Heterosexism: An Ethical Challenge.

Cahill, Lisa Sowle

This book is directed against "heterosexism" in the Christian churches. One author is a Lutheran, the other a Roman Catholic. Heterosexism is defined as a "reasoned system of bias concerning sexual orientation" (13), in which heterosexuality is privileged as the normative form of human sexuality. Homophobia, in contrast, is an emotional reaction of bigotry, reasoned out or not.

The authors, both heterosexual, are earnest, sensitive, and compassionate. Each chapter is headed by a biographical vignette or personal statement intended to make readers aware of the suffering endured by gay Christians as they struggle to find identity, meaning, and encouragement. One, never having had a sexual relationship, still says, "Deep inside I know that I'm a worthless person because the church's view of homosexuality has told me so over and over again. . . . I just wish I would die" (139). Another tells how his father withheld physical affection from him out of fear that it would make him "gay" (89). One homosexual man recounts how denial led him into a marriage which broke up when the truth was admitted (167).

The moral energy of the book is focused against "Christian" hatred of gay persons. As such, its message is powerful and appropriate. However, not all will be persuaded that to see heterosexuality as the human sexual ideal necessarily entails exclusionary attitudes, nor even that to center sexual morality on male-female partnerships necessarily implies that same-sex relationships are in all cases evil. The authors seem to set up alternative stances in a way which does not represent the nuance of the actual spectrum. They suggest that one can only affirm that "just, loving, and faithful homosexual unions are good" if one is willing to accept the premise that homosexual orientation is but a natural "variation" which is "part of God's original blessing" (23). On any other premise such unions either "fall short" or are evil. Missing here is the possibility that a good number of sexual and other relations open to people in the real world may be seen as positive goods for those people, even if their circumstances do not in every way match up to an ideal the Church holds forth. Less controversial examples would be second marriages, and adoption of children who in an "ideal" world could be cared for by their biological parents.

The real impact of this book lies in its extended revelation that, certainly due to rampant homophobia if not to what is defined as heterocentrism, gay persons are not in fact treated in Christian fellowship in a way consistent with the treatment of heterosexual persons whose situations may be in some sense nonideal too. Indeed, even in Roman Catholicism, where the homosexual orientation is supposedly not a sin, gays are given to believe that "God is against homosexual people in the very fabric of their existence as human beings" (88). This reality is a scandal and a judgment on "Christian" communities which make sexual norms sources of judgment, fear, anger, anxiety, and self-destructive guilt, quite in contradiction to the New Testament values of compassion, forgiveness, solidarity, and peace. The ethical challenge this book presents is to unite Christian sexual morality around sex as a universal human experience which offers all persons an ongoing task of authenticity, self-transcendence, and integration, a task in which few if any of us are "without sin."

LISA SOWLE CAHILL Boston College