by Gary L. Morella

In a statement without precedent in American history, forty prominent Christian leaders have joined in a common statement declaring a crisis in the American constitutional order. Never before has such an array of leadership been brought together to address a question of public moment. Signers include three cardinals and ten bishops and archbishops of the Catholic Church, the Primate of the Orthodox Church in America, and top leaders of evangelical Protestant denominations and pare-church organizations. This statement was entitled:

JULY 4, 1997

It serves as the cornerstone for the present discussion of how the moral relativism of modern philosophers has infected society to the point of not only causing insanity in the polity but also the Church. Nations are ultimately judged not by their military might or economic wealth but by their fidelity to "the laws of nature and nature’s God." Liberty is not license but is "ordered liberty" in response to moral truth. The great threat to society today, in particular the American experiment, is not from enemies abroad but from disordered liberty, which is increasingly expressed as a denial of the very concept of moral truth.

Let us look at the roots of this denial by examining an important intersection of the modern philosophies of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant, which is alive, and well both inside and outside of the Church. We will do this through examples involving Supreme Court decisions, and the culture war being fought by Catholics on the campus of a large secular university.

In its stated effort to end the national debate over abortion, the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992) transferred the legal ground for the abortion license from the implied right of privacy to an explicit liberty right under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court there proposed a sweeping redefinition of liberty: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." The doctrine declared by the Court would seem to mean that liberty is nothing more nor less than what is chosen by the autonomous, unencumbered self.

This is the very antithesis of the ordered liberty affirmed by the Founders. Liberty in this debased sense is utterly disengaged from the concepts of responsibility and community, and is pitted against the "laws of nature and nature’s God." Such liberty degenerates into license for the oppression of the vulnerable while the government looks the other way, and throws into question the very possibility of the rule of law itself. Casey raises the serious question as to whether any law can be enacted in pursuit of the common good, for virtually any law can offend some individuals’ definition of selfhood, existence, and the meaning of life. Under the doctrine declared by the Court, it would seem that individual choice can always take precedence over the common good.

The Court has gone still further in what must be described as an apparent course of hostility to democratic self-government. In Lee vs. Weisman (1992), the Court seemed to suggest that an ethic and morality that "transcend human invention" is what is meant by religion that is constitutionally forbidden ground for law. In Romer vs. Evans (1996), thousands of years of moral teaching regarding the right ordering of human sexuality was cavalierly dismissed as an irrational "animus." It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Court is declaring that laws or policies informed by religion or religiously-based morality are unconstitutional for that reason alone. In this view, religion is simply a bias, and therefore inadmissible in law.

The Court’s justification of the abortion license under its debased concept of liberty has brought us to the brink of endorsing new "rights" to doctor- assisted suicide and euthanasia which threaten those at the end of life, the infirm, the handicapped, the unwanted. We are confronted by a radical definition of marriage as courts declare marriage to be not a covenanted commitment ordered to the great goods of spousal unity and procreation but a mere contract between autonomous individuals for whatever ends they happen to seek. Under a specious interpretation of the separation of church and state, our public schools are denuded of moral instruction. Parents are unjustly burdened in choosing a religious education for their children to the point of withdrawing completely into a home-schooling environment to find an antidote for the poison of secular humanism. Interestingly enough, at a recent national home-schooling conference in Harrisburg PA, the majority of the participants considering home-schooling were in the process of taking their children out of Catholic as opposed to public schools for similar problems. The only distinction was that while the latter taught no religion, the former taught a false religion thanks to the work of dissenting theologians like Richard McBrien and Company. The fruits of dissent have been realized through a generation of Catholic legislators who separate their "claimed" convictions from their public actions, thus depriving politics of what should be informed moral judgment but results in a "yes, but..." morality which is no morality. But let’s not kid ourselves here. Everything is up for grabs including the Faith via "common ground" so there really is only the pretense of convictions on the part of Catholics in name only.

Our only recourse to right the ship is that we can and must bring law and public policy into greater harmony with the "laws of nature and of nature’s God." Not all Americans are agreed on the implications of those laws, and some doubt that there are such laws. But all can exercise the gift of reason to discern moral truth that serves the common good.

Which begs the question, just how did we get into this mess? The answer lies in an examination of the effects of modern philosophy on society, in particular the thought of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant as an intersection of their philosophies regarding preeminence of the autonomous self as the sole moral arbiter to the total exclusion of nature and nature’s God.

According to Hobbes, political and moral laws are binding only by virtue of the order of the sovereign, the only legitimate legislator. What makes the laws is not the truth of its foundations but the authority of the one who promulgates it. Moral notions are arbitrary for Hobbes. In short, might makes right.

A problem arises. If what is engaging in man’s humanity is contained in the desire for power, in which his nature is in some way concentrated, then his moral "ideas" or "thoughts" as Hobbes calls them, can surely be said to be artificial or conventional and to have no other validity than that conferred on them by the legislator. They have so little intrinsic weight that their flimsiness becomes worrisome. If they have no roots in nature and need the external support of the legislator to have value and thus to be, then what are they and whence do they come? With no support in being, they could only have their origin in that man whose whole nature is to be found elsewhere, in the desire for power.

