Mirror of Justice

I count myself as an admirer of Richard John Neuhaus; even when I disagree with him, I find his analysis to be insightful and challenging.  But his post on the gay identity angle of the Ted Haggard scandal leaves me perplexed.  Neuhaus writes:

There was an op-ed in Wednesday’s New York Times asserting that 70 percent of Americans personally know someone who is gay. That seems statistically improbable. Somewhere between 2 and 4 percent of American males identify themselves as gay. (The figure is much lower for women.) Most of them are congregated in cities, and in those parts of cities known to be gay-friendly. Chelsea and the West Village, along with the Castro district of San Francisco and counterparts in other larger cities, are not America. Gays live in such places precisely because they are not America.

Admittedly, young people in college, or at least in most colleges, do know personally people who are gay; and some of them they count as friends. Most campuses have special-interest LGBT groups, and students are indoctrinated in gay ideology under the rubric of opposing “homophobia.” At one Ivy League college, faculty members told me over dinner that one-third of the male students were at least “experimenting” with homosexuality. Among the women, there were also a large number of “LUGS” (Lesbian Until Graduation). Whether such developments will significantly increase the percentage of adults identifying themselves as gay or lesbian will, I suppose, be discovered in due course. Apart from an intuition for the natural built into human beings, there are all kinds of incentives and pressures militating against such a significant increase.

What most Americans know about being gay is distinctively unattractive and, in their view, morally repugnant. Gay advocates deceive themselves in thinking that the more people know about homosexuality the more they will approve of it.

First, as J. Peter Nixon remarked over at Commonweal, I'm curious why the West Village, Chelsea, and the Castro District are "not America?"  Putting that aside, though, the suggestion that gays are some sort of cultural oddity on display only in places where the gay lifestyle is most exuberantly celebrated is to dismiss the sociological reality that many gays have integrated into the mainstream.  I have never lived in any of the "gay-friendly" neighborhoods identified by Neuhaus.  But I have become friends with gays and lesbians while living in Boston, Chicago, New York, and Denver.  In Minneapolis, I live in a neighborhood crawling with minivans, lemonade stands, soccer moms, and several gay couples whose kids participate in the life of the neighborhood as fully as anyone else.  To suggest that gays' wider acceptance in society is a direct result of being "indoctrinated" in college is to promote a caricature not only of college, but also of gays' evolving relationships with the surrounding society. 

What exactly is Fr. Neuhaus hoping to accomplish with this sort of argument?  More importantly, if a gay person reads his post, what conclusions will that person be justified in drawing about the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

Rob