The other day I dismissed this puff piece in the NY Times about Robert George, the “big thinker” of the Christian right. Today Andrew Sullivan has more to say about George’s “new” natural law approach to homosexuality, which seems awfully similar to the old “it’s gross” approach to homosexuality:

On marriage, it seems to me that George is right about something: heterosexual intercourse within marriage that begets children is a vital, sacred, wondrous and central fact of human life. I’ve never doubted that. I’ve never even argued that the sacrament of matrimony in Catholic tradition could be anything but heterosexual. Where I differ most from George is how one approaches the diversity of nature around this central – and largely civil – human institution.

George is selectively flexible on this (for an online discussion, see Jon Rowe’s post here). He can see oral sex, for example, as okay even if it is not procreative, as long as it is somehow integrated into the procreative, i.e. foreplay. He is even prepared to endorse the sex lives of the infertile or post-menopausal, although both groups obviously have no natural way to procreate by sex. Why? Because they are engaging in something he calls “procreative in form,” as long as he is on top and rubber-free. If it looks like heterosexual procreation, even if it actually isn’t, it’s kosher. Maybe if a man and a man had sex with one dressed as a woman and retained rigid gender roles, they might squeak through George’s “procreative in form” loophole. But one suspects the loophole is there not to express compassion for the straight but to retain an iron-clad exclusion for the gay.

If the whole thing sounds like convenient sophistry to you, you’re not alone.

In fact, it is very hard to see what George’s argument means unless it can be reduced to the idea that sex for the infertile is moral merely because they are heterosexual, and that sex and love for homosexuals is immoral merely because they are homosexuals. So sexual orientation is the critical category here, not procreation or nature as it is actually found, and the result is to retain a stigma and legal discrimination against homosexuals – simply because they are what they are.

Well yes, that’s what all arguments against homosexuality boil down to. It’s wrong…because it’s wrong. This is why the argument against gay marriage, and gay rights in general, is ultimately a losing argument. And thank Robert George’s God for that.