During the last days of February and early March, following Ash Wednesday, the news media and opinion pages were full of two issues: Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, and President Bush’s proposal for a constitutional amendment. One major metropolitan daily wrote its first-page headline this way: BUSH: BAN GAY MARRIAGE. Did it occur to them to write, “Bush: Preserve Marriage”? No, it probably did not, because this issue is being framed differently in the media, not as an effort to protect an institution as old as the human race, but as a desire to punish individual self-expression in the name of the only goddess that we must all worship, Tolerantia.

What is the relationship between the uproar about The Passion and the widespread attempts to ward off Mr. Bush’s proposed amendment? There is more than one aspect. One common feature is the absolutization of tolerance as the ultimate and perhaps the only remaining value that we are supposed to have. Objections to “gay marriage,” as well as to the proposed alternative, civil unions, are not based, as Justice Margaret Marshall of the Massachusetts court asserted, on “residual personal prejudice,” but on a millennium-old, shared human understanding of natural law and of the laws of God as revealed in the Bible, the Holy Scriptures that have been so foundational to Western civilization. Whether or not the government defines marriage as the union between one man and one woman, between members of the same sex, or between two chimpanzees, what it is was specified by the Creator in the second chapter of the Bible, and reaffirmed by Jesus himself in the Gospel. It is part of the law of nature and as such has been universally recognized throughout human history. If we reject it, as we seem to be doing, it does not mean that we are more advanced humans, but that we are rapidly ceasing to be human at all. Some people want to do atrocious things, and making the principles of tolerance and individual liberty absolute permits them to do as they please.

Universifiability or Universal Tolerance

2004 marked the 200th anniversary of the death of Immanuel Kant, February 12, 1804. Kant, who was born in 1724, was once one of the most influential philosophers of all time. He considered it necessary for man as a moral being to presuppose the existence of God, one of the “necessary presuppositions of practical reason.” He was far removed from Christian orthodoxy theologically, but in his ethical thinking he urged principles of conduct that come close to the Golden Rule of Jewish and Christian ethics, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Kant taught the categorical imperative, a rule that is always and everywhere valid, and spoke of discovering it by the principle of universifiability: Act always on that maxim that you could wish to be universally applied, everywhere and at all times. Kant’s principle of universifiability is just as opposed to homosexual marriage, indeed to all homosexual conduct, as are the Bible and natural law, for if it were to be universally applied, it would wipe out the entire human race.

Opposed to universifiability, as well as to its Christian predecessor, the Golden Rule, is universal tolerance or, as in the Cole Porter song, “Anything goes!” Tolerance in the modern sense of “Anything goes!” makes a mockery of the age-old goal of philosophy and ethics, namely, to discover truth and to identify the good. Essentially, it deprives us of one of the fundamental characteristics of human beings, namely, the ability to judge and the necessity to make judgments concerning good and evil. Of course, this obligatory tolerance is not universal, even today, for it does not extend to cigarette smoking, nor to the use of politically incorrect words such as “firemen.”1 It applies only to sexual matters. Sexuality and all that is related to it has been removed from the area of morality and moral judgment. Clearly this goes against Jewish and Christian teaching, for the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is right in the center of the three great injuries to humans: the preceding commandment forbids murder and the following stealing. Somehow our society, with the social and intellectual elite in the lead, has decided that sex is merely fun. It is no more serious to choose to engage in sexual activity with a member of one’s own sex instead of the opposite than it is too choose to play tennis rather than squash.

Sexual behavior is not subject to criticism, and anyone who dares to do so is immediately banished from the discussion as “judgmental.” This ignores a major aspect of human existence: man is by nature a moral being, that is, a being who makes moral judgments (whether or not he follows them), who chooses between good and evil. Without the ability and the will to make judgments, morality vanishes, and that is where we are certainly headed as a civilization. If we must tolerate everything, then we will ultimately be able to preserve nothing. Jean-Paul Maisonneuve, S.J. points out that when tolerance becomes absolute, it becomes the worst kind of intolerance. Tolerance of individuals is a form of magnanimity, he says, a virtue. Tolerance of conduct and concepts known to be wrong is cowardice, a lie, and a crime.

