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Tolerance, Or Active Glorification?

(Lucas Cranach the Younger. Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. Source)

Please read A Reading List for Persons With Same-Sex Attractions before reading this text.

1) Introduction

In Canada, as we speak, Parliament has enacted a law on homosexual "marriage". People who still oppose themselves to this law are often called "intolerant". Is this true?

2) Society tends to produce what it glorifies

We all know at least one teenager, who wears his hair very long, who tries to play the electric guitar or the drums, and who tries to sing in English, even if he's a "dyed-in-the-wool" French-Canadian.

Is it because parents enjoy punishing their ears while they're quietly reading in the living-room? Maybe for some. But I claim it's mostly because of the active efforts that are deployed to glorify the "music" bands that the teenagers listen to.

What would happen if we surrounded a teenager with luxurious magazines on glossy paper, high-energy radio and TV programs, and throngs of other teenagers, and that all of these surroundings praised and glorified Gregorian chant? What would happen if Gregorian chant singers earned ten, one hundred or one thousand times more than the average worker? What would happen if a Gregorian singer could just snap his fingers and be mobbed by a crowd of admiring young girls?

What would happen? I claim there would be a statistically significant increase in the number of teenagers sporting a tonsure!

3) We can actively encourage or discourage people from getting married and having children

Marriage is like the "music" of teenagers or Gregorian chant. We can make active efforts to either run it down, or glorify it, or simply tolerate it. Suppose you're a politician, and you decide to encourage people to get married and have children. You could, among others:

- set up the taxation system so as to reduce the tax burden on married couples;
- severely punish adultery (since it's a violation of the written and public promise of the spouses);
- maintain a very high esteem for marriage, celebrate it publicly, and grant it legal value;
- censor films which attack the institution of marriage;
- encourage the election of politicians who are married, faithful to their spouse, and who have many well-raised kids;
- Etc., etc.

4) Sometimes, we have to tolerate some negative behaviors

Notice that society has roughly three choices when faced with a behavior: active glorification, its opposite active discouragement, and simple tolerance. If a behavior is anti-social, but that its repression would cause more harm than good, a society can decide to simply tolerate it.

For example, it isn't nice to forget to change your cat's litter. It would be better if all cats always had fresh litter, but if we had to send the "Litter Police" at all hours of the day and night, to kick down your door and go check your litter, let's say you'd be rather unhappy!

Should we do the same thing for homosexual couples? If we suppose, for the sake of the argument, that sodomy is bad for society, we can imagine that, even in that case, we would probably want to tolerate consensual homosexual relations that occur in private, to avoid transforming our society into a police-State.

5) Conclusion

Are opponents of homosexual "marriage" homophobes? Maybe for some! On the other hand, all these people are not necessarily homophobes. It can be scientifically demonstrated that the health of a society depends on the health of marriage. It can also be shown that the legal glorification of relations that are intrinsically sterile and deprived of sexual complementarity, is an indirect way of attacking marriage.

A society that chooses to tolerate hidden homosexual relations, while avoiding their active glorification, is only protecting itself. In other words, it's possible to be "in-glorifiant", without being "in-tolerant"!

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