This week

Friends, Romanists, Open-Book-readers (thanks, Amy).

First, I appreciate everybody who e-mailed me and assured they'd meet my prayer request from Tuesday. Though one such man is now in much more urgent need than I.

I have had a couple of people express private concern to me, since I mention "crossing a line" in the request and the two posts since have both been about spiritual strength in dying people.¹ It isn't important exactly what I meant by "crossing a line," but nobody should fear anything like that about me. I have no health problems, no reason to think my death is imminent. Nor have I done anything that has those consequences down the road.²

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¹ I also have made allusion here to my past episodes of sexual risk-taking and an HIV scare; people whom I know also have more knowledge of details, putting the worst closer to the front of their heads.
² See Note 1.

As she lay dying

One of the great American icons of my teenage years will probably die very soon -- Tammy Faye Bakker. Here is a news account and a link to the letter on her site. The doctors have stopped treating her cancer and she's down to 65 pounds, which is about as bad as medical news gets. Excerpts from the letter:

Thank you for the rooms full of flowers, the tables full of cards, and beautiful little gifts laying everywhere. Thank you so much! I know I have missed so many gifts I should have sent for these special occasions. And then, trusting God to heal my sick stomach. Please try to understand.
The doctors have stopped trying to treat the cancer and so now it's up to God and my faith. And that's enough! But please continue to pray for the pain and sick stomach ... They don't want me falling down the stairs. I am down weight wise to 65 pounds, and look like a scarecrow. I need God's miracle to swallow. ...
To those of you who are suffering as I....."don't give up"!! ... You see, God gives out his promises, they do not lie, they do not fail. We do not have to BEG him for them, they are FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She and husband Jim were at the center of the PTL scandal, one of the biggest religious news events of the 1980s. Like many a teenage cynic I lapped up every detail as Jim Bakker's televangelist empire was brought down by greed and lust. More recently, I watched every episode last year of the reality-show "One Punk Under God," about Jim and Tammy's son Jay Bakker. Partly because I was interested (and not in a good way) in Jay's "Revolution Ministry" and his changing it to a "gay-affirming" stance. But more, as the show wore on (there were just 6 or 8 half-hour episodes), because of the old memories of Tammy Faye, and how the show redeemed her.

Yeah ... back in the day, like many a cynical Gen-X teenager, I doubled over in laughter at footage of Tammy's on-air crying fits, the running mascara, the squeaky voice, and all the rest. I can still mentally play the footage of her standing outside the courthouse the day Jim was convicted of fraud, singing the chorus to "The Solid Rock" ("On Christ the solid Rock I stand / All other ground is sinking sand") and then chirpily saying "it's not over til it's over." She wasn't Kitschy; she was Kitsch. Everything about Tammy was over-the-top, so it's not surprising that she became a bit of a camp hero about a certain ... ahem ... type of man. Some film-makers even made a touching documentary about her that played in theaters, "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," with RuPaul as narrator.

But what the One Punk series and the Eyes documentary showed was that this was who she was. The letter shows the same even to the very end. In her letter, she's thanking everybody and apologizing for not sending back cards. Her sense of humor about herself is intact -- joking about looking a scarecrow, and the doctors not wanting her to fall down (she and Jay are constantly joking about her health throughout the show). And the multiple exclamation points ON EVERYTHING!!!!!!!! It's Pentecostal enthousiasmos, something that still strikes this Catholic Gen-X'er as profoundly alien, even as I've learned to admire and in some ways envy it.

"Tammy Faye" wasn't a role or a persona for the sake of a ploy or a scam, like many of us assumed was the case when we heard the stories about the air-conditioned doghouses, the cinnamon rolls baked only for their smell, etc. Tammy was someone so effervescent that she only knew how to be over-the-top. Anything worth doing was worth overdoing. She didn't have the element of cynicism, guile or calculation that keep most of us in check. She was so loving and so trusting a person and so guileless that it never occurred to her to ask whether it was a good use of money to air-condition a doghouse; it made the dog comfortable.

Tammy Faye was a cartoon in many ways, but she wasn't a fake. By the time of the One Punk series, her body was starting to give out from cancer. Son Jay requested, during Episode 5 if memory serves, that she appear no more on screen, as she could barely move around the house or even talk without effort. The dedication to Tammy Faye at the end of the last episode of One Punk read like an epitaph.

But still, throughout the show, she was loving and lovable. When the same attitude is overflowing from an old, sick body that knows it's not long for this world, it's different. The naive good-heartedness that made her so laugh-at funny in the 80s makes her inspiring in old age. Tammy has stayed naively authentic and good-hearted to the very end. She couldn't "reinvent" herself because she was who she was -- a Pentecostal to the bone who saw nothing but God's gifting hand in everything around her. It would be false to say she chose not to be bitter, because the word "bitter" just wasn't in her vocabulary.

Now, everything is in God's hands; all other ground is sinking sand. May God be with her to the end, and beyond.

Gay converts

Oscar Wilde waited until he was on his deathbed to convert, and his tombstone ... gives pause.

Pier Vittorio Tondelli also converted late in life, possibly as the result of the AIDS that would eventually kill him. But his last writings do not give pause, according to this report:

Speaking about chastity after his conversion, Tondelli called it “a mystic virtue for those who have chosen it and perhaps the most superhuman use of sexuality.”
A few days before dying, Tondelli read the Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians, making a few notes in the margins, such as, “Literature does not bring salvation, never. Only love, faith and falling back into grace saves.”

