Cherry-picking sin

Recently my facebook news feed seems to have been filling up with little red equals signs, mostly among my those of my cousins who fall into one of the following two groups: in their 40s or American. (I could do a nice little Venn diagram.) This morning one of them, who descibes herself as 'Catholic....sort of?', shared the Atheist Quote of the Day:

Homosexuality is not a sin. Atheism is not a sin. Belonging to the wrong religion is not a sin. You know why? Because sin is an imaginary disease invented to sell you an imaginary cure.

                                                                                                                  John Allen

A quick google tells me there are rather a lot of people called John Allen. I don't know which one of these he is or how exactly he arrived at his conclusions. Leaving aside the fact that a self-proclaimed Catholic (even if only self-proclaiming as 'sort of') is displaying support for same-sex marriage and showing appreciation for the Atheist Quote of the Day page, leaving aside the rejection of God and the downright relativism in the first half of said quote, the part which interests me particularly is the bit about sin being an imaginary disease and its complementary imaginary cure.

I recently blogged about the loss of the sense of sin, which Pius XII identified as the sin of the century, speaking in the USA in 1946. I and my fellow catechist also recently had a complaint from the parent of one of the members of our confirmation group. The underlying issue was that we had spoken regularly about sin and apparently we were supposed to be 'affirming' the young people and not 'making them feel bad about themselves'. Yes, we have talked about sin. Yes, we have talked about the devil. Yes, we have strongly encouraged them to go to confession. (No, we have not greatly succeeded in this and if anyone has any suggestions they would be greatly appreciated.) But I think I can put my hand on my heart and say that when we have talked about sin, we have always, invariably, talked about the love and mercy of God who is always waiting for us to come back to him.

John Allen is right about one thing: without the disease there is no need for a cure. Take away sin and God is worse than imaginary: he is irrelevant and unecesssary. Take away sin and the immeasurable gift of reconciliation is tossed aside as meaningless. (Of course it works both ways: take away God, take away the absolute and we immediately begin to drown in a mire of relativism without the compass of right and wrong.) If I do not recognise my own sinfulness and brokenness, I have no need of God, no need of reconciliation. Without recognising this I cannot recognise the immense love which God lavishes on me, God who made me for love and out of an overabundance of love, and who holds me in being at every moment. As the Exsultet proclaims:

Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed.
O wonder of your humble care for us! O love, O charity beyond all telling, to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!
O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ! O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!
O truly blessed night, worthy alone to know the time and hour when Christ rose from the underworld!

Sin is not an imaginary disease, it is a reality which each one of us allows into the world because while we may like to count ourselves as 'OK' or 'better' on the basis that we are not murderers, there are no good sins. It is the root of injustice, poverty, famine, persecution, war, suffering... There are many ways of coming to know God, and I do not think that recognising evil can teach us the existence of abosulte good, but the knowledge of sin and our own sinfulness can help us to know how very much God loves us. 

If we're going to do it anyway, should it be allowed?

Today I read health-related story with a much wider implication than health. Apparently, a cross-party inquiry concludes that we should decriminalise illegal drugs. 

 

Having skimmed through the 150-pages I have to say that the BBC report is rather misleading. Whilst the inquiry talks about decriminalisation, it also calls this depenalisation. It is no so much about letting everyone have all the drugs they want, but recognising that addiction is a disease (albeit one which starts with a choice) and that treatment is a better solution than prison (especially given that there are a lot of drugs circulating in the prison system). I have no problem with this. In fact it seems like a good idea. Where cannabis is concerned, the inquiry recommends that the government monitor Colorado, Washington and Uruguay where it has recently been legalised.

 

The BBC article implies an attitude of "people are going to take drugs anyway, so let's make it safer for them to do so". I don't think this is really what the inquiry's recommendations are getting at, but I will say that the committee's document does contain phrases such as, 'We accept that it is impossible to...' with unsuprising regularity.

 

There seems to be a lot of this around at the moment. From those who talk about 'reality-based theology' to strategies for dealing with drug misuse and abuse which assume that the user will never be able to stop, it would appear that whichever way we turn there are people saying that we should accept something because it's like that.

