May 27,
2014
“Compassion
does not trump truth,” says Robert R. Reilly, “And the truth is becoming harder
to tell.”
Carl E. Olson
Scholar and
author Robert R. Reilly was Senior Advisor for Information Strategy (2002-2006)
for the U.S. Secretary of Defense, after which he taught at National Defense
University. He was the director of the Voice of America from 2001 to 2002, and
served in the White House as a Special Assistant to the President from 1983 to
1985. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and the Claremont Graduate
University, and has written widely on “war of ideas" issues, foreign
policy, and classical music. His previous books and monographs include
Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music, The
Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern
Islamist Crisis, and The Prospects and Perils of Catholic-Muslim Dialogue.
His new
book, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing
Everything, was published recently by Ignatius Press. It has been praised as
“magnificent, a real achievement” (Austin Ruse, President, Catholic Family and
Human Rights Institute) and described as "rare tour de force on a defining
question of our time" (Dr. Robert Royal, President, Faith & Reason
Institute). Reilly recently corresponded with Carl E. Olson, editor of Catholic
World Report, about his new book and its approach and arguments.
CWR: Right
at the start, you make the connection between contraception and same-sex
marriage, writing in the Introduction that the “progression from the one to the
other was logically inescapable.” What are the main points of that progression?
How unique is the “capstone” of same-sex marriage; that is, how uncharted are
the waters that have now flooded society?
Reilly: The
key is separating sex from diapers. Once you consciously subvert the
procreative power of sex with contraception, there is a very slippery
slope—more like a cliff, actually—down to the moral pigpen where sex is simply
a form of degraded entertainment. You try to grab the pleasure from the act,
while denying the thing toward which the act is essentially ordered.
So it is perfectly
logical to go from contraception to abortion (so those whose contraception has
failed are not “penalized”) to the celebration of sodomy as the basis of
marriage. Homosexuals can easily pose the question, “if you endorse
contracepted heterosexual acts, what could possibly be wrong with our acts
which don’t even have to be contracepted?”
The logic of the situation makes it very easy to
see where this is going next—polygamy and polyandry.