Sir, - Senator David Norris was very critical (May 29th) of my article concerning the Amsterdam Treaty in which I warned of the danger of giving the European Courts jurisdiction to regulate our affairs, as had happened when he successfully challenged decisions of our High Court and Supreme Court (and, I believe, the will of the majority of the Irish people) in relation to the decriminalisation of buggery.
The evidence considered by the Irish courts consisted of the evidence of Senator Norris himself and other witnesses called by him, including Professor West, author of an authoritative work on the subject of homosexuality, and other important documentary evidence - the Wolfenden Report, the Kinsey Survey on homosexual behaviour in the United States, and a similar survey conducted in Sweden.
Chief Justice O'Higgins, in a careful and restrained judgment, summarised the evidence of Professor West and the other evidence available to the Court as follows:
homosexuality has always been condemned in Christian teaching as being morally wrong. It has equally been regarded by society for many centuries as an offence against nature and a very serious crime;
exclusive homosexuality, whether the condition be congenital or acquired, can result in great distress and unhappiness for the individual and can lead to depression, despair and suicide;
the homosexually-orientated can be importuned into a homosexual lifestyle which can become habitual;
male homosexual conduct has resulted, in other countries, in the spread of all forms of venereal disease and this has now become a significant public health problem in England;
homosexual conduct can be inimical to marriage and is per se harmful to it as an institution.
These conclusions are strongly supported by John Finnis, a distinguished professor of law and legal philosophy at Oxford, writing on "Law, Morality and `Sexual Orientation' " in the Notre Dame Law Review 69 (1994). He points out that "Socrates, Plato and Aristotle regarded homosexual conduct as intrinsically shameful, immoral, and indeed depraved or depraving. That is to say, all three rejected the linchpin of modern `gay' ideology and lifestyle." He goes on to propose three fundamental theses: the commitment of a man and a woman to each other in the sexual union of marriage is intrinsically good and reasonable, and is incompatible with sexual relationships outside marriage; homosexual acts are radically and peculiarly non-marital, and for that reason intrinsically unreasonable and unnatural; according to Plato, if not Aristotle, homosexual acts have a special similarity to solitary masturbation, and both types of radically non-marital act are manifestly unworthy of the human being and immoral.
Finally, I look for support to a most unlikely source - Oscar Wilde, generally regarded as the hero of the cause espoused by Senator Norris. Wilde is also regarded as having destroyed himself by his ill-fated court proceedings against the Marquess of Queensberry. But before ever that public exposure took place, he had written a powerful novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, brilliantly dramatised in recent years in the Gate Theatre.
He wrote it at a time when he was at the height of his fame, wealthy, cultured, lionised by London society. His mirror image was Dorian Gray, like Wilde, leading a secret life of debauchery. Hidden in his attic was a painting of the handsome young man he once had been, and still seemed to be outwardly, but as year followed year a horrifying change came over the painting until he could scarcely bear to look at it any longer. Wilde had not the strength of character to break free from the lifestyle into which he had been drawn, but he had the moral courage and honesty to recognise that it was ugly, degrading and depraved, and was destroying him as a human person.
I am fearful that the Amsterdam Treaty and its predecessor, the Maastricht Treaty, are leading us down the road to the point where we will be unable to protect ourselves against the evils referred to by Chief Justice O'Higgins and Professor Finnis, and graphically described by Oscar Wilde. - Yours, etc., Rory O'Hanlon,
Kilternan, Co Dublin.