Nobody understands chastity better than those who struggle with it and/or have paid a price for violating it. It's humbling to look back at what you gained for it. Not a pearl of great price, but a speck of sand (or maybe a handful) that grates against your own feet. And nobody is in more awe of the men God calls up to live a chaste, celibate life. We know better than anyone that it's impossible (yes, I said "impossible") without grace, without love for He Who calls, and faith in Him.

Hello to newcomers, and prayer request

I missed this late last week, but I'm still getting more visitors, from my first McGreevey post below, which was linked at the discussion of the press coverage at Get Religion. Welcome all, and thanks, Mollie, from a longtime reader of your site (and Tmatt's and the former Master Jeremy's, who stole my book title idea).

If you look around, there's a second post now, which I swear I had begun and half-finished before I saw her link, but which had the same art idea. How can you not love a New York Post cover?

UPDATE: More linkage! Thanks to Travis of the former Soviet Socialist Republic of TJICistan, buried in the current Soviet Socialist Republic of Massachusetts, for linking to my second post on McGreevey, with high praise.

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I'd like to make a personal request to all who know me or know my persona or intrigued strangers or whoever else. I've had a difficult few days, which I won't much go into for the sake of avoiding exhibition or voyeurism, and for the sake of my mood. Suffice to say three things: (1) I crossed a line regarding the topic of this blog that I never thought I would, and I was frankly quite shaken; (2) in confession, I was told by a priest who didn't even know me that "you have to make some radical lifestyle changes" (he was hearing my confession at "Last Mass in the Diocese" for maybe the second or third time, none face-to-face). To hear such a de-facto order from a stranger was equally unnerving; and (3) I'm feeling and fearing God's tug in other ways that lead into unfamiliar territory. I need all the help I can get.

Have a sense of proportion

Former NBA player John Amaechi says he feared for his life from Christians when he wrote his "I Am A Gay Athlete" book.

When John Amaechi told the world he was gay, he steeled himself for a torrent of negativity that never really materialized, the former pro basketball player told the GOP's largest gay organization Saturday.
"I underestimated America. I braced myself for the wrath of a nation under God," Amaechi said at the Log Cabin Republicans' annual convention. "I imagined that it would be a firestorm, that it would be some insane number of letters demanding my deportation or my death.
"And in fact, 95 percent of the correspondence I've had have been overwhelmingly supportive and positive," Amaechi said. "But I will say that the 5 percent that I've had have been unbelievably, viscerally, frighteningly negative."
Amaechi is a psychologist who works with corporations and also with children, "and I worried what America would make of that," he said. "And it is not an issue."

It's good that Amaechi is acknowledging being wrong.

But I'm more interested in why he had those expectations in the first place. How can a man be so out of touch with the reality as to think that a public figure proclaiming his homosexuality, in itself, is a life-or-death matter? Forty years ago ... sure. If he were an active player ... a different set of considerations and stakes; but there may be some negativity, sure. But have a sense of proportion, people.

The active debate in the US today, for better or worse, is not whether we should jail homosexuals or stone them to death ("wrath ... under God" and all of that, ya know), but whether marriage should be redefined to accommodate them. The US military is debating between requiring homosexuals to be discreet or allowing them to be openly practicing.

And what does "the wrath of a nation under God" mean? Amaechi is a smart and cultured man, who well knows the resonances and connotations of his phrasings: "wrath" specifically invokes the divine, and "nation under God" specifically invokes the US constitutional order and live political fights. This only underscores his complete removal from reality. Christians today discuss among ourselves how to best minister to homosexuals, not how to wall them up in ghettoes and require the wearing of pink triangles. What gay-bashing and death threats as there are hardly come wrapped in the mantle of the Church or explicit religiosity. It's as if Amaechi believed there were these creatures called ... what would be a good name ... uh ... "Christianists" who roam the land like the pod-people in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" waiting to establish a theocracy. I wonder where such an idea could be afoot.

Further, if Amaechi's fears were sincere and reasonable at the level of death threats or some judgement about America in general, why would he publicly "come out" at all (for better or worse, homosexuals, unlike Jim Crow-era Southern blacks, DO have the option of discretion and living unhindered)? Instead Amaechi wrote a book proclaiming his homosexuality, an act that has won him far more notoriety than he ever had as a basketball player. Instead, he publicly proclaimed that Tim Hardaway would cause hundreds of thousands to flee in terror.

Here's the great paradox surrounding prejudice. In a society that were really, truly and fundamentally homophobic, nobody would be voluntarily "coming out" (much less doing it for a profitable book deal) and the charges "you're hurting homosexuals" (by making them fear or flee, say) or "you're a homophobe" would have no bite and would not need to be denied, effectively or otherwise. Yet Amaechi's actions betray the exact opposite expectations -- he came out, he wrote a book, he denounced Hardaway et al as homophobic. Those actions speak far louder than wherever he was getting these ideas that the American Christianist theocracy would kill him. Yet STILL, as if it's some learned reflex like "Polly Wanna Cracker," the gay propagandist betrays anti-Christian and anti-society prejudices.

McGreevey Update

That's "FATHER Gay American" to you. The former governor and A GAY AMERICAN has started his studies to become an Episcopal priest. Predictably, the New York Post had a field day, with their front page "A-Men" and "gay love gov" headlines (at the right) and the inside headline of "Heaven Help Us."

I know there is an argument for silence concerning the affairs of another Christian denomination, but this is so ... beyond parody. There's a detail buried in the Post account that had me on the floor:

McGreevey will attend the seminary, the oldest of its kind in New York, four days a week, on top of teaching his evening ethics class at Kean University in Union.

