Not out of the woods, by a long chalk

Ref: Sexual beings - "Sex matters. If you don't accept gay people as sexual beings, you don't accept us at all. We deserve better — from our families, our churches and our government."

Before reading on, please take in the above article - all of it. This is front-line stuff.

Laura Douglas-Brown shows that even with most of society now being genuinely accepting of homosexuals if not homosexuality, gays and lesbians are fighting a grass roots battle that they never expected: among their families and friends. She rightly infers that in the church several denominations have adopted "compromise" policies that attempt to "welcome" gay people without welcoming all of that sinful gay sex. This indeed is the biblical view, and is not seen as a compromise.

The fact is that what has been accepted as logical and right for centuries is hard to turn around in a generation. You can convince an army of activists who will energise the media, the entertainment industry, human resources departments, even the church, but that doesn't cut ice with your aunt or grandmother.

Here's why. aunts and grandmothers operate on instinct not on journalism. Their instincts are honed in childhood and adolescence as they learn the logic of life. And whether the subject is cooking or sexuality, it's hard for them to shift their opinions in later life.

The matter of the rightness of homosexual acts is far from settled at the grass roots level. It seems to many to be so counter-intuitive; so against the natural design of our bodies. God did a beautiful thing when he figured out how to ensure that the species would not die out, giving us the strongest desires and wherewithall to satisfy them. To suggest that the wedding tackle (an old naval expression; forgive me) be used for different purposes is so ... so ridiculous not to have any credibility. That's where the aunts are coming from.

The results of this are precisely the kind of issues Laura describes and bemoans. When you try and fit a round peg in a square hole, it causes repercussions all round in all manner of connected and unconnected areas. It is analogous to a piece of machinery, where because one part goes out of alignment the whole unit reverberates and eventually fails.

The attitudes of the "aunts" (among whom I include myself) may yet sink the ship of "progress." Douglas-Brown's piece describes very well the practical impediments within our present society to going with the trendy flow of the activists. Despite massive efforts to teach children in school that it OK to have two daddies, not all the kids are taken in. Evolution is a slow process but only the good mutations survive and prosper; the mistakes wither because they lack the fundamental elegance that produces cultural fruit. They are hula hoops, airships, tobacco, the Muslim faith; not transistors, telephony, air travel or Christianity. They have insufficient staying power.

See Obama does get it (my change to the headline) for agonizing examples of some politians compromizing their beliefs to win power.

Tony Copple
Ottawa

Anglican Essentials Ottawa