Your own first paragraph suggests you are uncomfortable with the question you have posed. The reason is simple. The more interesting question is most probably not whether sex is good, but whether it’s bad. One must always admit neutrality into the debate. Sex may or may not be “good”, but it may also be neutral.

In the case of a good act, the government might attempt to encourage it, but must be careful when trying to enforce its will upon society. In the case of a neutral act, the right of the individual cannot be abridged. It may be difficult to agree an act is neutral, but most probably no more difficult than agreeing an act is good or bad. In the case of a negative act, the right can only be abridged upon socio-consensual agreement that the negative weighs enough to justify it.

I would be extremely interested if you would consider recasting your article, enumerating sexual acts with an eye to their negative effects, rather than their positive ones, in order to discern whether the right to engage in each act should or should not be abridged by society. Under our Constitution, a right is generally held unless abridged.

But the issue on homosexuality isn’t primarily whether it should be forbidden. There’s also whether “gay marriage” should be recognized, whether “homophobia” is a bad thing that should be suppressed, what children should be taught about homosexuality, and so on. So I think the primary question is what sorts of things homosexuality and sex generally are, and how they fit into human life. But those are just basic questions of sexual morality.

Jim:

The article under discussion did not discuss in general the “issue on homosexuality”. It was in particular an article entitled “Are Homosexual Acts Right?” By “right”, the article meant “good”. The article poses, in its introductory paragraph, whether sexual acts between homosexuals are “good”, because if so, “it’s a violation of their rights to stand in their way or act as if there’s something wrong with what they do.”

In my previous comment, above, I wondered if the question was ill posed, and might instead be reconsidered as “Are Homosexual Acts Bad?”, my main reason being that homosexual acts might actually be neutral, in which case, they should be just as constitutionally protected as if they were “good”. If the article fails to consider the neutral case, i.e., if it does not admit in its enumeration of various forms of sexual activity that certain of those acts may be neutral, if not all of them, then with all due respect to the author of a logical and cogent essay, the argument misses the crux of the inevitable social debate, looming on this country’s horizon.

Not to put too fine a point on it, or descend into unecessarily crude analogies, it’s not necessarily “good” to own a television, nor jump out of a plane, nor go without bathing for a year, but there seems no discussion over a person’s right to do it. Even advocats of gambling bans are arguing the act is “bad”, ergo its proscription. Under a country governed by our Constitution, the bar to limit a person’s right to act cannot be set at whether or not the act is “good”.

Oh, but I thought I subsumed the neutral case in the “good” case by admitting the force of the argument (I stated it without rebutting it in any way) that if someone wants to do something and there’s no reason it’s bad then it’s good for him to do it. So thereafter I had to show there was something wrong with homosexual acts to reach the conclusion that they’re not good. At that’s what I tried to do.

It seems to me the general trend of public discussion is that homosexuality is good for homosexuals, so that seemed to me the issue to deal with. And once again, I’m not dealing with legality but with fundamental rightness and wrongness, so the reference to the Constitution seems misplaced.

“From the foregoing, it seems that sex can have stable positive meaning only in the form of acts that express marital union. In other settings it cannot successfully express a love that transcends pleasure and personal interest, because its meaning is too much a matter of interpretation.”

This is an excellent statement of the issue. I’m reminded of my idea that sex goes wrong, both in art and life, when it is treated as a thing by itself instead of as part of something larger. http://www.counterrevolution.net/vfr/archives/001415.html Mr. Kalb has connected that idea with the idea of the transcendent. Sex points toward the transcendent, therefore for its true fulfillment it needs a stable human/social setting proper to the transcendent, a setting that transcends the participants as individuals. And that can only be marriage.

First license for a homosexual marriage issued in North America. How further down can things go, and how fast?

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33007

Over the past several years I have been reminded on a number of occasions of the titanic, boiling anger that seems to lie barely beneath the surface of this question on the part of homosexual ideologues. If you haven’t glimpsed it, it can take your breath away. There is something profoundly disturbing about it. An old friend of mine spoke up against the notion of homosexual “marriage” in the local paper. He showed me some of the e-mail and hard-copy mail he received as a result, and has described a few of the late-night phone calls he has endured. To say that it is out of all proportion to his mild demurrer is the understatement of the millenium so far. Threats of violence (specifically homosexual rape), vile abuse, accusations that he’s a repressed homosexual himself (why does THIS one come up with such monotonous regularity?), etc. etc. One senses something demonic at the root of it all.

“First license for a homosexual marriage issued in North America. How further down can things go, and how fast?”

Things can and will get worse. Normalization of pedophilia is just over the horizon. What’s to stop them?

Pedophiles are where homosexuals were in the 70’s. They are now building a cadre of intellecual and academic supporters. They have ties, albiet somewhat occluded, within the homosexual “community” and special interest groups. After all, pedophiles are really just an extraordinarily perverse sub-set of homosexuals. Birds of a feather and all that.