Is it hateful to believe that having sex with someone of the same sex is always wrong?

Consider the belief that people should only have sex if they are wearing a hat. This belief holds that sex where any member is not wearing a hat is always morally wrong. Sex with a hat might be morally wrong in some other way but a hat on the head of all participants is an essential requirement of a sex act being morally ok.

Now you might consider this belief silly. You might reject it out of hand as absurd. I contend that you cannot find this belief to be hateful. There isn’t any hate for any one behind it.

You could claim that the application of this belief is likely to be unfair and even cruel. Poor people who are less likely to own hats are going to be more heavily restricted by this belief than rich people with a hat for every boudoir. People with some physical disabilities might curse this belief every time they struggle to put a hat on, if they even can. Other people will find following this rule a breeze. But this unfairness in application does not necessarily make the belief hateful. At most we could say this belief is not very “woke” to its justice implications but I would still argue it is not a hateful belief in itself.

If this belief was widespread we would expect to see something; People with hate for others seizing on this belief to amplify and justify their hate. The desire to have sex regardless of a hat would be patholigised so that people with that desire could be seen as sick people, not to be trusted in many ways. People who have sex without hats ( a category that would earn both a medical name and a few derogatory slurs to call its own) would be denied jobs or the opportunity to formalize their relationships with the result that hatlessness in bed would be connected to criminality and promiscuity, justifying the discrimination. At the peak of this belief there would be a legal defence for murdering someone who wants to have sex without a hat and the police would barely bother to investigate the deaths of such people. Such people would be the butt of numerous jokes and stereotypical depictions. And far from the corridors of institutional power “Your mother doesn’t own a hat” would be a schoolyard taunt that always led to blows.

The institutionalized hate around this belief would make it difficult to separate the belief itself from all the prejudices and priveleges of its proponents. Indeed there would be no easy agreement on what was the hate and what was just the belief. Is a program to remind people to wear hats in bed using shock treatment and prayer born of hateful discrimination or misguided love? Arguments would go on about how to understand these programs. Such confusion, however, does not mean the original belief itself is hateful. There are people full of hate who have found this belief useful to them (and we can reflect on whether that utility is in the nature of any legalistic moral claim) but there could be people who hold none of the hate who still hold the belief in its entirety. It is simply incorrect to call them hateful too.

You’ve probably realized the metaphor I’m making by now. We live in a world in which some people believe that sex that isn’t between a man and a woman is always morally wrong. They believe there are many ways that sex between a man and a woman can also be morally wrong but the presence of the two genders is a necessary requirement for the sex act to ever be morally ok. This belief can be cruel in its application – people who don’t feel any homosexual desire follow it with ease unlike others who only feel homosexual desire. The belief certainly has been used by hateful people to justify their hate in all the ways I mentioned such views can. But I would still argue that the belief itself is not necessarily hateful.

This is important to realize. We are in the middle of a national debate on the merits of opening our civil rite of marriage up to same sex couples. At the moment civil marriage in Australia requires the participants to be male and female. For some people to remove this requirement would be to “endorse sin” at a national level and this forms the motivation of many no voters in the postal survey we may be having (the High Court challenge is yet to decide if it will proceed). I disagree with this view of sin. Its just silly to me to make heterosexuality a moral requirement of sex and a distraction from the real issues around love, mutual flourishing and consent. Still, I don’t think their idea that sex must be between a man and a woman is necessarily hateful and I wont join in labeling them as such.

There’s more I could say on this but I need to finish up. I think we need to be able to hear other people say “homosexuality is always wrong” in the same way we might hear them say “masturbation is always wrong” or “sex before marriage is always wrong.” That is, to disagree but not necessarily be offended. There will be some who are aiming to be hurtful and spread hate. Most wont be aware of how unfair they are being although some may well be. But the ideas themselves can be held by people who are loving, as hard as that may be to understand.