Well ... I would definitely agree that McGreevey has the morals of the evening.

All sarcasm and denunciation aside, this NY Daily News account mentions something worth detailing:

McGreevey first thought about entering the clergy when he was an altar boy at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Carteret, N.J., the source said. "This is something [he's] always wanted to do as a kid," the source said.
McGreevey briefly attended The Catholic University of America in Washington before transferring to Columbia University in the 1970s. While attending Georgetown Law School, McGreevey was enrolled in a Jesuit candidacy program.

I really do sympathize with McGreevey in some matters. No Catholic boy growing up with "that" was unmarked by it, no matter how things turned out. He told Oprah when pushing his own book of his boyhood uncertainties, from the end of this article.

On The Oprah Winfrey Show last year, McGreevey recounted looking up homosexual in a dictionary when he was a boy. When he read terms such as perverse and psychiatric disorder in the definition, he realized he didn't want to be that and quickly learned to repress his feelings, he said.
In his 2006 book, The Confession, McGreevey wrote that he had resorted to anonymous homosexual trysts at highway rest stops as he wrestled with desires frowned on by his faith and family.

Every article about this "Father Jim" tale has noted this, as if it were a contradiction but really isn't -- McGreevey's longtime self-presentation as a devout Roman Catholic. I could tell a very similar story to McGreevey in a lot of ways. I learned the basic mechanics of sex from looking up an encyclopedia when I was 17 or so (and frankly found it ... icky). I too reacted with revulsion at my first suspicions about myself. As an adult, I too have engaged in dangerous behavior when I've chosen to act out. My confessor has said "you've been running away from this all your life" (though he doesn't mean the same thing Dignity et al do). Psychologically, this all makes sense -- revulsion leading to self-destructiveness.

Like McGreevey, I would be considered devout by most people. I suspect most such Catholic boys (and single men) consider being a priest, at one level of seriousness or another for some period of time or another. In fact, I'd say that McGreevey even thought he might have had a calling to the priesthood not in spite of, but because of the celibacy requirement, which (though I support it) bears some ill fruit in this detail. It makes it easy for a devout Catholic boy to see the priesthood as the ideal hiding place. He won't have to deal with the "when are you getting married" question or have the girlfriend/wife for show.

If the Catholic boy is genuinely devout, this can even shade over into seeing same-sex attraction as confirmation of his calling: "after all, I'm definitely NOT called to marriage, and I have to be celibate anyway," the thought goes. I'm not saying this is a good reason to think you're called to the priesthood, but it is a common one, particularly since the Church doesn't have a very developed notion of the single, secular life as a vocation. The first person not wearing a Roman collar whom I told about "that" was an orthodox Catholic law professor with a national reputation, with whom I was taking a class. He published something about homosexuality that I thought was grossly incomplete and I wrote him a lengthy note saying what I thought the article didn't grasp (although nothing in it was exactly "wrong"), and we discussed it for a couple of hours. He suggested to me that perhaps God was "blessing you" (his term) with a calling to celibacy and perhaps the priesthood as well.

But I'm as confident as a single man can be that I'm not called to the priesthood (or cannot answer soon), because I struggle with compulsive sexual behavior. The Diocese of Arlington wouldn't take me now, and for reasons I am not convinced are strictly about the Church's celibacy requirement (which I support, though it is not directly at issue for McGreevey).

Here's the deal -- McGreevey is pushing 50 and only outed himself three years ago, so he had been struggling with this emotional whirlpool for about 30 years, before deciding to give up on it three years ago and enter the gay lifestyle. I know what that is, and you can't leave it behind. Even if you think McGreevey's living the gay lifestyle is the right path (though it is not), what theory of human personality says that a man three years removed from a lifetime of self-destructive compulsion can be a morally suitable candidate for the priesthood? Can his character really have left behind such depths of sexual immorality, compulsiveness and self-destructiveness so quickly (and I guarantee you that if he's admitting to anonymous pickups at highway rest-stops, he's done a lot more)? Human beings are just not that plastic, that quick. I expressed skepticism of Ted Haggard's claims about his sexuality on the same grounds (admittedly Haggard was making a more-radical claim).

It's not the morality of homosexual acts per se, but what a difficult job conquering the habits of a lifetime is for a 50-year-old man. Human beings become set in their habits, regardless of whether they are good or bad habits to have, and this has been old hat since Aristotle. The gay activists constantly insist that the closet is soul-warping (and I would not deny that it has its costs), so on their very logic McGreevey should be badly warped. Or is character not a requirement for even a gay priesthood?

What does all this say about the Episcopal Church's standards? McGreevey formally joins their church on Sunday and on the subsequent Wednesday, it's reported that he is accepted into their seminary and already has begun the discernment process. And just three years removed from habitual compulsive sexual behavior. Catholics priests are required to have a demonstrated ability to live according to the sexual rules. Admittedly, they are not the same rules as an Episcopal priest, but do the Episcopalians have any requirements whatever? Are they that desperate? Or that nihilistic?

According to one orthodox Episcopalian friend of mine (who had been a seminarian also), the discernment process usually takes months and often years and *then* you're accepted into the seminary (and many are weeded out; or graduate, but decide against ordination). Even the vicar at his "gay-affirming" church says this isn't supposed to be an insta-decision.

This process that he's in right now, is not going to be some snap of the finger, overnight process. That will not happen. That's not how it works. He knows that ... everyone knows that this is a process that ... intentionally is deliberate. You don't enter into it unadviseably.

