I am a homophobe. Why? An inner voice screams — after all, you respect those who are different, and more than that, you like some of them, just as you like some heterosexuals, and it has nothing to do with sexual orientation.
I treat you as my equals — indeed, sometimes I consider you more intelligent, occasionally better people than myself — and yet I want you to remain a minority, a decisive minority.
And for two reasons. First: somebody has to conceive, bear, and raise children, and no one will tell me that any arrangement can be better for a little one than a family with a mom and a dad. Biologically, nothing can replace the closeness of a mother's breast for a small child, and a father — as a model of masculinity for a son, or a mirror for a little girl's emerging femininity — has no compensating substitutes either. I know this from my own experience — I grew up among women, without a father, and my grandfather died too early to take me fishing, show me how to fix a bicycle, or paint a room. I have worked through some of those deficits — a few, I know, too late — and the rest have stayed with me to this day, and I have had to accept them :-)
The second reason is prosaic: the final stretch of a gay person's life is sad, often dramatic, and life itself is incomparably harder — not counting the ease of getting along with a partner, since they are, after all, the same sex :-). On a daily basis, one must contend with one's own otherness, often relocating to a different city or even a different country.
That is why I can understand your cry, your dissent, your rebellion, your desperate trying on of shoes that are not your own to see if they might be more comfortable and look nicer. The thing is, when a child puts on their mother's shoes for fun, the worst that happens is a tumble. But if a gay man decides he wants to be a father, there is a very good chance he will trip up the child — and that one is for keeps. That is the difference. As parents, we pass on patterns through our behavior — whether we want to or not. It is only a matter of time before the child notices the falsehood — the dissonance between what is said to them and what is actually going on. What will grow out of such a child, even with daddies who severely restrain their romantic expression? A good-enough mother or father? In the best case, someone with a fear of intimacy, having never witnessed it between the adults around them. From all of the above follows my desire to maintain the status quo of the homosexual minority precisely as a minority — one that has existed, exists, and will always exist in society as the result of individual choice, sometimes of fate.
It is also worth stating clearly that the question of orientation is not a binary, zero-or-one matter. Between pure heterosexuality and pure homosexuality there are at least three intermediate degrees — from which I infer that without all this media agitation, most of today's gay men could have had a wife and children! It would have been easier for them, and they would also have been useful to society on the most fundamental level. One would like to shout: keep it down at this funeral! Stop, enough! But you cannot, because then you come across as a homophobe! And if, as a parent, I were to fight to keep a gay person from teaching my child? I would be branded some dreadful obscurantist. Because I truly believe that the teacher-student relationship is not only about transmitting knowledge — it is in large part about forming a young person, and much happens between the words. Why do we address a teacher as Professor in school? Because for the student, they are meant to be a PERSONALITY!!! Beyond knowledge, they teach one's relationship with the world and with oneself. In the old days, such a bond was called Master and pupil, not without reason, for young apprentices absorbed even the way their guru walked. To this day, despite several offers to switch to a first-name basis, I cannot address my academic supervisor as anything other than Professor. And with such convictions, should I agree to a homosexual teacher for my future grandchildren?!
And besides all that, one would like to shout, after Fredro: Know your proportions, my good sir!
I know that the sphere of sex generates excitement — advertising exploits it on a massive scale. Yet damn it, the problems related to homosexual orientation concern 2 percent of humanity — as the share that has been permanently touched by and tasted it. Yet in opinion media, these issues occupy many times more space. Especially in recent days. You can smell it from a mile away — some sort of artificial offensive whose intensity shatters the real proportions of those two percent. And for God's sake, let us not treat sexual orientation as a criterion for social advancement. What else was the candidacy for president of the Left party built on?! It just so happens that gay people, as a group, tend to be intelligent, often artists, doctors — the elite. That is why the manipulation is harder to detect. And yet, just two weeks ago, calling Kaczynski an old pederast — albeit one with a cat — was not yet passe...
Everything has its time and place, said the sage Kohelet, and sexuality is no exception. You do not need refined taste to know that certain things simply are not appropriate in the street, others not in church or the theater, and so on. The sphere of intimacy belongs in the bedroom; we tolerate public kissing among teenagers, and even then, within limits :-) Perhaps it would be worth reconsidering your — the word relationship sounds weak in this context, but I cannot find a better one — attitude toward your parades, which in us, the normal ones — and I will remind you, there are 98 percent of us — often provoke indignation? Just as my freedom ends where yours begins, so where mine begins, yours ends. It works both ways. Incidentally, you are capable of so beautifully combining the absence of a real family with total professional dedication to science, art, work, often religion. Sublimation is a word that many a person must fill with personal meaning — and beautiful things can emerge when they do. I know this, because several of you are my friends.
And one more thing: the entire recent media affair in Poland stems from the Church's distinction between the sin and the sinner. It is worth finally drawing this line clearly and explicitly: LGBT encompasses both people and an ideology. So let us love the people — and say NO to the ideology.
