Positive Liberty

Does the rise of crystal meth in the gay community mean that gays are less worthy of marriage? Do we as a community have to get our act together before we can hope for acceptance? Have we “not done enough” to win the hearts and minds of straight people?

I despise questions like these. They have no good answers and only invite the worst sort of collectivism.

This piece by Mary Eberstadt in First Things is one example of what I mean. She writes:

…even as the celebrations of gay rights roar on, reality glowers in the corner like an unwanted guest. For the argument that homosexuality is “virtually normal”–the argument, that is, on which the gay rights and gay marriage activists have so far won–is a hypothesis that is not only wrong on theological grounds but also as a matter of established fact. By “fact” I mean by the most secular sources imaginable: social science, medical science, psychological studies, and more–including sources overtly friendly to the normalization of gay rights.

None of that evidence, of course, will surprise those who actually minister to homosexual persons from a traditionalist perspective. But this same evidence is almost entirely unknown, because culturally verboten, throughout the secular world, and particularly among our secular elites; it is as studiously ignored in our own time as, say, evidence about family breakdown was in the early 1960s.

She goes on to mention addiction, depression, dropout rates, and suicide, concluding,

Sooner or later, someone is going to ask why, if being gay is cause for celebration, gay boys and men continue to kill themselves at significantly higher rates than do heterosexuals. Sooner or later, someone is going to wonder why, despite society’s open arms, virtually every study of gay mental health shows higher rates of depression, alcoholism, sexual addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, and the rest.

Facts like these are “culturally verboten,” you know, and our “secular elites” never hear of them. It’s not like they appear in The New Yorker or anything. And we conservatives are boldly unmasking the hidden problems of the homosexual community: It turns out that a widely reviled group of people, commonly discriminated against by law and custom… sometimes has a few psychological problems. So it must be their fault.

It must be their fault, and all their talk about greater social acceptance must not be trusted. They’re hiding something from the rest of us, and we should go on showing our disapproval of them. We must never be fooled by a group of people who ask us for respect or decency; the brave and honest thing to do is to look closely at them and expose whatever faults they have. And we should continue to discriminate against them until they are happy about it.