That’s a pretty horrible picture, innit? It’s a 40-year-old German monkeypox patient whose nose began to rot off after he caught the disease. Turns out that he was HIV-positive and didn’t know, plus was infected with advanced syphilis — also a surprise to him. He told doctors he had never been tested for a sexually transmitted infection. There he was, celebrating diversity like a champ, and now his nose is partially rotted off. Heaven knows who he passed along HIV, syphilis, and monkeypox to along the way.
Meanwhile, New Orleans is so far going ahead with its big Labor Day weekend Southern Decadence festival, an LGBT event that draws 275,000 to the French Quarter for six days of sex, dancing, and debauchery. Decadence was cancelled the past two years because of Covid, but not over monkeypox, though it is certain to be a superspreader event.

I will never be able to understand the death wish of a culture in which a man like the anonymous German exists. Take a look at this collection of articles from medical journals, compiled by Joseph Sciambra (once a promiscuous gay man, now a chaste Christian), testifying to the shocking health realities of gay male culture. For example, according to the CDC in 2017, 60 percent of syphilis cases were found in only two percent of the population: gay men.

I remember being told by the media that gay men were vastly more promiscuous than straight men because society compelled them to be. Normalize homosexuality and grant same-sex marriage, and that would change. I never believed it because I knew perfectly well that gay men were insanely promiscuous not because they were gay, but because they were men. An ordinary male unrestrained by religious or moral scruple, and faced with a wide variety of willing partners who demand no emotional commitment, or even to know one’s name, before having sex — that man will likely behave exactly as most gay men do. Until now, at least, heterosexual men have had to cope with a culture of restraint imposed by women. Randy Shilts, the gay journalist who wrote And The Band Played On (and who later died of AIDS), made this very same point in his book. He said that straight men he’d spoken to expressed envy that gay men could have such a bounty of sexual experiences, because they didn’t live with the restraining factor of women. There was always, always somebody — and usually many somebodys — willing to say “yes” to anything you wanted, any time you wanted.

In the United States, we have had legal same-sex marriage from coast to coast for seven years now. Of course the culture of debauchery has not changed. It never was going to change. And look, if the horrors of AIDS didn’t change it, why should monkeypox?
If all this is normative behavior in the gay male community (note well: I’m not talking about lesbians), then what chance does a young gay male have of not being caught up in it? We live in a culture where, for better or for worse, homosexuality has been largely destigmatized. It seems plausible that if a young gay man wanted to have a normal, “vanilla” lifestyle of dating, courting, and gay marriage, it would be possible. I wonder, though, how likely it is when the cultural norms within the gay male community are so debauched. Seriously, gay male readers, what advice would you give an adolescent gay male if he wanted to avoid falling into that gutter? If you don’t have the ability to use the comments section, email me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and put COMMENT in the subject line.
In the late 1980s, during the height of the AIDS crisis, a New Orleans friend who is very liberal and pro-gay, though a heterosexual woman, told me a story about being out on the streets on Mardi Gras day. She said that she and her boyfriend were crossing lower Bourbon Street, the heart of the city’s gay community, when they saw a teenage boy, couldn’t have been a day over 17, staggering drunk (or drugged) and naked through the crowd of men. He had blood and feces running down his leg from his rectum. He had likely been raped. Nobody in the crowd was trying to help him. He was lost and wandering. He disappeared into the crowd of nearly-naked gay men partying in the street. My friend said the sight of that poor kid, who may well have been infected with HIV that day, upset her so much that she asked her boyfriend to take her home, that her day was done.

We never talk about stuff like that. It violates the Narrative. But it happens. It’s not the whole story about gay male culture here, but it’s a part of the story.

