Madam, - To the politeness of supposing that it was not you who wrote that stupid Editorial, "Gay rights, gay wrongs" (October 8th), I join also the courtesy of trusting that you nevertheless accept responsibility for what appears in the paper you edit.
We hardly can be surprised to find a perverted logic motivating the "visceral hatred" that leads thugs to beat up homosexuals when we find The Irish Times asserting that to describe homosexual activity as immoral is "to articulate the sort of views which underpin such hatred". By that logic, we must avoid condemning even murder, lest we "underpin" lynch mobs. Indeed, there seems to be a growing list of activities in relation to which you both publish and support the notion that to assert that they are wrong is to be discourteous (at least) to the many who engage in them, and that such assertions ought therefore to be silenced.
Increasingly also you exemplify the loudest bleaters about freedom of expression, since it is the loudest of them that would withhold that freedom from those expressing unfashionable views. Cardinal Trujillo has the good fortune, I suppose, of being unaware of your Editorial, though doubtless he is only too conscious of the modern hordes who would silence him.
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. It is only the "enlightenment" of more recent decades that says they were mistaken.
So, however modern the fashionable enlightenment to which you aspire, would you not allow the head of the Pontifical Council for the Family to say that Catholic politicians ought to be true to their faith in both their personal and political lives? Are they not free to be non-Catholic if they disagree with the tenets? Is anyone forced to vote for them?
Finally, we could all benefit by having the "Gospel of love" preached to us, but not from the pulpit of The Irish Times. You see, what Jesus taught was that God loves us all, not least the greatest sinners - not that He loves everything that we sinners get up to. - Yours, etc,
FRANK FARRELL, Lakelands Close, Stillorgan.