The New York Post offers a muck-raking-style preview of former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey's upcoming memoir focusing on the most disgusting of his transgressions, but underneath is a real tale of tragedy that exposes the complexity behind the problem of homosexuality and our society's inability to condemn it. The article starts with:
Jim McGreevey shockingly admits that before he became governor of New Jersey, he'd have anonymous gay sex at Garden State highway rest stops."All I knew was that my behavior was getting crazier and crazier," McGreevey says of his torrid truck-stop trysts in an upcoming book that details his tortured life of lies and sexual repression.
Shocking and sickening, no doubt, but sadly such behavior appears to be pretty common among gay men. The real tragedy of Mr. McGreevey's life is revealed later. Unfortunately the Post put the article behind their subscription wall (probably because of all the hits it was getting from Drudge) so let's turn to the North Jersey Media Group for more about Jim McGreevey's struggle.
What the book passages do describe is McGreevey's struggle with his own homosexuality and his efforts to be a straight man: staring at Playboy centerfolds, praying, reading psychology texts, frequenting go-go bars and becoming "as avid a womanizer as anybody else on the New Jersey political scene.""I knew I would have to lie for the rest of my life -- and I knew I was capable of it," McGreevey wrote. "The knowledge gave me a feeling of terrible power.
This sort of stuggle reveals not only the tragedy of homosexuality, but also the profound weakness of our modern culture. Notice that McGreevey's only approach for dealing with his perversion is to mask his wrongful lusts with yet more evil. (Excluding the ambiguous mention of "prayer"; it's unlikely that any meaningful prayer took place considering the other avenues of coping he busied himself pursuing.)
Homosexuality is a terrible affliction that appears to be closely linked to childhood sexual abuse, and reading about the trauma faced by individuals like Jim McGreevey it's impossible not to be sympathetic to their plight. The repulsion most Christians feel towards homosexuality stems from the left's insistance that homosexuality is a "life choice" rather than a serious and tragic disease that ruins the mental and physical health of millions of Americans. Alcoholism is not dismissed as a legitimate lifestyle, and perhaps homosexuality should be considered similarly; not made illegal, because such banning would be ineffectual, but socially condemned and usefully treated. (Unfortunately, from what I've read of alcohol addiction treatments, most addicts end up merely transferring their addiction to other substances, such as cigarettes.)
Unfortunately, I don't think that our culture is morally equipped to deal with homosexuality. We aren't prepared to significantly condemn the heterosexual "womanizing" that apparently pervades the New Jersey political scene, so how can society legitimately resist homosexual promiscuity? The truth is that sexual addictions of all sorts can only be effectually treated if the addict is willing to recognize that sex itself can only rightly exist within a proper moral framework: marriage between a man and a woman. A homosexual trying to "cure" himself by oogling women is like an alcoholic trying to switch to cigarettes -- what's the point?
Alas, the boat has sailed, and almost no politician of any flavor is willing to set a high bar. The only moral choices are marriage or celibacy. Period. Do we have to mock such a moral standard just because so many people have already failed to meet it? Is it so hard for people to admit their wrongs that our society must define away morality altogether? We're reaping the consequences of this decision, and homosexuality is just one aspect of the much larger tragedy of general sexual immorality.