UPDATE: Along these lines, here’s a strong essay by Bridget Phetasy about her regret over being a “slut”. Excerpt:
But if I’m honest with myself, of the dozens of men I’ve been with (at least the ones I remember), I can only think of a handful I don’t regret. The rest I would put in the category of “casual,” which I would define as sex that is either meaningless or mediocre (or both). If I get really honest with myself, I’d say most of these usually drunken encounters left me feeling empty and demoralized. And worthless.
I wouldn’t have said that at the time, though. At the time, I would have told you I was “liberated” even while I tried to drink away the sick feeling of rejection when my most recent hook-up didn’t call me back. At the time, I would have said one-night stands made me feel “emboldened.” But in reality, I was using sex like a drug; trying unsuccessfully to fill a hole inside me with men. (Pun intended.)
I know regretting most of my sexual encounters is not something a sex-positive feminist who used to write a column for Playboy is supposed to admit. And for years, I didn’t. Let me be clear, being a “slut” and sleeping with a lot of men is not the only behavior I regret. Even more damaging was what I told myself in order to justify the fact that I was disposable to these men: I told myself I didn’t care.
I didn’t care when a man ghosted me. I didn’t care when he left in the middle of the night or hinted that he wanted me to leave. The walks of shame. The blackouts. The anxiety.
The lie I told myself for decades was: I’m not in pain—I’m empowered.
Looking back, it isn’t a surprise that I lied to myself. Because from a young age, sex was something I was lied to about.
Yeah, me too. I was never any kind of “slut,” if that word can be applied to men. But it took me a while to work out that what the world (meaning popular culture) told me about sex was a lie. I was not especially sexually active in my pre-Christian years, but that wasn’t for lack of trying. What slowed me down was the misery I felt after doing the deed. Everything was clear after that: the lies I told the women, and myself, about what we were doing. I loved sex, but more than that, I really did want it to be about love, real love. I kept trying to tell myself that it was fine for it to be meaningless, because that’s what I was supposed to think. It was a lie. It was only after my conversion, and learning the value of chastity, that I was able to see the true meaning of sex. It kept me away from surrendering my life to Christ for years, because I thought — I had been told — that it was my birthright to enjoy commitment-free sexual pleasure. Hadn’t we put away the hypocrisy of our parents’ generation? Weren’t we, you know, liberated? I believed that with my mind, but my heart, and my body, said otherwise.
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When the children of God show the kindness of the true and living God, the God of all kindness is made known, is glorified, and is enjoyed. What did the world learn from Stephen’s kindness? They learned Stephen was not in the grip of cruelty and animus like they were: “Look how these Christians so desperately want us to be forgiven!” That is what they learned from Stephen. Whether they came to worship the Lord or not, they learned the God whom Stephen worshipped was full of kindness toward his enemies. Kindness is a fruit of the Spirit in the life of the believer because kindness is first of God.

A vivid lesson on kindness found throughout Old Testament scripture is how frequently kindness is expected as a matter of reciprocity.
Abimelech expected kindness from Abraham in return for having shown kindness to Abraham: “God is with you in all that you do. Now therefore swear to me here by God that you will not deal falsely with me or with my descendants or with my posterity, but as I have dealt kindly with you, so you will deal with me and with the land where you have sojourned” (Genesis 21:22-23).
Rahab, the prostitute of Jericho, expected kindness from the spies whom she had shown great kindness, hiding and protecting them in the roof. “Now then, please swear to me by the Lord that, as I have dealt kindly with you, you also will deal kindly with my father’s house, and give me a sure sign” (Joshua 2:12).
Upon ascending his throne, King David was eager to express kindness to any descendent of Saul because Saul’s son, Jonathan, had shown David great kindness. Learning of Mephibosheth, David said to him: “Do not fear, for I will show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan, and I will restore to you all the land of Saul your father, and you shall eat at my table always” (2 Samuel 9:7). 
What do these scenes of reciprocating kindness have to do with kindness being a fruit of the Spirit? The Spirit of God creates kindness in the lives of all his redeemed children so the children may show others the kindness which God has shown to them.
This was beautifully displayed in the life of Stephen, an early deacon (Acts 7:60).
On the occasion of his grim death, being stoned by a violent and angry mob in Jerusalem, Stephen cried out: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” This was not the kindness of a worldling (Mt. 5:46).
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It is in man that God has implanted his law, the rule of right action according to the created order that reflects it. It is eternal law, the law of God’s essence, given by divine condescension to the creature for his good, unto his temporal and eternal happiness. Man is meant to live with others; this requires order, which, in turn, requires law—even in paradise this would have been so. In short, man’s nature requires him to participate in God’s law by making law too. That human law must then reflect, respect, and reinforce human anthropology—now under assault—for which it is made, and glorify the God who made it.

