Homosexuality Is Not Sexuality



Crisis Magazine(c) The Royal London Hospital Museum & Archives; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation
Events of recent memory have left my head spinning in disbelief—”
Caitlyn,” same-sex so-called “marriage,” three women “marrying” in 
South America, and, yes, “gay Catholics” and “chaste gay couples.” 
With me, you may wonder how all this has emerged in a short few 
decades of social upheaval.

I may have an answer: Society has constructed an unreal cultural 
landscape in which things that are not sexuality are passed off as 
sexuality. 
Even a majority of Catholics are, perhaps unwittingly, swallowing this 
unreality, hook, line, and sinker.

The fabric of this false landscape is language—language that frames
 everyone and everything in a way that fundamentally relativizes the 
truth about human nature and God’s real plan for us and our sexuality. 
I’d assert that this process all started with a single word: homosexuality.
Think about it. By all accounts, the word “homosexuality,” used in 
contrast to its also-coined counterpart “heterosexuality,” is just about 
150 years old. Before this time in human history, there was no such thing
 as the conceptual construct of “orientation.” Sexual attractions did 
not define the human person, and people did not presume to assail God’s
 plan for human sexuality by categorizing attractions in a way that 
reduces God’s plan to one mere possibility among an ever-growing 
number of other “identities” and so-called “sexualities.”

A Flash-Flood of UnrealityFast-forward to the present. The 150-year-old 
crack in the dam has become a gaping fissure that allows modern minds
 and hearts to be flooded with some muddied and foul waters. Now 
everything is up for grabs because both our behaviors and our identities 
have become as fluid as the floodwater. Culture now grants us absolute 
permission to equivocate authentic sexuality with myriad counterfeits. 
This permission is safeguarded by coining even more terminology 
designed to protect the original insult to truth about sexuality, bringing 
about deeper and more deadly moral collapse.

This original “either/or-ing” of human sexuality—”orientation”—has 
made a mess of things. Now the meaning of God’s original plan for us is 
obscured and, worse, viewed as pure bigotry. Now it’s absolutely okay 
to be gay or straight or queer or genderfluid, or, or… Now we deal with
 sexual “minorities” who claim “erasure,” “homophobia,” and “othering”
 if you commit the cardinal social sin of … heteronormativity!

Now men who “feel” like women (and vice versa) must be affirmed 
rather than healed. Now men who know they are men are merely “
cisgendered” out of relativistic respect for those who are 
“transgendered”—all because fluidity—not authentic sexuality—must 
be maintained at all costs. Now, even “gay sex” is treated as real sex 
rather than the unreal and aberrant mutual masturbation of deeply 
confused souls.

By saying all this, by the way, I’m the worst form of “hater”—worthy 
of condemnation and perhaps prosecution and imprisonment.

Let Sexuality Speak for ItselfToo often, we get caught up in the 
wrongness of the unreality without focusing on letting the reality—
sexuality—speak for itself. It’s time to get back to basics—time to re-set 
the high bar of God’s plan as a high bar rather than as one mere “flavor” 
of sexual “identity” or “orientation” or behavior among many “okay” 
options. So, let’s answer this question: To what is sexuality ordered?
 In doing so, it should become crystal clear why homosexuality is not, 
in fact, sexuality. In the following assertions you’ll notice that I avoid 
using the terms “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” in favor of
 “same-sex attraction” and “sexuality,” for the sake of illuminating the
 realityof what is described by the terms.

Sexuality is ordered toward complementarityThis is so simple that 
even the youngest child “gets” this. There are two and only two sexual 
“identities”—man and woman, boys and girls. And they are made for 
each other. Complementarity is really “complete-mentarity.” As a man 
I do not possess what it means to be a woman, and vice versa. We 
complete each other. Same-sex attraction involves objective 
redundancy, not complementarity.

