I’m jumping back in to react to your last sentence on your reply post to another member. You missed the substance of the counters to arguments to you, Dex and I will include Seeker here, in the 5 previous posts I submitted on this thread.
If you think the goal was to simply gain linguistic advantage, please read my posts over. The post by Linux upthread (#96) conveys the same message in my argument in shorter terms. We were talking about the specific operative word “gay” as a start in communicating truth, which puts an attractive packaging to what is not attractive inside the box, to deceive, as intended by the promoters of a disorder. [Let us leave the sting of the sodomy word aside as that is not what I wish to cover in this post.] These promoters are indeed masters in bending the truth, attaching false meaning to operative terms, which is not to say, in the least, that I and others are against using an effective language that conveys love, to men and women who struggle, those who do not wish to give in to the disordered urge of homosexual genital expression.
The challenge you, Dex and Seeker have is that there that does not seem to be a word for the condition that you would find inoffensive. Correct me if I’m wrong, you also object to the word “disorder” as I recall from your old posts in the forum even as it is a word in use by the Church, not without much forethought and sensitivity.
As I’ve said countless times now already…
I know what the Church means when it says words like “disordered” because I speak the Church’s language. The world doesn’t. The world, and especially same-sex attracted people, hears us saying “all gay people are disordered”. They don’t hear “homosexual attraction is not ordered in the correct way for the objective design of the human being”. They hear that homosexual persons are disordered. That the
whole person is disordered. That that person is, essentially,
irredeemable. And that is an
appalling awful thing to hear, especially if you’re that terrified 13 year old boy at Church who interprets the Church’s words (and those who unthinkingly parrot them to real people without considering the impact of the way in which they say them).
The challenge is further made worse, in my view, when admitted but chaste homosexuals in the forum band around or sympathize with the theology of a Christian brother and forum member who advances the belief, through verbosity and great facility with words, that with monogamy and faithfulness in same sex relations, such can bear good fruit and flourishing of the spirit!
Kolbe, your express wish and efforts (I will say the same of Dex and Seeker) in helping struggling young Catholic men (and women) are commendable. This forum serves as a place where they should be able to seek guidance and counsel, and as a platform for honest discussion of Catholic values and moral issues. To bring (back) souls to our beautiful faith.
You state that this forum is a place where troubled homosexual people should be able to find guidance and counsel. While there are people on this forum who propose that to simply “be gay” is a deliberate active choice to live an immoral, disordered life, I would have to say that this is the last place a troubled homosexual should come if he (or she) wants to find a way to come to a peaceful acceptance of their condition and to live out their lives in loving chastity for the world. Why? Because they would forever be being told that their entire identity, their entire personhood, was evil and hell-bound because of the uncharitable and incorrect designations that people place on words that, in common usage, mean something different from how they are used by people on here.
If people want to terrify homosexual people, including those that are vulnerable, if they want to brow-beat them into abject despair (and to cause someone to fall into despair would be the gravest of sins - look up the religious meaning of despair if you don’t know what I mean), if they want to rip their self-identity to shreds, if they want to tell them that they are that which they are not, then they can count on me and people like me to oppose them. I don’t oppose the Church, I am not opposing doctrine or anything that the Church teaches on what is called for in living a good and holy life if one is a homosexual. What I am, is charitable about it, loving, caring. To me it doesn’t matter what a person calls him or herself. I don’t care about whether a term might be loaded to someone else. What matters is the person before me, the immortal soul that might be at risk if I say something to harm it.
I will say this, and I mean it: if by intransigence and a lack of willingness to meet people on their terms (linguistic or otherwise), we wittingly or unwittingly drive a person to believe that there’s nothing they can do to avoid damnation, then we commit the gravest of grave sins: we lead that person into a state of despair where, by our actions or words, we induce in that person a belief that they can never be reconciled to God because they are irredeemable.
They say “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”. We must never be so stubborn and prideful about the ‘correctness’ of our language that we fail to see the damage we do to those most vulnerable to being detached from the loving embrace of Our Lord. What a terrible, awful, ghastly thing to do to a person!