Deliberate ... my tookus. If this is a "deliberate" decision, I'd like to see the Episcopalians' idea of a hasty one. And is there ... at all ... potentially unseemly in the fact that "Father Jim" has dumped two wives already and pissed away a governorship. Sexual behavior aside, how can McGreevey possibly be considered a man of good general character -- based on the known public facts of his life, plus the kinds of things he's suspected of doing as chief executive of the state with perhaps the nation's sleaziest government culture, and the credible claims in his divorce. And so soon after 30 years in what homosexualists say is a character-warping closet? Nobody says priests need be saints (most of them are not, in fact). But character is even a formal requirement for seminarians in my diocese. Do the Episcopalians have ANY prior character test AT ALL. According to his ex-wife:

His actions over the past two and a half, three years, are not the actions of someone who was remorseful…he’s always been self-absorbed and it is all about him. I think he has lived in a state of denial for so many years. He doesn’t know what is real and is not.

Ugly divorces are what they are, but this does mesh with what IS publicly known about McGreevey. I loved this bit about ... well ... here's the quote:

He told me, "You have to be Jackie Kennedy today." And I'm thinking, Jackie Kennedy? Her husband was murdered. You cheated on me and I have to be Jackie Kennedy?

For sheer self-dramatization (unless the ex-wife is outright lying), this is flabbergasting.

But wait ... I'm forgetting what church we're talking about. The Episcopalians are reinventing themselves as the High-Liturgical branch of the Metropolitan Community Church, so heck ... McGreevey will fit right in. Maybe one of the dioceses bordering New Hampshire will also need a bishop soon.

Small favors

The DC Madam makes me glad I'm not straight.
A lot of other Washington men are wishing the same right now.

UPDATE: Actually, I first expressed this thought a couple of years ago. At this thread at Amy Welborn's about the marriage liturgy.

A GAY AMERICAN, DAMMIT!!!

What does Jim McGreevey, A GAY AMERICAN, think we'll believe? Anything, to judge from the latest court filings in his ugly divorce from his second wife, Dina Matos McGreevey.

Although it is clear that the Defendant knew of my sexual orientation before our marriage, she chose to either ignore it or block it out of her mind, even when questioned by her friends.

This isn't directly relevant to how secular law works, but even under the Canon Law of the viciously homophobic Catholic Church, the most persistent homosexual attractions do not, in itself, create grounds for an annulment. In fact, I know that secular law doesn't say homosexual persons cannot marry, because they do all the time (to persons they are eligible to marry, meaning not their siblings, not second and third "spouses" or not persons of the same sex -- the same rule that applies to heterosexuals). So his bringing this up, even in rebuttal, seems more like a ploy in the hope that the judge watches a lot of Oprah. The court filing continues:

On the offhand chance she wasn't paying attention, I AM A GAY AMERICAN. She is in deep denial.

Oh dear. If I could advise his lawyers, I'd tell them to cut the ALL-CAPS. It makes you sound like a whiny bitch. I'd also want to link to a river in Egypt. And not to refer to her. Now divorce is as divorce does -- it's always messy, usually ugly and never makes anyone look good. But one of the downsides of the closet, regardless of anything else (and closeted-me accepts this downside), is that it makes anything you say about others' contemporaneous knowledge of you impossible to prove. After all, even if you did tell someone, there could only ever be your word for it, because the whole point of the closet is for there to be no objective evidence that (unwanted) others could see. Hoist by his own petard I'd say.

Still ... I don't know about you, but if there's a human being in the world who has a right to say "you're not gay, you're bi," it's your ex-wife. Or was their five-year-old daughter history's second virgin birth? Actually, it'd have to be the third, given that McGreevey had a child with his first wife. And from what I hear ... outside the world of 19th-century novels and 20th-century movies, once is usually not enough. Not that most men complain ... a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

And what is McGreevey's obsession with being A GAY AMERICAN. After all, if there's nothing shameful about gay sex or homosexuality on the usual contemporary grounds, then what can there be shameful or denial-worthy about either heterosexual sex or bisexuality? Why is McGreevey so eager and willing to deny the obvious. I think I'll coin a new phrase to apply to case studies like McGreevey: Bi Panic Defense (cf.)

I also have to wonder about a few other things.

1. Will "Jim McGreevey began his gay affair while his wife was in a bedridden pregnancy with an unborn daughter whom he didn't want" become as much part of political lore as "Newt Gingrich served divorce papers on his wife as she was dying of cancer" has?
   
2. Will "Jim McGreevey used the phrase 'look like white trash' as a disparaging term with some meaning distinct from black trash or Asian trash" become as big a story as "Don Imus uses 'nappy-headed hos' as a disparaging term" has?
3. Will "Jim McGreevey exposes kids to life-sized posters of nude male models" become as culture-transforming as "Clarence Thomas talked about pubic hair on Coke cans" has. Maybe if he had a son and exposed him to life-sized posters of female nude models, the boy could grow up to join the Duke lacrosse team and become a symbol of "white (trash?) male objectification of women." Still, maybe there's some good here, in the detail that Mrs. McGreevey is saying that one way he sexually abuses their daughter is by having her sleep with him and his boyfriend. Father Martin Fox has wondered whether children should habitually sleep with their parents because it might interfere with ... you know. So maybe that'd be for the best after all ... nothing can cool your ardor for hot beefcake boytoy like a bawling 5-year-old girl, let me tell you.
   

Somehow ... I doubt all three. After all, the Mainstream media thinks "Thou shalt not make Members of Oppressed Groups (like GAY AMERICANS) look bad" is one of the 5 Commandments that Moses dropped on the ground.

