Review: Making Gay Okay

How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior is Changing Everything

Robert Reilly’s Introduction notes that this book is not religion based, but reason based.  He concedes that anyone who does not distinguish between a person and his actions will find this book hard to believe.  That said, he proceeds to discuss man’s nature, actions, reason, and rationalization --- with many, many examples and data to illustrate his points.

Reilly begins by discussing rationalization, concluding as I have, that no one thinks of themselves or their actions as evil.  They rationalize what most think as evil, and it starts with their assumptions over what is normal/natural versus what is unnatural.  He notes that Aristotle said: “The basic societal unit is the family,” whereas the French philosopher Rousseau claimed that “man is not a rational, political animal and that society in any form is fundamentally alien …  In his origins, man was isolated and essentially complete on his own and in himself.”  Greek philosophy discovered that “all activity seems governed by a purpose, by ends, to which things are designed to move.”   Further, “We can know reality, or what is, because it was made by logos or reason.”  We can see a thing’s purpose.  Rousseau, however, said there is no purpose or ends in Nature, “It is man, not Nature, who gives things their purpose.”  Rousseau claims that what any man wants is his right, for it is in his nature to want what he feels give him pleasure --- without regard to anyone else.

Rousseau’s philosophy is the underpinning of modern liberal thought.  “I want it, therefore it must be good --- for me.”  It recognizes no fixed moral imperatives; they can be changed at anyone’s whim:  “They have a right to their beliefs and actions.”  Mr. Reilly quotes the changing views and “rights” espoused by our president and vice president.  Mr. Obama wrote: “Implicit in (the Constitution’s) structure … was a rejection of absolute truth… that might lock future generations into a single unalterable course.”  Reilly summarizes Obama’s words thusly: “In other words, truth leads to tyranny.  Truth does not set you free; it imprisons.  Moral relativism sets you free.”

The above are thoughts from just the first 40 pages of this excellent book.  Further chapters discuss Justice, Biology, Morality, and Science.  He then discusses the growth of Rousseauian liberal philosophy into our judicial and educational systems.  I think perhaps more than any other book I’ve recently read, this book explains how our culture has gotten to this point, and the liberal-conservative divide:  two sides each of which is confident in its thinking that it knows what is best.

While there are many examples and facts in this book, I liked the data Reilly put forth about the medical results of homosexuality versus smoking.  From their nature, he notes, lungs are not designed to inhale smoke, nor the anus to accept sexual male sexual organs, and when used against their nature, the human body revolts.  We hear so much about the dangers of smoking and lung cancer, yet Reilly quotes studies citing a 4000% increase of anal cancer among homosexuals and, in one study, “the probability of a 20-year old gay or bisexual man living to 65 was only 32%, compared to 78% for men in general.  The damaging effects of cigarette smoking pale in comparison – cigarette smokers lose on average about 13.5 years of life expectancy.”  Many, many other studies are quoted in this book and its appendix, yet, as it points out, this country is on a course of promoting a morality and life style significantly more dangerous than smoking.

Reilly concludes:  “The key to democracy is not free choice… The key, as our Founding Fathers knew, is virtue … People who are enslaved to their passions inevitably become slaves to tyrants … A society can withstand any number of persons who try to advance their own moral disorders as public policy.  But it cannot survive once it adopts and enforces the justification for those moral disorders as its own.  This is what is at stake in the culture war.”

Read this book, if you are a thinking individual wondering how we got here, and what we can do about it.  As Christians, we CAN distinguish between people and their actions, and we can understand God’s purpose for creation and man.  God’s purposes define our nature, truth, and right, not every individual man. 

We are not God.