Hobbes emphatic concentration of man’s nature in the desire for power liberated the world of ideas from every natural attachment and ontological bond. Hobbes affirms that there is NO summum bonum and that good and evil only have meaning with reference to the person involved.

Aristotle was concerned with politic. He speaks of human groups and their goods and deals with "spiritual masses" and "contents of life." Hobbes, in contrast, treats politic with derision as an expression of individual vanity. Hobbes individualizes and psychologizes political claims. For him everything is open to question with no claims justified.

Hobbes held that the ravings of the individual conscience and the sinister authority of Rome were constantly blinding men to what their real interests were. His materialistic philosophy was geared solely to self preservation under an absolute authority. The safety of the people was the supreme law. He offended all types of Christians because he maintained that all actions could be mechanically explained and that free will was an illusion. He considered appeal to either individual conscience or to Church authority as the most potent of all threats to peace. Religion was a system of law not a system of truth. Thus any concept of natural law truths would have been foreign to him. He maintained vehemently that we could know nothing of the attributes of God.

On good and evil Hobbes said that whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calls good; and the object of his hate and aversion evil. He was a moral relativist in this regard abandoning any concept of universal absolute truths saying that good and evil are ever used with relation to the person that uses them; there being nothing simply and absolutely true; nor any common rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but from the person of the man.

Every man has a right to every thing, his fundamental law of nature, even to one another’s body. Thus, there can be no security for any man - survival at all costs, of the fittest, the law of the jungle seems to be what Hobbes is espousing. For Hobbes there is no ultimate end, no goal for human life just satisfaction of appetites. We strive for power ending only in death.

Descartes observed that since in this life greater rewards are often granted to vices than to virtues, few would prefer what is right to what is useful, if they neither feared God nor anticipated an after life - prophetic words for today.

Descartes’ goal of philosophy, to be masters and possessors of nature makes it impossible to differentiate if we’re masters or tyrants of nature. The transcendent abstract self of Descartes leads to a my body, my own type of mentality since the body can be used as the self desires. Descartes implies that we’re landlords of our bodies as opposed to tenants per C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity.

The forgetfulness of soul characterizes Descartes. He is a dualist saying mind is one substance; body another. Hobbes says, by contrast, there is nothing separate from the physical body - no separate mind. Aristotle and Aquinas’s concept of the unity of soul and body, i.e., they cannot be separated, is lost with Descartes.

This loss of soul as governor of body has consequences born out in culture. Witness the culture-of-death prominent in the world today, a contraceptive mentality leading to any and all forms of hedonism from promotion of homosexuality as a civil right to abortion as birth control to euthanasia.

The problem with Descartes and Hobbes is that there is no natural good or telos to human nature and the place of human beings as parts of the whole is rendered inscrutable. They miss the evidence of God’s divine plan as evident in the composite of soul and body, which defines the human being. As Veritatis Splendor reminds us, any view that treats nature and the body as "raw material for human activity and for its power" contravenes the Church’s teaching on the unity of the human person whose rational soul is per se et essentialiter the form of the body. The spiritual and immaterial soul is the principle of unity of the human being whereby it exists as a whole - corpore et anima unus - as a person. These definitions not only point out that the body, which has been promised the resurrection, will also share in glory. They also remind us that reason and free will are linked with all the bodily and sense faculties. The person, including the body, is completely entrusted to himself, and it is in the unity of body and soul that the person is the subject of his own moral acts. Right reason grasps the specific moral value of certain goods towards which the person is naturally inclined. And since the human person cannot be reduced to a freedom which is self designing, an unlimited freedom confused with license, but entails a particular spiritual and bodily structure, the primordial moral requirement of loving and respecting the person as an end and never as a mere means also implies, by its very nature, respect for certain fundamental goods (absolute, universal laws) without which one would fall into relativism and arbitrariness. A doctrine, which disassociates the moral act from the bodily dimension of its exercise, is contrary to the teaching of Scripture and Tradition.

Kant wanted to defend a realm of freedom, which is implicitly experience in each individual’s deliberation and action. Kant maintains that human beings are free using two related arguments. 1) I must acknowledge or experience my freedom in every act of deliberation that I engage in. It’s in my power to bring about A or B, and it’s my freedom of choice which leads me to A or B. If I’m seriously deliberating, I’m implicitly assuming my own freedom else my deliberations are a mockery. Thus, I must presuppose myself to be self-determining, the author of principles independent of the foreign influence of the absolute, universal laws of nature and nature’s God. 2) Per Newtonian mechanics my body is under the sway of physical mechanical causes. My passions, instincts are under the sway of this causal necessity. And yet, I find myself obliged by a moral law discovered within me to discern in situations involving moral dilemmas or conflicts that there is an opposition between my instincts and passions which would go the way of satisfying my pleasures and my happiness and what the moral law, the "categorical imperative," demands of me.

