideology of the will that is being imposed upon us now is only beginning to exercise its hegemony. The phase of enforcement has begun. How can our society remain sane and accept these new rulings? This reminds me of Germany in 1935 with the passage of the racist Nuremberg laws. No doubt, there were still many fine and moral people in Germany, but for the most part they acceded to the pseudoscientific, racist dictates of the Nazi regime. The denial of reality in which we are now involved is just as profound. However, we are in better shape because the principles of the American regime are still there to be appealed to, even if they are ignored. We are, after all, founded upon “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” We need to rescue their meaning. Perhaps a new American Revolution will be required. It can be a peaceful one, but it requires resistance and recovery.

How do kids know if they are gay/lesbian at so young an age? Do they understand fully what it actually means?

They don’t. It’s a farce. It is being enforced upon them. The violation of children’s innocence spread through these teachings simply shows that the homosexual movement will not allow anything to stand in the way of the rationalization of its sexual misbehavior. If the price for that is children’s innocence, too bad for them.

Are the teachers pressuring the kids to become gay/lesbian? And are the teachers being told to do so?

It is becoming part of the curriculum and is required in several states. Take a look at the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and see where its materials are used in elementary and high schools. It has spread like wildfire. Classroom presentations by homosexuals, or on the subject of homosexuality, are invitations to obscenity and inevitably lead to the question: “How do you guys do it?” The response is usually, “We are not allowed to talk about our personal sex lives.” Nevertheless, with the question implanted, curious young minds will ineluctably be drawn to the subject of sodomy. “So that’s what those nice guys who talked with us do? There must not be anything wrong with it!” Mission accomplished—to make the abnormative normative before the children have developed their critical faculties of thought. Of course, it’s much worse in high schools where very explicit instructions are given in deviant sex and how to “protect” oneself when engaging in it.

Why are the parents of children being shut up when they complain about their child being taught about gay sexual activities in schools at age 7? Do they not have a say just like the gay/ lesbians?

Here is a sample of what has happened, and a model for more to come. In 2008 in Massachusetts Dr. Paul B. Ash, the superintendent of Lexington Public Schools, announced the “new, formalized diversity curriculum in preparation for the next year, when we plan to pilot 4 to 5 short units in each elementary grade. Some units will focus on families, including families with single parents, foster parents, and gay and lesbian parents.” A parent, Shawn Landon, protested, demanding “prior notification to any discussion, education, training, reading or anything at all related (even remotely) to homosexuality”.

Here is part of Dr. Ash’s response to the father: “Perhaps you are not aware of the lawsuit decided by the United States Court of Appeals (Parker vs. Hurley). This case established Lexington’s right to teach diversity units, including stories that show same gender parents. The court decided we are not required to inform parents in advance of teaching units that include same gender parents or required to release students when such topics are discussed. The Appeals Court dismissed the claim that parents have a right to require the school to provide advance notice or the right to remove their children. In addition, the School Committee has decided that teachers must be able to teach topics they feel are appropriate without the requirement parents be notified in advance.”

Why is it that gay/lesbians seem to have more rights than we do? And why, if we are all equal, are we not being protected in the same ways?

Because “rights” are now being created by the state, rather than coming from Nature. According to natural law, you cannot possibly possess a natural right to perform an unnatural act. Once Nature is removed as the moral authority, you can declare anything equal to anything else – because it is simply based upon will. If the act of sodomy is then declared to be equal to the marital act (which is what the Supreme Court has done), the new version of equality requires the teaching of it as morally normative. In other words, this equality argument can quickly be turned against you by saying equality requires the teaching of sodomy. In fact, that is the argument of the homosexual movement. In order to defeat it, we have to show that rights come from Nature, not the state, and that sodomy is unnatural.

Will we ever be able to recover from this disaster in our world?

Yes. Reality always wins in the end. Reality is on our side. Illusion always leads to disillusion. The question is what will be left by the time this happens. The answer to that question depends on us. We must put our souls in order and steadfastly refuse to comply with this profound lie about what human beings are and reassert the truths of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” On the basis of reason alone, that is what I try to do in my book.