Mental health in Virginia

Catholic blogger Mark Shea has said that history has two phases -- "what could it hurt" and "how was I supposed to know." I suggest that what makes this cycle last, as a continuous dynamic, is found in the "what could it hurt" phase. Namely that "it" is, as often as not, a backlash or reaction against some previous "how was I supposed to know." Metaphors involving generals fighting the last war, 20/20 hindsight, and horses and barn doors, come to mind also.

We're seeing some of that dynamic in the Virginia Tech shootings. I'm convinced there is not really any meaning to be gleaned from them -- crazy, evil people do crazy, evil things. But the number of people who commit acts this extreme are so few that, even when some reason can be attached to a particular case, those cases can only be spotted in retrospect. As the Times blogger notes:

There are millions of American college students, and only one of them has ever committed such a horrific massacre. The factors cited by Miss Paglia affect all students; only one reacted as Cho did. ... Extremely rare events are difficult to explain by theoretical reference to general factors.

But that doesn't stop us from trying to explain such events, and therefore worse yet, to try to "fix" them. Other people can take up gun control or concealed-carry laws (Virginia Tech may have been a gun-free zone, but, to quote Gen. Turgidson, "Well, sir, I would say that [Cho] has already invalidated that policy!") Or violent entertainment. But I can speak to my experience with one thing -- the metal-health laws of Virginia, which have been taking a beating. In an Associated Press article headlined "Va. law makes intervention tough," a variety of "warning signs" in Cho's pre-shooting behavior are alluded to.

The 23-year-old immigrant -- an outcast by his own account, a bully and a perverted loner by others' -- who took his life and 32 others at Virginia Tech this week had troubled classmates and professors more than a year earlier with his dark writings and brooding.
He had been kicked out of class, and two women complained to campus police that they had received annoying and unwanted messages from him. Their complaints and an acquaintance's concern that Cho was suicidal were enough to get him taken for a psychiatric evaluation.

And then, the criticisms that this didn't amount to reason under Virginia law to force the commitment of Cho.

But they weren't enough to have him committed under Virginia law, one of the most restrictive in the nation when it comes to forcing treatment on a person showing signs of mental instability. Mental health experts say his case will heighten a discussion about whether it is time to revise those laws. ...
State law allows involuntary commitment only if a person is determined to pose an "imminent danger" to himself or others or is "substantially unable to care for himself."
Only Georgia, Hawaii, Montana and Ohio have similar standards, according to the nonprofit Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va. Other states don't use the word "imminent" in conjunction with danger or harm, making it easier to force treatment.
Retired state police superintendent Col. W. Gerald Massengill, who was appointed by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to head an investigation into the shootings, said he expects the review will cover mental health issues as well as law enforcement response.

As a Virginia resident, this law has affected me too. I first went to a therapist at the behest (the politest possible term) of my confessor and the strong counsel (ditto) of some of my Courage brothers, in response to some behavior that they said proves that "this is not about sex." I had always resisted seeing a head-shrinker for a variety of reasons -- a bad experience with a psychiatrist as a pre-teen; my intellectual-moral distaste for the whole psychiatrist-therapy racket as excuse-making witch-doctory for atheist New Yorkers with too damn much money; my general stoic temperament, which detests complainers and emotional exhibitionism.

But I relented. I went into this Catholic psychiatric ministry late one Friday afternoon, near weekend closing time because ... well, just because. And the therapist on duty, who I think was just hanging around at 6 to finish some work, agreed to take me on after an hour's meeting. But at the first appointment proper, I asked him something that mattered a great deal to me -- what are the circumstances under which I could be committed against my will. After all, I knew it wouldn't take Freud to diagnose me as suffering from depression and recommend putting me on meds; I had a suicide attempt in my past (not a very competent one, but still ...); I had deliberately engaged in some dangerous sexual behavior (barebacking, anonymous sex, masochism); in many respects, my life was out of control. "I'm at the end of my rope" is something I have said more than a couple of times.

But I told the therapist that if I judged that involuntary commitment was a plausible risk, I would not come. Under no circumstances was I gonna be publicly humiliated like that.

As it happened, he told me, I had nothing to fear. He told me that Virginia law is fairly restrictive on commitment and it would take much more than the kinds of things I quickly outlined to him. He said, close as I can recall, "you have to be more than just badly depressed." I don't recall that he used the word "imminent," but post-Cho reporting makes it clear that this is part of the law, as is the phrase "can't take care of yourself," which I do remember my therapist using. He also later told me that the records of our sessions would be destroyed after a set time (five years, if memory serves). So, I was satisfied and went to see him once or twice a week for several months.

Now, I'm not gonna pretend I'm anything like as disturbed as Cho. I'm also known to be a bit moody, and had many of the same problems in grade and high school, common to loner boys with academic inclinations. I can always function as a normal person day-to-day (as could Cho, who was evaluated thus: "his insight and judgment are normal"). But the chances of me going postal like Cho are effectively zero, because even in the darkest times, I turn inward in despair, not outward in anger. The chances of me committing suicide are thereby greater, but not high.

Still, if in my judgment Virginia had made it too easy to commit me against my will, merely on the basis of suicidal thoughts, occasional "weirdnesses" (aka "warning signs") and the kinds of things I knew I would have to tell the therapist, I would certainly have walked out of that Arlington office, never to return. And I fear that Virginia and several other states, in their eagerness to do something -- anything -- to respond to this massacre, will do something stupidly counterproductive, like make it easier to commit people beforehand based on fears about what they might do. Even apart from the fact that almost all the time, these cases wouldn't have resulted in something like Virginia Tech, easier commitment will make the marginal cases -- the person sane and competent enough to decide whether he should seek psychiatric help -- from doing exactly that.

