Thursday, June 18, 2009

Mr. Hough on ethics and homosexuality

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/entertainment/pianist-uses-tchaikovsky-20090617-cgod.html

Via CathNews I learnt that concert pianist and “gay activist” Mr. Stephen Hough

has been commissioned to write a theological treatise on Catholicism and homosexuality, It Is Not Good For Man To Be Alone . "I was horrified when a friend pointed out the book can be pre-ordered on Amazon," laughs Hough. "I haven't started writing it yet."

The title is taken from the Book of Genesis, before the creation of Eve. "The philosophical idea of Genesis is that everything God created is good ? If homosexuality is in the structure of things, as we now seem to be discovering, then it has to be good."
Forgive me if it’s impertinent of someone of my modest learning to criticise someone of Mr. Hough’s presumably formidable theological stature—a latter-day Aquinas, no doubt—but: everything God created was indeed good; the problem is that there was this thing called ‘the Fall’, after which all sorts of non-good things started to happen. So unfortunately we can no longer simply say that created = good.

And what does Mr. Hough mean by ‘good’? For him, whatever’s “in the structure of things” is good. For him (and his fellow-travellers), there’s no notion that the good is that which suits the nature of the thing desiring it; there couldn’t be, since it would be preposterous to argue that the unspeakable things which these people do to each other suit the respective natures of the organs involved, the organisms involved or the species involved. Or, perhaps more accurately, the distinction between nature and defects of nature is lost and whatever occurs ‘naturally’ (in the sense of non-artificially) is simply deemed ‘good’, so that we have a sort of parody of natural law—unnatural law, if you will. In this view, if homosexuality has a structural (by which he presumably means biological/genetic) origin then it’s good. I’d be interested to see how the unnatural-law ethicists explain the fact that there are all sorts of biologically-/genetically-based conditions which no-one would ever suggest are in any sense good.

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Feast of St. Ephrem, Deacon, Confessor, Doctor of the Church, A.D. 2009

2 comments:

matthias said...

if we follow the reasoning behind Mr Hough's statement then psychopathy is good,greed is good-oh sorry someone got there already.
I am with you Pole about your statements here and on Schutz's blog.

Cardinal Pole said...

Thank you, Matthias. By the way, I've made another comment at that post at Mr. Schütz's blog, this time in response to Mr. Schütz's reply to me.