Ignorant Attacks on Gays and Lesbians

Via Rod Dreher, I see that the Ochlophobist has some mighty wrongheaded views about gays and lesbians (emphasis added).

This is the I’ll have my cake and eat it too phenomenon – I’ll send my $500 to the Christians Rightly Allied Against Perversion (CRAAP) fund to have them lobby against homosexual marriage, but I still want my 4 large screen TVs in the house so that my 2 kids can each play their video games while my wife watches Desperate Housewives and I watch the instruction DVD which explains to me how to operate the DVD players in my new 26 foot long Ford Explosion. What I do not “get” when I do this is that when I live in a manner that assumes the correctness of grossly gratuitous consumption, I live in a manner that assumes that homosexuality should be socially accepted. Why? Because like calls out to like. Homosexuality as a lifestyle and as a moral act is a decadent, gratuitous form of consumption in which the human person becomes commodified. In fact the normative accoutrements which gays and lesbians themselves often heartily embrace as representative of their lifestyle convey a pervasive quality of consumer oriented decadence (yes, there are exceptions; they prove the rule). It would seem that such a false ontology would naturally follow from a relationship based upon a sexual act which can never rise above entertainment.

When I read this kind of nonsense, stated as though it were self-evident, I cannot help but think that there is a significant body of orthodox religious believers whose views on homosexuality require the maintenance of breathtaking ignorance about how actual gays and lesbians live in the real world.

Is it possible to count average gay couples as close friends and to regard all their relationships as gratuitous consumption decisions? Can one be aware that homosexuality exists in every impoverished country on earth, and persist in the belief that it is somehow intrinsically tied to fancy accoutrements? After listening to a long established gay couple discuss the anguish of how to handle intimacy when one partner is HIV positive and the other isn’t, can one possibly describe that sexual act as one that “can never rise above entertainment”?

It is stunning how confident some people are in pronouncing on the nature of homosexuality as though they could reason it out deductively from first principles, starting with the fact that it is verboten in the Bible, and inexorably reaching the required conclusions, worldly evidence to the contrary be damned. These people’s conclusions are about as sound as the insights you’d get if you gave an immortal alien race that never reproduces the story of Abraham and Issac, formal training in theology, and little if any contact with any actual human families, and asked them to make their best effort at stating the nature of the parent child bond among modern Christians.