Members of the “gay” rights community, which has now expanded to be the “lesbigay”2 community, do not demand tolerance for their behavior — that seems to have been won decades ago. Instead, they use the power of the word “intolerance” to reduce all of their critics except the most courageous to whimpering silence. President Bush’s statement, calling upon Congress to draw up an amendment to protect marriage, has brought the problem of the advancing wave of homosexual activism into sharp relief. Some critics claim that he has done this only to gain political advantage — to divide America, Senator John Kerry says — but whatever may have been his reason or reasons, his action is the first and perhaps the only thing that could be done to force the traditionally timid legislators to consider what the runaway judges are doing to our country and our society.

It seems evident that the majority of Americans reject the idea of gay “marriage,” for they are sufficiently rooted in common sense, natural law, and the Bible to know that whatever such a liaison may be, it is not marriage.3 There are advocates of conservative morality who wish to safeguard the word “marriage” — but not the substance — by creating a parallel institution for same-sex couples, called, for example, civil union. This seems not to interest most of America’s “gays.” Chief Justice Margaret Mitchell of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Council, the justice who wrote the Goodridge decision calling for same-sex marriage, denounced the alternative of “civil unions” before the state legislature had begun to create them, for to do so would reduce homosexuals to “second-class citizens.” The Massachusetts court’s decision has been followed by a cascade not of “civil unions,” but of lesser officials, such as the mayor of San Francisco, marrying hundreds of homosexual couples in defiance of the existing laws. In the case of San Francisco, the California provision for the defense of marriage was adopted by a popular referendum. As far as the mayor is concerned, the expression of the will of the many by referendum means less than the will of the few to marry outside the law.

It is at this point that the great rhetorical weapon analyzed by George Orwell as “Newspeak” comes into play by homosexual advocates, the transformation of language to prevent people from thinking politically incorrect thoughts. If the conflict can be expressed in the “strong” language4 or Newspeak, the outcome is virtually decided in advance. The apparent opposite of strong is weak, and seldom will the weak trump the strong. However, the real opposite of “strong” language is not “weak” language, but “true” language. If true language is adopted, the case of the “gay” advocates is instantly weakened. Among the effective “strong” language-words we include, first of all, “tolerance.” Tolerance demands: this is in itself a strange use of the term, for to tolerate someone or something traditionally meant to permit or accept it without agreeing or thinking it right. The gay rights community is not the least bit satisfied with having society tolerate them in the sense of “endure” or “put up with.” This goal was achieved long ago. What to tolerate means in their sense is to accept, agree, submit, even support.

A second strong word is “divisive.” Divisive is not to be confused with diversity, for diversity is good and to be praised, even required and enforced by law, as in the slogan, “Our strength is in our diversity.” The opposite of diversity is divisiveness. The behavior of those who make a distinction among behaviors, calling some good and others evil, is divisive and to be shunned for that reason. To think in this way really eliminates the concept of good and evil, for if something were actually found to be good in the old sense, it would make sense to further it and to oppose that which was found to be evil. To “discriminate” should also be condemned out of hand. Discrimination places people in different categories, relegates some to the role of “others,” and is of course always wrong (well, almost always, as we shall show). To criticize anyone and call his or her behavior morally wrong is to be “judgmental,” and being judgmental is unacceptable, shameful even. Judges are, of course, never judgmental in this sense, unless of course they happen to call homosexual behavior perverse and “gay marriage” a nonsensical idea.

Discrimination and Discrimination

The tolerance weapon is not used indiscriminately. Some people or activities are so far beyond the pale that there is never a question of tolerance for them. No one suggests that Holocaust-deniers, much less anti-Semites, should be shown tolerance. Even non-political cigarette smokers can hardly expect tolerance from the general public today and certainly not from bar owners in New York City. We must, therefore, discriminate between the behaviors and convictions that demand tolerance and those that demand intolerance. In other words, we must discriminate between discrimination that is politically correct, even required, such as that between cigarette smokers and non-smokers, and discrimination that is clearly wrong and immoral, such as discrimination between sodomite (oops! homosexual) couples and traditionally married ones. Therefore it is incumbent upon all who would be politically correct to discriminate between the discrimination that is obligatory, and the discrimination that is mean, cruel, and hateful.

What this little play on words shows is that even those who have been persuaded that in the name of total tolerance they must not discriminate, must in fact discriminate, will become intolerant when they confront behaviors or concepts that do not meet the current standards of political correctness.

What all this means is that advocates of the amendment to protect marriage (we do not need to say “traditional marriage,” for the alternatives simply are not marriage at all) must turn the language games, turn Newspeak, against their adversaries and not allow themselves to be forced into the mold of speech that prevents people from recognizing the thing with which they are dealing. After all, the ability to make moral judgments — to discriminate, even to be “judgmental” if you insist — is an innate and necessary characteristic of human beings. It can be seen at a very early age: one of the first things that a little child learns to say, and to say with energy, is “That’s not fair!”

