Farewell Reality

Let us be clear about what has taken place in the Supreme Court decision extending homosexual marriage to the entire nation. Justice Anthony Kennedy has led the Court in affirming a denial of reality and in enshrining darkness as if it were light, blindness as if it were sight.

In this he has been entirely consistent. In the 2003 case, Lawrence v. Texas, he discovered a right to sodomy in the Constitution. Then a year ago, in the U.S. v. Windsor case, he fabricated a right to homosexual marriage that obliterated key sections of the Defense of Marriage Act. Now, he has led the decision in removing any remaining provisions in state constitutions or laws that prevent homosexual marriage because he has discovered the right to such “marriages” in the Constitution – specifically in the 14th amendment (which, interestingly, was ratified by states all of which had prohibitions against sodomy).

Each step of the way has required the consideration of the act of sodomy as morally equivalent to heterosexual coitus and, now finally, to the marital act itself. The Obergefell v. Hodges decision has taken the last step in this chain of logic by sanctifying sodomy as a foundation for marriage.

Here’s what is required for one to think this way. The marital act is the highest expression of human sexual powers in that it is by its nature unitive and generative. In Aristotelian language, the full potential of human sexual powers is actually fulfilled – meaning, reached its perfection – in that act. Any sexual behavior that is less than the marital act is by its nature imperfect and a privation of the good of the marital act.

Let us compare it to 20/20 vision in the eye as opposed to blindness. An eye reaches its full potential, i.e. its perfection in 20/20 vision. It cannot see better than that. Anything less than 20/20 vision is a privation of the organ of sight. The further from perfection, the greater the deprivation. Blindness is the ultimate privation of sight. Now if one were to say that blindness is as good as, or equal to, sight, one would be asserting that the privation of a good is equivalent to the good of which it is a privation. This of course would be a violation of the principle of non-contradiction, which holds that a thing cannot be what it is and also be its opposite.

The Supreme Court has now held something similar: that an essentially non-generative and non-unitive act is equivalent to, or as good as, a unitive and generative act. Thus, sodomy and other homosexual acts are as good as heterosexual marital union. Upon this peculiar theory, Justice Kennedy bases his much vaunted freedom for homosexuals to marry. However, the freedom to marry is teleologically ordered by the ends of marriage, none of which can be met by homosexual behavior. The freedom to marry cannot include an abuse of this freedom, any more than the freedom of speech can include the right to lie. But sodomy is to sex what blindness is to sight. It is not only a privation of the good of sex, and therefore of marriage; it is its negation in that is deliberately non-unitive and non-generative. Justice Kennedy and his confrères have therefore violated the principle of non-contradiction. But, as we have already pointed out, this is not the first time. What can account for this consistency?

I’ve had some experience with people suffering from psychopathic paranoia. One very impressive thing about them is that they are usually of greater than average intelligence, and they operate with impeccable logic. Once you understand the premise upon which they are acting, you can see how perfectly logical their behavior is. The problem is that the premise upon which they are acting is delusional – totally unconnected with reality. That is why they are insane.

Justice Kennedy has also operated with impeccable logic, but his premise is totally disconnected from reality. In a way, his view is more disordered than the paranoid person’s distortion of reality because a paranoid person usually will not deny the principle of non-contradiction. Justice Kennedy and the other Justices joining him in this decision have violated that indispensable principle and, therefore, have passed over into insanity. The problem is that the institution in which the Justices operate is not a psychiatric one and they are not its inmates. But they are behaving as if they were; so perhaps it should be.

It is not only the Constitution and democracy that have been traduced by this decision, but reality itself. For the sake of our own sanity and spiritual survival, we must fully resist the Court’s imposition of darkness as light, of blindness as sight, of sodomy as a marital act.

“And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness grasped it not.”