Mary Eberstadt, the author of that wonderful collection of epistles from a newly-minted atheist to her much admired superiors titled The Loser Letters, addresses herself to the question how someone like her, someone who's quite averse to our modern infatuation with gayness, might respond to charges that she must be a homophobic hater.
She suggests deflecting such allegations by emulating, of all people, vegetarians. Eberstadt offers this hypothetical response to someone who has accused her of being a hater simply because she finds homosexual conduct to be not just distasteful but morally wrong:
A borrowing of the vegetarian's vocabulary might go something like this. "No, of course I don't hate sex/fun/gay people/love - any more than a vegetarian, say, hates people who eat beef/chicken/pork. In fact, let's explore that analogy a little more, because then maybe you'll understand where I'm coming from. And just as vegetarians don't hate meat-eaters, I don't hate people who do things I don't, or things that I think are wrong. But that doesn't mean that the matter ends there or that I'm saying that these things are a matter of taste only. Like the vegetarian, I think there are serious reasons for my aversion to what other people do. These reasons are moral. They also have to do with health. In general, I think it would be a better world if people didn't do these things, again as the vegetarian thinks. But please understand that hatred has nothing to do with it. Reason and information and a desire not to do harm - these things do."
This response, as correct and honest as it is clever, is offered in a larger essay in the current First Things which itself is very much worth reading. Unfortunately, this issue is available only by subscription until April.
RLC