The pope of Princeton

The underlying problem with prohibiting homosexual acts, then, is not that the state is using the law to enforce private morality. It is that the law is based on the mistaken view that homosexuality is immoral.

– Peter Singer

Having previously informed us that infanticide, if performed in a timely fashion, is compatible with die Neue Ethik of which he is a champion, the professorial pride of New Jersey is now turning his attention toward correcting the moral misapprehensions of Middle America.

In a recent column in the Guardian, Singer draws on the philosophies of John Stuart Mill and HLA Hart, the sexually explicit temple carvings of India and international anti-discrimination laws in a meandering attempt to disguise the fact that he has no intention of even beginning to explain why the view that homosexuality is immoral is incorrect. Considering that the assertion of this flawed legal foundation is supposedly the central point of his article, the omission is astounding and its curious absence goes a long way toward explaining some of Singer's other, equally convincing lines of reason.

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After skating very lightly past Islamic objections to homosexuality on the basis of their lack of secular democracy and habit of incorporating religious teachings into law, Singer first turns to Mill's and his principle that ''the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others'' as a foundation for his moral argument. But rightly sensing that this principle of individual sovereignty would forbid a veritable host of actions he deems acceptable, such as abortion, public education and the income tax, Singer quickly drops Mills in favor of Hart's hair-splitting division of legal paternalism and legal moralism.

No doubt the unsound foundation of Mill's formation for his case encourages this speedy departure, as it is far from clear that homosexuality, in all its disease-ridden, suicide- and violence-prone glory, does no harm to others. Indeed, on the sole basis of J.S. Mill, one possesses a better case for the morality of necrophilia, cannibalism and rape.

Hart's primary departure from Mill is his acceptance of the idea that the state may interfere with an individual if it does so on behalf of his physical well-being, hence the intrinsic morality of seat-belt and helmet laws. But Singer leaps from Mill's frying pan into Hart's fire here, since there can be no doubt that forced restraint from homosexual activity will cause far less physical harm to an individual than such activity permitted unrestrained. Hart's legal paternalism actually provides a irreligious moral basis for the illegality of homosexuality, and Singer's perverse citation of it only highlights the poverty of his reasoning.

Singer then turns, even more fruitlessly, to address the reproductive objection to the harm that homosexuality does to societal continuity. While it is fair to point out, as he does, that this objection has little weight in overpopulated India, he is silent about its obvious applicability to dying Europe, especially to a Britain possessing a 2002 birth rate of 1.64 per woman, 22 percent below the rate required for a stable population.

But Singer's biggest blunder is to ignore the obvious and direct connection between morality and legality, especially in secular democracies such as the United Kingdom and the United States which feature no shortage of religious teachings incorporated into their laws. While laws and morals are not the same and should not be confused with each other, as the Founding Fathers made explicitly clear, the laws of the land stem from the moral sensibility of the people. Modify the latter and the former will, in time, inevitably alter. This blunder stems from Singer's desire to avoid confronting the ultimate source of the view that homosexuality is immoral, namely, the written foundation of the Judeo-Christian ethic which is an implacable enemy of Singer's Neue Ethik, the Christian Bible.

This atheistic discomfort with directly disputing the religious ethic is all too typical, because if they admit that Judeo-Christian morality stems from nothing more than its mythical sky deity, they risk casting aside centuries of civilization-sustaining belief in favor of dancing with Darwinian nihilism. What is right for the philosophers and the Pope of Princeton is, as Voltaire noted, all too dangerous a seed in the minds of hoi polloi.

And yet, Singer's bulls notwithstanding, if sin is nothing more than a perception instilled by social tradition, is it not remarkable how its Biblical wages are so reliably paid?