Sexuality is ordered toward total self-giftOnce we understand 
complementarity, we can understand that this “completion” necessarily 
involves a covenantal exchange of persons. Sexuality is not merely 
about an exchange of pleasure, or rights, or services, etc. It’s a gift of 
self that requires two things. First, self-mastery or self-possession. We 
cannot give what we do not possess. Second, a capacity to receive the
 other’s total self-gift. With SSA, “you cannot receive that which you 
already possess.” A man cannot receive a total self-gift of the person, 
body and soul, from another man. It’s impossible. The “ache” of sexual 
desire is the longing for completion that comes from the covenantal, 
personal exchange of man with woman.

Sexuality is ordered toward consummation. The mutual, complementary,
 total self-gift finds its fullest expression in the indissoluble unity of 
body and soul that takes place when husband and wife (not just sex-less 
“spouses” but male with female) come together in marital relations. 
With same-sex attraction, no such pathway toward consummation is
 even conceivable. Sexual acting out between two men or two women 
is brute parody of the reality of consummation.

Sexuality is ordered toward the good of permanence. The magnitude 
of the meaning of “consummation” cannot be exaggerated. There is no 
such thing, this side of Heaven, as a temporary “total self-gift.” The 
pathway to permanence arises precisely because a husband and wife 
(a man with a woman) are capable of willing the covenantal bond that 
can and must last for as long as they both shall live. It can and must find 
permanent expression (until death) in the mutual gift of self expressed
 fully in marital relations. Again, this is utterly inaccessible to two men
 or two women. Two people with SSA may say they “choose” permanence,
 but it’s an objectively “human-willed” and not “God-ordained” choice
 because they are incapable of “enfleshing” an authentic and total 
covenantal exchange of persons.

Sexuality is ordered toward the good of fidelity. Part of the 
“permanence” of total self-gift is the exclusivity of “forsaking all others.” 
Again, it’s irrational to suggest that someone can make a total self-gift 
to more than one person. Sexuality is ordered toward “the one.” Thus, 
another tenet of the unreal secular embrace of “orientation” is exposed 
here—namely, that sexuality is not concerned with any abstract or 
generic information about the kind of person that attracts you. Sexuality
 is about prayerfully discerning who the one real person might be with 
whom you can mutually make a covenantal self-gift. The abstraction of 
“orientation” is a distractionfrom the real purpose of sexuality. SSA 
again provides no avenue for the exclusivity that total self-gift requires.

Sexuality is ordered toward the good of children. Finally, sexuality offers
 the human person the possibility of “imaging” God’s love and likeness
 in a unique way—through pro-creation, creating “with” God. This is not 
merely about raising children (though the “education” of children is 
certainly just as much a primary end here as is procreation), but about 
raising up children with God. Our “consummation” of covenantal 
self-gift is, like the Blessed Trinity’s own, fruitful, moving beyond the 
“selves” of husband and wife and toward an immortal form of
“consummation”—a child. In Heaven, by God’s design and plan, there 
will be one lasting fruit of earthly marital union: our children. Same-sex 
attraction obviously is utterly sterile, not in any way ordered toward 
this immensely meaningful finality of authentic sexuality.

Let’s Get RealNeither same-sex attraction nor the coined term 
“homosexuality” can rightly be considered either a form of, or a 
participation in, real sexuality. The reality that is same-sex attraction
 exists in total opposition to the reality that is sexuality. Perhaps this 
is why one finds this sentence in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Sexuality is ordered toward the conjugal love of a man and a woman. 
(CCC 2360)
Maybe this is also why the next paragraph in the Catechism (CCC 2361) 
quotes a crucial phrase from St. John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio 
(FC 11):
Sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to 
one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses,
 is not something simply biological, but concerns the innermost being 
of the human person as such. It is realized in a truly human way only 
if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and woman commit 
themselves totally to one another until death.

More important: Can we all pray that more people will stop cooperating 
in the failed social experiment of homosexuality, heterosexuality, 
orientation, etc.? The only “truly human” way to “real-ize” (as in 
make real) our sexuality is when it is properly ordered toward marital 
love.

Editor’s note: The image above is a detail from “The Marriage of the 
Prince and Princess of Wales” painted by William Powell Frith in 1878.