 

I saw a postcard the other day which proclaimed "I set myself incredibly low standards and aim to fall just short of them" or words to that effect. This is mediocrity in the extreme and I for one am not buying into it. Yes, I have a tendency to sin; no, I cannot conquer it by my own efforts. But we were created good and nothing is impossible for God. A little co-operation with grace goes a long way. I don't think that we should ignore the fact that we are going to fail, to sin, to take drugs, to commit crimes, and we should be prepared, and we should devise and implement means which help us not to, and which help us to pick ourselves up and start again afterwards, but that does not mean we should re-define objective wrongs as acceptable.

 

God sees that we sin, he sent his only Son who suffered and died for our reconciliation, and he continues to love us and is always there when we turn back to him. And we must show this same face of compassionate welcome to others. But he doesn't say, "OK, everyone, 2000 years on you're still sinning, so we're having a new strategy: it no longer matters what you do." If we have this pessimistic attitude of 'it's going to happen anyway' we will never be able to accept the grace to get up again when we fall, never draw any closer to God, never grow in holiness. If we consider the inevitable as acceptable we will end up seeing it as good. Up will be down and black will be white. It will become even harder to choose between right and wrong, good and evil, life and death, if we start calling them by the same name: "legal".

Keeping up with life

The Daily Mail (not my favourite source of healthcare/science, or indeed any other kind of news, but anyway) reports a worrying trend in the number of women taking stimulants in order to cope with life.

Aside from the fact that Ritalin and friends are not licensed for the treatment of ADHD in adults (ie their safety and efficacy in this group of patients is not proven) and that buying medicines on the internet is a stupidly dangerous thing to do there are some other concerning aspects.

The women taking these drugs are obviously experiencing extreme pressure to perform and conform, but more seriously still we can see a tendency to measure people by what they do. We are not ourselves, or what we eat, but what we do. This is massive problem because if you cease to "do" then you also cease to "be". In the case of the students using these drugs, their measure of themselves is how well they perform in exams: I am only as good as my exam results. Others struggle with the demands of juggling work and family life, or long hours and pressure to meet targets. But where is the weakness in admitting that something is hard? There is also, as so often with mental health, a reduction of the human person to the merely biological.

According to the article, women aged 25 to 34 are the most stressed demographic group in the country. No surprises there: we are the group who first experienced student loans, SATs at 7, 11 and 14 years, league tables, contraceptives for all, abortion virtually on demand... We have grown up being encouraged to turn down children in favour of career success, with the advice that giving up work for motherhood makes you a failure, that instant gratification is our right and we are also the generation whose parents lapsed in their religious pratices meaning that many of us have never stepped foot inside a church. We started life with the understanding that, as women, we would have to fight tooth and nail to be recognised as good enough and we have arrived at adulthood finding that most of the work has been done.We have moved on from the time where everything was blamed on our parents not giving us enough attention. Now we are our bodies. We have been formed by secularism and individualism and taught that an expensive pair of shoes can solve all our probelms.

We were promised the world, and the world turned out to not be worth the paper it was written on. Only God's promises are worth trusting, and the majority of this group have no idea what they are.

It's not my fault!

I was somewhat bemused to read yesterday morning that there is a gene for binge drinking. Further inspection suggests that this gene predisposes some people to experience a stronger physiological response than others when drinking alcohol.

Personally, I would say that binge drinking has more to do with sin, freedom and the perennial search for happiness than genetics. Obviously binge drinking can't make us happy, any more than sleeping around can (and there does seem to be a strong correlation between the two). But whether they know God or not, everyone has a hunger for him, a longing for the infinite, and without knowledge of God this leads us to look for happiness in many places where it isn't to be found. Furthermore, I would say that not finding this happiness, not being able to satiate this desire we have (because for so many people they haven't chosen to reject God, it's just that faith has never been suggested to them as an option) we end up trying to fill up our lives with <i>anything</i> that might make us feel something, be it sex, drugs or rock n roll. Of course this self-destructive behaviour leads us into a downward spiral of increasing unhappiness: only in God and his loving Plan can we find happiness. He has made us for Himself and our hearts are restless until they rest in Him, to paraphrase St Augustine.

