There should be no ‘gay equality’

The term in quotation marks comes from an article entitled Struggle for Gay Equality Is Far From Over by Alice Thomson, a living argument against women equality among columnists.

Miss Thomson seems certain that the present generation has scaled moral heights that were beyond the meagre resources, or indeed dreams, of the previous 250 generations of recorded human history.

She clearly suffers from the presumption of progress, that clinically provable symptom of mental retardation. Hers isn’t an isolated case, for the underlying disease is pandemic, similar to the Black Death in spread and arguably outstripping it in destructive potential.

Moderns, even some cleverer ones than Miss Thomson, believe that the demonstrable progress in science and technology is part of the overall upward momentum of mankind. Yet an unbiased analyst will realise that those are the only areas in which progress exists.

It’s even easy to come to the conclusion that scientific progress is inversely proportionate to the development in morality, intellect and social fibre. Nor does scientific progress come free of charge.

Let’s not forget that the same technology that heats your house can also vaporise it; that the same car gadgets that help you find your destination also enable the state to spy on your every move; that the same insecticides that improve our crops can be used to murder millions of people.

There’s nothing as catastrophically dangerous as scientific progress married to moral decline. Empirical evidence of that is easy to find: after all, the most scientifically accomplished century yet, the twentieth, produced more violent deaths than the other 50 centuries of recorded history combined.

Miss Thomson would brush this observation aside even if it occurred to her, which it probably wouldn’t. To her, the giant strides made in equality testify to our steady ascent up the morality ladder.

If probed, she’d probably be confused about the true meaning of equality. Equality before God or the law is the right use of the word. But equality becomes a gross solecism when applied to good and bad, virtuous and sinful, beautiful and ugly. The right word for equalising those isn’t equality but anomie.

And anomie, if universally spread, spells a moral, social and intellectual collapse. The end of our civilisation, in other words.

Miss Thomson is upset that some troglodytes take exception to the announcement that the diver Tom Daley and his ‘husband’ are having a baby by a surrogate. One comment described the news as “both disturbing and disgusting”, while Miss Thomson’s less progressive colleague wrote “Please don’t pretend two dads is the new normal”.

Such views were mainstream a short while ago. In fact, Miss Thomson confirms as much: “The proportion of people who say they think same-sex partnerships are ‘not wrong at all’ has quadrupled from 17 per cent… in 1983 to 64 per cent in 2016, but that still leaves a third who feel ambivalent or hostile.”

It’s that Darwinist presumption of progress again: all change is for the better. Thus at some point within that 33-year period, two thirds of the British public underwent a Damascene moral catharsis, and Miss Thomson won’t have a moment’s rest until the remaining third follow suit.

I’m amazed that the proportion of holdouts still clinging to sanity is as high as that, what with people like Miss Thomson forming opinions and the state throwing its bulk behind them.

Modernity clearly didn’t heed Hilaire Belloc’s macabre prophesy: “We are tickled by [the Barbarian’s] irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”

Inversion of our old certitudes indeed, and equalising normal sexuality with what for 5,000 years was known as a perversion (or ‘abomination’ in that homophobic book troglodytes regard as sacred) is only a small part of it. Yesterday, for example, a Lancashire court passed judgement on a 14-year-old robber who hit a middle-aged woman on the head with a nail-studded club and left her for dead.

At different times in history, before the old certitudes were inverted, the feral creature would have suffered different degrees of severe punishment, from being simply put down to being locked up for decades.

Our morally elevated time is different though, much to the delight of Miss Thompson and her ilk. Hence the little animal received a sentence of a 12-month probation and a £20 fine, only payable when he is 18.

No doubt Miss Thomson wouldn’t spot any link between that outrageous miscarriage of justice and Tom Daley’s predicament. Yet it’s clear-cut: the presumption of progress is tantamount to the presumption of equality where none should exist.

The wielder of the nail-studded club is presumed to be equal to his classmate who wields nothing deadlier than a PlayStation. He did commit a sin, but the distance between that and virtue is minuscule by the standards of inverted certitudes.

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad,” and what is madness if not losing touch with reality? According to Burke, social reality is formed by prejudice, which is intuitive knowledge; prescription, which is truth passed on by previous generations; and presumption, which is inference from the common experience of mankind.

All these are overridden by the pandemic madness of modernity.

Even 20 years ago, someone suggesting that it’s perfectly normal for two homosexuals to marry and have children would have been considered mad. Now he finds himself in a majority, and no one dares to suggest this is wrong.

We’ve simply lost the ability to discriminate between good and evil, intelligent and stupid, normal and perverse. No doubt Miss Thomson and others whose name is legion would welcome this. Any kind of discrimination is to them evil, and the word has universally fallen into disrepute.

Yet no moral, intellectual or aesthetic judgement is possible without discrimination. Nor, without an ability to discriminate between normal and perverse, is any judgement possible of two homosexuals father/mothering a child.

Homosexuals must have equal rights before the law, but homosexuality shouldn’t. (“Love the sinner, hate the sin” was Augustine’s way of expressing the underlying concept.) Hence no homosexual, or heterosexual for that matter, should be abused, prosecuted without due process or denied employment opportunities merely on the strength of his sexuality.

But equalising homosexuality with heterosexuality when it comes to marriage and parenting goes beyond decadence. It spells a moral and mental collapse – with civilisational collapse predictably just round the corner.

You know, the sort of calamity the likes of Miss Thomson equate with progress.