If we refuse to tolerate homosexual conduct, much less the atrocious and obscene displays that characterize “Gay Pride,” and consequently are called “intolerant,” the reply is, “That is intolerable, and therefore I do not tolerate it.” We may add, “Under appropriate circumstances we will tolerate the people, but we cannot and will not let tolerance go so far that we approve conduct and concept that are contrary to nature, to common sense, to good taste, and ultimately to the laws of the Creator.”

Uncertain Trumpets

“For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound,” St. Paul wrote, “who shall prepare himself to the battle” (I Corinthians 14:8). Many conservatives, knowing that “gay marriage” would be wrong, are seeking to preserve traditional marriage by offering the challengers a compromise, some kind of civil union to provide homosexual couples with the same privileges that are enjoyed by married couples. There are three great difficulties with this suggestion, the one practical, the other two matters of principle. Practically speaking, the gay marriage advocates simply will not agree to the compromise, as Justice Marshall’s rejection of the idea even before it was implemented shows. One difficulty in principle is that the setting up of civil unions gives formal approval to conduct that is condemnable, in the process giving up the right to criticize it in principle, or, for example, to warn young males that to adopt the homosexual life-style will shorten a man’s life expectancy by twenty-five to thirty years5 — far more than cigarette smoking.

The second difficulty in principle is harder to express simply. It lies in the fact that homosexual advocates argue from a position that absolutizes the right of the individual to live exactly as he or she pleases, overlooking the implications both for children and for society in general. As George Gilder and others have pointed out, the institution of marriage has a “civilizing” impact on maturing young males, educating them to responsibility for others, for a wife and usually for children. This valuable procedure has already been seriously weakened by the easy availability of females for sexual fun without marriage, made possible by the generalized use of contraceptives and abortion on demand. While the individual married couple may say that their own marriage is not weakened or troubled by the elevation of “gay” partnerships to the same level, the unique social institution that marriage is and has been can only be debilitated by being treated as no different from other associations, especially unnatural ones.

The Sanctity of the Constitution

Federal and state court judges, including those of the United States Supreme Court, have arrogated to themselves the power to change the very structure of society by reading into human documents — the United States Constitution and certain state constitutions — sweeping powers and principles of which the Founders never dreamt. Somehow many of the moderate defenders of traditional marriage seem not to recognize that this arrogation is what has violated the Constitution, not proposals to adopt a constitutional amendment. The amendment process is provided for in the U. S. Constitution itself. It is fanciful to suggest that an amendment constitutionally adopted could itself be unconstitutional, but courts might consider even that to be a proper exercise of their supreme judicial power.

Courts, including above all the United States Supreme Court, have run wild, deciding cases according to the principle that “the Constitution means what a majority of the justices of the Supreme Court says it means.” The only way to correct this is by amending the Constitution, as President Bush has said. No doubt the knowledge that it is incredibly difficult to do so is a comfort to justices when they feel inclined to give free rein to their fantasy, deciding cases as they see fit, not as they really read the Constitution to say.

Several of those who oppose gay marriage draw back before the project of blocking it by a constitutional amendment. Passing a constitutional amendment of this nature would be extremely difficult, not least because it would come up against the charges of intolerance, judgmentalism, divisiveness, and all the rest. Strangely, at this time some of the critics of gay marriage draw back before the only step that could block it, namely the amendment. Dr. Charles Krauthammer, a brilliant political analyst, has lost his usual sobriety in declaring, “The sanctity of the Constitution trumps everything, including marriage.” It is unfortunate that the Justice and judges of Roe, Casey, Lawrence, Goodridge, and so many other constitution-warping decisions did not have this insight. Since they did not, it is foolish to let the totally unconstitutional concept of the sanctity of the Constitution prevent us from pursuing the only constitutional way to check the impending descent of our society into sexual suicide.

