Madam, - I hope you will not deny me the opportunity to respond to Ronan Hodson (December 8th). He employed a device to which dishonest debaters commonly resort - he translated my remarks into extreme forms that he felt more comfortable about rebutting. It gives me the comfort of knowing that he is unable to respond to my comments exactly as I made them.
However Mr Hodson chooses to caricature or misrepresent it, my letter of December 2nd was a criticism of the coverage of the recent Vatican document relating to how the Church should choose and train its priests in the face of the modern pressure to make homosexual activity acceptable within the priesthood.
I suggested that the media are intimidated into an unquestioning support of the claims of the likes of Mr Hodson, while they are ever more hostile to beliefs that were respected for 2,000 years and more.
I said that people who retain those beliefs are entitled to uphold them publicly by the use and expression of reason.
I presented an example showing how defiling sexual activity can be, while it takes more than the mere preference of an individual to make his or her sexual activity acceptable.
I condemned the conspiracy to bar celibate people from the attempt to define the limits of acceptable sexual activity. (I would object equally to any notion of forbidding the sexually active to expatiate on celibacy.)
It is unnecessary to go further than the report, opinion, Editorial and Letters columns of The Irish Times of the past week to find substantiation of the views I expressed. The intimidation to which I referred is moral rather than physical, but none the less objectionable on that account. One form is to accuse of homophobia anyone who questions whether homosexual activity is morally good, and to equate that questioning with beating up homosexual people, figuratively if not literally.
Perhaps I am fortunate that Mr Hodson categorises mine as a merely "conservative homophobia", given that the Church's describing homosexual acts as immoral has been equated, by a more prominent Trinity College person, with the actions of the Nazis in places such as Auschwitz. To say that these acts are "disordered" appears to be regarded as even worse.
It is also intimidatory to assert, with the loud and endless repetition in which Mr Hodson has now joined but without the substantiation of rational argument, that homosexual activity has become an accepted norm, and that dissent from such an overwhelming consensus is not to be dared, even by "hectoring phantoms" unaware that "the front line has passed them by".
So let me say simply: I do not harbour homophobia. I do question the rightness of homosexual activity. I regard the sexual abuse of children as the worst kind of sexual activity. It is not the only sexual activity that is wrong. I am not conscious of having any "enemies" - I would hate to have a "gay" one and I hope that Mr Hodson does not regard himself as such.
Finally, in view of Mr Hodson's amazing panoply of abusive adjectives and nouns, I invite all objective persons to examine his letter and mine and judge to which "vituperation" can fairly be applied. - Yours, etc,
FRANK FARRELL, Lakelands Close, Stillorgan, Co Dublin.
Madam, - The recent Vatican statement on homosexuality has caused considerable controversy, much of it beating about the bush.
There are two possible basic standpoints on this subject. One is that if we believe that we came into existence as a result of an intelligent creator, the division of the human race into two groups of people, male and female, is a perfect division.
It follows logically that homosexuality is unnatural; there is no grey area.
On the other hand, if we accept the scientific version of our genesis, evolution, the division in question cannot be perfect. That would be completely alien to the evolutionary process, which must be defective. It follows logically that homosexuality is natural.
I would be interested in any further hypothesis on this subject but I doubt that there is another credible one. - Yours, etc,
TOM WILLIAMS, Goldenbridge Avenue, Dublin 8.