Sodomy

“Know you not that the unjust shall not possess the kingdom of God? Do not err: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, Nor the effeminate, nor liers with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor railers, nor extortioners, shall possess the kingdom of God. And such some of you were; but you are washed, but you are sanctified, but you are justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of our God.”

I intend to do the same thing with this article that I did with my article on the Boomers. That is, I intend to capitalize on people’s tendency to read only headlines, to look for things to be upset about, to assume and categorize somebody before understanding their opinion, and being aware of how my opening excerpt from the Bible and my title will place me, I am going to apologize for homosexuals and queer Catholics.

It is hard to give an answer for someone you do not understand! I do not understand queer Catholics. I hope to come to understand them. They are something of a non sequitur to me, and I find them strange, but strange is only a synonym for queer.

However, I do understand homosexuals. I can give an answer for them.

Sodomy is like murder. It is fulfilling your desire by the use of death. However, let me point out how much these words are misunderstood! I will give you a parable of a murderer and a sodomite.

A man every day goes to work and deals with an abusive manager. This manager is a woman, and the man is bothered by the fact that she has authority over him. This is compounded by the fact that her authority is misused. She often gives him contradictory instructions and, when he complains to her about this, she responds by launching into a long emotional story about the stresses of her position. When she got her position, he had been gunning for it, too. He was passed over in favor of her. Despite this, being Christian, he repeatedly forgives her and himself and tries to offer her sympathy, because he understands that she is in a position that really is not fit for her. He can even overlook the fact that she willfully sought out that position in competition with him, because she does not know that he wanted it, he has never told her, and she did it because her husband left her, and she needed more money in order to provide for her household.

But, nevertheless, his repeated good and Christian works build on him over time. He is tempted every day. He sees little problems with her. In his life, being a single man, he is very efficient in everything. He keeps chastity. He is scrupulous in his use of company resources, including making sure that he is productive the entire time he is on the clock. He is dressed neatly. And he does not hold anyone else to this standard, but practices constant charity with all his coworkers, understanding that Jesus Christ has put him in this position in order to be a good example.

He drinks a little bit. He drinks one beer a night, and that bothers him, so he stops for a little bit. Then he starts again and gets into two beers a day. Then he stops that, but his coffee intake in the morning goes up. He can’t sleep at night. He takes some hard liquor to help him sleep.

Then, one day, he snaps. His manager was especially hard on him without realizing it, especially emotionally needy, and the day was especially trying. Driving home, looking forward to his liquor, thinking he might even drink it a little before sleep, maybe while he watches television, he is suddenly cut off in traffic.

“God damn—,” and then stops himself briefly, a fraction of a second, before finishing the curse: “—her.”

This has been the parable of a murderer.

Now let us see the parable of a sodomite:

A boy at ten years old has his first exposure to pornography. He does not understand what he is looking at. It occurred because he noticed that his oldest brother was looking at some strange pictures, and he asked to see them. His older brother showed them to him.

The pictures are of a fantastical scene that I will not describe. Parts of the body are being affected in ways absolutely impossible. It would certainly be fatal if it were attempted in real life.

This scene, then is burned into the boy’s mind. He does not know what to make of it, why his older brother was looking at it, but he notices his body responding. The ways in which his body responds reminds him of innuendos and things said on television which his parents were watching. He holds onto the picture, hides it, looks at it regularly. He becomes somewhat obsessed with it.

This continues for some couple of years. Behavior responding to this picture starts to multiply, all done behind closed doors. More pictures are sought out. He begins to educate himself in a sort of fantasy world that is not ergonometrically possible. He notices how his body responds, and he seeks out more responses of a similar kind, not at all aware of what he is doing and what it means, being very confused about the nature of things happening to him.