When the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was brought out in the 1950s, it abolished the old thou-thee-thy-thine forms except when addressing the Deity. The later, very conservative New American Standard Bible did the same. However, both of these texts have now been updated, and the “thou” is gone, even for God. English speakers today are generally unaware of the fact that the “thou” form is not deferential or especially reverent, as many would now explain it, but is the old second person singular, “you,” originally “ye” in the nominative case, as the second person plural. Now “thou” is gone, and “you” is easy and familiar, used in addressing everyone from the youngest child to the most exalted person, even to God. Now, however, there is no way to distinguish between being formal and being familiar and intimate, as there is in many other languages. There is also no way to distinguish between second person singular (old “thou”) and second person plural (“ye” or “you”), so other expressions have come in to make it evident that you is plural, such as y’all or you all in the American South, or “youse guys” in some parts of the urban North. Curiously, jus (pronounced youse) is the second person plural in Lithuanian, and thousand of Lithuanian immigrants settled in the Chicago area where “youse” is often heard, but no direct connection can be established.

The argument of Bible translators and others that the “thou” forms cannot be understood by twentieth and twenty-first century Americans hardly rings true. The old Authorized (King James) Version, which uses thou forms throughout, is almost universally used in African-American churches, and no one complains that he or she does not know what is meant. Love songs, such as “Drink to me only with thine eyes” can still be understood, as well as the last line in the song “Because.” “Why do I love thee? Because God made thee mine.”

Courtesy Is Going, Too

The familiar “thou” is gone, but that has not made our society more courteous. Miss and Mrs. have bitten the dust, replaced by the universal Ms., and even that seldom appears, inasmuch as all titles are vanishing. Socially speaking, there is some utility in knowing whether a woman is married or single, and perhaps the way to avoid the inequity without universalizing Ms. would be to create an equivalent distinction between married and unmarried men. By analogy with Miss, which is shorter than Mrs., we could use “Mir” for unmarried misters, and then bring back the Misses and Mistresses. Mir could replace “dude,” a form of address common among the younger dudes of America.

In Germany, where a good deal of formality still exists, military officers address each other by the polite form Sie, but in German-speaking Austria officers address each other, even the generals, as Herr Kamerad, du. In Switzerland, when Protestant pastors are admitted to membership in the synod, the familiar du is immediately extended. The fact that there is a special pronoun used for members of one’s circle suggests intimacy — in the military, the brotherhood of arms — but the fact that others may not use it no doubt suggests exclusion, and of course our modern egalitarian society cannot bear the thought that any group, even military officers, would be exclusive. About the only time when this editor is addressed as “professor” is in a faculty meeting, where everyone else is a professor, too. Unfortunately, if everyone is “in” and no one is “out,” then no one is really “in” either. It is not likely that we can revert to thees and thous, but to recover some titles might be therapeutic and help us to avoid knowing that we are experiencing Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West.

In American English, the loss of titles in address and the increasing tendency for everyone, even the humblest telemarketers, to address everyone else by first names, goes along with the tendency to use more and more foul, obscene, and blasphemous language in public and on the airwaves. This all corresponds to the late 19th-century literary and artistic style called naturalism, which in order to be natural, became crude, vulgar, poor and dirty. The ideals of Greek antiquity called for people to strive to be kalos kai agathos, beautiful and good. Modern Americans who can afford it spend vast sums and undergo more and more cosmetic surgery in the effort to attain and preserve beauty, but all too little attention is devoted to trying to be good. To speak of a man as “virtuous” could almost be taken as an insult, no doubt because virtue comes from the Latin vir, man as distinguished from woman.

Who can find a virtuous man among the presidential candidates? If one of them actually strives to be virtuous in his own inner life, and we trust that at least some do, he certainly does not want to be advertised, “Vote for virtue, vote for NN!” Our speech, and not least our political speech, strives for the least common denominator. The old concept of aristocracy meant “rule by the best,” i.e. the most virtuous, but today no one would dare to campaign that way. There is a Roman proverb, corruptio optimi pessimum est, the corruption of the best is the worst, but unfortunately we seem to have embraced the idea that the corruption of the best is clever and cute. As Calderon said, the sleep of reason produces monsters. We do not really need titles in our political campaigns, but we do need more reason than we seem to have available.

One of the ugliest aspects of modern life is racial prejudice, and one of the worst forms of it is anti-Semitism. The struggle against anti-Semitism is made more difficult when it becomes the automatic reaction of some to things that they do not like. Sometimes shouting anti-Semitism is like the boy crying, “Wolf!” when there was no wolf, as a result of which no help came when there really was a wolf. The efforts of some critics to stamp Mel Gibson’s The Passion as anti-Semitic are like crying “Wolf” when there’s not one there.

