Recently in Homosexuality Category

Things are getting hardcore in the Archdiocese of Washington, DC: gay activists have organized to force gay priests out of the closet to protest the Catholic Church's stand against gay marriage. Excerpt from the Church Outing website:

Lastly, we encourage every Catholic priest to trust in God and in the power of the Christ to help you through this difficult, but important act of truth, faith and love. It is not the intention of this site to complicate the lives of closeted gay priests, rather to help them make the difficult choice to stand up against the hateful and harmful new direction the Church hierarchy is taking the Holy Mother Church.

Disclaimer: The goal of this site is not to force Catholic priests out of the closet against their will. The goal of this campaign is to aggregate reports on every gay priest in the Archdiocese, so that we can work with them, one on one, helping them stand up to the the church hierarchy's stand on this important issue.

Translation: denounce and disobey the hierarchy or we'll expose you.

Truth to tell, there are a lot of orthodox Catholics who agree with the liberal pro-gay ones when they say, as the Church Outing site does:

Even more shameful, is that many of these priests, while remaining silent, actually lead duplicitous lives rich with romantic and sexual relationships -- both homosexual and heterosexual.

This hypocrisy must end.

...except what the orthodox Catholics find shameful is that these priests are violating their vows regularly and unrepentantly.

I agree that the hypocrisy should end, and I can't say that I'd feel terribly sorry for a priest who leads a life "rich with romantic and sexual relationships -- both homosexual and heterosexual" who got busted for his duplicity (and I say that for Orthodox priests too). That said, I disapprove of outing on principle. The hypocrisy of these clerics makes me ill, but if there is no crime involved (e.g., sexual abuse), I find it a more frightening and offensive thing that someone would take it upon themselves to ruin somebody's life through outing.

I think we've probably exhausted this topic for now, but I didn't want to let E.D. Kain's series of posts about the conflict between gay marriage and religious liberty, re: the situation the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, DC, pass without note. E.D., please note, is a supporter of same-sex marriage, and believes the Catholic Church is very wrong to oppose it. But he's starting to see that gay marriage really is a threat to religious liberty. Read him here, here, and finally here. Excerpts from his series:

Religious organizations would not be forced to provide space or perform marriages for gay couples. They would still be required to do a number of other things, including provide benefits to gay couples, offer other charitable services to gay people, and so on and so forth. Again - I think they should do this, but what I think really isn't the issue here. The issue is whether they should be required to by law. If they are required to follow specific rules in order to receive federal funds, and they believe that those rules are in conflict with their beliefs, then they will have no choice but to refuse those funds.

You can't really have it both ways. These funds are used to provide for the poor. You can't complain that the Church is awful for receiving the funds on the one hand and awful for not providing these services on the other. The two are connected, and if the law makes it impossible for the Church to do both, then there really is little that can be done except change the law. Or change the Church. And so this comes back to a question of religious liberty.

And:

I believe the Church and other groups that oppose gay marriage are wrong and that someday they'll look back on all of this with the same shame opponents (and their ancestors) of racial equality look back on the days of segregation. But that doesn't mean we approach each battle in this war with the attitude that so long as marriage equality is reached, all other considerations are negligible. If you want a much harder path going forward, then by all means give your opponents reason to believe that their religious liberty actually will be infringed upon. Most of the time that argument is a straw man. But not always. Giving it credence is probably not a good long-term strategy.

I appreciate that E.D., unlike so many gay marriage proponents, recognizes that religious liberties are at risk from the march of gay marriage rights, and that this really does involve a conflict of rights claims. At some point, this really is a zero sum game. The usual cry that goes up from gay rights backers is that no pastor is going to be forced to marry a gay couple or be censored if he preaches against homosexuality, so there's no problem at all. That's simply untrue. I don't think, though, that E.D. fully understands (yet) how much of a rollback in religious liberty is at stake in this fight. It's one thing if the boundaries of gay rights are set by statute, as in the DC case. It's another if they are set by a court in a constitutional case. In the former, exemptions for religious organizations can be carved out -- but if the Supreme Court decides that gay marriage is a constitutional right, then religious organizations will be given much less room to move, and there's nothing they will be able to do about it.

I strongly encourage you to read Chai R. Feldblum's paper on the conflict between gay rights and religious liberty. Feldblum is a Georgetown Law professor, a lesbian and a gay rights activist. She was also raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, so she understands the issue from both sides. Here are relevant excerpts:

A reader in Britain e-mails:

One of the constant complaints by pro-SSM readers on your blog is that your fears about the impact of SSM on free speech and freedom of religion are overblown. As you know, I tend to agree with you rather than your critics, despite my cautiously pro-SSM stance (although if I am honest I have been slowly returning to my neglected faith of late and am starting to think again).

