Suppose Stephen Gately had been straight. Why would anyone then have grown indignant about his death?
This morning's Daily Mail carries a piece from one of their bitchy columnists, Jan Moir, poking fun at middle aged women (the Nolan sisters) for being fat and wearing spandex; also attacking the reverent attitude to the death of Stephen Gately of Boyzone. Gately, she said, was a pretty airhead who "couldn't carry a tune in a Louis Vuitton trunk"; more to the point the circumstances of his death showed up civil partnerships for a sham and not in the least like marriage. Gately died alone on a sofa outside the bedroom where his partner, she seemed to imply, was enjoying a young man the couple had picked up earlier this evening in a nightclub. It is hardly the behaviour that Mail readers expect of married couples, straight or not.
Moir took aim at the announcement that Gately had died of natural causes. They meant no more than that he had not been murdered, she said. But anyone who raises the question of what is natural in a story about gay people will also raise questions about the morality of their behaviour and even their orientation. A large part of the acceptance of being gay as a morally neutral condition has arisen from the idea that it is a natural one, so the word is loaded. In consequence she's been assumed to be fantastically homophobic. I'm not sure this is entirely fair: columnists in her slot in the Mail are equal opportunity haters, and what they write about other middle-aged heterosexual women can be quite as nasty and insinuating as anything about gay people or foreigners.
But there is an informative clash of two different views of morality here. They are not exactly split on the question of whether being gay is itself "an objective moral disorder" as the Pope has it. No doubt some of her defenders think it is, and most of her attackers think it isn't. But the real argument in the comments and reaction to her piece is about whether any moral judgements can be applied to sexual behaviour between consenting adults.
This argument itself is experienced as moral, which is to say disagreement seems repulsive. Some people find others' sexual peculiarities immoral, shocking, or reprehensible; much of the rest of the world finds it immoral, shocking, reprehensible, to make any judgements at all about consenting adults. Sexual behaviour is held to be entirely within the realm of private preference, impossible to criticise from the outside.
I don't think sexual behaviour is or could be bracketed out from moral considerations, because it takes place between people (I know I am setting myself up for someone to come along in comments and say they have found a trick which doesn't involve anyone else: we thought it of you already). But if we allow that it is possible to do moral or immoral things in a bedroom, how do we classify them?
The pope's view is that there is one act which is natural (that word again) and desirable when performed with the right intentions between the right people.
What you might call the high-minded liberal consensus is that anything is right which communicates love between people who have not promised themselves elsewhere; the consumerist view would be that anything which makes both parties feel better must be good. Muslims, Jews, and most Christians seem to take the view that whatever is sanctioned by their communities is also sanctioned by God.
None of these attitudes has a grip on British society as a whole. But the official pieties are mostly those of the high-minded liberal view. I suppose it is mine also, but it has incoherent edges, like everything else. But what this story seems to illustrate more clearly than anything is not the necessary incoherence of moral reasoning, but its necessary quality of indignation. Without a sense that somebody, somewhere, is outraged, nothing feels like a moral question at all. So just possibly the newspapers which specialise in shock and horror are, though themselves immoral, the vehicles of our real moral debates.
