The Catholic theologian James Alison and others have frequently made the point that there are many parallels between left -handedness and homosexuality. Both occur entirely naturally in a small but significant minority of people, both are entirely non-pathological - and both have historically been treated with suspicion and condemnation, including condemnation in the name of religion. The world has moved on from branding left-handedness as sinister, and no longer says to people who are naturally left-handed that "It's OK to be left-handed, just don't write left - handed": but that's an exact counterpart of what the Catholic Church says to its gay and lesbian Catholics: "It's not a sin to be gay, but it is a grave sin to do gay".
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| left and right handed scissors |
Think of it this way. There is a distinction between left-handedness and the act of writing left-handedly. For most of us the distinction remains exactly that, and has no moral consequences. We would understand that a left-handed person forced to write right-handedly owing, say, to having their left arm in a plaster cast, or a right-handed person forced to write left-handedly for analogous reasons, would, with some difficulty, be able to learn to do so. These people would in some sense be acting “contra natura”. But the use of the hand appropriate to their handedness would be entirely unremarkable, and if we used words to describe it at all, they would be words like “typical” or “natural”. Now, imagine that, involved in a Catholic discussion, you find yourself addressing a left-handed person. You say: “Any left-handed writing you do is intrinsically wrong; and in fact the inclination we call left-handedness must be considered objectively disordered.” The only justification for using the distinctions in this way is if you have received, from quite other sources, the sure knowledge that right-handedness is normative to the human condition, anything else being some sort of defect from that norm, and yet you don’t want entirely to condemn the person who has a more or less strong tendency to left-handed writing.
Left-handedness would seem to be irrelevant to modern political discussion, but this symmetry between it and homoerotic orientation has suddenly and unexpectedly become an entertaining sideshow in marriage politics, New Hampshire.