My worries were confirmed by this story from here in Britain, which may interest you.

What has happened is this: the Labour government here brought forward a Bill that included clauses to ban incitement to hatred against homosexuals. Many people -- including, but definitely not limited to, traditional Christians -- felt that the wording was imprecise and might inhibit people from expressing opinions on the morality of sexual behaviour, for fear that what they said might be construed as inciting hatred (there have been numerous cases now in Britain of people being visited by the police and informally "warned" about incitement after expressing the orthodox Christian position on sexuality). So a member of the House of Lords put forward the following amendment to the Bill:

"In this Part, for the avoidance of doubt, the discussion or criticism of sexual conduct or practices or the urging of persons to refrain from or modify such conduct or practices shall not be taken of itself to be threatening or intended to stir up hatred."

Very reasonable, you might think. But when the amended Bill went back to the House of Commons the government MPs voted to remove this "free speech" amendment. When the Bill returned to the Lords -- the two Houses often play legislative ping-pong in this way -- the Lords put it back in. This continued until the Commons, under the direction of the government, had removed the "free speech" clause four times. Yesterday the government finally gave in after a late vote in the Lords on Wednesday re-inserted the clause for the fourth time. The "free speech" clause will stay in the final Act of Parliament.

So, in short, what we have here is a supposedly liberal government consistently ordering its MPs to vote to deny explicit free speech protection to critics of homosexuality, lumping in such criticism with incitement to violence and hatred. Now of course the obvious rejoinder from your critics is that in the US this couldn't happen because of the First Amendment, but that's not really the point. The point is that, contrary to the wishful thinking of many on the pro-SSM side, there are plenty of members of our political and cultural elites who are willing to sacrifice free speech and the free exercise of religion on the altar of sexual liberation, when they get the power to do so.

I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that we'd see the same thing here, if not for the First Amendment, which bans so-called "hate speech" restrictions. What Americans don't understand, and what we in the media prefer not to report, is that in the coming legal regime, churches and religious institutions will face significant curtailment of their own activity, outside of speech itself, with regard to same-sex marriage and related phenomena. As the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington knows very well, no matter how vociferously SSM proponents try to deny it.

I'll say one good thing about the increasing legal hostility to Christianity in repaganizing Europe: it may serve to make the Orthodox churches wake up and realize that whatever divides Orthodoxy from Western Christianity pales before the great battle the remnants of the Church in Europe faces in the coming decades. See this from Greece. Time for as much unity as can be managed. I'm pleased that Kyrill, ,the Moscow patriarch, and Pope Benedict are moving closer. They're going to need each other. Given where we know this is going, and going fast, we all will.

It occurs to me that there's a good discussion to be had around this question, but let me say in no uncertain terms that I'm going to unpublish any comments that are abusive, vitriolic or significantly off-topic.

So, why don't gay Catholics leave the Catholic Church? It could be that they are part of a parish that, in violation of Catholic teaching, affirms that their homosexuality is a moral good -- in other words, they don't feel at the local level any significant pressure from Catholicism's prohibitions against homosexual behavior. (This is, I think, why so many conservative Episcopalians remain Episcopalian). It's fairly easy to live as a Catholic without having one's homosexuality (or sex life at all) come up in parish life. In all my time as a Catholic, the only time I ever heard homosexuality addressed from the pulpit was two or three times at my Fort Lauderdale parish, in which the priest attacked "homophobia."

I could be wrong, but I very much doubt Andrew Sullivan ever has to hear a word spoken against homosexuality at his parish in Washington, DC. If he did, it's not hard to find parishes that don't hassle him about it, and to live one's life as an openly gay Catholic without having any kind of in-your-face conflict. In most ways dealing with the church's hard teachings (hard for our culture to take, I mean), most American Catholic parishes are functionally AWOL. It's Moralistic Therapeutic Deism all the way down. And not just in Catholic churches, I hasten to say! The idea that poor, put-upon gay Catholics are having to sit there every week and hear priests denounce their affections from the pulpit is simply nonsense, as is the hoary pop-culture cliche that priests are obsessed with sex and harp on it in sermons. For better or for worse, that just doesn't happen.

But the Church's principled stance against homosexuality bothers him a great deal -- and it should bother him, given what he believes is true about homosexuality. In a case like the gay marriage referendum in Maine, in which the state's Catholic bishops lobbied against same-sex marriage, it makes perfect sense for gay Catholics who believe the Church is deeply wrong about homosexuality to be offended, inasmuch as the Catholic bishops, in fighting for what the Catholic Church teaches is true, contributed to a public policy outcome detrimental to the same-sex marriage cause. For gay Catholics, that's not nothing.

