Concerning this essay…

It is funny how liberals in the U.S. see gay rights as a civil rights issue and conservatives cannot be enticed to go there. The party of Lincoln takes pride in abolition but they frame the argument on gays in a totally different way. [NOTE 1] I would say that it is a religious form of bigotry. When the U.S. had slavery, the religious groups, especially in the South, made slavery a theological tenant of their religion. Since then, only the extreme right has held on to such nonsense. I dare say that after, and when, the gay issue is resolved, the religious taboos against it will disappear…given a hundred years or so. I sincerely believe that the old line Republican Party would be considered liberals by the standards of our current batch of aspiratory, nouveau riche Republicans. I do think conservatives, as deriving values from the past, have more chance for error than liberals that derive values from the future (thus the liberal, negative slant as you suggest on the moral significance of the past). The error derives from the inability to retrieve a true and proper past and the ability to hermeneutically create a past the never existed. The liberal error derives from not fully thinking through the hermeneutically retrieved past that governs popular messaging. Change has to come from within culture and cannot be imposed from an exterior social structure (the communists made this particularly clear).

Culture (bildung) is bound by a fictional past (in the way it projects and gathers, re-members, significance) and compelled by its abysmal future. In this sense we are all conservative and liberal. However, the violence and indolence of the present, makes the current state of affairs deplorable and should make the status quo intolerable to our present situatedness (dasein), the French have referred to this predicament as mauvaise foi (‘bad faith’) and hypocrisy. I still maintain that the Austrian ‘free market’ turns a deaf ear to the present vis-à-vis human suffering in similar fashion. I like the way you put this, “you can tie yourself into knots trying to “prove” that you are a “proper” form of the human until you realise how monstrously improper the entire question is”. I find the notion of the ‘proper’ to be pervasive as it is thought, as the ‘serious’ and elevated form of human activity especially in academia. I also would note the way in which the serious and the ‘proper’ are rewarded and reinforced in capitalism (which Socrates might refer to as sophistry). I am not suggesting that it would not be rewarded in any economic system. I am only pointing out the innocuous affinity to authorize and reward the ‘proper’ in capitalism. The insidious nature of academic breakthroughs makes it feed on the milk of the ‘improper’, that which was heretical to the popular dogma of its day, the dominate paradigm.

I think all this momentum works against a contemporary gay person. I think it is quite admirable and courageous to openly face this amount of derision and ignorance. It is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s remark of untimelessness (Untimely Meditations), born out of season. It is a burden that Jesus would have known but, as “the last Christian”, orthodoxy has denied that Jesus in favor of the apostate ‘proper’ Jesus. Thus, with regard to “none so blind”…”Therefore I speak to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.” [Matthew 13:13] It is ironic that I have heard so many Christians think that homosexuality is a sin but the ‘improper’ Jesus did this:

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.” Having said this, he spit on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. “Go,” he told him, “wash in the Pool of Siloam” (this word means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing. [John 9]

In unorthodoxy, could it be that the sin of blindness, the improper, sees and the ‘seers’ are blind?

[NOTE 1] The Republican pride in civil rights can be overdone at times. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not split along party lines as much as it was split along the Mason-Dixon Line. After the vote, the Dixiecrats changed party en mass to the Republican Party where they remain to this day. As a Southerner, I can tell you that bigotry is alive and well in the South but it has gone underground. However, the younger folks are not AS trapped in the sins of the past as their elders. Here was the actual vote count on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved. Aristotle