News updates

● See if you can follow this transcript on a hearing before the Connecticut legislature and conclude anything other than that the gay "marriage" pushers don't have a clue about what an argument is or how to listen. My favorite exchange was:

Lawlor: So labeling people as intrinsically evil and objectively disordered is a respectful thing in your view?
Brown: Well, first of all the Church doesn't label people as that. It talks about acts, what the Church doesn't agree with that's a very different thing. So that's a mischaracterization of what the Catholic Church teaches.
Lawlor: Okay, so I'll clarify my statement… so you believe that people who love people of the same sex are intrinsically evil and objectively disordered. Is that what you feel?
Brown: Of course I don't. I'm not saying people or individuals, I'm not saying anything like that...

Then another twit tries to make a religious reverse-litmus test. And these are the individuals deliberating on marriage law?


● Black-Eyed Peas singer Fergie admits here to having had a string of lesbian experiences as a teen or young adult, simply as a form of adolescent rebellion. What interested me wasn't the "strict Catholic" narrative (yawn ... been there ... done that) but that she says quite upfront that lesbian sex was in the past and was not motivated by "who I am" but was a choice for reasons not different from the reasons others shave their head or drive their cars too fast or date outside their race/ethnicity. Fergie is saying what we all know when we think about it outside the toe-the-line orthodoxy of the Gay Thought Police -- namely that there are elements of choice in sexual behavior and that sexual "orientation" is not determined-for-life and is subject to change.


● On the gay-tolerance front, Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco of Genoa criticized a proposed gay civil-unions bill in Italy, saying that recognition of sexual unions must make some reference to moral standards external to the unions other than mere consent or libertinism. Since then, the cathedral is defaced and the cardinal is now under 24-7 police guard. No thanks undoubtedly to inaccurate reports like this one in 365Gay.com (it states as a fact that Archbishop Bagnasco "link[ed] homosexuality with incest") which is not exactly what he said. It's a good thing homosexuals are expanding the bounds of tolerance.

Personal updates

A few short personal updates:

● I admitted at a recent chapter meeting, when our Chaplain read the Prodigal Son parable, that I don't like it. In fact, I think "hate" was the verb I used. Which is the opposite, I would suspect, of most people's reaction -- it's easily among the most-popular and -cited of Our Lord's parables. But my honest reaction is that the parable is incomprehensible. Mystifying. Which I realize is to some extent the point, but that doesn't make it easier to swallow. Or to "get." When asked, "what would you have done in the prodigal son's situation?" my honest answer is "probably left home the next day, wondering wtf THAT was all about." I've noted before that stuff like this I just don't *get.* The person in the Prodigal Son parable with whom I identify the most, at least in terms of psychological makeup, is the other son. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not jealous of my brother exactly. And I certainly wouldn't claim to never have strayed. But I would very much have had the brother's reaction, even as the prodigal son himself.

● After having been snubbed in the listing of manly Catholic blogs (why ... was it just because I have [censored]?) I decided I need to butch up, with sports fandom. I decided to enter my work's NCAA basketball pool and immersed myself in the tournament. I submitted two brackets -- one which I tried to pick (and when I fell into conversation with people that was "my bracket), and one where I just blindly went with the higher-seeded team. In an 80-bracket office, one finished 9th (out of the money though), the other 76th. Guess which was which. I spent the whole Friday of Day 2 of the 1st Round at one sports bar watching games. Fridays during a Lent when you've given up alcohol can make bars one of the oddest places in the world. Over the course of nine hours, I ordered all three things on the menu I could have and really felt guilty putting the poor bartender through all my 108 soda refills without bumping my bill up.

● The darkness and depression got to me a couple of times and I crashed hard after a week of daily-Mass attendance which is a common pattern, like Icharus (maybe partly because I hate the Prodigal Son parable).

For a lighter note

Ann Coulter and Bill Maher agree. Let's tone it down.

I don't know if I should blog about this ...

... because to be perfectly honest, I am in a state of spitting rage over Cpl. Matt Sanchez. And there's always the issue of repeating an outing slander. But since the outee himself has acknowledged both the charge and its truth, I think I'm on safe ground.

Long story short: Cpl. Sanchez became a minor celebrity by calling Columbia University over its anti-military bias, some directed specifically and personally at him, and the coddling treatment of leftist barbarians who shut down conservative speeches. He made a couple of appearances on Fox News and, then last week, appeared at CPAC and had his photo taken with Miss Faggot Herself (above).

Well ... that calls for burning-at-the-stake in the ... ahem ... Church of Liberalism. And so several Internet sites proceeded to "out" Sanchez as a man who, before he joined the Marines, made several gay porn films and worked as a gay prostitute. Then the news worked its way up the blogospheric food chain, up to scum like Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, Gay.com, AMERICAblog.

Here's the Marine's response. I don't want to link to any of the offending sites -- anyone curious for confirmation can do a Google News search for "Matt Sanchez" (as I write, there's a beefcake illustrative photo. Some of the sites have hard-core stills from the films; consider yourself warned). I won't pretend objectivity. I have made my mistakes and committed my sins in this sphere also. Some of them I paid for, dearly. I spent a night in the emergency room with anal gonorrhea and lived six months expecting an HIV-positive diagnosis because a man lied about his status. I've been careful in a bunch of ways (never acted in a gay porn film ... for more reasons than one). But who knows? So I know the chance that some Sanchez-like fragging may lie in my future.

