For the longest time I agreed with you guys. About homosexual sex (not homosexuality itself) being immoral, that is, and not about it needing to be outlawed. I would have told you even then that it’s none of the law’s business who marries whom, that the law is about preserving order and physical safety, not enforcing the lawmaker’s personal idea of ethics. The only people I would ever trust to do that are prophets. (Before you bring up Lot the people he was commanding “not to approach men” were already married to women. Not to mention all the robbing and murdering they were doing, which folks always somehow fail to mention.)
I was pretty firm about this and on retrospect I don’t really blame myself for it. The only two pro-gay arguments I ever commonly heard people make are pretty poor. One of them is, “Anything that doesn’t hurt anybody can’t be immoral,” which isn’t a philosophy at all and would have sounded lazily simplistic even to a flower child on Haight-Asbury. The other is, “They were born that way,” which is pure textbook fallacy of appeal to inherent nature, and the ultimate sign of how frighteningly determinism has dominated modern thought. I was born without a sense of bodily shame but that does not give me an automatic “get out of immodest behavior free” card. Some people are said to be born with elements of Antisocial Personality Disorder in them. So what of it? But I’m sure that by now we’re back on, “Anything that doesn’t hurt anybody can’t be immoral.” Desire is involuntary; action is not. And we’re defined by our actions. You see how unpersuasive people can people even when they’re right.
And so, hearing only these two pathetic arguments, and not thinking through the matter with Lot any further myself than most other Muslims do, I was as firm about homosexual behavior as most of them still are now. After all, I thought, the way the world works is that mutually exclusive pairs of complementary opposites work together to produce an effect that only they can produce together. Male and female is just one example or extension of many. Yin and yang and all that. From the way these pro-gay advocates talked you’d think that the abstract relationship was the only thing that mattered and the fact of what the people were in the first place meant nothing. I was sick of people treating the biological aspect of a biological process like it was a mere trifle when after all it’s the thing that begins life we’re talking about. But I didn’t really care about that. The only thing that I hated was being called a “homophobe”, a bigot, just for holding a contrary viewpoint, even though I had no stereotypes whatsoever about gay people themselves and simply disagreed with one single thing they did. I didn’t go around making stereotypes about all non-Muslims and call them all Islamophobes. Indeed, these guys were the bigots for automatically branding me one just for not holding to their own values. And I still, even after changing my mind on the issue, find that disgusting, and will rush to people’s aid in a hot second about it. If someone makes stereotypes about gay people or fears them, they’re a homophobe. If they merely don’t approve of the act, if they have a different opinion from your own about it and do not judge the homosexual himself or make any assumptions about him whereas you make assumptions about them and call them names just for having certain religious beliefs, you’re the one who’s prejudiced. Period. End of discussion.
Anyway, I was sitting in a restaurant one day a few months ago when an unrelated train of thought caused me to realize kind of out of nowhere that if homosexual sex is immoral then so is adoption. Because parentage is also a relationship based around a biological process, and yet that doesn’t mean it has to be based around a biologically viable form of it. Adoption is not the way Mother Nature intended for parentage to work and yet it does work. In fact my mother was adopted. I wouldn’t be here in the first place if not for it. How is homosexuality any different? In both cases the spiritual and psychological bond is what really matters. Deciding not to be rash I turned it over in my head for a few days and even put in on the back burner but neither my conscious nor my subconscious mind could find any holes in the logic. The biological aspect, it turned out, really was more of a trifle after all, in the very grand scheme of things.
So now I support gay marriage. Actually I always did in a legalistic sense, as I’ve said, but I’m more into the issue itself. Although I will still not countenance hearing people being called “homophobes” just because they don’t. There is too much hate in response to hate, but more importantly there is too much of an assumption of hate. Too many things need to stop. For example, look at some of the comments we’ve had. Disgusting? Gross? Society hitting rock bottom? I’m sorry, aren’t there a lot of wars and stuff you could be saying this about instead?
