Part one:
I can’t help but feel sorry for some of our uber-Catholics here. There are so many serious issues facing organized religion and yet I sit and read this extremely harsh (anti-Gay) rhetoric in the guise of blindly supporting the Church; they are apparently forgetting how much room there is for dissent and how many major differences of opinion there have been in 2000 years. Can we really pretend we are unaware that so many good priests, organists, choir directors, teachers; who are perpetually single are almost certainly a high percentage homosexual? How can it be ignored that the ancient world primarily felt same sex acts were temptations for all men (ignoring women completely) and that even the word homosexuality or the concept of a same sex orientation as we understand it today didn’t exist? I don’t think the Catholic Church is threatened in the least by a healthy, honest debate.
First and most importantly, after much reading I am still mystified as to how the Church can admit same sex attraction is completely beyond the control of most homosexual individuals and yet say it is severely disordered and require chastity of those so inclined. Needless to say, despite weekly Mass and lots of prayers, I was not 100% successful in maintaining abstinence in my own early life. While it is an obvious statement to say in a pluralist society a majority will not have to or even desire to abide by the Catholic playbook, many here comment as if it is a forgone conclusion.
What if the Bible really has been misunderstood on homosexuality? Seriously, imagine for just a moment that the Church has completely changed her position. (They have made some pretty major adjustments in the past. It can happen.)…So finally, they realize that using the word “abomination” for eating shellfish and male/male sex really cannot be equally offensive to God. What if only certain male/male sex is referring to a Holiness code of another time and place far removed from our own? How can so many here and elsewhere be so absolutely sure when things like slavery have been abolished, women can vote, and too many things to mention here have changed? No not all change is good, I grant, and I’m certainly not suggesting that anything goes, but again; readers here have consistently ignored, downplayed or contradicted themselves on the simple fact that homosexuals have always been here, always will be; the question is are we going to continue pretending that being unfair (denying for just one example the 1000 benefits that go along with marriage) to them has any good effect?
No one has answered if the children of homosexuals by whatever method are less deserving of benefits than heterosexual couples’ children.
Obviously there are overwhelming positives in the Catholic Church, far more Truth there than anyplace comparable or I wouldn’t be there. But I think pulling out Orwell, and making accusations of how debilitating and unhealthy a Gay lifestyle is ignores all the societal factors that go into it. Non acceptance at Church, work, your family and friends. The constant hiding…If you think homos have so many rights, and privileges and everything is so peachy, try walking down the street in a conservative town doing what straight lovers would do – hold hands, cuddle, even kiss a bit and see what happens…Try putting your same sex partner’s photo on your desk at work. A million things hetero people take for granted.
Do you have any idea how I felt reading in the mid 1970s in a library book that my lifelong attraction was a mental illness? I was an absolute mess internally for years and even tried to kill myself. Outwardly very successful, but inside scared to death, hiding, pretending to like girls… I guess me and so many Gay teens didn’t hear the “love the sinner, hate the sin” stuff. Where would an overwhelming majority of us get these ideas? Why do Gay teens kill themselves at three times the rates of regular teens? Even now, watching “A very British sex scandal” (story from the 1950’s) as I noticed no one commented on, where one could be (and many were)
imprisoned for LIFE for homosexual activity. Gee, you talk about a “homosexual agenda” what do you think was going on here? Wealthy homosexuals were shaken down, average ones dragged through the system, their life ruined by loss of family, job, place to live… everyone was involved from the police being agent-provocateurs, and manufacturing evidence all the way up to the prosecutors and judges. Law enforcement people (also in the 1950s) had meetings with others from America and other parts of the world and worried that if homos were in high places, they were more likely to be blackmailed and communism would win out. This of course affected military and other employment and social policies. Sounds like an anti-Gay agenda to me. So, yes, absolutely, in the backdrop of this, Gays want ALL their rights! Step on someone long enough and hard enough, they will become militant. This isn’t a surprise, it is inevitable!
I see that no one is advocating termination of welfare for single mothers, outlawing divorce or taking the Church truly to task for the decades long coverup of sex scandals. Or was that human error,(?) but there can be none in other policies such as the one about homosexuality, on the newest of ALL sciences, human sexuality and psychology? (Most people barely are aware that physics, chemistry and other physical sciences are several hundred years old, but psychology is barely over 100). Note also that in Michigan alone there are
50,000 unwed births annually & the divorce rate?
What of evidence at
NewScientist.com that the homosexual brain responds to same sex pheromones the way heterosexual brains respond to opposite sex pheromones WHEN the subjects didn’t even know what chemicals they were exposed to? Or that autopsies show Gay brains are different?