And this attempt at public humiliation was for what. What was Sanchez's crime? There no evidence that he himself called anyone "faggot" or was even otherwise anti-gay, even by the generous definitions that would make me anti-gay. It is 200 proof McCarthyism (i.e., imputed guilt by pre-crime association) and chemically-pure ideological hate to say that Sanchez committed any crime by being a conservative who appeared on Fox or appearing at CPAC with *others* who may be anti-gay by some stretched definition. I truly, truly hate these people. Hate them. These adolescent, gossiping, bitchy, whiny, subhuman, inhuman, spite-filled homosex activists. So marinated in their own self-righteous, hate-filled, narcissistic circle jerk that they completely obliterated their moral sense in the cesspool of their own sin. They have killed their souls. An example of their wicked Marcotte-like combox viciousness is here (you have also been warned).

As another indication of how completely these homosex activists live in their own intellectual fantasyland, several of the commenters there and elsewhere actually thought that "ohmigawd, the right's gonna SO turn on this guy." They actually believe their own transference, that Christians and the right are filled with gay-haters. That was even the gyst of the closest I saw to an adult reaction from a liberal -- from Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force:

While it may be delicious to watch our opponents twist and squirm after honoring and embracing a larger-than-life gay porn star, I don’t see any hypocrisy in U.S. Marine reservist Matt Sanchez’s actions. As is his right, he spoke out against what he believed was bad treatment by Columbia’s ‘radical anti-military students’ (Sanchez’s words). Right-wing pundits and organizations pounced on the handsome Latino Marine and showered him with praise and media exposure. Now, they’re scrambling for cover.
Porn — gay or straight — has no ideology. Porn stars and porn consumers are Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, atheists and evangelicals. There’s no inherent contradiction between Matt Sanchez being pro-military and being part of the ‘adult film’ industry. The real hypocrisy expresses itself in two different and important ways. First, the failed ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ law requires Matt Sanchez and thousands of other loyal Americans to hide their sexual orientation to serve their country in the military. Second, Ann Coulter and her ilk lift a man to hero and spokesperson status until — gasp! — he is found out to be a ‘faggot’ (Coulter’s word).

I'll set aside #1 for now. I think Foreman is wrong-headed, but at least that's an actual argument. But #2 and the "scrambling for cover" line are simply false and, as I say, indicates how out-of-touch liberals are with actual conservative thought (a theme I never can repeat too often). It's one day later. David Horowitz. Right Wing News. Don Surber. Ace of Spades. Gay Patriot. Hot Air. The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. If there's an important conservative blogger who has mentioned this story in order to do anything other than defend Sanchez, excoriate the gay left or dismiss the "news," I am unaware of it. (Correction invited.)

But unlike Foreman, because I take Catholicism seriously, I knew this would be the reaction when I first heard of this yesterday, assuming merely that it was in Sanchez's past. After all, what is Christianity worth if we can't see the penitent sinner in a case like Sanchez. Would any human being rather that everyone who made a porn film (or several) spend the rest of his life doing that and have no second chance? I've participated in the sexual corruption of enough men in my life that I'm no better than the two thieves crucified alongside Him. But one repented and the other didn't. Secular gays and their left allies will simply never get that. From SeeDubya at the Junkyard blog:

It hasn't worked out quite like they thought. Bryan has more on Sanchez, redemption, and the Christian roots of forgiveness, and a link to Sanchez's own very forthright story in Salon. Do read that, if you haven't already. (So far the comments are admirably supportive of Cpl. Sanchez as well.)
I don't think the Left understands the idea of redemption well, or that they believe anyone believes it. After all, for the cultural left, redemption isn't necessary. Change isn't necessary. Everyone is perfect just the way they are and we have to accept them. I once heard a sermon to this effect in the (Episcopal Church, USA's) National Cathedral in DC. The Suffragan Bishop--which I think is like a vice-bishop--capped off her sermon with a sort of altar call. This was years ago, but I still remember her saying "Come as you are. God wants you just as you are. You don't have to change."
God wants you just as you are, yes. And He loves you just as you are. But He will change you, if you let Him.

Politically-speaking, the best response came from Michelle Malkin and in part because she acknowledged a change in her own opinion.

I said the other day I thought CPAC organizers would be justified in being embarrassed if the rumors about Sanchez’s porn star past 15 years ago turned out to be true. Well, the rumors are true. But it is neither CPAC nor Cpl. Sanchez who should feel embarrassed.
It’s the nasty, gloating liberals who claim to stand for tolerance, privacy, human rights, and compassion. I predicted the other day that left-wing bigotry would rear its ugly head. I was right. The e-mail I’ve received is more disgusting than anything Ann Coulter stupidly said at CPAC. And I can imagine the vitriol Cpl. Sanchez is enduring.

Preach it, sister!! If "hatred" and "bigotry" are defined neutrally by language, tone, argument and usage, rather than by definitional gerrymandering based on political-issue stance or by a-priori decrees that only certain groups commit it, then the secular gay- and other-activist left is easily the most hate-filled and bigoted place in the world. No dispute. No way.

Marriage across cultures

At Beliefnet the other day, I pointed out that marriage has always meant male-female, despite all the ways has otherwise differed. This drew the following rebuttal:

It took me all of five minutes to find this interesting article on same-sex marriage in non-European traditions:
http://www.colorq.org/Articles/article.aspx?d=2004&x=ssmarriage

A quote: Woman-woman marriage has been documented in more than 30 African populations, including the Yoruba and Ibo of West Africa, the Nuer of Sudan, the Lovedu, Zulu and Sotho of South Africa, and the Kikuyu and Nandi of East Africa.

