Freedom, responsibility and homosexuality

We touched on one of the famous complexes that Dostoevsky sets out in his novels. Sinners, especially, generally greet the possibility that priests and men of religion have committed a sin with great joy, almost like glad tidings. For this legitimizes, normalizes and eases their own sinfulness.

We very often encounter the media counterpart of this language of glad tidings. When an imam or a priest does many things that an ordinary person does quite normally, it becomes the subject of sensational news. What determines the market of this news, from its seller to its buyer, is in fact people's wish to be rid of, and cleansed from, the pressure of sin within them. Of course, in a way peculiar to jahiliyya.

Viewed from the opposite side, it is also typical for consistent religious people to cause a particular discomfort to sinners. The psychology behind this is reflected very well by the people of Lot against those who tried to stay pure: "Drive them out of your town; they are supposedly very pure people."

The desire and demand to be pure, to stay pure, constitutes a serious problem and threatens the order in places where crime runs rampant, has become almost a norm, has become the rule of the established order. This is so not only in the matter of sodomy but in other areas of crime as well.

In a place where bribery and theft, or racist discrimination, or oppressing women or the weak are seen by everyone as a right, it is not only that you must object in order to cause discomfort and be counted a spoilsport; even persisting in staying pure can become a cause of discomfort.

As is known, in the case of the people of Lot, the society that had made sodomy a norm had a sin even greater than practicing sodomy in its own private life: wanting everyone to conform to it. That is why, when they heard that two strange and radiant guests had come to Lot, they ran and tried to draw them, too, into their own way of life. When Lot tried to protect those guests of his and insisted on not handing them over, they said, "Drive them out of your town, they are pure."

The intonation in the expression "they are pure!" here carries the meanings: "They are putting on airs of purity before us, they are regarding us as dirty, they are imposing on us a norm we do not know, they are slandering our way of life." Evidently the desire to stay pure was regarded as grounds for exclusion from that society.

The culture of sodomy has such a will. A way of life charged, in Nietzsche's expression, with a very fierce "will to power." And history always repeats itself. Today, too, homosexuality, which in the end has existed in every period of history and will probably continue to exist as a form of deviance, is not content with being lived secretly in private life; it wants to be recognized as an identity and to command respect, but it is not content even with that; in an imperial manner it tries more and more to make everyone a partner in this sin. It resorts to all sorts of insidious ways to encourage people toward it.

Otherwise, as we have said before, sexuality is a matter concerning people's private lives, and no one, not even the state, has the right to pry into other people's lives and dig up and expose them. Perhaps the only point on which homosexuals may be right concerning the exposure of sexuality in the public sphere is that male and female sexuality is freely put on display. Yet Islam opposes the display and encouragement of homosexuality just as it opposes the public display of male and female sexuality. It is a fact that a constantly provoked sexuality badly damages the health of society. Therefore, there can be said to be no discrimination here of the kind that some would call "homophobia." Why do we shrink from saying that the excessive emphasis on male and female sexuality serves only capitalism, which has commodified the human body, and that apart from that it has a corrupting effect on society?

Those who see a problem of freedom here have one or two more things they should see: the danger of becoming consumers, divorced from reason and responsibility, of the capitalism that has commodified the female and male body. Yes, capitalism demands people's freedom to consume its commodities, and the whole problem of freedom is founded on this freedom to consume.

Second, of course, human freedom is something that must be balanced with responsibility, and this responsibility concerns especially the limits at which the exercise of freedoms touches the rights and freedoms of other people. What we know as hududullah, "the limits of God," are in fact the limits that mark out the rights of other people. When a human being commits a crime against other people, he has committed a crime against God Himself.

In this regard, the condemnation of homosexuality is due to its not being a sin that remains within itself, and to its having a dimension that infringes on the rights of other people.

If you think about it, many human behaviors have these social dimensions. That is, behaviors that do not remain confined to a person's own individuality but have effects on other people. The sin of a person who drinks his own drink in his own home in a way that affects no one is his own, and no one has anything to say. But the drink of one who, because of the drink he has taken, uses violence against his wife and children, or takes to the road and causes an accident, is now a public matter.

The days of the coronavirus must have taught us important lessons about the limits of individuality of a social act and our responsibility toward others, and opened wide horizons.

Yet it is not at all hard to guess what kind of catastrophe the world that homosexuals, who cannot tolerate even their sin being coded as sin, desire and are trying to build could be for all people.

It is therefore no surprise that they feel a rage toward religion, particularly toward Islam. Their characterizing Islam as an understanding left behind in bygone ages expresses the most archaic, most primitive arrogance of the deviant norm they are trying to impose on everyone. This psychology, even in the most ancient times, was not content merely with a demand for freedom when it found the chance; it has a fascistic nature that tries to impose its own norm on the whole of society.