The origins of the “gay marriage” nonsense
My reading this week has been historian Tom Holland’s Dominion: the making of the Western mindThere on p. I came across this gem - the original notion of “gay marriage”:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Holland
Yet even as psychiatry served to challenge Christian assumptions, so also did it fortify them. Krafft-Ebing’s conclusions were not nearly as clinical as either his critics or his admirers cared to think. Raised a Catholic, he took for granted the primacy of the Christian model of marriage. The great labour of the Church in fashioning and upholding monogamy as a lifelong institution was one that he deeply valued. ‘Christianity raised the union of the sexes to a sublime position by making woman socially the equal of man and by elevating the bond of love to a moral and religious institution. It was not despite believing this, but because of it, that Krafft-Ebing, by the end of his career, had come to believe that sodomy should be decriminalised. Homosexuals, he declared, might be no less familiar with ‘the noblest inspirations of the heart’ than any married couple. Huge numbers of them, inspired by his researches, wrote to him, sharing their most intimate yearnings and secrets. It was on the basis of this correspondence that Krafft-Ebing was able to arrive at a paradoxical conclusion. The sexual practice condemned by the Church as sodomy was perfectly compatible with the ideal that he saw as Christianity’s great contribution to civilisation: lifelong monogamy. Homosexuality, as defined by the first scientist ever to attempt a detailed categorisation of it, constituted the seamless union of Christian sin with Christian love.
