Review by Derek Brown, The Gospel Coalition
Robert Reilly. Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2014. 250 pp. $22.95.
With the recent launch of Evangelicals for Marriage Equality, Robert Reilly’s latest work, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything, could not be more relevant to Christians who desire to think carefully about the so-called gay marriage debate.
Although Reilly wouldn’t locate himself within the evangelical tradition—he is a Catholic scholar and apologist—he has much to offer evangelicals who sense a deep contradiction between the order of creation and homosexual acts, or who are still undecided over the question of same-sex “marriage.”
Two Views of Reality: Aristotle vs. Rousseau
Reilly’s basic premise is simple. At bottom in the debate over same-sex “marriage” are two opposing views of reality. On one side you have a vision of reality where nature “is teleologically ordered to ends that inhere in their essence and make them what they are” (xi). On the other is the view that things in themselves do not have a “teleologically ordered” purpose but rather can be made what they are by an act of the will. Thus, as Reilly astutely observes, the same-sex “marriage” debate is about more than just marriage. “Since the meaning of our lives is dependent upon the Nature of reality, it too hangs in the balance” (xii). The acceptance of homosexual “marriage,” then, is not necessarily the intellectual and moral progression of an enlightened society; it has the potential to turn us against reality and the nature of our existence as humans.