Yesterday - after undergoing a sex-change operation and taking on a new symbolic name - the Rev. Drew Phoenix received another one-year contract to head St. John's United Methodist Church.
"This is about more than me," Phoenix said after the decision by the bishop of the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church. "This is about people who come after me, about young people in particular who are struggling with their gender identity. I'm doing this for them."
As Diogenes at Catholic World News says, that's one way to settle a controversy over the ordination of women. Wasn't there a Catholic bishop not too long ago who gave permission for a man surgically rearranged to resemble a woman to enter a convent as a nun?
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Didn't Wendell Berry light a cat on fire in the back forty as part of some strange, fall festival thing? Didn't he write about it in one of his best-sellers?
And, again, it is none of your business. If you think someone is self-mutilating, just think "there but for the grace of G-D go I" and walk on. But we as a society have already decided that some things that people do to themselves *are* society's business, even if they don't hurt anyone else. People whose behavior seems to indicate grave mental illness are routinely hospitalized without their consent if they seem to constitute a threat to themselves, let alone to others.
I don't believe that anyone who has undergone sexual reassignment surgery has been involtarily admitted to a mental health facility based upon that request. Once again, they have been subjected to extensive screening processes when it comes to their mental health and therapists have concluded they would be most helped by having the surgery.
Is it a rule of this blog that every post regarding a given non-RC denomination has to include a gratuitous slam at the Catholic hierarchy?/i Yes. it is. Hadn't you noticed this before, Man from K Street? ;) Even if it has to be accomplished by simple assertion without citation, support or factual basis, as here? Especially in such a case. Beats dealing with the increasing mess in Rod's own communion: viz. ocanews.org You're a professional journalist? Kind of gives one pause, dunn't it?
In the sities Johns Hopkins University was in the forefront in performing surgeries on hermaphrodite babies. The parents simply chose a sex and the surgeons gave them what they ordered. Now it's proven that the male and female brain wave activity differs and many of those babies were wrongly rearranged. Nature has obviously mistakenly arranged some of those transgendered folks. How sad that the price for matching their brains with their bodies is sterility and very complicated sexual expression and sex drive.That is a very high price to pay.
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