For Kant this recognition that I find myself under a law calling me to act in situations of duty against whatever inclinations that I have running contrary to that duty, is an awakening to a free capacity within me that is properly human. This is proof that I possess a rational independence from external causes such as the absolute, universal laws of nature and nature’s God. Kant’s realm of freedom is separate and can come into conflict with the bodily realm of mechanical necessity. He doesn’t argue that God, nature, or society gives this moral law. I give it to myself according to Kant. I am autonomous, a self ruler. Each individual as he understands himself to be free is also the originator of this law and subject to it simultaneously. The common humanity of persons is recognized through recognizing each individual’s autonomy. "I’m OK, you’re OK!" Kant thinks that if I were to construe or accept this law from some outside authority, God, nature, or society, I would no longer be autonomous. I would be operating heteronomously (ruled by another). This heteronomy is taken to be a fundamental evasion of my own responsibility and dignity as a person. Kant respects in other persons their dignity. For Kant this dignity consists in obeying a law we give ourselves. Kant’s views on the human person and human dignity are expressed in his GROUNDING FOR THE METAPHYSICS OF MORALS. He recognizes that natural and moral laws deal with what does happen and what ought to happen respectively taken in a fundamental context. One might be quick to assume that he, by such a recognition, sees the difference between authentic freedom, doing what we ought, vs. license, doing what we want. But this is not the case because he misses the truth that natural and moral laws are intimately related for societal common good irrespective of any divine connotations. For example Kant would have no problem with the promotion of homosexuality as a civil right since such a concept is a function of an individual’s with homosexual attractions autonomy to define and legislate his own moral law. For Kant the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of morality are self-contained within the individual who is causing no harm to his fellow man. Moreover, fellowman is obliged to recognize this authority else the dignity of the moral legislator is being violated. The fact that the physical consequences of adhering to such a law are dire is of no concern to Kant as autonomy is all that matters.

It was a Kantian Supreme Court Justice masquerading as a Catholic that wrote the majority opinion previously described in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, which recognized the unlimited freedom for the totally autonomous unencumbered self. Each individual can now define his own moral universe with no thought given to the simple question of what happens when A’s moral universe collides with B’s in the absence of some universal, absolute truth? The inevitable result of such idiocy is anarchy!

The inconsistency in Kant’s philosophy is his categorical imperative maxim: Act only according that what you do is a function of that action becoming a universal law. How is this possible when a myriad of universal laws unique to individuals may conflict with a similar number of universal laws unique to other individuals, i.e., how is the dignity of the latter set upheld in the face of this conflict of "morally relative universal" laws which is oxymoronic? Kant leaves us in his treatise on the metaphysics of morals with these perplexing statements. "To explain all this is quite beyond the power of human reason, and all effort and work of seeking such an explanation is wasted ... reason should not, to the detriment of morals, search around in the world of sense for the supreme motive and for some interest that is conceivable but is nonetheless empirical." Here Kant seems to commit the ultimate sin of pride by refusing to look in the only logical direction to philosophy’s final questions - theology. This separates him from the brilliance of Aquinas, his inability to reconcile faith and reason.

What follows is an example of the culture wars being fought by Catholics on the campus of a secular university - a national modernist modus-operandi. It is a war being fought against the moral relativism of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. It is a snapshot into how freedom has been confused with license with the approval of the diocesan Church. It is a scary tale of just how alone Catholics who have the audacity to proclaim the truths of the Faith are in a world devoid of reason. In the Wednesday, March 14, 1999 Penn State student paper, the Daily Collegian, a full page ad appeared promoting the homosexual lifestyle as a cause to be celebrated. One of the co-sponsors of the ad was the Office of the Vice Provost for Educational Equity.

Description of ad in Penn State Collegian

We, the undersigned, are pledged to break the silence and end the discrimination aimed at our family, friends or ourselves based on sexual or gender orientation. We respect the basic human rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered individuals unequivocally.

(What follows are eight columns of printed names with the homosexual symbol "inverted triangle" held up by two arms superimposed over the names.)

ALLIES, the University Park Allocation Committee (UPAC) and the Office of the Vice-Provost for Educational Equity sponsored this ad

It is to be noted that two priests from the Penn State Catholic Community signed this ad in celebration of sexual perversity, one of which, in a column written for the local paper said, "There are healthy expressions of a homosexual orientation." This is a heretical statement given the clear teaching of the Church as the CDF has stated, the orientation to homosexual acts is "objectively disordered" because it urges a person, not toward the inherent good of marriage and procreation, but toward sinful conduct.

Where the procreative and unitive aspects of sexuality are violated is by the unnatural acts of homosexuality which is why the Church teaches that any orientation to this behavior is objectively disordered, i.e., it is an orientation to a misuse of human sexuality, an orientation to acts which are sins against nature and nature’s God. The unitive is violated because the plumbing doesn’t work, i.e., man wasn’t created physically for homosexual acts; the procreative is a consequence of this fact.

