A recent article in The Australian on my book Homosexuality, Marriage and Society carried the banner (and opening gist) “Rabbi likens homosexuality to incest and bestiality”. Nowhere did I say this — and the article provided no source for it in my book. But it served to trigger condemnations of the book and foreclose consideration of its arguments, which I would like to briefly state.

The principal notion behind the same-sex marriage movement is the human being as an essentially physical being, driven and defined by its diverse impulses. Society must gratify them to grant essential personhood. My book counterposes to this the notion — from the Abrahamic faith traditions — that the human being also possesses a soul or conscience, which resonates with its Creator’s eternal moral laws, including the norm of heterosexual marriage. The soul confers both freedom and responsibility upon the person to evaluate and arbitrate physical impulses by reference to its moral compass.

Homosexuality comes from diverse sources: bodily temperament and disposition, psych­o­logical trauma and from ideological cultures which advocate for it. All of these sources are, however, extraneous to the real human essence, the soul or conscience, with its independent compass. Homosexuality is not like skin colour, with which the soul can have no issue. It is a behaviour, with which the soul can and does legitimately struggle, however difficult and deserving of compassion it may be. The cultural ideology supporting same-sex marriage represses both the consciousness of the soul and its conflicts with the body — which expresses our real humanity.

Same-sex marriage is harmful to the family. It is statistically far less stable than the complementary masculine-feminine union. The procurement of children for same-sex couples through donor gametes deprives these children of needed identity — to know and be raised by both of one’s biological parents. It deprives children of the differentiated roles of father and mother required in their upbringing. Homosexuals themselves are victims of the same-sex marriage movement’s ideology, which posits that the human being is determined by physical impulse, and dissonance between conscience and impulse as “internalised homophobia”.

Its drive to ban therapy — even for homosexuals who want it — is a denial of patient autonomy. It suppresses both the significant incidence of successful therapy and the absence (as reported by the American Psychological Association in 2009) of evidence of harm from such ­therapies.

The re-education needed to support the ideology of same-sex marriage is seen in the “Safe Schools” program, which models “sexual diversity” to susceptible children, of which 25 per cent have as-yet fluid sexual identity, and would otherwise overwhelmingly settle into heterosexuality. It also seeks to weaken parents’ traditionally recognised right to transmit to their children religious teaching, which includes traditional marriage.

Victoria, which has made the Safe Schools program compulsory in all state schools, did this by excluding special religious instruction from classroom hours and “replacing” it with a compulsory subject that relativises world religions and puts them on a par with “secular humanist” non-belief.