Robert Reilly picks up on something I'm ashamed not to have noticed in Gen. Pace's recent allegedly homophobic remarks. The general didn't single out homosexuals.
He said that he objects to homosexual acts "just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with someone else’s wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not — we prosecute that kind of immoral behavior between members of the armed forces."
Which means once again through media sleight-of-hand our attention was misdirected:
the real crime of General Pace is that he is in favor of chastity. A Washington Post editorial chastised General Pace for "his public expressions of intolerance on the men and women he commands." Yet, General Pace had expressed himself only on the immoral nature of acts against chastity, not persons.
Which is a fine, Aristotelian thing to do, as Reilly explains, chastity being the first principle of politics properly understood. He then proceeds to as succinct an explanation as I've seen for the relationship between equality and Truth --and why relativism, far from being a mere wink wink at other people's foibles, is incompatible in the long run with equality and freedom. Why? Because equality depends on the idea that there is one truth and everyone is held up to and judged by the same standard.
one’s own truth is not the truth, but simply a preference, usually based upon a disordered appetite. The current argument goes that almost any preference (for homosexual marriages, partial-birth abortion, euthanasia or pornography) must be tolerated because of the principle of equality. "Whatever works" for one person may not for another, but who’s to say what is morally superior or inferior?
However, equality is a moral principle that precedes and makes tolerance possible, not the other way around. Unless tolerance is practiced within this principle, tolerance completely undermines it by reducing equality itself to simply another preference. If the United States is based upon a preference rather than the truth, it will soon disappear. How would you like to die for a preference? Would you have the nerve of asking our Marines to?