I am not some sort of neo-luddite who wishes to exclude science and technology from every facet of life. If people have genetic tendencies towards certain behaviours or illnesses then of course identifying that and seeking solutions can be a good thing. But the increasing tendency to identify genes is part of both the "loss of the sense of sin" bemoaned by Pope Pius XII (once we blamed "the system", now we blame our genes) and also constant reduction of the human person to the merely biological. Yes, I have a body, but I am not my body. Neither am I my DNA. And while we continue to place all our hopes on genetics we will never find the answer to those situations which many would agree are a problem.

Weighing risk and benefit: audacious or reckless?

Prescribing is all about weighing up risks and benefits. The weighing up may be explicit (helpfully already carried out by the licensing authorities and NICE guidelines etc.) or implicit (carried out by the doctor at the bedside) and everyone makes some sort of judgement when self-medicating. It is half a millenia since Paracelsus said that the only difference between a medicine and a poison is the dose.

However, it does seem that lately this process of weighing up risk and benefit seems to be going a bit squiffy. I see two contributing factors to this. On the part of the presciber we have the loss of the personal, an absence of a holistic view of the patient leading to, or due to, the emphasis of explicit over implicit. On the side of the patient there is a tendency to subjectivism, giving an additional weight to the inconvenience of the illness rather than the reality of the treatment. Reduced inconvenience in the here and now weigh more on the scale of risk and benefit that the long term effects of a medicine. And it is not just the healthcare professionals who have lost their holistic view: patients too are inclined to reduce everything to the biological. I'll take a tablet and it will all be better.

First up: drug cocktails. I do think that evidence-based medicine is a good thing. We should be using medicines to help people have improved health and quality of life and it is important that everyone has access to the benefits of knowledge regardless of location and how switched on your GP is. From this point of view, guidelines, recommendations and national standards are no bad thing. But sometimes the guidelines seem to come before the patient. If you have a heart attack, for example, you will be prescribed 4 different medicines straight off, no questions asked to reduce your chance of having a second. As someone who was, until recently, taking 6 tablets a day I would say that the mere fact of taking a lot of medicine makes you feel ill. Physically I feel no better since we changed everything round a bit so I could take only 2 tablets a day, but psychologically it makes a world of difference. If this person who had a heart attack had nothing else wrong with them, they've just gone from zero to four, but the chances are that if they're an older person they might have diabetes (at least 1 more medicine), moderate pain of some kind (paracetamol, codeine and two laxatives for the constipating side effects), anxiety (brought on or compounded by the amount of medicines they now have to take)...

If the number of tablets taken is our main concern then 'polypills' could be the answer. Instead of taking 4 different pills after your hypothetical heart attack, you would just get one which contained all 4 medicines. Easier to remember, less psychological impact,  might be a good thing. But there are problems... If you need to increase the dose of one of these medcines (because following your hypothetical heart attack, you have started taking your medicines and your cholesterol is now under control but your blood pressure is still going through the roof) what do you do? If you need to stop taking one of them (becuase the aspirin gives you an ulcer) what happens then? In fact, prescribing has moved away from combination painkillers in recent years. I believe Such polypills, with their one-size-fits-all approach, possibly lead us yet further in reducing the patient to the merely biological

From the patient point of view I would like to cite the example of hormonal contraceptives, a supposed panacaea for women's health problems as well as the terrible disease of fertility. Contrary to popular belief these are medicines. The benefit (I don't need to worry about what I do) comes from such a narrow vision of what a person really is that immediately half of the risks are discounted (STDs, and then all the non-biological ones) as is the fact that this "benefit" can easily spill over into other aspects of life: I can do what I like with respect to behviour which might lead to pregnancy swiftly becomes doing what I like with respect to commitment (and no, I am not saying that the pill causes infidelity). And the short-term benefit of not getting pregnant becomes a long-term risk of not getting pregnant: very few people think about the fact that when they finally do decide that they want a family they might find that they can't. We also shouldn't ignore the reports of extremely serious consequences: death and permanent disability.

