Is tolerance compatible with religious thinking?

12/04/2007

Terence Cullen's remarks on the subject of gay rights (MT, March 2007) beg the question of how far tolerance and free thought are compatible with religious teaching.

Mr Cullen, who describes himself as a "free-thinking, non-practising Catholic who still retains the core beliefs" duly reveals his adherence to the doctrine that homosexuality is unnatural, abnormal and perverse. It is one thing to observe that gay relationships are non-procreative, but it is another thing altogether to conclude they are are "aberrations from natural relationships", and that gay couples are therefore undeserving of equal rights to heterosexual couples.

The notion of heterosexuality as "natural" and homosexuality as "unnatural" is a strangely simplistic one to issue from the pen of an avowed "free-thinker".

For one thing, it implicitly presumes upon an unimpeachable authority. In fact Mr Cullen's argument hails directly from The Old Testament, which represents male-male sex as perverse precisely because two men cannot produce children (Leviticus 20:13). Mr. Cullen makes no attempt to provide supporting evidence, and he entirelry ignores the pioneering work of Alfred Kinsey, who in 1948 demonstrated that the experience of homosexual desire among a given number of men eroded the conceptual boundary dividing "heterosexuals " from "homosexuals", "natural" sex from "aberrations."

Perhaps Mr Cullens has not read this, yet it takes only a little imagination to appreciate that homosexuality should not be written off as "unnatural" simply because it does not result in pregnancy. By the same token, gay men and women should not be presumed incapable of nurturing adoptive children in a stable and loving environment merely because they cannot have children of their own.

Would Mr. Cullen make the same assumption about infertile heterosexual couples?

Ultimately, Mr Cullen shies away from accepting homosexuality as a valid alternative sexuality, equal to but at the same time crucially different from heterosexuality. The tolerance he extends to gay couples is of a very limited kind. He regards them as participating in a "minority interest" - rather like tiddlywinks - whilst his assertion that a non-discriminatory society must inevitably remove the legal restrictions upon children, smoking, drinking, having sex etc. implies that he regards gay adults as little more responsible or thoughtful than children themselves. Again, he produces no evidence for his claim.

Mr Cullens' letter, which elevates belief to the status of fact and substitutes bigotry for tolerance, is a betrayal of the free thought he claims to represent, and an insult to the intelligence of considerate readers, whatever their sexual orientation.


Michael Zeelie, Tyne and Wear