Whatever its genesis and cause—some suggest Karl Barth’s infamous “Nein!” to Emil Brunner—Protestants largely abandoned the natural law tradition sometime amidst the tumultuous twentieth century. It should be noted that this abandonment conspicuously coincided with the advent of a positivist Supreme Court led by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and his militant campaign from the bench to detach law from a “brooding omnipresence in the sky.”
Unsurprisingly, Protestant-positivist conceptions of law (like theonomy) have filled the void in the interim. Originalism—a sort of first-in-time positivism now generally identified with the Constitution’s original public meaning—albeit popularized by a Roman Catholic, dominates the Protestant jurisprudential posture. Like many American Protestants, Originalists—there are some, heavily qualified exceptions—decry judicial use of the classical natural law tradition as tantamount to so-called living constitutionalism and judicial overreach. But recent social trends evince that this form of originalism is radically insufficient. It inordinately fixates on method to the detriment of a substantive vision of justice.
Consider that two ethical concepts presently captivate the popular political imagination: justice and the common good. One currently serves as the causa belli of the progressive-woke left and the other saturates the rhetoric of the nascent post-liberal right. Both bewilder many observers. Both, in their own way, spring from the demand for a thoroughly moral socio-political regime, a comprehensive vision of life oriented to something higher.
Protestantism, if it is to have a political future, must recover a moral vision that rightly defines, orders, and mediates these contemporary emphases, which–if taken in isolation–drive many to dangerous ideological and political extremes. Rightly understood, the apparent dichotomy between the two is false, one manufactured by recent, shrewd efforts of rhetorical capture. Law is the common denominator of justice and the common good, although such a notion has been lost as of late. As Thomas Aquinas defined it, law is an ordinance of reason, promulgated for the common good, made by one who has care of the community.
In a very real sense, then, justice and the common good are inseparable according to the tradition only lately jettisoned by Protestants. The way back is the way forward. Protestants need to play catchup to remain players. This isn’t demagoguery or pandering. It is about recovering a coherent vision of a moral order and the goods toward which said order must be oriented to be just. It is about rediscovering a proper understanding of law by, inter alia, rejecting Justice Gorsuch’s now (in)famous positivist quip in Bostock, “Only the written word is the law.” For law is more than pure fiat; it must attend to reason and nature and conform to something ethically and metaphysically higher.
Such a recovery project requires an extension of the ad fontes enthusiasm amongst Protestants over the past couple of decades to the Protestant legal thought once firmly planted in the natural law tradition. Scholars like Stephen Grabill and Jordan Ballor have already begun this project. The works of Matthew Hale (1609-1676), Johannes Althusius (1557-1638), and Franciscus Junius (1545-1602), to name a few, are now accessible thanks to these scholars and many others. The Angelic Doctor is increasingly appreciated by Protestants (as he was in the past) as much as the Fat Doctor.
Yet, this is about more than resourcement. Protestants must readopt and embrace the child they once forsook, namely, a classical understanding of law, its source, rationale, and function in society. Shockingly, even at this late hour, by an acquired instinct of recent vintage, much of orthodox Protestantism still shuns, or is ignorant of, the natural law tradition.
Without it the future of political Protestantism is bleak indeed, in part because Protestants will be far less equipped to answer the most pressing ethical questions of the day, and will not be as able to adjudicate all-powerful rights claims like those in Bostock, Obergefell, and Roe. Neither will they be able to offer a positive politics, nor a metaphysically coherent account of human nature powerful enough to bring certain inseparable political themes  together, themes such as justice and the common good. (Politics, after all, is but an actionable, lived extension of metaphysics.) They will, rather, remain political infants, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness.
Under a natural law-based jurisprudence, positivist, mechanical, proceduralism is insufficient. Law as law must be reasonable, which is to say, the means law employs to attain its ends must be fitting to the ends themselves. Most importantly, law must be cognizant of, and congruent with, the metaphysical realities of creation, especially an appreciation of the givenness of nature and natural limits.
As Pierre Manent put it recently, “the most precise way to designate what afflicts us, what troubles and demoralizes us, is to say simply: we no longer know what law is.” The key question is, “If our actions are not to be regulated by law, then what shall regulate them?” Ryan Anderson has identified the same problem plaguing debates within conservatism writ large. Responding to common good skepticism from a (typical) right-liberal (who essentially accepts that government mostly only exists to protect individuals from harm, and to protect their individual rights) Anderson asked how “the scope of […] rights” can be determined “without some account of human flourishing and the common good?” For instance, how can the conflict between the woman’s bodily autonomy and a baby’s right to life be mediated otherwise? What about rights of conscience? All exercise must have limits. A rule of right action must apply else we fall into the chaos of mere competing rights claims without means of adjudication—no lodestar to guide us. That way lies devolution into pure power politics. That way lies madness.
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