Heterosexual attraction is natural to man and woman (Catholic Catechism #2333), while homosexual tendencies are unnatural. Heterosexual attraction is God-given, and for the vast majority of the human race, leads to marriage, children, and family; same-sex attractions are an objective disorder, but not sinful in themselves (CDF Statement, 1986, sect. 3). One often hears this objection to the term "objective disorder" being applied to homosexual tendencies: "If a man lusts for a woman or vice versa, this too is an objective disorder." But this is not so, because, if the man or woman controls this natural attraction, and wills to express it in the natural state of marriage, it is a good thing, desired by the Creator. But if one has a sexual-genital attraction to another person of the same sex, it can NEVER lead to a morally good act between the two individuals, but rather it will ALWAYS lead to an immoral act. That is why it is called an objective disorder.

And yet we have a priest who tells the large Catholic population at Penn State that there are "healthy" expressions of homosexual orientation. So much for the state of Catholicism at Penn State. This priest has done a disservice to his Church, his community, his university, and especially, to the souls of the Faithful which are entrusted to him, souls that deserve authentic Catholic catechesis instead of a bastardization of same. This is a classic case of "rendering to Caesar more than what Caesar is owed" as the Church on this campus is not a sign of contradiction to a world embracing hedonism but rather a sign of conformation.

The priest’s statement was an obfuscation of the Church’s teaching on homosexuality in the same manner that Always Our Children was in its implication that parents who observe their children exhibiting homosexual tendencies should say nothing. This is nonsensical as would these same parents be expected to say nothing if their children exhibited tendencies toward fornication? At least the latter recognizes a complimentarity of the sexes, which is natural in that context as opposed to the unnatural "vice" as St. Thomas Aquinas called homosexual behavior.

Sadly, a tremendous wound has been inflicted to the Body of Christ by the actions of this priest who confuses genuine compassion for the sinner with a pseudo-compassion for the inclination to a lifestyle that the Church calls "objectively disordered." By his public heresy, the priest has given ammunition to homosexual advocates who demand civil rights in an affirmative action sense, rights that they already possess as opposed to "special rights" which they don’t deserve. In short, he has scandalized the Faithful in this community. To say that the "Church does not ask homosexuals to deny their homosexuality" as the priest also said in his column implies somehow that homosexuality is a gift from God - another obfuscation of Church teaching reinforced by the latest research in regard to homosexuality and orientation toward same. The Church clearly is teaching those inclined to homosexual lifestyles out of unconditional love for them that they are embarking down a road leading elsewhere than to salvation per the Catechism.

The word "orientation" has serious theological implications. If you believe that some people are essentially homosexual, you turn Christian anthropology on its head. Christianity holds that we are all heterosexual in our God-given nature, though some heterosexuals have a problem with same-sex attractions. If you believe that homosexuality is part of a person’s nature, given by God, then homosexual acts become a fulfillment of a person’s God-given nature, and that’s never been the Catholic teaching.

The editors of the Catechism of the Catholic Church recognized this distinction. The original draft of the catechism (1994) was modified in 1998 to refer to homosexuality as an "inclination, which is objectively disordered."

The homosexual condition is neither normal nor natural. It remains an occasion of sin for which heroic chastity is necessary for avoidance. The same heroic chastity, I might add, that unmarried and married people need to avoid sin. There is no difference whatsoever. We would do well to remember the official statements from the Church on Homosexuality.

The teaching of the Roman Catholic Church on homosexuality is given in the official Latin version of the Catechism. Please reference the following paragraphs, 2357-2359. The Catholic teaching on this issue is now in accord with Cardinal Ratzinger’s pastoral, speaking for the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, which was released in 1986 and is subsequently referenced below. It is confirmation of traditional Catholic Teaching to make every attempt to avoid the occasions of sin.

"Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

"Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed toward those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not.

"To chose someone of the same sex for one’s sexual activity is to annul the rich symbolism and meaning, not to mention the goals, of the Creator’s sexual design. Homosexual activity is not a complementary union, able to transmit life; and so it thwarts the call to a life of that form of self-giving which the Gospel says is the essence of Christian living. This does not mean that homosexual persons are not often generous and giving of themselves; but when they engage in homosexual activity they confirm within themselves a disordered sexual inclination that is essentially self-indulgent.

"As in every moral disorder, homosexual activity prevents one’s own fulfillment and happiness by acting contrary to the creative wisdom of God. The Church, in rejecting erroneous opinions regarding homosexuality, does not limit but rather defends personal freedom and dignity realistically and authentically understood.

"It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech or in action. Such treatment deserves condemnation from the Church’s pastors wherever it occurs. It reveals a kind of disregard for others that endangers the most fundamental principles of a healthy society. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and in law.

"But the proper reaction to crimes committed against homosexual persons should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.

"It has been argued that the homosexual orientation in certain cases is not the result of deliberate choice; and so the homosexual person would then have no choice but to behave in a homosexual fashion. Lacking freedom, such a person, even if engaged in homosexual activity, would not be culpable.

