When Love Isn’t Love
by Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine:
If there is a telltale of the social justice Catholic, it may lie in one of two assumptions, or both together. The first is that we know what justice is. The second is that, when we say that God is love—and presumably we pursue justice because we wish to love those who suffer injustice—we know what such love is, and we have the capacity to love, at least in a way that adumbrates that divine love.
Others, who say, “Love is love,” have set themselves out of the discussion already. We in the West have been distinguishing love from love since the time of the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers. “Such love is hate, and such desire is shame,” says the poet Edmund Spenser, referring to a lust to possess the body of one you have fallen for, outside of marriage, and with no thought of marriage at all. It doesn’t help matters that the lover in this case is a young woman who mistakes another woman, a paragon of chaste desire disguised as a knight as she searches for the man she is destined to marry, for a male.
But let us look at those matters of justice and love.
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