Believing Christians should shun anti-Semitism like the plague, for they must know that Jesus Christ and all of his apostles were themselves Jewish; in fact, for some time virtually the entire Christian church consisted of baptized Jews. One of the saddest lines in the Bible from a Christian perspective is John 1:11, “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” There seems to be two levels of understanding “his own.” It could refer to his fellow-Jews, or to all of us, his fellow-humans. Unfortunately, just as by no means all circumcised males are real Jews, by no means are all baptized Gentiles truly Christian.

Three Varieties

We can distinguish three varieties of anti-Semitism: religious anti-Semitism, which is really anti-Judaism, and not anti-Semitic at all; racial anti-Semitism, which has no respect either for Judaism or Christianity; and political anti-Semitism or anti-Zionism, hostility to the State of Israel. Martin Luther is commonly branded with anti-Semitism for the nasty tracts he wrote towards the end of his life: one of them, Against the Jews and Their Lies, might seem to offer irrefutable proof. Closer inspection reveals that what Luther objected to was not the racial identity, but the fact that the Jews would not rally to the Gospel, even after Luther himself explained it to them — hardly commendable, but not anti-Semitism in a racial sense. This sort of thing is not innocuous, and it certainly is obnoxious to Jewish people, but it is not the anti-Semitism that reached its most horrible expression in Hitler’s Holocaust. Any Jew who became a Christian would be received with open arms by Luther, but this made no difference to Hitler, who persecuted all racial Jews, whether Christian or not, even Protestant pastors and Roman Catholic nuns. As Bill Buckley once pointed out, preaching the Gospel to Jews is not anti-Semitic; what is anti-Semitic is for a Christian to withhold the Gospel from Jews.

Racial Anti-Semitism

Xenophobia, fear of or hostility towards strangers, is sadly an all too common human characteristic. Racial anti-Semitism is antipathy to Jews not because of their religion, but because of their race. For a people as few in number as the Jews to survive and to prosper, enduring slavery, exile, and dispersion across most of the surface of the earth during more than three thousand years of recorded history, is so unusual that it alone might seem to give credence to the assertion that they are God’s chosen people. The Jews have always been a “peculiar people” when they have lived among others.6 Xenophobia is always possible when groups differ from one another, and Jews living in a generally Christian society have differed to varying degrees from the general public.

In the “Christian” West, xenophobia began to be superseded by real racism, supposedly justified by science, in the 19th century. In that century two developments seemed to undermine the concept of the unity of the human race, permitting or even promoting generalized racism, as well as anti-Semitism. The middle of the century saw the publication and rapid dissemination of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, undermining the doctrine that all humans are descended from a single pair, created in the image of God. During the same period, scholars, particularly German theologians, began to challenge the unity of the Old Testament books, attributing the texts of the Pentateuch to various sources and editors, in effect to anyone but Moses, and thus turning the doctrine of creation in the image of God into Hebrew poetry, rather than objective fact. If the races of man are not all derived from a common ancestor and are not all created in the divine image, but have evolved at different times, at different rates, and in different places, then nothing could be more natural than to expect to find substantial differences among the various races, with some being “higher,” having evolved more rapidly, and others “lower.” It would be logical to promote the “higher” while repressing — gently, of course — the “lower” ones.

So far, the once Christian West has not been ready to shuck off the implications of the Creation story, even though it has now been largely abandoned as an article of belief. We have not yet succumbed to the temptation to engage in “scientific racism,” as Hitler did. May God forbid that we ever do. When all Christian restraints — residual personal prejudices, as they are now called — are abolished, they will be replaced not by a kind spirit of universal human benevolence, but by illusions of racial superiority and actions intended to prove it. When the evolutionary doctrines of the survival of the fittest and the utilitarian doctrine of the greater good of the greater number come to prevail, man will have lost what Sorokin called his invisible armor and be subject to selection and exploitation like domestic animals. Nothing will stop us from pursuing the goal of racial perfection. Of course, our compassionate modern world will not resort to gas chambers, but there are less brutal means of curtailing the growth of “lesser races.” For the moment residual personal prejudices7 are still sufficiently present to prevent evolutionary “science” from promoting racism, including anti-Semitism. To the extent that attacking The Passion might tend to remove those “residues,” it is not a wise policy.

