ESSAY | ON PUBLIC POLICY
I Don’t Care If They Don’t Teach Love
What I want them to teach is this
Can We Please Teach Love
That’s the Prism & Pen prompt for 14–28 February 2022.
Frankly, I don’t care if straight people love me or not. I don’t care if straight people try to teach love of gays or not. I don’t think they can.
Love is not a concept one can teach another. It’s a primal, deeply biological response to stimuli.¹ ² ³ ⁴
One can’t teach another to have a biochemical response. It’s nonsensical. Just as one can’t teach a person to be homosexual, one can’t teach him to love homosexuals (read LGBT+ people).
Teach Fact
What one can teach, in the sense of knowing, is facts — the science behind human sexuality.
[T]here is overwhelming evidence of a biological basis for sexual orientation that is programmed into the brain before birth based on a mix of genetics and prenatal conditions.⁵
Teach kids that and they are on the road to accepting LGBT+ people as part of the natural order of human sexuality. That is something one can teach and at an early age.
Teach Attitude.
What one can teach is attitude, not fact but mindset. Teach an attitude favoring diversity and inclusion of people different from oneself.
Teach a doctrine of inclusivity and rejection of exclusion and hatred from an early age. Teach by example, deed, and word. Teach kids. They are incredible mimics; they will pick up on the lesson.
By high school it’s too late. It’s not a lesson learned from example; it’s an intellectual exercise, an appeal to reason. If the teenager has been taught from infancy to hate, to reject diverse people, to exclude people different from himself, he will reject the intellectual appeal as contrary to his deep-seated inclination.
The lesson will fail because it tells the child to reject his core self, something a teenager is not likely to do. Reason won’t prevail in the teen over his sense of self. Not in the average teen. Perhaps such an instruction will succeed in the few teens inclined to think for themselves, inclined not to believe something simply because most do. But those teens are precious few.
Change Religious Beliefs
To get a teen or adult to reject his core beliefs, one must bring incredible force to bear. Religious doctrine is that force. Teach a reasoning person he must accept, or at least respect, diversity or risk the disfavor of God and one brings to bear a primal force ingrained from childhood. One sets one core belief in opposition to another. God is prime. God’s doctrine will overcome.
The Catholic Church opposes the acceptance of homosexuality within Christian society. … According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “homosexual acts” are “acts of grave depravity” that are “intrinsically disordered.” It continues, “They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.⁶
Homosexual acts are “intrinsically immoral and contrary to the natural law.”⁷ Moreover, though same-sex sexual orientation is not a “sin” in and of itself,
it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.” Ibid.
That is not only Catholic dogma but also official doctrine in all western-world religions. So long as it is God’s will, so long will opposition to and exclusion of LGBT+ people be the official attitude of every religious person and even many non-religious people.
Do Not Try To Impose Love on Them
In that endeavor, one will fail. Appeal to their sense of reason instead. Ask them at least to tolerate diversity in sexual orientation because it’s demonstrably part of the natural order. It’s a biological fact. Appeal to reason. It’s unreasonable to oppose a biological fact.
One might as well oppose rabbits as oppose diversity in sexual orientation. For one to say he “opposes” rabbits would be illogical, irrational, and inane. It’s a silly attitude. Just so silly is it to “oppose” diversity in sexual orientation.
Don’t try to teach them to love us. That requires too great an affirmative action on their part.
Teach them instead to accept and respect the fact of the natural order of things. If it’s a biological fact, it’s necessarily part of God’s design for life on Earth, Church Doctrine to the contrary not withstanding. Official Church dogma then becomes the irrational prejudice of small minds still vested in biases originating in the superstitions of 3,000 years ago.
This story is a response to the Prism & Pen writing prompt, Queer as Kids: Or … Can We Please Teach Love?
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