"A society that has lost the capacity for intimacy in this sense has also lost the fundamental glue binding husband and wife, and with them, the entire familial structure."
He's right. Maybe. But he's wrong to put the blame for the erosion of our "capaicty for intimacy" on homosexuals. Which is what the post does.
As Stephanie Koontz tells it in today's Times:
Traditional marriage, with its 5,000-year history, has already been upended. Gays and lesbians, however, didn't spearhead that revolution: heterosexuals did.In the same vein, homosexuals are not the ones who gave us cable TV, girlie magazines or R-rated movies. If we're really endangering the "fundamental glue binding husband and wife" it isn't the homosexuals who are doing it.
Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution. Heterosexuals were the ones who made procreation voluntary, so that some couples could choose childlessness, and who adopted assisted reproduction so that even couples who could not conceive could become parents. And heterosexuals subverted the long-standing rule that every marriage had to have a husband who played one role in the family and a wife who played a completely different one. Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.
There is one other objectional point in what is otherwise an unusually strong Cross Currents post. Midway through, Rosenblum says:
"“Gay” Parades, with their inevitably large component of street theater, are part of the bombardment of sexual messages aimed at our kids and us. The bikini-clad men prancing down the street are not engaged in a traditional civil rights march (homosexuals suffer from no civil disabilities in Israel). Rather they are engaged in recruiting efforts."
Recruiting efforts? Who still believes that homosexuality is a choice? Anyway, Jonathan, if you don't like the sight of bikini-clad men, there's a very simple and time-honored solution: Look away.