Political Anti-Semitism

In this context, political anti-Semitism refers to hostility to the State of Israel. The U. S. government is constantly charged with supporting Israel against the legitimate claims of the Palestinians; indeed, this is one reason for Muslim hostility to us. By supporting the State of Israel to the extent that we do, we are attempting to help the embattled little nation survive in an incredibly perilous environment. The large number of Palestinian Arabs, mostly but not all Muslims, in Israel proper and on the West Bank creates seemingly insoluble problems, particularly in the light of their repeated threats to throw the Jews into the sea. To an outside observer it seems paradoxical that the surrounding Arab nations could not and would not accommodate several hundred thousand displaced persons forty years ago when it would have gone far to forestalling the problems that the world now faces. The Palestinian refugees were displaced precisely because of the unjustified assaults on Israel by the surrounding Arab states in the Six-Day War. After World War II, thirteen millions Germans were forced from lands that had been theirs for centuries as a consequence of losing the war that Germany began. If West Germany had left them all to fester in refugee camps, could peace have been preserved in Europe?

At the present time racial anti-Semitism is politically unacceptable, but hostility to Israel — political anti-Semitism — is acceptable to many in Europe and increasingly among liberal Protestants in the United States. There have been incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism in France, although it is rarely ethnic French who commit them: it is Muslim immigrants. The presence of millions of committed Muslims in Western Europe is one of the reasons why the European nations cannot react as they should to the ongoing series of terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians. Instead of condemning the suicidal murderers, they condemn retaliatory attacks by Israel.

Memories of the Holocaust should cause the nations of the nominally Christian West, especially but not only Germany, to be very watchful towards political anti-Semitism. They should also emphasize warding off the real dangers, not fuming about rhetorical slights. Although members of the German Jewish community were outraged by remarks by a member of the Bundestag, the real danger of anti-Semitism in Europe does not lie in alleged elements of anti-Semitism found in addresses by politicians, but in the temptation to soothe growing Muslim populations by adopting a hard line towards Israel.

Anti-Semitism of whatever variety is a disgrace to all who consider themselves Christians. It is a disgrace to the nations of the West, however they wish to define themselves religiously. The Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust; the other nations did little to mitigate it. The fact that the Allies were at war against Germany did not mean that they could not have done something, or at the very least attempted to arouse the German population to the horror of what their government was doing and to the devastation that it would deservedly bring upon them. We seem to recognize this in the United States and to be watchful against it, even at the price of sometimes hearing “Wolf!” when the wolf is not there. The Europeans do not see it so clearly.

The power of the gay rights activists to transform society, its laws, customs, and all traditional understandings and values is immense. As soon as Madam Justice Marshall of Massachusetts handed down her double-barreled establishment of the right to homosexual marriage, events began to cascade around the entire country. San Francisco led the way, followed by New Pfalz, New York, and other jurisdictions, whether or not the laws of the particular state define marriage as between a man and a woman. In one state, county officials discovered that state law does not define marriage, and so have begun to issue licenses to homosexuals. Of course the reason that state laws do not always define marriage is that until now all human cultures have known what it is. Torture is and should be forbidden by law. If someone should note that electric shock is not specifically listed as torture, would he then have the right to use it? The best explanation for this growing insanity lies in what St. Paul wrote about the Romans who did not honor God or thank him, “Thinking themselves wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:21,22). Unfortunately, having become fools, our judges and other authorities will not be able to recognize the truth in Paul’s words.

Endnotes

1 Where have all the firemen gone? Gone to firefighters, every one. Of course, even firefighters makes an invidious distinction between human agents and the material world, as though humans were somehow better than or superior to tools and other mechanical things, so we should probably call them fire extinguishers. The Oscars competition still makes an invidious distinction between actors and actresses, but surely that soon will pass.

2 This clever word means lesbian-bisexual-gay.

3 Marriage is, as the old Anglican prayer books say “an honourable estate, instituted of God,” and God definitely did not institute homosexual unions and call them marriage.

4 Readers may remember that mathematician A. A. Upinsky distinguishes between “true” language, which describes reality truthfully, and “strong” language, which manipulates those who hear it.

5 If two virus-free males enter a life-long union and do not stray into other liaisons, then neither will contract AIDS through his homosexuality. Unfortunately, while life-long unions do exist, not many male homosexuals remain faithful to one partner.

6 With the increasing of anti-Christian acts and attitudes in the United States, Christians may have to learn from the Jews how to survive and flourish in a hostile climate.

7 For Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall, it is only residual personal prejudices that cause some to oppose homosexual conduct. Those who oppose anti-Semitism should be glad that such “prejudices” are still common.

Notes on Sources

For “The Passion and the Amendment,” Charles Krauthammer’s remarks appeared in his syndicated column published in the Charlotte Observer, March 1, p. A-17.