Customer Reviews

Homosexuality and American Public Life

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Many in American society today struggle with issues involving sexuality, and sadly reap the whirlwind of their choices. The homosexual population (including our own friends and family members) unfortunately involves an aggressive element, one more concerned with license than liberty, and with generating heat rather than light. With this preamble, -Homosexuality and American Public Life- enters the debate and seeks to restore a rightful understanding of human sexuality, one more easily grasped by the common man just a few generations ago.

Because of limited space, I'll restrict my comments to the moral and legal sections of the book. In Part II, Moral Norms, Robert George deals with the ideas of neutrality (which turns out to be not-so-neutral after all) and the naturally-derived definition of marriage as a "one-flesh communion" of persons unique and uniquely important in our experience. He goes on to articulate the assumption of a controversial philosophical dualism within the homosexual position that necessarily intrumentalizes the body, and therefore the person.

Part III on the legal aspects of the controversy was actually the most interesting to me, partly because I was unfamiliar with the authors (except for Arkes), who are certainly notable in their own right, but mostly because of the substantial arguments they marshal in defense of traditional marriage. I thought that some of this material might have been incorporated into the rather short (two chapter) section on Moral Norms. In III, Hadley Arkes serves up the reasoning behind the Defense of Marriage Act, articulating well the flaw inherent to the notion of "homosexual marriage": namely, that it cannot help but render marriage as a relatively meaningless and socially constructed convention, one open to nearly any relationship (e.g., polygamy) imaginable.

Philosopher Michael Pakaluk brings a welcome addition with his arguments about homosexuality and its effects on the Common Good; He asks, exactly what harms can we expect if the homosexual movement is afforded the acceptance it desires? Pakaluk notes Arkes' point above, but then turns to another concern that often goes unmentioned: the moral relationship between parents and children. Severing the institution of marriage from its procreative aspects constitutes not an extension to marriage, but rather a radical redefinition thereof. Indeed, it represents the loss of an institution (or at least the societal recognition or understanding of such) connecting parents to their biological children. If there is any difficulty in seeing the implications of this disconnect (or even believing that such implications are worth considering), it is only because we have already lost a great deal in terms of understanding parental duty and the nurturing of our children. This is an important and often neglected aspect of the debate - one that deserves greater attention.

Finally, David Coolidge opens with a useful catalog of marriage models: Commitment ("radical but appealing"), Choice ("just plain radical"), and Complementarity (traditional). He argues that the Commitment model embraced in the public sphere by homosexual advocates degenerates, in practice and in principle, to the Choice model. He addresses a number of arguments for and against traditional marriage, and fills his commentary with many gems worth holding onto; for example, "We question the view that sexual desires are the key to identifying one's sexual identity. We question the view that 'sexual orientation' is as significant as being male or female." He writes with superb common sense, the kind of sense missing in many moral discussions today.

This is a book written, I think, with some reluctance, but out of a greater measure of duty to loved ones within the homosexual movement, to those who might be involved without such argumentation, and to all of us who need to reclaim an understanding of human nature - the same nature providing a ground for the rights we cherish. Many will object vehemently to the content of this volume, but if they do, I challenge them to do so with reasoned arguments, and without heated and divisive language aimed at ending the debate before it can begin. For a more complete study, I recommend coupling this book with Beckwith and Koukl's -Relativism: Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air- and the essays of Harry V. Jaffa of the Claremont Institute. ....

I found this book to be fair, scholarly, and very interesting as deals with homosexuality and the public life of our culture. I wrote--" This work is an exemplary gathering of scholarship to discuss and debate the facts as concerns a controversial yet 'in' subject--homosexuality." This is from my review at The CRITICAL REVIEW, an AMAZON Associate.

Those who wish to see science supporting homosexuality's claims of innate character will undoubedtly attack this material. Resorting to the usual ad homenin arguments lacking any coherent argumentation but filled with emotionalism. This book is well written and presented with scholarly works to support claims made by the authors, unlike some science work that starts with a premise assumed then set out to locate support for the premise. Science is supposed to be science, objective and authentic in its research methods without which it is just popular experimentation. This book supplies the reader with information for an informed decision concerning the debates on the topic and leaves off the emotionalism so rampant in the controversy of the day. Well done!

