@ InSearchofGrace;
Yes, well, my sense is that your “handle” on here is descriptive of our general position as a group, regardless of faith, or even lack thereof, or orientation. I had no doubt about your intellectual or research abilities; those are evident. So is your adherence to the tenets of the Church in this matter as I believe they are meant to be understood.
For my part I am an unmarried heterosexual. I encountered homosexuality first by the agency of priests and brothers in my parochial and then high schools, and later in college as friends of my fiance. I have had several dear friends who were homosexual, lesbian, or bi, and a nephew of mine and grandson of my girlfriend are gay. So I have been both the object of advances I did not wish or instigate, and have as well seen and been confided in about the dilemas faced by my friends and relatives surrounding these questions.
Frankly, if I was in the shoes of anyone I know who is gay, I think I would go bonkers and have very large self esteem problems not from any moral issues from within myself, but from the ignorant insensitivity and patronizing of the people around me and society in general. This is in vast distinction, in my experience, from what you attitude might be and yes, I do consider the attitude of many Catholics on here as bigoted. To some extent they use the tenets of the Church as shields and weapons to keep the questions we deal with here in adversarial terms so as to yield a false sense of emotional insulation in the matter. And that adversarialism is not restricted to our faith and is even highly amped up in other religions or philosophies in a shameful manner that will have unfortunate consequences down the line as has already happened in some regrettable instances.
You have correctly assessed my stance, and I firmly hold that for a number of scholarly, religious, and mostly experiential reasons having to do with the primacy of Love over law, particularly in that the intellections we base on interpretations reside in a quale far smaller than that of the heart, especially the Heart of God. That holds in my book regardless of interpretations and mincings of meanings of passages however blatant they might appear to theologians with vested interests not, imo, altogether supportable. The mind, and therefore a group, can have as a focus ANY premise and demonstrate its correct and logic exegesis from nearly anything. Certainly your perusal of medical journals has supplied you a sufficiency of such pathologies, well intended or not.
I have to deal with a disconnect–the source of which is summarily dismissed by many even of good intention. For my part I cannot fathom how someone could bring themselves except by ignorance, callousness, or emotional and intellectual dishonesty to not understand that the vast majority of homosexuals are born that way and are as blameless for that dynamic as you or I might be for handedness or the shape of our nose.
My sister and her husband have the stated policy of “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” From witnessing the dynamic between these tow people and their homosexual son, I’d have to say that there is a palpable backwash of feelings that is intense enough that my nephew felt he had to move to another state in order to escape it. And that is given that his parents do actually love him and he loves them. But there is this elephant in the room no matter what. And while my nephew identifies with the elephant, necessarily, as it is his inborn nature, my sister and brother in law love him with the exception of that part of him. So the message that he gets and won’t admit to his parents it that he knows that their love is not unconditional, despite that they would do anything for him.
And this is the elephant in the room with everyone who is either phobic or even sincere in their convictions. They will not accept as integral to the person they are dealing with a factor that to them is an inescapable part of their nature. And for that inescapably part, because it is way in the minority and repulsive emotionally to so many, they are perforce emotionally persecuted, even unwittingly by those who may have very good intentions. And the Church says “Well, that’s a hard lot, but you have to live with it and never engage in that part of human intimacy that for most of us means love itself. Tough cookies.”
As near as I can tell, ISoG, there are more like 12 gender orientations, far more likely than the two generally recognized, similarly to the idea that while the general blood types are recognized those have as well their subtypes and multitudinous variations. The broad types are generally for the purposes of safeguarding from toxic combination. And some of them are rarer than others. So it is clear on inspection that there is more of a spectrum of orientations than the either/or that the digital tendencies of the brain, and law, like to deal in.
And even the Church is unclear as to the actual origin of the condition and lacking that etiology already claims it to be a disorder based on what may in the long run prove to be far more of sociological sanctions than anything actually divine. One of the most profound things I ever heard in this regard was from a trance medium of astonishing accuracy who said that “Any message from the other side is necessarily tainted by the lens of the mediums personality.” Indeed, the entire realm of interpretation of the inner life is one of just that: interpretation. A comparison of the great mystics of the Church amongst each other and even of those outside the Church may be very useful in this consideration.
All that is to say that in my conscience, whatever the official stance of the Church may be by force of momentum, there is a whole lot more latitude deserved in this issue than it is being ecclesiastically given from an official position. And I will stand before God as my judge with that and own it.