"Here, the Church’s wise moral tradition is necessary since it warns against generalizations in judging individual cases. In fact, circumstances may exist, or may have existed in the past, which would reduce or remove the culpability of the individual in a given instance; or other circumstances may increase it. What is at all costs to be avoided is the unfounded and demeaning assumption that the sexual behavior of homosexual persons is always and totally compulsive and therefore inculpable. What is essential is that the fundamental liberty that characterizes the human person and gives him his dignity be recognized as belonging to the homosexual person as well. As in every conversion from evil, the abandonment of homosexual activity will require a profound collaboration of the individual with God’s liberating grace.

"Christians who are homosexual are called, as all of us are, to a chaste life. As they dedicate their lives to understanding the nature of God’s personal call to them, they will be able to celebrate the Sacrament of Penance more faithfully and receive the Lord’s grace so freely offered there in order to convert their lives more fully to his Way.

"The human person, made in the image and likeness of God, can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her sexual orientation. Every one living on the face of the earth has personal problems and difficulties, but challenges to growth, strengths, talents and gifts as well. Today, the Church provides a badly needed context for the care of the human person when she refuses to consider the person as a "heterosexual" or a "homosexual" and insists that every person has a fundamental Identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life." The following document from Cardinal Ratzinger is the Catholic response to legislative proposals on the non-discrimination of homosexuals.

Recently, legislation had been proposed in some American states which would make discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation illegal. In some Italian cities, municipal authorities have made public housing available to homosexual (and unmarried heterosexual) couples. Such initiatives, even where they seem more directed toward support of basic civil rights than condonement of homosexual activity or a homosexual lifestyle, may in fact have a negative impact on the family and society. Such things as the adoption of children, the hiring and firing of teachers, the housing needs of genuine families, landlords’ legitimate concerns in screening potential tenants, for example, are often implicated.

While it would be impossible to foresee and respond to every eventuality in respect to legislative proposals in this area, these observations will try to identify some principles and distinctions of a general nature which should be taken into consideration by the conscientious Catholic legislator, voter, or Church authority who is confronted with such issues.

The first section will recall relevant passages from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Person" of 1986. The second section will deal with the applications.

Homosexuality as any problem encountered by mankind can be used as channel of grace IF AND ONLY IF mankind realizes that this is a cross to bear in the same manner that Jesus carried His to Calvary. The struggles of those heterosexuals with homosexual inclinations is no different in this regard than any other individual. Everyone has genuine struggles - many of which are far more debilitating than sexual, i.e., born blind, limbless, suffering any myriad of physical disabilities, etc. We’re all called to a greater end, an ultimate end which the natural law rooted in the Decalogue leads toward. Catholics, above all, should realize this instead of apologizing for ignorance of the natural law which leads to self-destructive lifestyles from both physical and especially spiritual standpoints.

How can pursuit of happiness be realized by adherence to a way of life which leads to your physical destruction? Even atheists recognize that. You would think that a Catholic priest would.

Consider Matthew Shepard whose death was horrible, not for the lifestyle that he lived but rather because he was a human being indistinguishable from other human beings whose life was snuffed out because a Commandment of God was violated. At least his death is recognized as punishable by law. Infants at the moment of birth in this country currently have no such protection. Their lives are brutally terminated by the puncturing of the back of their skulls by scissors while they hang kicking almost totally out of the womb and the subsequent sucking out of their brains while their lifeless little bodies go limp. And that’s the law in the United States of America. The real tragedy of deaths like Matthew Shepard’s is that they are somehow elevated to a higher plane whereby the lifestyle of the individual carries a higher precedence than the intrinsic worth of the individual himself as a creation of the Almighty. We do not need to search for the reasons for this crusade. They are well known and the modus-operandi of a group who will use anything, any individual, to suit their agenda which is the forced acceptance of sexual deviancy as normal upon society as a whole.

I would ask why equal treatment under the law is being perverted by raising the gravity of Shepard’s death to insinuate that somehow his is "especially tragic" because of the lifestyle that he lived. How is it that his death is singled out, or for that matter, any death singled out as being a greater cause for concern than someone else’s? Hate of some sort has to be involved in practically every murder. There is nothing unique about Shepard’s case in that regard.

As a tax-paying resident of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, I strongly protest the misuse of my taxes for the support of a public institution which promotes activities which are contrary to the natural law, the common good, and held in anathema by the vast majority of the world’s religions along with a professional psychological organization.

One of the offerings in the latest Spring 1999 catalog regarding Professional Development Opportunities for Faculty and Staff from the Penn State Human Resource Development Center is indicative of the obfuscation necessary to cloud the truth related to "sexual orientation". In the section entitled "Diversity and Equity" we see "Issues of Sexual Orientation in the Workplace." The abstract states that "We live in a culture that teaches us to fear and condemn gay and lesbian individuals, which makes it difficult to learn accurate information about homosexuality" with the remedy being to "gather accurate information."

The entire premise of this course is skewed as gay and lesbian individuals are portrayed as innocent victims of societal prejudice when the truth is that their lifestyles, including the inclination toward same, is the chief cause of concern by the vast majority of those who are in disagreement with the concept of "sexual orientation as a civil right." Accordingly, let’s take the advice of this course and examine accurate information on this issue.

