I applaud such discernment that will not send us rushing headlong along the routes that some liberal nations have carelessly gone.

Obliging for a good reason

Gays have rights. But rights, as Bentham said, are nonsense on stilts. Unless they are properly articulated by an account which explains its only basis - viz. the co-relating obligations that reason directs of every other human being. (c.f. John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, OUP:1980; Aquinas, OUP:1998)

For: to say that I have a right (or a due) to X is to say (if to say anything at all) that other persons have an obligation (or duty) to promote X in me. Such obligations are given, in the first instance, by the directions of human practical reason, which ask that we promote the basic goods of life, truth, friendship and other aspects of human fulfillment in all and every human person without arbitrary exclusion. So we all have a right to life, and not to be killed in innocence, because sound human reason tells us that we ought not to destroy human life and to not murder the guiltless.

Thus we have to be careful about asserting rights, because only rights that can be fully supported by each of their respective obligation-imposing reasons to promote them can be meaningful claims. For this reason some claims of rights, clearly immoral, cannot be anything except vacuous rhetoric, because there are never corresponding reasons to promote evil or immoralities. Sound human reason invariably recommends the promotion of values and the avoidance of disvalues.

So gays cannot but have rights: for everyone else has obligations, informed by sound practical reasoning, to not harm them, and to promote their participation of human life through opportunities for employment, for education, etc., just as we are obliged to promote the lives of everyone else around us who is not gay, without arbitrary exclusion. So gays must daringly articulate their right to life, to employment and participation in public life.