Acne is one of those conditions where the risk:benefit calculation seems to be working out a bit strangely. Above is the report of a girl who died after taking the pill for acne, likewise Roaccutane (OK, the report is from newsbeat, but BBC3 recently broadcast a documentary) can cause extremely serious problems (incidently I don't know why Roche say there is no link between the drug and depression as their own SPC for Roaccutane says there is...?!). I realise this is not a black and white situation. If you have severe acne (and if you are seeking such drastic measures presumably your acne is severe) then you might well be depressed (or so fed up that you think you are depressed), believe your life is over, etc and I don't want to belittle that in any way. But I can't help thinking that the choice of acne or death, or acne or permanent untreatable depression, is a no-brainer. So on what basis are we making these decisions?

The majority does not rule

A Bangor University study on assisted suicide reveals that two-thirds of people accept it. Apparently  62,000 people were included, which I first thought was quite a lot. However, it turns out that this was an international survey, and so actually this isn't a very large proportion. "Accept" is also a rather ambiguous word, which makes me wonder what people were actually asked. Careful reading shows that this study was in fact a literature review which brought together the results of studies already carried out. Hmmmmm.

Something which strikes me as interesting is the fact that this report states that a recent review shows that doctors consistently resist assisted suicide. Let's leave off the pity plea and be realistic: "assisted suicide" is an attempt at making "euthanasia" sound better. And the reason doctors are resisting it is hardly surprising, since they are the ones who would be assisting. A person might want to die, their relative might think that they should be allowed to, but if you are the one writing the prescription or supplying the drugs then you are not assisting, you are enabling.

Researchers apparently also said that 'headlines tended to feature professional arguments against celebrity campaigners, with ordinary people "less clearly represented".' When they speak of professional arguments, do they mean that they come from professional arguers (eg. Chris Moyles...I don't know his views on euthanasia but I'm prepared to bet he'd have an arguement about it, Richard Dawkins, possibly one of the most argumentative men on the planet, or anyone's youngest brother providing the person they are arguing with is an older sibling), or medical professionals. Because if it is the latter than surely this puts 'celebrity campaigners' on a level with 'ordinary people'. As Blessed John Henry Newman said:

All bow down before wealth. Wealth is that to which the multitude of men pay an instinctive homage. They measure happiness by wealth; and by wealth they measure respectability... It is a homage resulting from a profound faith... that with wealth he may do all things. Wealth is one idol of the day and notoriety is a second... Notoriety, or the making of a noise in the world -- it may be called 'newspaper fame' -- has come to be considered a great good in itself, and a ground of veneration.

One commentator said, 'The medical profession needs to recognise and have respect for this majority view even if we don't agree with it.' And a palliative care expert (who I suspect may have been quoted somewhat out of context, on the basis that palliative care is all about not walking away) said that doctors must 'never walk away from patients'. All this makes me want to label the article with a big flashing sign saying !RELATIVISM ALERT! Combining these two comments makes it sound as if doctors are neglecting their duties by not allowing the majority (otherwise known as 0.0006% of the world's population) to dictate how they do their jobs. Even if 99% of the world's population were in favour of euthanasia, it wouldn't change the fact that helping your patient to die with dignity has a lot to do with helping your patient to live with dignity and nothing to do with ending their life prematurely. It also would not affect the intrinsic wrong of killing. So-called "assisted suicide" is the final step in the wrong understanding and use of freedom. Funnily enough it's the same as the first step (when Eve took the apple): I am free and therefore I have the right to choose...so I choose death. I refuse to accept my limitations that I am a creature and am finite. I reject God. I want to be God without God.

Who takes responsibility for this guesswork?

Over at the Hermeneutic of Continuity, Fr Tim Finigan mentioned (and I believe I am supposed to touch my forelock to him, but am new at this whole blogging thing so I am prepared to stand corrected) the case of Adrian Smith who was demoted from a managerial position for posting comments on facebook about same-sex marriage taken place in churches. I went and found the article in the Manchester Evening News because surely for such measures to be taken against him, citing gross misconduct, he must have written something actually bigoted (rather than just expressing an opinion, which is what is taken for bigotry these days) or incited people to burn down churches where same-sex marriages are performed or something equally extreme.

In fact, no.