It has been widely touted by homosexual advocates that the American Psychiatric and Psychological Associations no longer include homosexuality on their disorder lists. The former group no longer includes pedophilia, sadism and masochism as disorders and is now constructing the profile of the "psychologically normal" pedophile, sadist, and masochist in the same manner as they did for the homosexual. In the context of a school setting, is the American Psychiatric Association telling parents that there is no problem with their children being exposed to publicly avowed pedophiliacs, sadists, and masochists? After all, these "former disorders" come under the heading of sexual orientation.

Evidently, the answer is yes since these "orientations" are no longer considered "disorders" by the APA. Similarly, parents are expected to accept, with no questions asked, heterosexuals with homosexual tendencies who are proud of it via public pronouncements, moreover who believe it to be a cause for celebration or pride by the districts de facto legitimization of it as a cause for nondiscrimination. This is nonsense! Parents have a right as do school districts to be discriminating in who they allow their children to be exposed to for one basic reason, the school acts in place of the parent by law with the understanding that the parents are the PRIMARY educators of their children. The school supports parents in this regard. If parents cease to be discriminating and, by default, school districts which are subordinate to the parents role, they act irresponsibly. This becomes a more egregious offense when the state deems activities acceptable that have been traditionally regarded as "intrinsically disordered" as held by many faiths binding to believers. There is much talk about "separation of Church and State" when it comes to those who would erase any references to God in the founding documents of this country. But the silence is deafening when the state takes it upon themselves to ram an "amoral belief system" down the throats of a tax-paying public to the total exclusion of any considerations whatsoever of those who, for reasons of conscience, cannot abide by same. What about their rights?

"Sexual orientation" the term most commonly used to denote someone’s patterns of attraction suggests a more or less permanent condition, present from birth, something that directs a person’s thoughts and actions. This term is problematic in the extreme given the fact that there has been absolutely no conclusive evidence to date that anything resembling a gay-gene exists. Even if it did, would that detract from the fact that the action performed is abnormal? Similar arguments have been applied to alcoholics and serial killers.

The confusion, says clinical psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, arises because much of the discussion is driven by social activism rather than hard science. Nicolosi is co-founder of the 1000 member National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). "Developmental disorder" was the term most commonly applied to the homosexual condition until 1973. An increasing number of mental-health professionals including NARTH favor recovery of this understanding of homosexuality as an illness.

Making sexual orientation a cause for nondiscrimination says that orientation to objectively disordered behavior is acceptable. Nicolosi says "homosexuality is not a natural alternative lifestyle; rather 1) it is a developmental disorder, 2) its causes and predictors are very well documented, 3) it is treatable in adulthood, 4) it is highly associated with self-defeating and self destructive behaviors, pathology, and maladaptation, and 5) the four previous points have been politically buried or denied."

Nicolosi points out that all the major studies reported in the early 1990s were conducted by gay researchers or by activists who promoted the gay agenda. "It’s amazing that the same people who accept these studies will dismiss organizations like NARTH for supposed bias," he said.

Thus the scientific bases for what some researchers call "constitutional homosexuality" was weakened. The most widely accepted research still points toward environmental factors such as the role of parents, an early seduction or peer rejection.

In 1973 the board of trustees of the American Psychiatric Association closely followed by the American Psychological Association voted no longer to classify homosexuality as a disorder, but as a normal variant of sexual expression.

The decision was confirmed, by a 6-to-4 margin, in a vote of APA membership, hardly a ringing endorsement. Four years later, a survey found that 69 percent of APA members still considered homosexuality "pathological." Nicolosi says, however, that this is a diagnosis that dares not speak its name.

"Though many mental-health professionals see homosexuality as a disorder," he said, "few are willing to say so publicly. It’s not politically correct, and they would be harassed, called bigoted and homophobic, and charged with inciting hatred." But, said Nicolosi, the popular impressions remain, and they have repercussions. "The most important concept promoted by gay activists is the idea that there are certain people for whom homosexuality is normal and natural," Nicolosi said, "and that these are homosexual persons."

The human person can hardly be adequately described by a reductionist reference to his or her so-called sexual orientation. Every one living on the face of the earth has personal problems and difficulties, but challenges to growth, strengths, talents and gifts as well. The American Psychiatric Association ignores a basic incontrovertible fact of natural law - the primary tenet being that one tends toward what is good and avoids what is bad. Almost everyone would agree that the meaning of life has something to do with the pursuit of happiness regardless whether that be imperfect happiness in an Aristotelian sense restricted to the here and now or a more permanent supernatural happiness held by believers. How can something be normal and natural if it is self-destructive as is the case for homosexual lifestyles? Reference the inordinate number of deaths and disease in the homosexual community relative to the total population per statistics from the Center for Disease control.

