While the Catholic church and Islam will not bless the Other with holy sacriment, the state has given its sanction, and most Protestant churches accept gay marriages, as if wishing the Other would just blend in seamlessly, accepted by the 97%, ignoring the very fact that God or natural selection produced this Other. That it must have a special role.
For Catholicism and Islam, all forms of promiscuity and sins, including adultery, prostitution and gay sex, are proscribed, which really translates as: should be discouraged or at least kept out of the mainstream, so as not to disrupt society. This moral injunction is meant to control socially disruptive behaviour. Promiscuous sex, gay or straight is disruptive to society. It's Plato, where chaste boy-love is the highest form of love, with wife and family next.
Disease or dis-ease?
As for the reversal of the medical definition of homosexuality as a disease in 1973, that doesn't mean the social and psychology problems disappear. Whether it is called a disease or just a social problem is a moot point. White notes: 'We were gratified that officially we were off the books,' but 'most psychotherapists, especially the Freudians, kept their reservations about homosexuality in petto.'**** The homosexual's role in society is a work in process, but it will always be the Other, the hetero norm's shadow.
Interestingly, at the Washington DC Dyke March this year, the organizers refused to allow marchers to have an Israeli flag, outraging a few, underlining their role as defenders of other repressed minorities, this time the Palestinians. Gays generally are a bit more socialist, like Jews, but also more supportive of Palestinians, despite Israel's 'pinkwashing'.
In 2011, the Obama administration directed agencies involved with foreign policy to promote LGBT rights, a striking policy for a government that, up to the early 1990s, considered homosexuality a security risk and cause for job termination. This sudden promotion of a gay agenda abroad by western nations, led by the US (until Trump), dubbed the 'gay international', is resented by all third world nations and Russia, and has had a vicious backlash, with msm^ now targeted where before they were just ignored. It came spectacularly to Orlando, Florida, where 50 gay nightclubbers were murdered in 2016 by an Afghan American. Wake up call, anyone?
----
*Edmund White, The Farewell Symphony (1997), 341.
**op. cit., 245-6.
***op. cit., 284.
****close to the heart', 250.
^men-having-sex-with-men
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
