Russia has survived so many challenges! Will it survive the demographic implosion of Europe?
Maybe, if the view of people such as Dr. Irina Suluyanova, head of the Biomedical Department of the Russian State Medical University and deputy chair of the Church-Public Council for Bioethics of the Moscow Patriarchate, in the defense of virtue is widespread and firm-- and if Russians stop killing their unborn babies, the unending heritage of the Marxist-Leninist mentality.
Dr. Siluyanova's interview to Interfax is a must-read. The main excerpts below:
- Do you agree with Patriarch Alexy’s statement that the holding of a gay rally in Moscow and similar events are tantamount to suicide for society?
- Certainly, the patriarch is absolutely right. This suicide is manifested in the moral degradation of society, the loss of clear positions and ability to distinguish between vice and virtue. As is well known, both an individual and society as a whole can only exist biologically as long as this ability to discern virtue and vice is not lost. To lose it means to step towards self-destruction. ...
- But sexual minorities claim they defend their rights...
- In my view, to pose the problem as involving human rights in this case is absolutely incorrect. There is no right to vice or moral crime in the list of basic human rights. The rights advocated by homosexuals are nothing else than the right to vice, the way of life which is criminal from the ethical point of view. From the classical ethical perspective, morality first of all fulfills the function of protecting human life. ...
- As a specialist in bioethics, how would you define homosexuality? Is it an illness or a sin?
- This is something to be discussed very clearly, something to which we should not shut our eyes, just as we cannot shut our eyes to people’s traumas and defects. It is the same as looking at a blind man, we would deny his blindness and assure everybody that he is in good health. We should call thing their proper names. It is certainly a moral vice. Until 1980, homosexuality was viewed as a sexual psychopathology, and many psychiatrists and medics uphold this understanding today.
Generally, almost all researchers distinguish two types of homosexuality: the so-called active or inborn and passive or acquired. So, people with inborn homosexuality make up 3% of the total number of people. All that is above this 3 percent represents ‘secondary’ homosexuality, which spreads like an ‘infection’. If such a practice is viewed psychologically as a norm under the influence of cultural trends and liberal guidelines, it is as it were sealed in human physiology and this vice spreads with lightening speed.
It should be added that the threat of spreading homosexuality lies not only in moral degradation and personal ruin but inevitably in human physical destruction. Homosexuality is essentially ‘infectious’. ... In the past when homosexuality was considered to be a pathology, it was treated; people realized that it was their defect and deviation from norm. A person tried to overcome this vice, working at self-improvement, which is essentially the essence of medicine called as it is to cure illnesses, especially those involving human psyche.
-Why then today there is a growing number of medics who refuse to view homosexuality as pathology?
- The point is that in medicine, just as in society, there are its own liberal processes taking place. Medicine is directly dependent on values and worldviews dominating in a society. It is intimately bound up with the person’s understanding of himself and others. And the modern tendency to legalize homosexuality is an example of medical and social problems intertwined. When in 1993 the tenth review of the International Classification of Diseases came into force, homosexuality was moved from the category of ‘diseases’ into that of ‘sexual orientation’ for the first time in the history of these reviews. ...
-Do you know of any historical examples when legalization of homosexuality proved to be destructive for a society?
- One of the most powerful examples is the death of the antique culture caused, among other things, by the lack of clear saving criteria for distinguishing between vice and virtue in sexual relations. It is an example where a failure to make a moral distinction between vice and virtue led to the physical death of a civilization. The identity of antiquity lied, among other things, in ‘naivety of lechery’ when the sexual element came to penetrate all spheres of life. There is ample evidence of sexual perversion that prevailed in that era.
As Chesterton aptly put it, ‘when sex stops being a servant it immediately becomes a despot’. He also said that Christianity came to the world to heal it and did it by the only possible way which is asceticism. It can be said generally that the development of Christian culture was a first sexual revolution which led to a radical review of the problem of human sexuality. ...
The Bible’s strong rejection of homosexuality is a common knowledge. Let us recall the same Book of Leviticus where this kind of relations is punished by death. St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans, describes same-sex relations as ‘reprobate mind’ and those who have it as ‘filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness’ (Rom. 27-31). ...
In ancient cultures it was transsexuality that to a considerable extent determined the emergence of such religious and mystical cults as worship of Moloch whose ‘priests’ cultivated the rite of castration. This rite can well be accounted for as a testimony to ‘insurmountable physiological and mental aversion’ of one’s own sex and castration as ‘triumph’ of deliverance from it.
-What means can be used to struggle with the spread of homosexuality?
- Today it is necessary simply to conduct mass information campaigns, educational actions and social advertising for society to take it adequately. There is no other way. ...
In the West, all this is done by the hands of those who are themselves bearers of this vice. Naturally, they seek to legalize their depravity as a norm. But a healthy society should have strength to resist it, first of all through firm conviction and statement of the need to call things by their proper names. What is vice is vice, and it can never turn into a virtue. ...
