There exists “only one sex act; it is the marital act. Any other use of our sexual faculties is a disorder and an abuse of those faculties; but it is not sex,” emphasizes Catholic theology professor John M. Haas in the forward for a new book. Hereby Catholic ex-gay leader Andrew Comiskey insightfully justifies the Catholic Church’s definition of homosexuality as “disordered” in Rediscovering Our Lost Fullness: A Guide to Sexual Integration from Sophia Institute Press.
In the Bible, Haas notes, “God created man and woman. Period. There is nothing else.” Thus, “there is no such thing as a homosexual. There are only men and women who act in certain ways, with virtue or without virtue.” As an “obvious sinner” with a “long history of same-sex attraction and addiction to pornography,” Comiskey concurs in this binary and explains how his bitter life experiences twisted his desires.
Growing up, Comiskey developed an “unusual need for same-sex love and attention. Though exaggerated, these needs were emotional and not sexual at all.” “I had been bullied from mid-childhood through my teen years because of my evident effeminacy. On several painful occasions, peers rallied to ridicule and accuse me of perversion,” he relates. Long after, “I still perceived male peers as suspicious and disdainful of me.”
As Comiskey analogized, a “missionary once told me: cannibals eat only those who they admire, and they eat them to get their traits.” Similarly, he and other observers of homosexual behavior have “linked homosexual desire with the longing for what one feels he lacks in himself, that is, disintegrated attributes of one’s personality.” He notes how one homosexually attracted man Comiskey counseled clearly “was looking at the other young man and loving a lost part of himself, a part that he could not recognize and accept.”
Homosexual individuals have proven particularly susceptible to modernity’s burgeoning sexual sins. A “global virtual porn superhighway has defiled most young people’s imaginations,” Comiskey observes. Yet in his “experience, porn is more of a temptation for persons in shame over their same-sex attraction than it is for the average opposite-gender idolater.”
Online sexual fantasy befits Comiskey’s agreement with Haas that “LGBT+ persons exist only in their own fallen imaginations.” Rather, Comiskey suggests, “our Creator and Redeemer sees instead persons wounded by abuse and neglect who have come to mistake emotional needs for erotic ones, persons…seduced by rejection of their own anatomy.” Self-defined “LGBT+” individuals “settled early on cultural lies” and “mistook early dents in our humanity as our destiny,” yet the “homosexual act torpedoes one’s integration” of natural body and personal identity.
“God’s goal for every man and woman” is properly defined chastity, which reserves sex for God’s design of a life-giving marriage between husband and wife, Comiskey explains. “At chastity’s core is the union of sexuality and spirituality, arguably, the two most profound longings of our humanity. We all know the ache: the passion for beautiful presence, enduring, true,” he observes. This “turns into a gift of integrity, of wholeness, to and for others. When our spiritual longing for God and His goodness is reconciled to our longing for others, we are whole, united, undivided in our motives, our speech, our behavior.” By contrast, “if you are a divided, lustful soul, you tend neither to see truth clearly nor to act prudently and decisively. In the end, you will treat others badly, unjustly, not giving them their due.”
In particular, “same-gender sexuality offends God,” Comiskey explains, for this “defaces how He chooses to represent Himself in the duality of male and female (Gen. 1:26–27).” Accordingly, the “Creator has a will for our sexual humanity. To defy that will is to defy His very essence,” Comiskey adds. The “language Scripture uses to prohibit homosexual practice is strong and framed as rebellion against His natural order.”
Contrastingly, Comiskey observes, in numerous Biblical analogies
marriage as a witness of Jesus’ love for His Church becomes something enormous—the fusing of God’s desire to wed Himself to us with the sexual love of marriage. Becoming one flesh reveals spiritual union, the eternal consummation we all await.
Aside from faith’s commands, Comiskey places facts over feelings. “We make much of our desires today. If I feel something, I am somehow obliged to realize it, no matter how disordered those desires may be,” he notes. However, as St. Paul noted in Romans 2:15, “natural law is the understanding that certain truths don’t depend on us. There is a real standard of morality.”
“Reality makes me happy; I thrive when acting upon my true nature,” Comiskey notes while describing how he fell in love with his wife Annette and became the father of four. “Integration—wholeness—must involve ‘otherness’: those who are different from us and who call us into something more, something greater,” he writes. “As I sought spiritual strength in community to love this one woman, I became more of a man. And she became more of a woman.”
