By Roberto de Mattei
Translation via Rorate's Italian contributor Francesca Romana:
“I’m all for freedom of speech…….as long as they keep their mouths shut!”
In the countries where “pseudo homosexual marriage” has been enforced, it was generally preceded by two laws which accompany it: the recognition of the rights of gay couples and the introduction of the crime of “homophobia.” Even among Catholics there is no lack of those who delude themselves [into thinking], that in granting these laws, it is possible to placate excessive demands and avoid arriving at the “greater evil” the so-called “gay marriage.” In reality, when the lesser evil is granted, everything else is essentially granted, since in the case of the law against homophobia, between it and pseudo-gay-marriage, it is not easy to establish which is the greater evil.
Will the law against homophobia presented for the first time in 1999 by the government of D’Alema, and then presented again without success under the governments of both Prodi and Berlusconi, be associated with the name of Enrico Letta and his “broadminded coalition” government ? What is certain is that the design of the law against homophobia and transphobia, approved by the Judiciary Commission of the Chamber and now up for discussion in Parliament, represents a grave threat to the natural Christian order and freedom of speech, not only for Christians, but for all Italian citizens.
The essential idea is to punish whoever is guilty of “discrimination” on the basis of “sexual orientation.” The concepts of “discrimination” and of “sexual orientation” are however devoid of juridical value and, above all, illogical. To discriminate means treating a person in a less favourable way than another. But the principles of discrimination regulate social relations. Discrimination in itself, in fact may be a good or bad choice, according to categories of reference: in the participation of public or private competitions, in the selection of military corps or sport contests, as in the admission to a Catholic seminary, the criteria of choice changes, but discrimination is always present. Why should it not be licit, apart from the respect due to the fundamental rights of the individual?
Also ambiguous is the concept of “sexual orientation” defined according to the law as “attraction for a person of the same sex, for the opposite sex or for both sexes”. This definition is so wide and generic as to justify any choice whatever that arises from the desires of the single individual. The same is said for “gender identity”, defined in its turn from the text of the law, as “the perception that a person has about themselves as belonging to the female or masculine gender, even if it is the opposite of their own biological sex.” But what is graver is the legislator claims to attribute to this freedom of sexual orientation, the qualification of “status” which is a subjective situation that possesses rights as such, leaving out any reference whatever to an objective vision of values.
If the value of unlimited freedom of choice is affirmed, denying a moral and natural law which constitutes limits, the concept of deviance and transgression falls with it. Once the natural law is denied and the principle of absolute liberty is admitted, the way to pedophilia, incest and every other manifestation of sexual life, today considered as deviant, is open. What is considered as abnormal today will be the normality of tomorrow. And vice versa. What appears as normal today, will be condemned as abnormal tomorrow. Everything is permitted because everything arises from man’s free choice, which cannot be limited by absolute norms external to his will. The norms external to the will of man are those called moral laws. The foundation of morals is the distinction between the ideas of good and evil with the norms indicating the good to follow and the bad to avoid. If a moral order does not exist, crimes do not exist, absolutely speaking, since the notion of crime has its moral dimension which is dissolved by absolute relativism founded on the primacy of the absolute freedom of man to express and realize his personal desires.
In the laws regarding homophobia, like those under discussion [now] in Italy, absolute libertinism is inevitably made to coincide with the maximum totalitarianism. In the absence of any morals and of objective rights, society is reduced, in fact, to a place of conflicts, in which the rights of the weakest are sacrificed to the egoism of the strongest. It is not necessarily the strength of an individual with respect to another, as in the case of the mother and the baby in abortion. It may be the strength of organized groups, the power of the mass-media and financial interests. Homosexuals are not helpless and defenseless citizens in front of the law as are the babies who are victims of abortion, but they constitute a power-group: a lobby.
Today this lobby imposes the crime of homophobia, tomorrow it might impose the elimination of the criminal act of pedophilia in the name of the individual’s freedom to sexual orientation and the desire of gratifying personal sexual inclinations with a child. From article 1. of the law against homophobia, it is inferred that the invented and protected juridical good is not just homosexuality, but the freedom to choose sex in form and participation without limits. Why then exclude minors as a possible object? If the unborn child can be killed for the sake of the psychological needs of the mother, why should a living child not be made the object of gratifying the sexual desires of an adult or of a group of adults, that democratically establish it by the majority? The nucleus of totalitarianism is not in the idea of limits and neither in the use of force, but in that disordered use of force which becomes blind violence, because it is free from all moral references. In short, the roots of totalitarianism is disorder, the confusion between good and evil, between what can and cannot be done. The idea of the existence of an absolute order of values constitutes, on the contrary, an objective limit to abuse and totalitarian violence.
In introducing the criminal offence of homophobia, the protection the family has always enjoyed over the course of the centuries is subtracted and this juridical protection is transferred to homosexuals, recognized as holders of rights as such. In order to obtain this goal a leap in logic is required: the passage from human rights to homosexual rights. Homosexuals, like heterosexuals, being men, enjoy the rights of all men, but the rights of homosexuals, properly speaking, do not exist, just as abstract rights connected to the sex of men and women do not exist. In fact, rights do not exist where duties do not exist. Rights for mothers exist, because, above all, the duties of mothers (and fathers) exist. But the rights of women do not exist neither in the abstract nor concrete, since duties that are connected to the female status do not exist and even less so to that of the homosexual. The only rights possible are rooted in the natural law and in natural institutions such as the family.
Once there used to be in force a Christian family order, where homosexuality was banned as immoral. The new legislation wants to turn that order upside-down, by laying down that which was once considered deviant, as a new social model and isolating as crimes, and thus as deviant and abnormal, the affirmation of Christian principals. The possibility of defining homosexuality as abnormal or deviant, is suppressed by law, since any criticism or reserve regarding homosexual people, of their activity and lifestyle, would be considered a form of unjust discrimination.
Few are aware however, that in the 21st century, the age of persecution against the defenders of the Christian and natural order has begun also in Europe.
