On May 23, 12:27 am, Anim8rFSK cox.net> wrote:

What an odd coincidence.

In rec.arts.sf.written, I just got finished replying to a religious
nutcase who regularly posts there. This time, he quoted an article -
serious enough in itself - from a Catholic publication entitled "In
the Secular Worldview, Incest Is Perfectly Permissible".

In the case of incest, of course, virtually all incest would qualify
as statutory rape if the laws didn't exclude it. What remains
generally is taking an unacceptable risk of inflicting congenital
defects on children. Thus, the issue is not as stark as it might be
painted, even under the kind of hyper-strict secular world-view
required to even make it an issue.

With polygamy, social policy reasons concerning the equality of women
might be considered to have legitimate weight.

In my reply in that other newsgroup, by the way, I noted:

"Since the overwhelming majority of people in the world's advanced
democracies are Christians, soon enough they will correct the elite
dominance of the courts by having the constitution amended so that
whether or not homosexuality is illegal is purely a decision of
elected legislators which the courts have no authority to overturn; I
presume this is what this is really about, isn't it?

Of course, it may well be that even the overwhelming Christian
majority does not belong - except for a small, isolated minority - to
churches whose membership would _want_ to go back to persecuting
people for being different. But sentiments that are more widely shared
will take much longer to overturn. I'm not sure that any advanced
liberal thinkers really see a percentage in floating the notion of
legalizing either polygamy or incest."

So I want there to be no confusion here; I do not favor going back to
the dark days when people were prosecuted for homosexual acts between
consenting adults.

But could there be a secular rationale for outlawing homosexuality,
too?

Yes, there could be.

I remember reading a magazine article about transsexuals many years
ago which noted that in some states, the testes were not removed in a
sex-change operation, because of state laws, enacted during the Civil
War, to prohibit men from having themselves castrated (because of the
perceived threat of them doing so to avoid the draft).

We have laws against the use of marijuana and heroin and other drugs.
Some have railed against these laws as manifestations of a Puritanism
that is hostile to any activity done simply for the fun of it. But
there are more rational reasons for drug laws; drug users often end up
making themselves unemployable, and hence charges on the public purse.

And if people have damaged themselves by drug use so that they can't
hold a job... they also are unfit for military service.

We don't let men into women's locker rooms. People fighting in a war
are at close quarters with each other. Thus, although the Greeks may
have had a different cultural view of things, as the recent movie
about Thermopylae, 300, took the trouble to point out, the ancient
Romans, not a Christian society, took a dim view of homosexuals among
their troops.

So, if we feel homosexuals have no place in the barracks, it makes
sense that we would want to use the law to minimize the number of
people who make themselves unavailable for the military for that
reason.

The question, thus, isn't whether we can _find_ a secular reason for a
law, as much as whether we should want to.

John Savard