Then I thought that maybe this is part of the recent spate of facebook/twitter crimes, by which an individual writes something more or less offensive (often whilst drunk) and gets sent to jail for it. I heard of a newly qualified teacher who didn't get the job he applied for because the governors saw pictures on facebook of him acting stupidly whilst drunk and decided that he didn't have the necessary character for forming young hearts and minds. People need to realise that twitter is public (and should be avoided when drunk) and that there is nothing private on the internet, including facebook. And, I think, the law needs to take account of modern means of communication which are changing much faster than the law ever can. Did Mr Smith, then, say something which he thought he was just saying to his nearest and dearest but turned out to be public?

In fact, no.

Mr Smith's 'crime' (bearing in mind that he is not being prosecuted, just sanctioned) turns out to be breach of his employer's code of conduct which, according to the MEN, states that employees must not "expressing religious or political views which may upset co-workers".

I think that warrants closer inspection...

Firstly, if you express views which may upset co-workers as long as they're not religious or political then that's fine. So if you were to express "Darcey's earrings are way too big but at least she's a better judge than Arlene was", or "I hope that Saddam rots in hell", "I am saddened and disappointed by the content of JK Rowling's new book. She may not agree but I think as a well known children's author she has a certain responsibilitiy" or even "I can't believe anyone thinks (insert name of celebrity) is good looking. He/she looks like they've been hit by a bus, and is also completely devoid of talent" all those are also fine. However, if you say "I don't see how Nick Clegg in conscience can remain head of the Lib Dems seeing as how he did a U-turn on tuition fees which has always been one of their manifesto promises," or "The government don't have a mandate for same-sex marriage and I can't help thinking that the furore is a cover-up to distract us from the failing economy, much like the issue of the Falklands in Argentina" that is not OK. And secondly, I feel there is a problem with the wording "may upset co-workers". It doesn't matter if no-one is actually upset by your religious or political views, just as long as they might be. But in this case, who decides? We're back to people being told that they can't wear a cross because someone "might" be offended. If no-one is offended, what is the basis for thinking they might be. And is there a difference if I say "I think abortion is wrong" and am a Catholic or if I say it and am an atheist. The statement equally "might" offend someone who has had an abortion but only in one case could it be argued to be a religious view.

It would seem that Adrian Smith has made two mistakes. Firstly, signing up to work for a company with such a ridiculous code of conduct and secondly using facebook whilst Christian.

A lack of logic is a dangerous thing

One of my cousins sent me a link the other day to a video of a guy defending same-sex marriage. He was calm, eloquent and believed in his cause. And dangerously convincing. No doubt using words like "dangerously convinving" make me a homophobic bigot, but what I'm actually talking about is logic, or a total lack thereof.

The problem is this: no-one is taught logic anymore and therefore very few people can recognise when the flaws in an opponent's argument have nothing to do with the point at stake. These days, hardly anyone bothers to put together an argument which has any more content than maligning the opposition. This guy talks about logic, talks as if he's being logical, attacks "so-called homophobic logic" and you have to really pay attention to see where his logic totally falls apart and reveals itself to be a big pile of...fallacies.

When I clicked on this link, the first thing that happened was that I was asked to respond to the following statement: "I believe that everyone should be treated equally regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation". There is a long-standing, regularly exploited ambiguity of the words equal and same. For example, I believe that men and women were created equal in dignity, but men and women are obviously not the same, whether on a biological, psychological or spiritual level we are clearly different. But when people start talking about gender equality they usually mean that everyone is the same. But "treating people equally" doesn't mean "treating everyone the same" and everyone being equal and treating everyone equally and treating everyone the same are three different things. If they were the same, then I should give money to everyone who asks me for it, whether they need the money for medicines or illegal drugs. I should carry out brain surgery on two people who have fallen down some stairs and injured their head even though one of them is a 92 year-old whose blood pressure medication made her dizzy and the other is 20 and was drunk. Equality comes in ensuring that both get the treatment with the best risk-benefit ratio, giving them the best prospect of recovery. How that is decided, and who decides it, is another issue. As for sexual orientation, everyone is called to live chastity, and for the record that is not something which is lived on a purely physical level. If I don't have a boyfriend, but have sexual fantasies about a good-looking guy I saw on the bus, am I chaste? If I am married and do the same, am I chaste? No: "sexual pleasure is morally disordered when sought for itself, isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes" (CCC 2351) whether in the mind, the heart or the act.

