Andrew Sullivan At His Best Speaking On Natural Law

Wayne Besen March 12, 2010

About the Author

Wayne Besen is the Founding Executive Director of Truth Wins Out and author of “Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth” (Haworth, 2003). In 2010, Besen was awarded the “Visionary Award” at the Out Music Awards for organizing the American Prayer Hour, an event which shined a spotlight on the role American evangelicals played in the introduction of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill.

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Priya Lynn March 13, 2010 at 1:53 pm -

I regularly hear religionists talking about gayness being against “natural law” and I never get what they mean by “natural law” – the term just sounds nonsensical. There’s no such thing as a “law” of nature, gayness exists in nature, what on earth does this term refer to?
William March 13, 2010 at 3:34 pm -

Well, Priya, they certainly don’t believe that you can discover natural law by observing nature. What they mean is that they have constructed their own paradigm of the world as it “ought” to be, and as they believe that it WOULD be if the mythical Adam and Eve had never partaken of the forbidden fruit in the mythical Garden of Eden. For example, everyone in the world would be speaking the same language — Hebrew, perhaps? Although Dante believed that it would be Latin! Death would not exist, which would be very awkward, because the world would have become most uncomfortably crowded long before now. In this drab and uniform fantasy world things like gayness wouldn’t exist either, and that’ presumably what they mean when they say that it’ “against natural law”.

Charlie Dunbar Broad, the late English philosopher — who, as I’ve only recently discovered, was himself gay, but that’ purely incidental — once remarked that the universe was more complicated than Victorian science supposed — “more complicated and much nastier.” Nastier? Well, I’m not sure, so I won’t discuss that. But this I will say: the universe is more complicated than biblical fundamentalism would like it to be — far more complicated and much less boring.