I will not describe this further. Suffice it to say, this is the beginning of a long and confusing road which seems to become clear by the time he turns nineteen, after having been baptized and attended a non-denominational church for a year. Finally, he encounters, online, certain sermons that seem to explain what he has been doing behind closed doors and in his mind (much more severely) for, at this point, almost half his life. These sermons are not gentle. They are extremely opposed to this behavior, calling it disgusting and horrible and many other things.

Suffice it to say, he responds! He begins to resist the behavior. He has varying success, at some points does not indulge for long periods of time. He reads many books and watches and listens to many things about it. He hears arguments for and against it, and he resists the ones for this behavior for several reasons. First of all, the original picture depicting things absolutely impossible and even fatal to the body, and so he has always had a sort of traumatic disconnect with his own fantasies, because they are not possible in reality. Secondly, he does not want to be considered disgusting and horrible by his new peer group, which, because of his grasp of theology, he understands will eventually see all the things that he has done in the dark.

Nevertheless, this battle for his identity and his freedom persists for years. He eventually gets married, and when he does, it seems like he can rest easy. His body, which he understands at a much higher level, is perfectly satisfied with his wife, and some realities about the nature of men and women, never told to him at ten years old, begin to dawn on him.

Still, he struggles on occasion. He has dreams, he sees images by accident in popular media, he has temptations. These nearly defeat him a time or two, but he never loses.

One day, after a particular nasty dream, he wakes up his wife. Now, they have been engaged in the practice known as Natural Family Planning. They have been using it in order to increase their chances of having children, and despite this, have failed at every attempt. He knows that there is not chance that they should conceive a child because his wife is not ovulating.

Despite this, using particularly insensitive argumentation and demands, he convinces his wife to attempt to have a child.

They succeed. A child is conceived. This seems to fly in the face of Natural Family Planning principles.

This has been the parable of a sodomite.

I think the problem with sodomy is mostly that it is not defined. Most sodomy is committed by heterosexuals. It is the simulation of the marital act done in a way that is not teleologically fertile. Many conclusions can be reached by realizing this, but one of the most useful is this: there is no reason why folks who have this particular temptation should be set aside into a particular category that is nearly irredeemable.

Sodomy is equated to usury by the Church Fathers. The reason is because both are sterile. Sodomy takes the procreative power of man and buries it in a latrine. Usury takes the productive power of man and buries it in fake money, like the man who buried his gold in the parable. Both require the exploitation and abuse of others, generally by force, generally of strong men. (It helps to understand that sodomy was often inflicted on losing soldiers in battle, and usury today and always has been inflicted on the poor because they are laboring too hard to be educated on it. It is a perversion of man’s strength, which is fertile, hence the word “virile”.)

Those who are tempted by sodomy or fornication have every reason to be angry with the usurer, and they do not deserve to be enslaved to a 9-5, Mon-Fri, Winter-Winter, W-2 Contractual Relationship that would call sitting at a desk thumbing through your phone “work” so long as it’s “on the clock”, and planting gardens or teaching your children or making furniture a “hobby”. Those tempted by murder and cursing, the violent, who often hate the lustful, ought to band together with them against usury. The violent, really, are manipulated by the overwhelming desire to see justice and purity imposed on the world external to them, in the same way that the lustful are manipulated by the irrational desire to expend themselves creatively. Thieves, too, those who are tempted by things they see that they can acquire, ought to work together with these other two to solve usury. A thief can actually steal from a usurer without sinning, moreso today than ever before, if they understand properly the circumstances they are in, and treat the goods in the proper manner. The story of Robin Hood demonstrates this, as does King David in the Bible who was saved from one of his several instances of robbery by the clever appeasement of Abigail.

There is plenty more to say on all these subjects. I want to point out this definite fact: In this day and age, absolutely everyone is mentally ill. Most of this is due to mental-sexual trauma in childhood. Nobody is healthy. I guarantee it. This should be considered before anyone judges anybody or proposes solutions or ostracizes or anything else. Do not see the speck without first removing the log.

I am happy to engage with anyone on this topic, but I do have to limit how descriptive I am.

God bless you.