Returning to the website, I might easily agree with the equality statement, but then I could well be left questioning myself over why, in that case, I don't agree with same-sex marriage (it being obviously discrimination, myself an unknowing homophobic bigot). I might even end up deciding that as I'm not a bigot and I am in favour of equality I therefore had better start supporting same-sex marriage because it's totally in line with my priniciples. You see...dangerous, and the guy hasn't even started talking yet.

Sometimes there are no shades of grey

A couple of weeks ago pro-abortion campaigners delivered 600 coathangers to the Department of Health in protest at Jeremy Hunt's supposedly pro-life views. Their concern is that if the abortion limit is reduced (not that anyone seems to have plans to do so) that abortion will become "illegal and unsafe".

As a young adult, I had rather contradictory views on abortion. I was convinced that the unborn child was a person, and arguments at what point exactly it became a person seemed deeply flawed to me. However, I also believed that it was inevitable that women would have abortions and therefore it was better for them to have legal access to abortion so that they didn't die in back-street abortions. In short, I subscribed to the 600 coathanger view.

I have long since changed my mind about this. I realised that if the unborn child was a person (and furthermore, if we cannot say definitively that it is not) then there can be no justification for abortion. The "people will do it anyway so lets make it legal" argument has long been applied from everything from prostitution to speeding and doesn't hold water: if something is objectively wrong then making it legal doesn't make it objectively right.

After reading about the coathanger delivery I started thinking about it again, and I realised that what really worries me is what it is that drives women to seek an abortion at all costs. Things have changed since the Abortion Act was first introduced. Single mothers, although obviously they have extremely difficult lives, are not ostracised from society. And if she really doesn't want to or can't look after a baby, then there are hundreds of couples out there going through IVF and surrogacy who do want to have a child.

I was reading a friend's column in El Colombiano yesterday, in which she explains that being pro-life isn't just about mindlessly shouting about something you disagree with, but that it is important to inform your conscience about why abortion is wrong. I then read the comments section. I try not to do this, it generally annoys me. What I found was that whilst the comments where anti-abortion, quite a lot of them said things like "there's no need for abortions in this day and age because we have contraceptives". (That is something that I still struggle with. I am 100% with the Magisterium on this, but it has been so well drummed into me throughout school and university here in the "geopolitical epicentre of the culture of death" that contraceptivees are the solution to all the world's evils that often it is the first answer to pop into my head. I choose to reject this answer, but it is still there.)

What we have lost here is love. Love of a mother for a child is surely the most fundamental kind, and if a mother can argue that her child is not a child, or puts her right to what she considers life over his or hers then we have lost something fundamental. And for those women who have abortions because they are desperate and struggling and genuinely see it as the only solution, well, they are also called to make a great act of love, and so are the rest of us, to support them (practically, spiritually, psychologically) in that love. And if, horrifyingly, a child has been conceived in rape then that woman is also a mother and she too is called to make a sacrificial act of love. Acts of love are not easy. We must die to ourselves, say no to our own comfort, our own plans, in order to love. And "dying to ourselves" is not just a nice turn of phrase: Jesus really died on the cross out of love. And that is the measure for which we must strive.

Doctor What?

I am a big fan of Doctor Who. I watched it (and hid behind the sofa from it) and I remember being told that a particularly scary alien had been made by school children in their classroom. I didn't buy that: said alien was clearly going to come and get us all.

Although I watch Doctor Who, if I had children of my own I wouldn't let them watch it, because of the obvious agenda which has been present since its reincarnation with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor, that is, the normalisation of same-sex relationships. I feel this is particularly relevant now with the current move towards the legalisation of same-sex marriage (despite the fact that the government has no mandate for this, but don't get me started). OK, so we all know that the BBC has a very liberal ethos, but it worries me that such ideas (not to mention the level of sexual innuendo) are being blatantly targeted towards children.

