The fix is in?

Bush administration pressure on conservatives to accept the nomination of Massachusetts Governor Paul Cellucci to serve as our ambassador to Canada is a perfect example of the great danger we face in the new administration — the temptation to accept the implicit repudiation of our most fundamental goals for the sake of short term partisan advantage. If moral conservatives are going to draw the line at anything the Bush administration might do, it will be this terrible appointment.

Governor Cellucci has been an uncompromising advocate of the radical homosexual agenda in Massachusetts. I will spare you the details of his tireless — and publicly defiant — work for this cause, but you can learn all you wish and more about it by visiting the web site of the Parents Rights Coalition. Suffice it to say that Cellucci has used his office enthusiastically to provide government funding and encouragement of compulsory homosexual recruitment sessions for the public school children of Massachusetts.

I want to focus today not on the litany of the Governor’s outrageous actions, but on the deeper reasons that advocacy of the homosexual rights agenda is disqualifying for any prospective holder of high public office. It is important to review this argument so that we will remember that we are simply not free to follow President Bush in such acts of so-called (and misnamed) “tolerance” unless we are willing to recognize them for what they are — the direct repudiation of our most important principles.

The movement to achieve public acceptance of the radical homosexual agenda is the most powerful attempt today to prepare the nation to acquiesce in the abandonment of any notion of right and wrong. I believe that in important respects it has replaced the pro-abortion movement as the most dangerous moral temptation we face. Those of us who are keenly aware of the ongoing moral and physical cost of abortion may not always notice it, but we have actually won the moral argument about abortion. The advocates and practitioners of abortion in America today carry on in full knowledge that what they are doing is wicked and violates fundamental principles of American life and belief — they simply insist that they have the power and will to do this wrong and will not stop. They have, for the most part, ceased the missionary crusade to convince the rest of us to call abortion a good thing. This is progress.

Compare this situation to the dispute over the homosexual agenda. Here, we are still being told we have a positive obligation to acknowledge moral parity between the homosexual “lifestyle” and the marriage-based, two-parent family. Those who actually defend the view that these two very different visions of the nature and purpose of human sexuality differ as right from wrong are stigmatized as bigots, no better than the racists who form judgments of human moral worth on the false basis of skin color.

Respect for the family flows from understanding that the family is the school of personhood — the natural and divinely ordained basis of our most formative attempts to discern the will of God and our responsibilities to other human beings. Our experience in the family reveals to us the relations of pleasure to virtue, of private good to common good and of liberty to responsibility, that constitute the unchangeable structure of any well ordered and morally fruitful human life. Human reason can discern that God’s plan for family and procreation is a plan for the formation of morally excellent human beings and that the subordination of sexual pleasure to the higher goods of fidelity, communion and responsibility is a relation organic to human nature itself.

For these reasons, the assault on the family by agents of the homosexual agenda is not simply the attempt to raise one particular sin to parity with one particular form of virtue. It is the embodiment of the desire to kill in the nest the very possibility of the formation of young people who can distinguish between virtue and vice, responsibility and licentiousness. The dispute over the radical homosexual agenda — the fight about a redefinition of our understanding of human sexuality — is also, more fundamentally, about whether we are going to continue to be a people capable of making principled moral judgments at all. If it is “intolerant” to refuse to re-order our common life on the licentious principle of doing whatever we want in sexual matters, it will soon be considered equally “intolerant” to order our common life on the basis of any moral principles whatsoever

If these are the stakes, we should look very carefully at what public figures say and do on the issue of sexual responsibility and sexual conduct. We should apply such scrutiny particularly to those who offer themselves as leaders of the moral conservative cause, or with whom that cause is tempted to align itself. For if we are not careful, we will find ourselves committed to political alliances and strategies that — whether in the name of “tolerance” or of “pragmatism” or of whatever other buzzword is used — represent the abandonment of our resolve that there is no compromise of principle possible on the question of the family.

As with abortion, so with the homosexual agenda, much intermediate progress may be possible and many alliances with those who see only part of the truth may be advisable. But we must always distinguish with clarity and firmness between actions and words that seek only part of our goal and actions and words that compromise our goal by falsely conceding somehow that our principles are only partly true. The unborn are wholly innocent and abortion is wholly wrong — even if we must proceed against this evil, at times, in partial steps. Human sexuality is wholly ordered to the marriage-based, two-parent family, and “alternate” forms of human sexual relations have precisely no claim to share in the dignity we accord to the family — even if we must at times acknowledge the weakness of the flesh and the great difficulty of always living up to the ideal of family life.

By anything approaching this standard, Governor Cellucci’s appointment to office by the Bush administration is utterly perverse. Then-Governor Bush summed up his position on the homosexual agenda in the presidential debate by saying that, “I’m a tolerant man. I just happen to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.” Now that he is President, Mr. Bush needs to understand that he may not “tolerate” in his administration high officials who say and do things that legitimize the misunderstanding of human sexuality that puts personal, individual, selfish and irresponsible gratification at its center. He may not “tolerate” those who remain willing allies of the effort to stigmatize the moral convictions of people of faith on these issues, dismissing as ill-tempered bigots those who wish to stand up for the true principles of human dignity. He cannot “tolerate” in his appointees those who would, as Governor Cellucci has, violate our First Amendment right to freely speak the truths of conscience.

Several weeks ago, the world watched in puzzlement as President Bush discovered that his promise to aggressively curb carbon dioxide emissions was inconsistent with his goal of increasing the energy supplies that are the life-blood of free and flourishing economies. The Cellucci appointment presents a similar picture — the president has apparently been resting in the serene confidence that he can continue to be so tolerant of the family’s ideological enemies as to appoint them to represent this nation before one of the great nations of the earth, and yet still have an administration that “just happens to believe that marriage is between a man and a woman.” I suppose his administration may just happen to have a majority of officials who hold this quaint opinion, but it certainly will not be capable of making to the world a coherent proposal about the extremely important issues of moral judgment and conscience that are necessary for the proper defense of the family.

Due to pressure from the White House, an expedited Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee confirmation hearing on the Cellucci nomination was held on Wednesday. As it became clear that opposition to the nomination was gathering strength, immediate votes in the full committee and full Senate were likely to be scheduled with little or no advance notice, suggesting strongly that the fix was in. By the time you read this, Ambassador “Fistgate” Cellucci may well be on his way to Canada.

As the controversy over Governor Cellucci breaks into public view, it is crucial that principled defenders of the family fight hard to make their case as strongly as possible. We absolutely should not reserve our fire until we believe we have a good chance of stopping the nomination. By contending against bad policy and bad appointments with determination and vigor, even when we cannot necessarily carry the day, we demonstrate to ourselves, our sometimes weak allies and our opponents that we will defend principle consistently and tirelessly. By fighting even the losing battles well, we ensure that the Machiavellian calculations of our opponents will have to include paying the price of struggle with decent Americans every step of the way. They would like nothing better than for us to reserve our moral zeal for those cases we are sure to win. This leaves all the close battles to them.

If moral conservative outrage does not save President Bush from this offensive blunder, the new Ambassador to Canada may still serve some good purpose after all. His presence in the Bush administration would be an ongoing rebuke to any moral conservatives who “just happen to believe” that they can blindly trust this administration’s judgment on the most important matters of public policy. If we relax our vigilance, anything is possible.