![]() ![]() Then, about one hundred and fifty years ago, it began to replace that longstanding teleological tradition with a brand new creation: the absolutist but absurd taxonomy of sexual orientations. Over the course of several centuries, the West had progressively abandoned Christianity’s marital architecture for human sexuality. It is a history that began far more recently than most people know, and it is one that will likely end much sooner than most people think. Sexual orientation is a conceptual scheme with a history, and a dark one at that. Contrary to our cultural preconceptions and the lies of what has come to be called “orientation essentialism,” “straight” and “gay” are not ageless absolutes. Alasdair MacIntyre once quipped that “facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention.” Something similar can be said about sexual orientation: Heterosexuals, like typewriters and urinals (also, obviously, for gentlemen), were an invention of the 1860s. ![]()
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