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Sexual behavior
cannot ever be morally neutral
I thought hard about whether
to respond to Ms. Eska-Thedra’s Sept. 24 letter because I sense that
our disagreement is getting rather overheated. But for the sake of clarity,
I feel I must respond on a view points.
While I would be certainly happy to assume the moniker of “Southern,”
I am not really a son of the South because I grew up in the Midwest. That
being said, I hope being Southern doesn’t disqualify someone’s
opinion in the mind of Ms. Eska-Thedra or anyone, for that matter.
Using the term in a pejorative way is hardly fair to the many wonderful
people in the South and is an example of, dare I say it, “intolerance.”
But, that is not a surprising reaction from someone like Ms. Eska-Thedra,
who regards the assertion of a moral truth the equivalent of a kind of
moral totalitarianism. It has gotten so tiresome to see such phrases as
“peeking into people’s windows” jump out as soon as someone
hints at the possibility of moral truth. This is the threat used by the
PC police to scare everyone into absolute conformity to the morally relativistic
culture of our times.
No, Ms. Eska-Thedra, I do not as a Christian or an American or a recent
Southerner advocate such tactics, and never have. What I do advocate is
the notion of telling the truth according to long-established and very
clear teachings of the Bible and Christianity, especially when doing so
is difficult and contradictory to a modern mind-set which so wrongly equivocates
all sexual behavior as morally neutral.
For the umpteenth time, it does nobody any good to go around pretending
that something which is morally harmful is a “good.” It’s
like pretending that heroin is good for you because it helps you lose
weight. By claiming right is wrong and wrong is right, we doom the more
impressionable members of our society (namely, the youth) to lifestyles
devoid of real meaning and happiness and full of frustration and misery.
If you don’t believe me, please survey some of those who spent their
youth pursuing the hedonistic fantasy of “sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll”
and see how they made out.
Rather, one is obliged to tell another the truth. It must be done charitably,
without judgment, and usually only when requested. But it must be done,
or the person who is engaged in a given wrong behavior will suffer and
you, as the one who had the chance to help, will be partially responsible.
As for how the sins of another affect me, I can only return to the teachings
of the Bible and the Catholic Church, which have affirmed the communal
nature of sin since the beginning. No sin is truly private because in
ways both obvious and mysterious, the sin of others affects us all.
If you don’t believe me (and I know you don’t), then look at
how the alcoholism of a father affects the family, or how the drunkenness
of a teenager leads to the death of others in a drunk-driving incident,
or how the adultery of a man and woman leads to the dissolution of one
or two families.
If you want to focus on homosexuality, there are many scientific studies
that point to the harmful emotional and physical consequences of the homosexual
lifestyle in addition to the horrible plague of AIDS.
If you wish to leave people to their vices and let them harm themselves
and others through their misunderstanding of God’s will, then so
be it. But please don’t pretend that such an approach to living life
is a Christian one. It is rather the unfortunate result of misguided compassion
at best, and an abrogation of personal responsibility at worst, which
is something I know Christ would not “tolerate.”
Trey Hoffman
Partial Southerner
Peachtree City, Ga.
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