Dr. Jennifer Morse recently gave a perfectly civil and thoroughly Christian talk to a group of Catholic college students in Iowa. In a speech deeply rooted in compassion, she urged students to reach out to same-sex attracted classmates and offer them friendship. She thought they could benefit from chaste friendships, and that they would not necessarily get much of that type of support from others on campus.
The response to Jennifer's speech was predictable. The Gaystapo took to the internet with a series of egregious mischaracterizations of the speech - all of which were intended to intimidate those who would dare show compassion for those struggling with same-sex attraction. Among the lowlights were:
1. The claim that Jennifer somehow exploited the death of Tyler Clementi by mentioning his name in one sentence of her talk.
2. Pretending to believe that telling Catholic students to reach out to their same-sex attracted classmates in chaste friendship would amount to anti-gay bullying.
3. Organizing their usual swarming technique of sending people to attack Jennifer's Facebook page, although most had not listened to any part of her remarks.
In order to fully understand the extent to which the homosexual left is trying to make perfectly normal mainstream opinion seem hateful and offensive, click on the following link to hear Morse's "offending" speech. Any fair-minded person who listens to the whole 30 minute podcast will arrive at the same conclusion: there is nothing there for any normal person to take offense from.
But the homosexual left is anything but normal. It is a movement that relies upon hysteria to breed intimidation. Take a few minutes to compare what you saw in Morse's speech with the reactions from the Gaystapo. Here are links to two of the more egregious articles from the other side:
1. Please bear in mind that Huffington Post gets more traffic than the New York Times, Fox News, and NRO. Their report on the Morse speech can be accessed here.
2. The Advocate reports that the Clementis think it is “cruel” and in fact constitutes a "new low" to reach out to those struggling with homosexuality. In fact, they are furious over the idea of extending compassion toward and forming friendships with homosexuals. They demand an apology here.
Those witnessing the emotional meltdown of the Gaystapo might be tempted to think of Orwell's 1984. More specifically, they might recall the two minutes hate. It isn't difficult to imagine crowds of homosexual activists sitting around watching clips of Morse's speech and screaming at their monitors in a show of solidarity. Take the time to log on to a comment thread on the Huffington Post or on the Advocate. We're already there. Jennifer Morse has become Emmanuel Goldstein.
But the Jennifer Morse controversy is more than a foretelling of the future. It is also a reminder of the past. One cannot easily dismiss the similarity between the Morse episode and the Salem witch trials that characterized another dark period in the history of our civilization.
As C.S. Lewis once observed, the witch trials are misunderstood. Many believe they represented a time when people administered justice according to antiquated principles. Nothing could be further from the truth. Those trials happened merely because people applied a different set of facts to the same principles. They thought witches could fly to gatherings where they could consort and cast spells and destroy innocent lives. And so the courts tried them and sometimes executed them. The principle that people who did such things deserved to die was correct. The belief that they were actually doing them was incorrect.
There are no witch trials today because we do not believe a self-proclaimed witch when she says she will cast a spell upon us. When she says she has the power to transform us we merely laugh and walk away.
That explains all the hysteria in response to Jennifer Morse. Her opponents say she is wrong because homosexuality is genetic and unalterable. But they react to her with hysterics because they know in their hearts that the Gospel transforms. They know the Truth has power over all things. At some level they know that if they we were made in the image of God they cannot consent to their own destruction and call it good.
Of course, once convinced they are not made in the image of God, people have a difficult time loving themselves. That struggle hardens the heart and transforms loving your neighbor as yourself from a virtue into a vice. Eventually, tolerance becomes letting people destroy themselves and then destroying those who try to help them.