In the episode The Doctor Dances the Doctor (Eccleston) tells his assistant Rose that humans from the 51st century (ie. the pansexual Captain Jack) are more "flexible". The implication is clear, that we mere 21st century beings are limited in our understanding of human sexuality. By the 51st century we have come to realise that everyone can sleep with whomsoever they wish...be they man, woman, Ood, Time Lord or headless monk...and especially if they're Captain Jack. If there was ever an example of a person who sought, and failed to find, fulfilment in the concupiscences Captain Jack is that man.

In the recent episode A Town Called Mercy the Doctor asks the town preacher if he can borrow his horse. The preacher tells the Doctor that the horse is called Joshua, meaning deliverer. The Doctor replies that he speaks horse, "His name's Susan and he wants you to respect his life choices". Yes, that's right, gender is a choice. LGBT orientation is so natural that its even found in animals.

I had hoped that when Russell T Davies (whose writing frequently centres on sexuality - his series Queer as Folk portrayed a gay sexually active 15 year old - see Wikipedia for his complete works) left the series that this element would disappear. However, it was obviously not to be. Whilst A Town Called Mercy contains an interesting exploration of revenge, mercy and reconciliation, it also clearly portrays the aforementioned idea that we can choose our gender, as well as touching on the assertion that it is fear which leads to prejudice, hatred and violence, and the illogical inverse that all prejudice (or perceieved prejudice) stems from fear. How often have we recently heard gay-rights activists claiming that Christians are afraid of homosexuality?

If I am afraid of anything it is that the normalisation and acceptance of intrinsic wrongs lead to the perception that they are objective goods and that the confusion of freedom with licenciousness will continue to reinforce the dictatorship of relativism and the culture of death. Which is why I write with one eye on the screen, and the other firmly firmly fixed on a crucifix.

Harm reduction: Relativism in action?

Many of our healthcare strategies are based on harm reduction. We use methadone to treat drug addiction, substituting long-acting methadone for short-acting heroin. Many people live stable lives on methadone, but very few of them manage to get off the methadone. We have simply substituted one addiction for another, but we accept this because it reduces crime and anti-social behaviour. It does have some benefit for the individual as well, they are not committing crime or anti-social behaviour, but the benefit to society as a whole is much greater than the benefit to the person in question. They are still an addict; their dealer is now the government.

Pharmacies provide needle exchange services. Clean needles and sharps bins are given to drug users and dirty needles can be exposed of. Users do not need to share or reuse needles and therefore they have a reduced risk of contracting blood-borne diseases and other infections, using drugs is made safer. The NHS spends less money treating them and there is a clear public health benefit. But the individual is still an addict.

These strategies are not a total waste of time, and do bring some other benefits to users in terms of physical health. They are brought into contact with a health care professional whom they see regularly and/or frequently, and thus are enabled them to access other medical services. The problem is that that both these strategies are based on the premise that people will always take drugs (being intrinsically bad), an assumption that the person will not and is not able to change, and the reduction of the person to their body. We think we are choosing a lesser evil, but actually we are settling for a lesser good.

We were created good, and whilst are capable of misusing our freedom and choosing the bad, we are also capable of exercising that freedom in the way that it was intended and choosing the good. Choosing between good and bad is not the best use of our freedom: even a lab rat is capable of doing the same. The proper use of our freedom is choosing between good and better. Obviously our ability to exercise our freedom is serverely impaired by behaviour such as drug misuse and abuse, but it is not gone.

Reduction of the person to the physical is also seen in the way we attempt to address the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy: again, on the basis of harm reduction we throw contraceptives at the problem. Once again it fails to address the root of the problem which is a lack of understanding of what a person really is. Made in the image and likeness of God, we have an inherent dignity, a dignity further raised by the incarnation: God became man. The Lord Jesus worked with human hands, thought with a human mind, acted by human choice and loved with a human heart (GS 22). 

We have a body but we are not our bodies. We also have a soul and a spirit, and in the hierarchy of body, soul and spirit, the body is the least. We are capable of entering into relationships on more than a merely physical level. Understanding of this dignity leads to respect of self and others, a better basis for decision making and surely a change in the way we choose to behave. Quick-fix solutions of short-term harm-reduction are not the answer to problems which come from a disordered desire for instant gratification on a physical (and psychological) level and a wrong undestanding of the human person. They are much easier to measure which is good for government statisticians, but that is a topic for another day.