So why do they stay in a church that condemns homosexuality [Clarification: that condemns homosexual acts, but not homosexual persons, a distinction many gays insist is one without a difference -- RD], and that's not going to change on the subject, when many (at least in big cities) have plenty of other options for worshiping as Christians in churches that fully affirm their sexuality? What is the reason for staying in a Church whose teaching on sexuality you definitively reject (as distinct from wrestling with in good faith), and in so doing implicitly reject the Church's binding authority in matters of faith and morals? I'm not asking as a rhetorical question; I'd really like to hear what you readers -- gay and straight, Catholic and non-Catholic -- think. One non-Catholic reader wrote to me this morning about his own wrestling with ordination in his Protestant denomination, and how his experience arguing with church folks who doubted his motives for seeking ordination under his particular set of conditions taught him something about why gay Catholics stay:

Over the years, I have come to realize there was probably no small measure of passive-aggressiveness in my stubbornness. I still believe the call to ministry was and is there, but I still can see some measure of seeking affirmation, even if it meant causing a stir along the way. What I have come to realize about gay ordination as a result, even though I am not a supporter, is that what those pursuing it desire above all else is to force the Church, not only to acknowledge them, but also to affirm them. Thus, they act in this passive-aggressive manner and then proceed on to outright aggressiveness. They can't move on because to do so is to admit defeat in their quest for affirmation. Yes, they certainly could gain that elsewhere, but that's not what they want. They want everyone's hearts and minds, not just the like-minded. And to gain that, there is no measure of resistance they will not endure.

This, by the way, is why I have no faith at all that the orthodox churches, synagogues and religious institutions will be left alone once gay rights advocates have the fullest constitutional protection. Tolerance will quickly be insufficient; affirmation will be the minimal standard -- or else.

That's my view. I welcome yours -- but again, be as sharp and as pointed as you like, but vitriol, abuse, name-calling and the like will be deleted.

Andrew Sullivan, on a church in the Castro district of San Francisco:

There is one, of course, The Holy Redeemer, smack bang in the gay district in San Francisco, and unmolested, respected, admired. Rod Dreher's conflicts are a fantasy of his own creation. The truth is that gays have long been amazingly tolerant of the churches that seek to strip us of civil rights. One ghastly exception was Act-Up's assault on St Patrick's Cathedral, but that proves the rule. If anything, gay men actually do more to support the church than attack it.

Oh, really?

Most Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, in the heart of San Francisco's gay Castro community, was vandalized over the weekend by opponents of Proposition 8, the California resolution passed by voters in November that rejected gay marriage. Swastikas were painted on the church and the names Ratzinger (referring to Pope Benedict XVI) and Niederauer (the San Francisco Archbishop) were scrawled besides the Nazi symbol.

Photo here.

Said Pastor Steve Meriweather to KCBS: "I think it's unfortunate that they selected our community to attack, because it's the wrong one."

Unlike what, those other churches, Catholic and otherwise, that actually support Catholicism and traditional Christian moral teaching? Parishes that aren't tame? Parishes that, unlike Most Holy Redeemer, don't host Drag Bingo Night featuring men in nun drag calling themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (shown here at the parish receiving communion in drag from the Archbishop of San Francisco)?

Right, some church. I'm not impressed. I don't know anything about the theology of the Christians chased out of the Castro by the gay mob, and I'm no longer a Catholic, but I guarantee you I'd stand with them in the middle of that storm any day, as opposed to stay in that scandalous Catholic parish. And I bet most Catholics I know would do the same thing. As long as you're a Catholic who rejects Catholic teaching on sexual morality, there's no conflict at all. But if you have the integrity to be an openly faithful Catholic, however peaceably, well, this is what they have in store for you in the Castro:

No comments on this thread. I'm tired of having to delete all the profanity and filth from those who disagree. I wouldn't have posted this at all except I can't let Sully's remarks about me go unanswered. He's living in unresolvable conflict with his church, and that's a painful place to be (I've been in a similar place, for very different reasons, and it hurts like hell), but denial is not a solution. I genuinely don't understand his position. He doesn't believe the Catholic Church teaches truth, except insofar as it coincides with what he believes. Staying inside the Catholic Church makes him truly miserable. So why stay? If he wants liturgy, smells, bells, and a complete blessing on the way he chooses to live his life, there's the Episcopal Church. I actually did believe in Catholicism, but for my own reasons was so tormented by staying that I lost my faith ... and so I left. I left in tears and heartbreak, but I left. Truly, it's a mystery to me why any free man would stay in a church in which he did not believe, and that made him so unhappy.