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The Reactionary Utopian
February 2, 2010
Sodomy, Abortion, and the Forces
of Hate
by Joseph Sobran
DUNN LORING, VA — So J.D. Salinger is dead at 91, a recluse to the end. The 20th century was an excellent time to be reclusive, if you could manage it, given the wars, conscription, taxes, and bureaucracy.
When The Catcher in the Rye was published half a century ago, few if any dreamed that an American president would ever use his, or her, State of the Union address to toss a bouquet to sodomites. Holden Caulfield referred to them as “flits.” Sounded pretty harmless then; we’d never heard of, or imagined, AIDS.
Nowadays you can probably find a book club dedicated to your pet perversion. In those sweet days of yore, Winston Churchill could call a political foe a “disgrace to pederasty,” and we could laugh at the naughty witticism, if we even knew what pederasty was. Liberals now call the normal aversion to sodomy “homophobia,” even though it springs from well-founded concerns about health and sanitation as well as morality.
Nor did many of us predict that a mulatto president (with the middle name Hussein!) would one day have to worry about losing the pederast vote. The prospect was just too bizarre to be plausible. As commander in chief of the armed forces in wartime, Obama could calm an anxious country with a simply and crisply worded executive order directing all members of the armed forces to scrub their hands thoroughly immediately after fisting.
Children need no parental teaching or coaching, let alone theological training, to persuade them that sodomy is contemptible and repulsive. They care little for what their elders think is “progressive.” On the contrary, they are apt to scorn the very attitudes of which adults approve. I cannot remember a single conversation about sodomy with any of my five children (the oldest of whom are now in their forties), but peer pressure seems to have guided them well. One of my sons put it this way: “I know why it’s a sin; I don’t know why it’s a temptation.”Garry Wills assures us that Jesus, if he were among us today, would be partial to “gays.” He cites not a single verse or word in the gospels, or any other part of Scripture, to support this peculiar view. At times, he reminds me of the Tolstoy character who chooses his opinions as he selects his clothes — according to mere fashion. Wills also holds that abortion is a woman’s right, never mind that the one of the earliest surviving Christian documents, the Didache, which may well express the thinking of the Apostles, flatly forbids abortion (as does the Hippocratic oath).
The current furor over abortion has even become an issue in this year’s Super Bowl. Having one’s own unborn child destroyed is now among the sacred rights of women. Deny it if you dare! Focus on the Family ignited a bitter dispute when they produced a mildly pro-life ad about a young football star named Tim Tebow and his mother (who had been advised to abort him) in the telecast of the event. Feminists, enraged, accused Tebow and his mother of “un-American hate,” among other offenses.
Tebow also quoted the Bible. The forces of hate, it seems, will stop at nothing.
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