Nonetheless, Comiskey concedes continuing same-sex struggles. “I am a man endowed with a spiritual and physical essence to love a woman well. I may falter at this for a variety of reasons,” he writes. “Sensual idolatry beckons, and at times I long for that familiar plunge. I’m not proud of my residual temptations.”
Modern society “demonizes those of us who refuse to bend the knee to LGBT+ identification,” Comiskey observes, but he remains committed to unpopular truths. The American Psychological Association’s (APA) 1973 removal of homosexuality as a psychological disorder from the APA diagnostic manual resulted from a “highly politicized move, driven more by ‘gay’ clinicians than hard science,” he notes. He insists upon the freedom of individuals to seek counsel for unwanted same-sex desires, given his own experience. He would have been “lost to cyclical partnerships with ‘gay’ peers,” but “launched into a Christian fraternity where good, conservative men embraced me, and I grew alongside them.”
While, per other commentators, modern “sexual states” in the West seek to enforce “genital liberation” with increasingly totalitarian tendencies, Comiskey stands as a prophetic “voice crying in the wilderness.” Amidst mind-numbing LGBT propaganda, he offers refreshing perspectives on the sad truth of the brokenness he has escaped. His story of healing and hope deserves a wide audience.
Wellington says
No wonder so far there has not been a comment on this article since it articulates the traditional Judeo-Christian take on sex and marriage, which formerly was the received wisdom of the day (and by the scientific and medical world too it is important to note), but which “take” is now looked upon as hate speech and plenty of other negatives such as gross ignorance, bigotry, etc. In brief, welcome to a new form of totalitarian thinking whereby any disagreement with said thinking is consigned to eternal perdition.
Again I aver that if the Judeo-Christian view on sex and marriage (especially marriage) is correct, then there is no way to reconcile so many modern assessments of these two per the Judeo-Christian tradition and take on “these two.” Either the Judeo-Christian view on sex and marriage is correct or it is not, modernistic attempts to the contrary notwithstanding.
Oh yeah, a huge “divide” here. Clearly for all those who can still think clearly and are not afraid of being called a whole host of negatives. Yes, the silencing of those promoting traditional values is dispositive of just how much the promotion (and success) of tyrannical “modern values” has become.
This needs to stop if traditional values have any chance of yet proceeding and succeeding. Frankly, I see a dismal future for such values.
Damn. Open Pandora’s Box and there is no closing it. A given.
Don McKellar says
Regardless of the Christian context of this piece, the underlying principles and arguments are scientifically and factually sound.
Alkflaeda says
The pattern of medicalisation of a merely criminal act, and then de-medicalisation once the “disorder” status had done its job of engaging people’s sympathy and bringing same sex desires and acts into wider discourse, is a familiar one – it is being enacted with transgenderism, and arguably with paedophilia. In this instance, it has a useful side-effect from the point of view of LGBT activists – behaviourists used to use some pretty nasty methods to deal with all sorts of ideas and actions which were viewed as part of a disease or disorder process, and these archaic clinical interventions have now been repackaged as “conversion therapy”, and used to demonise legitimate and humane help offered to those who have made a free and genuine decision to change. Every ideology has its martyrs, and the LGBT ideology counts Oscar Wilde (who was actually a same sex paedophile) and Alan Turing in its martyrology. This does not mean that I do not believe that same sex desires are associated with trauma – but I do think that medical science has been cynically used to enable same sex practitioners to shed the criminal status of their actions; criminality should have been retained whilst at the same time methods of helping people to change were being developed.
Jim J Fox says
‘The pattern of medicalisation of a merely criminal act’
What criminal act would that be?
The Catholic Church (or any other) as the authority on morality? Are you SERIOUS?!
Religion is the problem, not the answer.
If God (pick one) designed the cosmos and all living things, evolution has shown him/her/it to be incompetent. No question.
Wellington says
Bad religion is not the answer but even though myself a skeptic I think good religion sustains so much of a functioning and healthy society. As Benjamin Franklin, himself a skeptic, noted, if man is bad with religion imagine what he would be without it. Of course, Islam in the major exception to this Franklin rule.
I wonder if you agree (I do) with what Dennis Prager, a devout Orthodox Jew, has said and that is that the death of Christianity in America would mean the death of America. Your turn if you wish.