LIBERAL AGENDA: ABORTION, DIVORCE, FORNICATION, SODOMY

The streets of the City of New York were the scene of an astonishing occurrence this past Saturday. The occasion was the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade. It is traditional at this parade for the mayor to march or ride in a place of honor at the head of the thousands of marchers. Tradition was broken this year, and there ensued another skirmish in our country's kulturkampf, or "culture war."

"Dinkins is Booed, Showered As He Marches With Gay Group" read the headline over a wire service dispatch from New York this weekend, in what I maintain is a remarkable cultural signpost of where Middle America's real views can be found. If this is the way Gay Liberation plays on the streets of New York, how does it play in Peoria?

"Mayor David Dinkins was booed for miles and showered with beer Saturday when he marched with members of an Irish homosexual and lesbian group rather than at the head of the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

"A smattering of cheers was drowned out by boos from the thousands along the parade route.

"`One-term mayor!' some spectators chanted as Dinkins, wearing a green jacket, walked by with the Irish Gay and Lesbian Organization.

"A handful of eggs was thrown along the parade route, and there was a forest of placards. ~`Gay sex, no way,' one said. Others said, `Boo, Dinkins, Catholic basher.'"

Mayor Dinkins sees his marching with the "gays" as similar to marching "in Birmingham" with civil rights marchers during the '60s. Others of us see it very differently.

Although raised a Protestant, I have always had great respect for the Roman Catholic Church. An anonymous reader recently sent me a Catholic publication that contained the following remarkable comments of Francis Canavan, S.J. Although Father Canavan understood himself to be addressing an audience within his church, I submit his message speaks to all of us.

"Water naturally runs downhill. So do our human passions. There seems to be a psychological law of gravity that exerts a downward pull on our human inclinations, as physical gravity acts on material bodies. I thought of this when I watched a videotape of a talk show on abortion that the Public Broadcasting System had once put on. It pitted a Catholic priest against a pro-abortion ex-nun, but the priest soon learned he had two adversaries: the ex-nun and the moderator. Towards the end of the program, a third opponent was brought in, a young man who informed the priest that the Catholic Church was losing credibility because of its opposition to contraception, abortion, divorce, premarital sex, and homosexuality.

"His choice of the word `credibility' puzzled me. If he had said that the Church was losing popularity, I would have understood him, because chastity has never been popular. But why did he say that the Church was losing credibility, i.e., the ability to be believed?

"Belief, one would think, means accepting something as true, and requires an act of the mind rather than of the sex glands. Gonads are not organs of thought. Vitally important parts of human nature though they are, we can't think with them. They arouse strongly felt passions in us, and are an unfailing wellspring of song and story. But we cannot use them to arrive at reasoned convictions.

"Yet this young man found it `incredible' that the Church should ask him, or anyone else, to restrain his sexual urges. In this he was a typical product of contemporary liberal culture, a culture perhaps best symbolized, at its popular level, by Madonna prancing around in her underwear, singing raunchy songs.

"Liberalism marches on, and at the head of its column it carries a banner with a strange device: Contraception Abortion Divorce Fornication Sodomy. If I were marching in that column, I would want to state my cause in terms less revealing and embarrassing ...

"... We now have, properly speaking, no sexual morality. Having uncoupled sexual activity from procreation, we discover that we have also uncoupled it from marriage and even from union with the opposite sex. We no longer see any natural structure or purpose intrinsic to sexual intercourse from which norms of right and wrong sexual conduct can be derived.

"The only moral norms that we now accept are very general ones such as tolerance and respect for other persons, which a liberal theologian would call the Christian law of love. In regard to sex, this law tends to reduce itself to the precept: be sure to use a condom and never force your intentions on an unwilling partner.

"It is a morality that has flowed, like water, downhill to its lowest level. In the nineteenth century, even that great exponent of liberal freedom, John Stuart Mill, could still declare: `It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.' Today the satisfied pig declares Socrates to be lacking in credibility."

Francis Canavan, S.J.