The only reason you would not like this book is if you buy into the pro-homosexuality empty logic and sloganeering. This is a very frank, open, and rational discussion on the effects of homosexual behavior and policy on a society.

Wolf and Kristol are to be applauded for their scholarly and highly objective analysis of why gays are, scientifically speaking, evil. What makes this brilliant essay even more impressive is that it is written by two openly gay Jews who love each other very much but see the evil and depravity in their homosexual lifestyle. Although Kristol demostrates his gayness every week on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos", he boldly acknowledges in this book the hypocrisy of his position on gay sex.

Kristol, who has never shown any interest in serving in the military but has made a very lucrative career as America's greatest cheerleader for war, explains that he has been afflicted with the dreaded hypocrisy for as long as he can remember. His recollection of his high school days, when his effeminate personality came into full bloom while at the same time he was denouncing the gays in his school, is especially moving. He also candidly reveals that he has never ever, not even once, been correct about anything he has ever publicly written or spoken about in his 30 year career as an over-paid commentator. He recognizes the absurdity of an incompetent "political analyst" who is always wrong being allowed to spew his nonsensical opinions on TV day after day for years and years on national television and getting paid obscene sums of money to boot. This is why he, and the multitudes of other yakkety-yakkers on TV believe that America is the greatest country in the world.

Homosexuality and American Public Life says what too many are afraid to address. It is a masterful treatise on a subject that has been silenced for too long. I recommend this book for all those struggling with how homosexuality fits into American public life. I challenge Rep Barney Frank to read this book!

"Homosexuality and American Public Life," a collection of thin rationalizations attempting to justify homophobia, will be much quoted in future debates over same sex attraction. It is a public policy contribution to the "you can change" advertisements that appeared in American newspapers in the summer of 1998. The authors believe same sex attraction is a reversible "disorder" that is not genetically or biologically determined. Homosexual acts are immoral and any resulting happiness is at best illusory. Alarmed at the recent progress of the gay movement, the authors hope to counter its progress by working out the anti-same-sex implications of their traditional (mostly Catholic) ideologies.

The quality of the papers is very irregular. Over 90% of Reker's citations are at least 15 to 20 years old. The virtually documentationless reports of therapists Fitzgibbons and Nicolosi are bloodlessly cool to the pains of their clients. Psychiatrist Stainover is forced to admit to a 25 to 50% genetic predisposition to an individual becoming homosexual but he clings to the notion of same sex attraction as an "option" that is eventually "correctable." Law professor Arkes misleads, asserting anti-discrimination laws grant "special rights" instead of protecting the ordinary right to be free of pervasive patterns of anti-homosexual discrimination. [Think of Matt Shepherd and Billy Jack Gaither.]

Three unpersuasive leitmotifs appear repeatedly.

First, same sex relationships are conceived of only in sexual terms. Arkes thinks of sexuality only as "genital stimulation," and "penetration and orgasm." Pakaluk sees same sex relationships as "mere whim or preference," the equivalent of "the sexual expression of conjugal love." For Nicolosi the key to a fictitious gay identity is the pursuit of "sexual pleasure." These authors are transfer experts, transferring their fixation on the physicality of sex to same sex attracted individuals, and then deny the possibility of emotional and spiritual satisfactions.

Second, sexuality is necessarily only reproductive. Political theorist George makes procreative sex a defining fetish for marriage. Marriage is a "two-in-one-flesh communion of persons" that is consummated and actualized by reproductive acts. Hence a vicious circle: only marriage makes reproductive sex possible, and only reproductive sex validates, legitimizes marriage. Non-reproductive same-sex sex is necessarily "masturbatory and sodomical" and makes mere instruments of each other's bodies. He struggles to avoid admitting that such sex, though non-reproductive, often can and does grow out of and become an expression of the same deep sources of love that motivate men/women couples. And he will not see that his own notion of reproductive sex itself instrumentalizes the sexual act toward reproductive ends. His thinking is captive to his received morals.

