Refutation: Catholic Answers’ Article on Homosexuality

Article: Catholic Answers - Homosexuality

Recently at my high school our GSA and some individuals unrelated to the group were celebrating Ally Week in various ways, such as through wearing clothes of certain colors on different days. One of my good friends who is against homosexuality didn’t like the fact that the school was supporting it. Since she was against it, I decided to do a quick Google search to see what kinds of reasons people have for being against homosexuality, most of which I was already somewhat aware of.

Although my friend isn’t a Catholic, the page seems to be largely applicable to non-Catholic Christians as well as Catholics. Also, as the Catholic Answer’s page on homosexuality that I came across is well-written, fairly straightforward, and one of the first results in Google, I’ve decided it’s a good article to try to refute. Now on to the article.

In the introduction to the article, they explain that the homosexual sexual orientation is not in itself sinful, but that acting upon homosexual desires by committing homosexual acts is. So far, so good.

Next they talk about “Divine Law” and how the Bible is against homosexuality, referencing passages like Leviticus 20:13 (NIV) and Romans 1:26-28 (NIV) in support of this view. If we accept that these passages are not out of context or misinterpreted somehow, then that still leaves the question of why homosexuality is so horrible other than God’s arbitrary dislike of it. Unlike many other articles, the author of this one realizes this and says:

All of Scripture teaches the unacceptability of homosexual behavior. But the rejection of this behavior is not an arbitrary prohibition. It, like other moral imperatives, is rooted in natural law—the design that God has built into human nature.

This leads us to the nadir of the article where the author tries to argue that because humans feel that homosexuality is wrong as a result of their “moral intuition,” that it is wrong. The author is ignoring the millions of homosexuals and bisexuals who don’t feel there is anything immoral about homosexual behavior or relationships and the perhaps billions of people who tend not to engage in homosexual behavior (e.g., heterosexuals and asexuals) who agree. That isn’t to say that just because many people don’t find homosexuality immoral that homosexuality isn’t immoral, but rather that because there are (many) people whose “moral intuitions” don’t tell them homosexuality is immoral, that the argument that homosexuality is immoral because we feel it is immoral is flawed.

They then throw around the word “natural” a lot, especially in the Natural Law and “I Was Born This Way” sections of the article, but it’s hard to tell what they mean exactly. If homosexuality occurs in animals, such as humans, it is natural by definition. As humans as well as non-humans animals are known to engage in homosexual activities, homosexuality is natural. However, just because something is natural does not mean it’s moral. Just as many people have natural tendency to act aggressively or even fight one another, that does not mean acting upon those tendencies is a good thing or a bad thing. I’m not sure what point they’re trying to make by calling homosexuality unnatural is other than to elicit some sort of disapproval that people have towards things that are labeled “unnatural.” I can’t see any other reason.

They then argue that homosexuals do not represent 10% of the population, but are rather a much smaller percentage. The number of homosexuals, as they correctly state, is not relevant to the morality of it, so that’s not in the scope of this refutation. The author also argues that people who are against homosexuality for various reasons aren’t necessarily homophobes. I agree and the reasons they use to back up this view are valid.

Right after they finish the sentence up about people who are against homosexuality not being homophobes, they go straight to calling for homosexuals to live a life of chastity and say:

The modern arguments in favor of homosexuality have thus been insufficient to overcome the evidence that homosexual behavior is against divine and natural law, as the Bible and the Church, as well as the wider circle of Jewish and Christian (not to mention Muslim) writers, have always held.

Um, what? The author ended up not providing one reason why homosexuality is wrong other than the stuff about how it’s “unnatural.” I should have expected as much.