We live in a world of intimidation, demagoguery, and spin-doctors where irrationalism insures that education is replaced with indoctrination. We see proponents of homosexual lifestyles demonizing all who dare get in the way of enforced acceptance of sexual perversion as a civil right. They scream that it’s not fair when our legislators go against their agenda confident in the fact that our representatives serve solely at their pleasure. They accuse the very people who care about them the most by telling them the truth of being insensitive overlooking the fact that there is something called a "common good" for society which carries precedence over "individual good." They confuse freedom, doing what you ought, with license, doing what you want.

In situations, like this, involving serious moral issues in which people strive to form a right conscience, the role of government is clear - strict neutrality. The moment the government (public school or university in this instance) presumes to "give advice" in this delicate area, it opens the door to influencing the free decision of its citizens. And from influence it is only a short step to coercion, a result that is being legally challenged by concerned parents from coast to coast.

The promotion of homosexuality by Penn State through the Vice Provost’s office of educational equity is a threat to civil freedoms. This is based on two Supreme Court Cases of recent memory. Griswold vs. Connecticut established the right to privacy. And Engel Vs. Vitale and Schempp-Murray established the freedom from government coercion when religious issues were concerned. If the Supreme Court could argue that prayer or Bible reading being offered in school was intrinsically coercive to those who did not share the Judeo-Christian view and, therefore, an impermissible infringement on the separation of church and state, then a university promoting homosexuality could hardly be construed as less invasive or less of a breach of that separation when said university receiving funding from the state promotes activities which are counter to the religious tenets of a large segment of faculty, staff, students, and taxpayers of the Commonwealth. The very fact that a state funded university is offering services which legitimize so-called alternative lifestyles means that the university feels that said lifestyles are a good thing to promote, and by extension, a good thing for all employees to accept. The exchange is by its nature coercive and open to legal challenge.

A difference exists between invidious discrimination against persons as opposed to just discrimination against behavior. All are in opposition to the former while the latter is a requirement for responsible parents and schools.

The introduction of public policy to protect an orientation to behavior to which no one has any conceivable right leads to other distorted notions and practices.

For example, the 1990 J. of Homosexuality produced a double issue devoted to adult-child sex referred to as "male intergenerational intimacy" which neither hid nor condemned pedophilia. One of the many disturbing quotes said, "parents should look upon the pedophile who loves their son ‘not as a rival or competitor, not as a thief of their property, but as a partner in the boy’s upbringing, someone to be welcomed into their home...’" (p. 164). The Amer. Psych. Assoc. did NOT denounce this position. Why? Why are these views being publicized in "homosexual" journals? The answer is in J. Sex and Marital Therapy which shows a strong correlation between homosexual males and pedophilia in proportion to their numbers (about 1 out 36 men). The APA’s prestigious Psychological Bulletin concludes that childhood sexual abuse is on average, only slightly associated with psychological harm—and that the harm may not be due to the sexual experience, but to the negative family factors in the children’s backgrounds. This is an INCREDIBLE statement.

The diagnostic manual of the APA now says that there is no problem with pedophilia unless it bothers the pedophiliac - so much for the concern of the safety of children. Are we as a society obliged to follow the dictates of an association whose surreal positions defy reason?

We’re talking about protected zones of advocacy for orientation to objectively disordered behavior which our public and private institutions have no business considering if they truly care about the "safety" of their children, students, and employees.

What we have to understand is that the door is opened to the acceptance of sexual perversion as a civil right by agreeing that there is nothing wrong with being inclined to said acts. When you divorce the act itself from the inclination, you conveniently say that being inclined to aberrant behavior is all right and we must leave all of those with said inclinations alone since that would be an offense to their dignity.

Do we apply the same illogic to those inclined to alcoholism, kleptomania, sadism, masochism, pedophilia, et al.? Sanity declares otherwise but of course we no longer live in a sane world given Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, and the APA telling us that homosexuality, sadism, masochism, and pedophilia are no longer disorders.

This is the modus operandi of the militant homosexual movement that, if given an inch, will take a mile toward not only the promotion of homosexuality as a civil right but the enforcement of same making it a hate crime for anyone to say otherwise, in particular, that the inclination is objectively disordered.

Bishops who ignore this fact are adding more fuel to a fire that is getting increasingly out of control.

Unfortunately, one of the many flawed messages of ALWAYS OUR CHILDREN which should have been dead on arrival instead of given a life by the NCCB, was that it’s OK to be inclined to homosexual acts. This was the obvious consequence of ignoring the fact that such an inclination is objectively disordered. Given the apparent rush to proclaim such a judgment by Church dissenters and the secular press, as reported to me by a colleague at the Penn State Catholic Center, the director of the PSCC could not contain his glee in disseminating AOC as widely and as quickly as possible, a joy that rivaled finding one of Willie Wonka’s golden tickets.

The problem is not with thoughts per se being sins although Jesus had something to say about this regarding committing adultery in your heart, I seem to recall. The important point is that what you’re thinking about can be categorized as good or bad in the same manner that the acts you perform can. The idea being to avoid the occasions of sin (committing the act) by resisting bad thoughts.