But these articles are, in the end, just window dressing rationalizations for a third leitmotif: a moral rejection of same sex attraction. Everything is secondary, Rekers claims, "to arguments about whether or not it is moral." For this purpose, the ghost of Thomas Aquinas is resurrected. [A loving Jesus is left in his tomb.] Semen is the key to Aquinas, Smith claims. Its goodness is reproductive. To use semen in a non-reproductive way is to misuse and waste it. Homosexuality is immoral because "it involves wasting the matter that should be directed toward the creation of new life." Smith has apparently heard of neither wet dreams nor Chinese ejaculation interruptus. Aquinas' subtle reasoning misses the reality that sexual wholes might have purposes that go beyond the purposes of its semen parts.

Ultimately most damning, however, is the reductive move by every author that strips sexuality of all meaning except that of reproduction, that impoverishes by seeing union only in the instrumentality of reproduction. These authors -- and not the homosexuals they so obviously do not understand -- so fixate on the "orgasmic ingredient" of same-sex sex -- all in the attempt to save their received authoritarian theologies -- that they blind themselves to the realities of those sexual acts through which two men or two women can and do become "two-in-one-flesh," emotionally and physically and spiritually. The authors of these papers are tacit Christians, but they don't know much of the healing love of Him they profess.

Two stars when read with skeptical rigor; no stars when read mindlessly.

Bill Kristol and his ilk need to be banished from all access to pens, pencils, word processors, etc. He is beyond repugnant.
He is all that is vile and contemptible in man...

Among the traditional values activists who want to keep the hetero in sexuality, a consensus is developing that there is needed a "public philosophy," a theory to underlie their practice, and at least the appearance of a rationale to bring respectability to what - absent such an underpinning - are little more than near hysterical rants.

Insofar as quoting Scripture to their fellow citizens has proven pretty much ineffective when not just alienating (except for the small percentage of the populus describing itself as "Evangelical," people are suspicious of anything that looks like forcing one's religious opinions upon others) the writers contributing to this little volume have divided their efforts into two neat halves.

They're not - of course - giving up the ghost on scripture-flinging: the first half comprises the usual litany of Biblical "texts of terror" used to suppress, silence and mass-murder queer folk for millenia.

The second, a not particularly impressive set of intellectual acrobatics and somersaults of reason, comprises efforts at elaborating a socially utilitarian basis for homophobia and heterosexism to exist. It also provides an outline of legal strategies that could be employed to keep marriage and the adoption of children out of the hands of like-gendered couples and to keep our nation's armed forces completely and unalloyedly heterosexual.

The theses put forth by this book's authors and editors are so plainly flawed in their conceptions, so deeply stained by the taint of sectarian and sexual and even racial intolerance and so cartoonishly 'off the mark' when addressing objective issues of natural law, human biology and the social constitution that they are ensured a wide readership amongst Santorum-style Republicans, addle-pated members of the reactionary Roman Catholic and Evangelical Christian "intelligensia," proponents of creationism and the "flat Earth theory," and heterosexuals fearful of anything not clearly colored either pink or blue.

Had this compilation been published in the 19th rather than the 20th century, it's theme and title would undoubtedly have been "The Free Negro Peril: How and Why to Fight It."

None of this is to say this is not a useful book. It is, in that it affords a rare glimpse into the upside-down, sad-funny intellectual world of the homophobe and the bigot. There have been endless treatises published on the evils of homosexuality but this is rare for its patina of pseudo-scientific reflection.

This book purports to be a scientific examination of homosexuality, but unfortunately, it approaches the subject in a decidedly non-scientific manner. It starts with a conclusion ("homosexuality is harmful") and then searches high and low for evidence supporting its position.

Unfortunately, the scientific evidence for their conclusion is lacking. The authors gather up a motley collection of various doctors and pundits who represent a "who's who" of the anti-homosexual political movement in the United States. Their "compassionate" arguments against the dignity of homosexuals is a chilling display of bigotry dressed in modern social scientific discourse.