Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Ickybod

Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

Usually Jonah Goldberg talks good sense, but yesterday I heard him defending the Indiana law as nothing more than a pitiful little consolation prize for the religious right. He was saying that the same sex mirage juggernaut has carried the day, and all conservatives are asking for now is the right to be left alone. I want to explain why this is not the case. I want to provide a theological explanation on why this is not what is happening at all.

For those of you who check this site regularly in order to get your daily dose of whimsy, that mild, unassuming form of humor that I use to put a smile on your face, and a politically-correct spring in your step, I am afraid that today might be a little different. Usually I write with high levels of restraint, but I am afraid that we are now in a position where I cannot explain what is happening without getting into what is actually happening.

First, opponents of same sex mirage have often failed to recognize that rebellion against God’s order for marriage can fail on multiple levels, and not just one. In other words, homosex is not just immoral, as opposed to moral. It is not just disgusting, as opposed to alluring. It is not just kinky, as opposed to straight. All observations along those lines would be correct, but they do not explain why the current battleground is made up of florist shops, bakeries, and photography studios. That is what I wish to explain.

Homosexual sex is not just a sinful abomination, although it does remain that. But in addition to the sinfulness, it is also lame. God’s design for faithful marriage is glory, and to pair up a couple of guys is inglorious, and a couple of girls is just plain sad.

The sin of our age is egalitarianism, wherein we release the hounds of leveling, and declare war on everything that might adorn anything. We have done this to heterosexuality first through feminism, confounding equality before the law with equality as sameness. Pointing to the latter, De Tocqueville put it this way almost a couple centuries ago: “Attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded, and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women” (p. 211). We started by employing feminism to turn first rate women into third rate men, and recently we have found ourselves turning third rate women into fifth rate men. And we are rapidly approaching the nadir, where a woman’s highest achievement will be considered as matching the worst behavior of male slobs everywhere.


I am reluctant to use ridiculous examples because we live in a day when satire is dead, and I am hesitant to give anybody any ideas. But the example, for all its absurdity, is exactly where we are right now. Suppose, in our ongoing egalitarian battle against lookism, the Supreme Court mandated a heavyweight division in the Miss America contest, with sumo wrestling replacing the swimsuit competition. Suppose Indiana declined to send any of their three-hundred pounders to the national competition because it was “just stupid,” and we were dealing with the resultant national outcry.

When something really lame is receiving public honors in a parade down Main Street, there will have to be a lot of policemen around with billy clubs, in order to silence those snorting in the crowd gathered along the sidewalk. The emperor has no clothes, and so the empire is weighing in with the full majesty of the law to prevent anyone from acknowledging the obvious. The reason for the bedlam is this — they cannot afford the accurate observation.

Homosexual mirage is sinful, yes, but it also lame. It has no glory.

Christian marriage, by way of contrast, is glorious, because the woman is the glory of the man. When you have two men, there is no crown. When you have two women, there is no head for the crown to rest on.

[Concerning 1 Cor. 11:1-16 and Is. 4:5] “The NKJV translates it this way: ‘For over all the glory there will be a covering.’ This is what Paul is referring to — a godly wife is to her husband what the Shekinah glory was to the tabernacle. Now this is how it all ties in with our foundational theology of marriage, and what we believe marriage actually is. The Bible teaches that a woman is the glory of her husband. She is his crown: ‘A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband’ (Prov. 12:4a). And a man does not walk down the street kicking his diadem in front of him in the hopes of making himself look better or more important” (For a Glory and a Covering, p. 37).

The feminist movement declared war on women being the glory of the man, and the homosexual movement completed the task by insisting that no one be the glory of anyone else. And when man in his rebellion rejects the glory of God (Rom. 1:23), the next thing that happens is that he is turned aside from how the glory of God manifests itself in the world, which is through the marriage of a man and a woman — true glory.

When Paul teaches us that the woman is the glory of the man, having already said that man is the glory of God, this sets up a standard Hebraic superlative, like we see in the example of the Song of Songs, or the Holy of Holies. Woman is the glory of glories. Homosexual men have thrown that glory away. Because they are homosexual, they have rejected their glory, but because they are still men, they still yearn for glory.
Now bring it all down to the present moment. It is no  coincidence that the battleground professions are those professions which glorify an event. And homosexuals are stuck — through their own demands — with an event which has no glory. So they turn to the Christians, to the evangelical florists, and they demand that we share our glory with them. And this is something we cannot do. Glory doesn’t work that way.

So homosex is in fact detestable, but the main thing we need to notice about it right now is that it is Ichabod. The glory is departed. So perhaps we could compromise and just call it Ickybod.