If the thought is an inclination to an act of sexual perversion, then I submit that that thought is "immoral" in the sense of its broad definition and must be recognized as such. "Immoral" here meaning "conflicting with generally or traditionally held moral principles." AOC said, in effect, that such thoughts are not immoral which is not true given the broad sense of the definition of "immoral." If our thought is a temptation to sexual acts with someone of the same sex, that thought or temptation is "immoral", "disordered" in the sense of moral meaning of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior, ethical judgments, expressing or teaching a conception of right behavior, conforming to a standard of right behavior, sanctioned by or operative on one’s conscience or ethical judgment. Would a thought, temptation regarding having sex with a person of the same sex be "conforming to a standard of right behavior"? I don’t think so anymore than a thought regarding having sex with a child, inflicting pain on oneself or another for sexual pleasure is conforming to a standard of right behavior. If not, then that thought at that particular time is an "immoral" thought, temptation which, if resisted, is not a sin.

What the committee of bishops seem to have cavalierly done with one fell swoop of the pen was to give the erroneous impression that homosexual orientation was not disordered by saying that it was "not immoral". If disordered means "morally reprehensible," how do they rationalize that statement?

In the context of Cardinal Ratzinger’s 1986 pastoral to the world’s bishops, a persons inclination to homosexual behavior is objectively disordered (objectively morally reprehensible) because it can never lead to a morally licit act for the reasons which were previously given.

There is a principle or "rightful autonomy," not radical autonomy, at the heart of the moral life concerning man as the personal subject of his actions. The moral law has its origin in God and always finds its source in Him: at the same time, by virtue of natural reason, which derives from Divine Wisdom, it is a properly human law. The natural law is nothing other than the light of understanding infused in us by God, whereby we understand what must be done and what must be avoided - no Kantian ambiguities here where all choices are equal. This law is called natural not because it refers to the nature of irrational things but because the reason which promulgates it is proper to human nature. We are commanded to respect the natural order and forbidden to disturb it. This is why sins against nature cry out to heaven for vengeance (Genesis 18:20-21) as they are sins against the very Author of nature. God cares for man not from without through the laws of physical nature, but from within through reason, which, by its natural knowledge of God’s eternal law, is consequently able to show man the right direction to take in his free actions. This participation of the eternal law in the rational creature is the natural law which involves universality in that it is inscribed in the rational nature of the person, and makes itself felt to all beings endowed with reason.

In summary, if all truth is personal and subjective per Kant and company as dignity demands, then in my very poor imitation of Saint Thomas Aquinas, I would simply ask "how are the questions posed by the following thought experiment answered?"

Imagine someone arguing that human dignity is not absolute, but merely relative. There are two replies to such relativism, one theoretical and the other practical. First, a relativist actually makes an absolute claim in stating that "everything is relative." Not only do relativists theoretically contradict themselves with their own first premise, they contradict themselves in practice. As Peter Kreeft notes, "The relativist lets the cat out of the bag when you practice what he preaches, when you act toward him as if his own philosophy of relativism were true. He may preach relativism, but he expects you to practice absolutism.

Kreeft gives the example of telling his relativist students that all women in the class will flunk. Given their relativist premises, the students have no argument to make against so blatantly unfair a practice. Who are they, after all, to IMPOSE THEIR BELIEFS ON HIM? Now apply this reasoning to the dignity of all human life. Many today wish to apply relativism to the value of human life, arguing that personhood is not absolutely, but only relatively, applicable to all human beings. But the lines drawn in such application, based on convenience, are completely arbitrary. If someone tells you that life is complex and demands such arbitrariness, you could ask him, "so does that mean that you wouldn’t mind if a thief, faced with the ‘complexity’ of his own existence, decides to draw some arbitrary lines and steal your wallet?

No one in his right mind stands for the relativistic view of human dignity when it comes to his or her own human dignity. Each of us - even the hardened secularist who preaches relativism - instinctively recognizes that our dignity as persons implies certain moral absolutes of behavior. These moral absolutes are a function of the Natural Law, without which anarchy exists.

I repeat a question which is never answered. What keeps said atheistic, relativistic society from deciding that a certain group are undesirable and thus can be eliminated for the good of the whole? It’s happening in Holland with Euthanasia which started out as physician assisted suicide, evolved to voluntary euthanasia, and now is pure and simple involuntary euthanasia. Are people worthless because they are old? Tell that to fans of Pablo Casals who was a virtuoso cellist at 90. It’s happening to millions of babies in the womb - the holocaust of our time with the blessings of an activist judiciary who usurp the legislative branch of government by making laws instead of interpreting them contrary to the tenets of a Constitution which, if it means anything, must remain static to give any kind of meaning to "separation of powers."

Just who would you appeal to in a Godless society when the knock arrives at your door and you’re told, it’s time for you to meet the great nothing? Surely, even atheists would hold that you have some rights? But what happens when those rights are perceived to be yours alone and the appeal for your life is taken as FORCING YOUR BELIEFS DOWN SOMEONE ELSE’S THROAT. What do you do in such a situation?