A blessed and happy Season to you both!

It’s not just as a Catholic, but someone who follows post-modern criticism of “systems,” I find liberalism faulty. Nonetheless, it is true it produced good as well — the turn to the subject added a needed dimension to our understanding of our place in the world, and helps in developing authentic personalism. The problem to me is the exaggeration of things on the will, and sometimes a misplaced understanding of freedom which turns out to promote a kind of slavery as freedom (as we see with many forms of capitalism and the kinds of defense given to such systems as being ‘free’). But there is also, of course, a role for freedom, and I hope my other writings reflect upon that need. Nonetheless, my issue is that the underpinnings of liberalism which also create the system we live in today has all kinds of errors in it which lead to the promotion of all kinds of unfreedom as freedom.

It seems to me that as believing Catholics, we have to believe that “liberalism” is a gravely deficient ideology simply because it is not Catholicism–in its pure form, and maybe most of its forms, it is non-theistic and non-Christian.

On the other hand, we may want to support liberalism in practice, or the greater part of it, because it leads to the best workable sort of system in a fallen world–a world where the great majority of people may never recognize, much less act as if, we should love our neighbors as ourselves.

We believe that humans are not in essence selfish atomized individual units. What if they do often or even most of the time act that way? We need an economic system and a social system that takes account of the facts of life in this world–precisely to promote the common good as best we can.

Was it Churchill who said that democracy is the worst possible system of government, but better than all the rest?

I can support liberalism in practice, or large chunks of it, without buying into it as an ideology, all the while trying to convince my fellow free citizens and voters that the ideology itself is not the Truth.

I think this is right.

Henry,

It all seems very simple to me. Speaking in broad generalities, some people are straight, and their sexual and affectional preference leads them to desire sexual contact with members of the opposite sex, and to have the inclination and capacity to love others of the opposite sex in a special way. Some people are gay, and their sexual and affectional preference leads them to desire sexual contact with members of the same sex, and to have the inclination and capacity to love others of the same sex in a special way. There are many kinds of love (parent for child, sibling for sibling, friend for friend), but all the world knows there is a special kind of love between a man and a woman. A tremendous amount of great literature deals with that love. What the world doesn’t necessarily know is that two gay men, or two lesbian women, can experience that same kind of love. And many who do want to get married.

When I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to Elizabeth Bennett to wind up with Mr. Darcy because I understand the special love between a man and a woman, not because I have made a scientific observation of men and women and deduced their feelings, but I feel the same way, only for the same sex, not the opposite sex. Hopefully when straight people see something like Brokeback Mountain, they can identify with two male characters who love each other, because they know what that special love feels like from their feelings about the opposite sex.

When you love someone in that special way, all of that talk about the complementarity of the sexes is silliness, whether you are an opposite-sex couple or a same-sex couple. You don’t love someone because they complement you. You love them because you love them.

So people who grow up in our culture and find themselves feeling that special love for another person often will want to marry that person. All of us, gay or straight, have grown up with the idea that when you love a person in a special way, and you want to spend the rest of your life with that person, you want to make a commitment to each other, and that commitment is often marriage.

Now, I suppose in our culture, many straight people get married for the wrong reasons, or don’t take marriage seriously enough. But many straight people get married for the right reasons and take marriage very seriously. Straight people who want to get married are not (necessarily) saying “I have a desire, and all desires must be fulfilled.” I don’t see why one should assume gay people are saying that either.

It is really just so simple. Sometimes people think too much for their own good.

Henry, I think you are pointing rightly to some serious distortions of love, marriage, sex, etc., but most of them really have nothing to do with the core issue(s) of the debate about homosexuality which involve judgments about gay and lesbian personhood and the possibility of their fulfillment as persons. Heterosexual and homosexual persons alike are able to fall into destructive, individualistic and selfish views of love, marriage, sex, relationship, etc., but it seems strange and unjust (not to mention counterintuitive) to presume selfishness and the idolization of freedom on the part of gays and lesbians who want to marry.

My two cents.

Please reread everything I’ve written. I’ve not said “this is my right,” nor have I called anyone cruel, nor have I said “this is how it is.” I have not claimed to know how anyone feels or thinks, as far as I can tell. I try to be careful in that regard, and if I have made such claims, then I am quite sure that I am wrong to have spoken in such a way.

I have only made a few requests, wondering what a conversation based on those requests might look like. I don’t know how it might look, and I haven’t tried to project one.

What I have said is simply that people need to be able to explain themselves to themselves, and those who are different need to listen, since we don’t know. I do not make pronouncements on straightness and judge it in light of gayness. I have no experience of being straight, and so I only know that I can learn about it from without.

There’s a German saying, if you chase happiness, you’ll chase it away. The Tao concept of wu-wei, “non-doing”, effortlessness, is helpful, or the saying “going with the flow”. Of course one shouldn’t try not to try either…Experience without judgment – people can sense if you’re “screening” them for mate possibilities. If one’s mind is focused on finding a soulmate, there’s way too much pressure and an otherwise open person might flee, since neediness shows and is unattractive. By thinking about the future, the present gets short-changed – and you’re not really present, you’re making plans.

If you were most suited, you’d be married. But whether you’re suited is not a fate but a decision. If you think it won’t happen it certainly won’t. Dhammapada, first pair :) Frequently, we get what we think we deserve. This may of course differ from what our conscious mind claims.

As for paradoxes, I think loneliness can only be solved alone.

It may sound trite, but it’s true
“Work like you don’t need the money,
Love like you’ve never been hurt,
And dance like no one’s watching”
or as I phrase it
“Work like no one’s watching
Love like you don’t need the money
And dance like you’ve never been hurt.” ;-)

This passage of your writing makes something abundantly clear, Henry: You are so dogmatic, so certain of your received notions about the world and its purposes that you absolutely REFUSE to recognise the EXCEPTIONS to your “laws”–the “homosexual unions” that clearly are NOT causing “all sorts of problems.” For you, they have to be discounted as being any real manifestation of any genuine love between two people of the same sex; for you, love between two people of the same sex must BY DEFINITION be non-sexual, but this simply isn’t the way your so-called “natural law” works. Your view is primitive, CRUELLY dogmatic and wholly unscientific.