Dr. Peter Kreeft: "The Church is the best friend of homosexuals…"

In light of the President’s recent “evolution” on same-sex marriage, here’s a 2004 interview Dr. Peter Kreeft gave to the Boston College Observer (text posted at PeterKreeft.com):

What are your thoughts on the current debate about gay marriage?

Dr. Peter Kreeft: As a philosopher the thing that strikes me most is the brilliant strategy of the gay marriage movement. Like Orwell in 1984 it sees that the main battlefield is language. If they can redefine a key term like “marriage” they win.

Control language and you control thought; control thought and you control action; control action and you control the world.

Mussolini knew that too. He made it illegal for Italians to say “hi” in the traditional way. The Italian for “how are you?” is “Come sta lei?” “Lei” is the feminine inclusive pronoun. Fascist ideology held that this was emasculating and weak, so you had to say “Come sta lui?” from now on. “Lui” is the masculine pronoun. So no one could say “hi” in Italy without identifying themselves as pro or anti-fascist.

In America, the feminists have succeeded in exactly the same way. They’ve labeled the traditional inclusive language, the language of every single one of the great books of Western civilization written in English, as exclusive because it uses “he” and “man” to include women; and they’ve labeled their new artificial ideological invention, which insists, contrary to historical fact, that “he” and “man” exclude women—they’ve labeled this “inclusive” language. And amazingly, nearly everyone follows like sheep!

So it will be easy, I think, for them to redefine marriage. Hell, they’ve already redefined “human beings” or “persons” so that they can murder the littlest ones whenever they want to. Why should they feel any guilt about dishonesty when they don’t feel any guilt about murder?

I think you will find that there is an overwhelmingly strong connection between these three agendas: gay marriage, feminism, and abortion. Very seldom do you find people who are for one but not the other, or against one but not the other. And what they all have in common is this attitude toward language: it is what the most powerful and insidious propaganda film in history called “the triumph of the will.” Already in Canada it is a crime, punishable by a fine or even imprisonment, to speak against homosexuality in public. Politically incorrect ideas, such as Biblical morality, are now defined as “hate speech.”

One of the things I fear from this is an ugly backlash against homosexuals. If the truth is now whatever we will, then just as there is nothing to stop society today from redefining marriage, there is nothing to stop it tomorrow from redefining personal dignity and rights so as to take them away from homosexuals. The Nazis did exactly that.

The Church is the best friend of homosexuals, both because she tells them they are made in God’s image and have intrinsic dignity and rights and are called to be saints, and because she is the only social force left that insists on moral absolutes—so when they sin against themselves she says NO, just as she does to heterosexuals who sin against themselves sexually, but when others sin against them she says NO also.

No one else dares to say NO. She speaks up for everyone, including homosexuals.

Read the rest at PeterKreeft.com.

Dr. Kreeft also has a wonderful talk titled “Moral Theology and Homosexuality” where he goes deeper into this topic. It’s definitely worth a listen.