Madam, - Frank Farrell (October 12th) boldly states that "for several millennia it has been the considered conviction of people of vastly greater moral and intellectual weight than will be found among your staff and contributors that homosexual activity is wrong".
Some of the weightiest intellectual and moral figures of the previous centuries justified colonisation through their assertion that Africans, South Americans and Irish did not fully qualify as human. The moral and intellectual consensus within pre-20th century Western society was that women did not fully possess a capacity for reason and thus could not be allowed to vote.
It is a fact that any society creates moral and intellectual boundaries which deem particular forms of thought and behaviour acceptable or not.
This does not mean that all values are relative and exist only within a particular social context. Rather it means that existing ways of understanding our world, such as the belief system of the Catholic Church, must increasingly justify their positions in relation to new forms of knowledge. Thankfully the "fashionable enlightenment" of which Mr Farrell speaks has led to a new moral consensus within our society which rejects the prejudices of those who cannot accommodate homosexuality within their worldview.
A progressive society is not a liberal free-for-all where all opinions are equally valid. It is a society where moral value is conferred according to the insights of reason and knowledge. It is a society where the Word of God is no longer recourse enough to support opinions which cause suffering and shame for some and justify the violence of others. - Yours, etc,
CONN HOLOHAN, Gordon Street, Dublin 4.