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                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 26, 1993                   TAG: 9303260561
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

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NO HARM IN HOMOSEXUALITY

ETHICS is about maintaining peaceful and cooperative relations with your neighbors. Being an ethical person means carrying your own weight, not hurting anyone, keeping agreements and otherwise being a desirable neighbor.

Ethics does not in any way depend on fairy tales about Santa Claus, the Bogeyman or God. Nor does it have any special connection to sex.

Columnist Don Feder (quoted in Horizon, March 14) says, "Once homosexuality is accepted, it will be logically impossible to oppose any other perversion . . . " Nonsense. The place to draw the line is when other people are hurt. Homosexuality may be fruitless, but it is not by itself unethical. Transvestism is a strange taste, but harmless. Pedophilia, by contrast, is a form of rape that causes lasting harm.

I fear many dangers to our civilization - nuclear weapons, population growth, toxic wastes, the ozone layer - and I even worry about soil erosion. But I cannot believe, as Cal Thomas argues (March 10 column, "Gutting foundations twice in New York"), that the foundations of our civilization will be destroyed if we let homosexuals marry each other. JOHN HODGES BLACKSBURG

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