Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality.If your taste runs to politics and polemics po·lem·ics n. (used with a sing. or pl. verb) 1. The art or practice of argumentation or controversy. 2. The practice of theological controversy to refute errors of doctrine. , Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality (Knopf, $23, 222 pp.) is required reading. Sullivan, the editor of the New Republic, is gay, Catholic, more conservative than liberal in his theology, and more classically liberal than progressive in his politics. In fact, he's a bit of a Tory. Sullivan advocates a strict state neutrality concerning the legal status of homosexuality. That means no anti-discrimination laws Anti-discrimination law refers to the law on people's right to be treated equally. Most developed countries mandate that in employment, in consumer transactions and in political participation people may be dealt with on an equal basis regardless of sex, race, ethnicity, protecting homosexuals, no barriers to service in the military and no marriage laws discriminating against same-sex couples A same-sex couple is a pair of people of the same gender who pursue a romantic or sexual relationship together. The term "same-sex relationship" may be used when the sexual orientation of participants in a same-sex relationship is not known. . This is a book that can change minds, and is especially noteworthy for the graciousness with which Sullivan engages others. Whether the liberal state can ever be, or should be, as neutral as Sullivan suggests remains the question. For Catholics with a soft spot for natural-law arguments Natural-law argument for the existence of God was especially popular in the eighteenth century as a result of the influence of Sir Isaac Newton. Observers concluded that things are the way they are because God intended them to be that way, though He operated outside of the natural about sexuality (never my favorites), Sullivan's exegegis of the church's muddled mud·dle v. mud·dled, mud·dling, mud·dles v.tr. 1. To make turbid or muddy. 2. To mix confusedly; jumble. 3. To confuse or befuddle (the mind), as with alcohol. homosexual anthropology is telling. What, he asks, are homosexuals for, if, as the church now accepts, homosexuality is a given, not a choice? Can such a "natural" condition logically require a lifetime of sexual and emotional denial? |
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