Wednesday, November 5, 2003

Gay rights debate: Moral truth is a form of totalitarianism

I, like Mr. Hoffman, considered not responding to yet another tantalizingly Southern and morally haughty letter. But some things cannot be helped.

First, Southern is as Southern does or says. While you may be from the Midwest, your view is in the tone of the Southern Baptist (while I assume you are Catholic, as I am): By default narrow and prejudiced.

The comparison of homosexuality to something like a drug is cruelly narrow and devoid of modern thought. It does no harm when the people consent and use protection as in the world of the heterosexual (a lifestyle in which they are many and more faults including bestiality, adultery, coveting etc.). It does not destroy families or lives, but rather creates a happier and more mentally sound individual.

To deny them what they are by nature is crueler than any case you mentioned (and should not Christians be kind and fair to every human, sinful or not?).

Recently, findings have indicated that sexuality is determined pre-birth in specific genes (this leads to feeling male/female or trapped within the wrong body gender). By denoting their sexuality to a sin, you are saying that they themselves (because of what they are made of) are sin. Living, breathing offenses to God.

And yet, did not God create all man in his image? And is God, in his omnipotence, infinitely correct and infallible? So then, as he made these people homosexual in the womb, does this prove God’s fallibility by his creation that contradicts his original teachings on sin (God is continually molding homosexual sinners upon conception)?

Obviously, then, he made a mistake and he himself created sin. For no person should be homosexual according to your argument. Therefore, following implications in recent findings and your article, God is wrong. And I doubt you would like to say so.

Moral truth in itself is a form of totalitarianism. It is a form of control in which the minds of people are manipulated by fear of divine punishment preached by so-called experts upon their high pulpits.

By instilling the fear of the divine within people, it is then possible to control their actions by insisting that failure to comply will result in the aforesaid punishment. A punishment made so horrible, a person would do anything to avoid it.

Such control has been practiced in all religions. Christians, however, have elevated it to an art form. By creating a sweetly ambrosial heaven and demonically horrific hell (for in the Old Testament and majority of the New, there is neither a heaven nor a hell but rather a gray area beneath the earth called Sheol in Hebrew to which all people go and continue to exist in a sort of half life), the Church could impress on the people the control they had over where they would go.

And to which place would all people rather go? That place of white light and pleasure, naturally. By then playing on this desire and the fear of being denied this desire, it was all to easy to control people’s lives and actions and to impose dogma and so-called moral truth on the masses.

Christian nosiness and the need to control others derives from this ancient form of dogmatic control. And further, the homosexuality with which so many Christians have a fascination is never harmful to those who choose to practice it. Unless they too become victim to the moral truth of all religions and are so deluded into believing themselves sin contained in skin.

And who can call themselves Christians who would seek to horrify, control and demoralize another human being?

Dixie Eska-Thedra

Fayetteville, Ga.