I don’t want to bang on about this too much, but I am in a state of black
despair about this whole miserable business. Look: I’m an Anglican. I
know the hymns and liturgy, I know the history. I grew up with it all. I
go into an Episcopalian church as one going to a refuge from noise and money
and the damn fool Zeitgeist. I go looking for eternal truth, and expecting
to find it. If this church that I grew up with is going to be a club for
homosexuals, turning its teachings upside down to accommodate every passing
social fad, “celebrating” the “gay” ethos, what is there in it for normal
people like me? But now where shall I go? The Roman Catholic church is
headed the same way–half the priests are queer already, people tell me. I
get e-mails–a surprising number–from people who have left the western
Catholic churches and found a spiritual home among the Orthodox. Well, I’m
open to the suggestion; but why, in my fifties, should I have to give up the
devotional habits of a lifetime? Just losing the hymns would break my
heart. And in any case, the Orthodox priesthood, with all those bright
vestments and ministrational hierarchies, is going to be just as appealing
to homosexuals as the Catholic churches have proved, and will sooner or
later go the same way. We have let something loose in our society, and it
won’t rest until it has occupied the commanding heights and forcibly shut
the mouths of all who object–bigots! homophobes! haters! I have never
liked homosexuality, nor tried to hide that fact; but all my life I have
supported tolerance towards homosexuals as a harmless minority who are just
as entitled to pursue their private inclinations as the rest of us. I have
always thought that the criminalization of homosexual acts was both foolish,
and inhumane, and un-Christian. I am no longer so sure. Perhaps our
grandfathers were wiser than us. Perhaps there are some things that we, the
normal majority, SHOULD, deliberately and consciously, disapprove and
marginalize. But what hope of that now? The toothpaste is out of the tube.
To the catacombs!