Guardian: Our kind of loving

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/23/pope-benedict-xvi-gayrights
23.12.8 by Mark Vernon

When you are gay, you learn to handle the pontifications of religious leaders on homosexuality with care. The thing to watch is that it doesn't get under your skin. If, unwittingly, you do take it too much to heart, it can ruin your day. And if it ruins too many days, then it ruins your life.

Being gay is about your love life. Gay men and women aren't people who perform certain acts; they are people who love in certain ways. The L-word is never mentioned by those who condemn homosexuality. I suspect that they don't talk about homosexuality as a form of loving because if they did, their arguments would fall away. For what is life without love? No life. And that is, in effect, the no-life they are asking gay men and women to lead. To declare love as a whole section of humanity experiences it as simply deviant (or worse) is about as fundamental an attack on a human being as there can be.

The paradox is that you'd think that Christian leaders, above all others, would realise that. After all, it is they who declare that God is love: "God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them." (1 John 4:16.) They may excuse their opinions by saying they are challenging the sin not the sinner, or the practice not the orientation, or by some other such sophistical formula. But the truth is that writing off all gay love makes about as much sense as writing off all heterosexual love.

Sure, some attempts at loving are not healthy. That is the case for everyone, and gays arguably know it more than most, since we have to work at our loving. We receive precious little help in that, and we make our mistakes. But we do it as part of that lifelong effort called learning to love ? which is also called learning to be human.

It's not entirely clear what the pope actually said this time: some of the reporting of his comments seems rather overblown. That's the Christmas silly season for you. However, it's pretty clear he thinks homosexuality nothing less than a calamitous disaster for the human race. It is as if homosexuality were as infectious as the common cold. Soon everyone will be sneezing. What kind of fantasies about homosexuality does that imply?

It's also pretty clear that he thinks homosexuality unnatural. He paints a monochrome picture of the relationships between man and woman. Man looks like this; woman looks like that. Together they should look like the Joseph, Mary and Jesus on a million sentimental Christmas cards ? putting to one side the fact that they weren't married and he was illegitimate. But if the pope won't take a lead from the Bible, in which I don't think there is a single example of a stable nuclear family, he might actually turn to nature and read about our evolutionary cousins, the bonobos. The primatologist Frans de Waal describes their loving in moving tones in his book Our Inner Ape.

"The French kiss is the bonobo's most recognizable, humanlike erotic act. Whenever I show an undergraduate class a film of my bonobos, the students get very quiet. They will watch all sorts of sexual intercourse, but invariably the deepest impression is made by a video clip of two juvenile males tongue-kissing."

If only De Waal could show that clip in the Vatican. I'd love to be a fly on the wall.

Talking of living naturally, it is tempting to wonder whether the pope reflects on his own lifestyle. He lives in a small city-state, ruled and in large part populated by celibate men. That hardly seems natural. I suspect that this is why most Catholics take virtually no notice of his teaching on sexual matters. Would you take advice on how to cook your turkey from a strict vegetarian?

So my advice to my fellow homosexuals who today pick up their paper, or go online, and read that the pope has aligned their gayness with nothing less than the destruction of the human race, is this: hand him the rope. To be frank, he just looks silly. Don't let his silliness get under your skin.