Nevertheless, in the providence of God, between creation and the parousia, life is such that pagans do see and speak truth. Nothing about the antithesis prevents us from acknowledging that reality. We are not  obscurantists. We affirm the goodness and fallenness of creation. Fearlessly, confident in the Scriptures and the Christian faith, we engage the world about us, even a lesbian atheist who, despite what we might expect, has the good sense to see that boys and girls are not mere arbitrary social constructions and that deviance from the divine norm is not a biological or moral necessity but a choice with tragic consequences.

I first encountered Camille Paglia in 1991, just after she had published the essay, “The Joy of Presbyterian Sex.” Blame Bob Godfrey. I was pastoring a church in Kansas City and happened to be visiting Escondido and stopped by Bob’s office. He had just read the essay and recommended it as a brilliant skewering of the attempt by mainline (liberal) Presbyterians in the PCUSA to promote homosexual marriage (an oxymoron)  by domesticating and suburbanizing Ben and Barry’s rebellious and wild sexuality. In that essay she argued that homosexual encounters are not for suburban bedrooms but for back alleys and, as a practicing lesbian, she resented the attempt by the PCUSA to repackage her intentional, volitional rejection of divinely established norms. What Paglia might not know is that this is what the mainline does: accommodate to the culture  in order to retain its privileged status within the culture.

Paglia is at it again. She’s deconstructing Gay Orthodoxy in the pages of this weekend’s Wall Street Journal,  telling the truth about homosexuality and the suicide of the West at the behest of late-modern feminism. Before you get your hackles up, there is a sane, reasonable, biblical place in the account of male-female relations that is between late-modern feminism and wacky patriarchalism on the Palouse but that is the stuff for another post. Here, today, we should pay attention to two things: 1) The truth of what she said and 2) Its remarkable source.

There are universally known laws. Paul says so in Romans 1-2. Any Christian who denies that there are universally known laws, is not only denying the plain teaching of Scripture but the catholic tradition and particularly the Reformed tradition. Both pagans and Christians know those laws. We all, to some degree or other, by nature after the fall, seek to suppress that knowledge but, in God’s providence, it’s just not possible to suppress it completely and sometimes those the truth of those laws pop out, in surprising places.

One of those universal truths is that there is such a thing as nature. The Christian conviction that there is such a thing as nature or creation and that it was made good distinguishes us from the Gnostics. There is, as Ken Myers has been reminding us for years, “giveness.” There is human nature. There is biology. Humans are male and female. Without becoming too detailed, God intended that males and females should relate to each other sexually. It is obvious from nature that homosexual behavior is not only counter productive but personally, physically, sexually, emotionally, and spiritually destructive. J. Budziseweski has been pointing this out for some time.

Americans, including American Christians, have an ambivalence toward nature. The American republic came into existence partly through the recognition that there is such thing as nature and that some things are contrary to the nature of things as constituted by God. The Declaration of Independence speaks of “nature and nature’s God” in the first paragraph. Our case for self-government was grounded in the nature of things, in the existence of “self-evident” truths. It has been fashionable for at least 30 years to mock the very idea that there are “self-evident” truths but, as I keep saying, jump off a three-story building and ring up afterward to tell me how it went.

What’s that you say? You can’t? Why not? Oh, I see, because you’re dead. How did that happen? Gravity, you say? You mean  to say that the laws of physics apply to you even though you don’t recognize them? Really? Well, that is something isn’t it?

Of course it’s silly but that’s the world in which we now live. We pretend as if there really aren’t any such things as binding, fixed realities to which we must submit or else but there are such.

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