No doubt if I were a professional anthropologist and willing to devote hours to research, I could present more evidence, but this seems enough to cast some doubt on your statement.

I decided my response was too long for a combox (plus Rod quickly afterward said the thread had jumped the shark). But here it is:

First of all, as a matter of general background, I am extremely suspicious of accounts of primitive societies that seem to dovetail with current concerns and/or the ideological predilections of the Western intellectual classes. I think it was that Christianist-godbag Nietzsche who warned about how study of the Other or of the past becomes a dig for what you yourself buried (in other words, finding what you're looking for).

There is precedent for this skepticism -- there's the now famously debunked Margaret Mead among the Samoans (and among others). And there's an important example (John Boswell) that I'll go into below. More generally, in his criticism of "feminist science," sociologist Steven Goldberg (The Inevitability of Patriarchy) wrote of how rampant is the misuse of semi-understood ethnography to back the wishes of a contemporary form of liberal activism (feminism).

When its explanations manage to avoid refutation by a cursory logical glance, they invoke bogus empirical evidence whose misrepresentation can be exposed by spending 90 seconds with the source invoked. (I have checked well over a hundred claims -- never made by the ethnographer who actually studied the society in question -- that a specific ethnography describes a nonpatriarchal society; it has never taken over 90 seconds with the invoked ethnography to demonstrate the ludicrousness of the claim. I have never found anyone willing to attempt to back up such a claim once it became clear that I had checked the ethnography that had been invoked.)

If some anthropologist were to have written in, say, 1980 that "Tribe X marries men and men," that's one thing. I'd sit up and pay attention. But such a claim made afresh in 2007 (or any time after, I'd say, about 1990) I just yawn. It should have to be looked at with, not just a grain, but a whole salt lick.

Second, there are severe problems with any attempt to analogize social relationships across societies. As I said when I last broached into this subject, many societies, especially primitive ones, have defined social relationships that may involve persons of the same sex and/or same-sex love in some sense of "love" — sponsorship, adoption, brotherhood and what Boswell tendentiously tries to turn into homosexual marriage — adelphopoiesin. Other societies have long been known to have social relationships that involved same-sex sex acts — Greek pederasty, and rites of passage and periods of testing for manhood, especially.

I quite realize that erotic love as we understand it has not always been the exclusive goal of marriage — as often as not, property and, particularly among the upper class, political-dynastic considerations have been. But there will often be in a society other arrangements between persons of the same sex that also have something to do with property or politics (adelphopoiesin being one, in fact). That doesn't make those arrangements marriages.

Third, we are truly crippled in avoiding presentist eisegesis by the fact that English uses a single word "love" to cover a host of relationships. Thus even a good-willed person can leave the wrong impression (and Boswell does too). But it's not just the language, because Shakespeare could write (Laertes speaking to Hamlet before their deadly duel):

... But till that time,
I do receive your offer'd love like love,
And will not wrong it.

No ... it's more the present-day sexification of everything. We can hardly conceive any more of love that doesn't either involve sex or isn't smirkingly winked at as a denied or repressed form of sex (visit the local U.'s gay-studies department on a day ending in "y" for examples of "queering" everything under the sun). But because sex is in fact a feature of marriage, we thus "read in" sex and so see "marriages" where there are not. People can love one another, actually mean it, and even enter into a formal arrangement of it. That doesn't make it "marriage" any more than it does two college fraternity brothers (who love one another) signing a contract (i.e., a formal arrangement of property) to share their apartment.

With these considerations in mind, I conclude that citations from civilized societies about themselves, ones capable of self-conscious self-presentation from within, count for far, far more than any number of "anthropologist among the primitives" field work. I would also say that whatever classifications might work best in other societies, the relationship cannot meaningfully be called a "marriage" unless

• it is supposed to involve sex (whatever the relative importance of eros or love may have been)
• it is supposed to be exclusionary (I don't mean monogamy, but rather whether entering the union precluded someone from marriage, whatever the existing understanding of it)
• it is supposed to be permanent (I mean it doesn't have built-in impermanence, not whether dissolution was ever possible)
• it has substantial social approval (people always behave badly; that doesn't make, say, robbery or murder a lifestyle, or a gang of thieves or the Mafia the government)
  

I say "supposed to" in most of these formulations because practice obviously never perfectly follows understanding. And the one exception is the ultimate "supposed to" -- in fact, it's hard to imagine what a "socially-disapproved marriage" could ever mean (especially to a social constructionist) or what the value of marriage would be except for approval of some other (society or God).

With all that in mind, much of the information here on supposed same-sex "marriages" simply dissolves, even on the brief descriptions given there. Even the one that most-closely resemble marriage was hardly more than a socially-disapproved deviation. After all, the biological argument for the centrality of male-female to family formation is so simple, obvious and universal that it hardly needs stating.

The African "female husband" practices do not center on same-sex sex (the only sex mentioned is opposite-sex) and so have nothing apparent to do with lesbianism. They seem more like family-line/ancestor-worship accommodations of either solitary females in a family or a general male-shortage (the later would be common in a warrior or hunter tribe, as all the there-named groups I know anything about are).

The African and Fujianese male practices are clearly rites of passage or adult-boy sponsorship, analogous to Greek pederasty in our own tradition. The page even says the younger boys married and the older man was expected to pay for his wedding.

The Guangdong Golden Orchid Societies, as presented here, come closest to marriage. But as this source indicates (even while breathing the m-word and saying that erotic pleasure was sometimes involved) they were first and foremost a group arrangement of women who eschewed marriage and lived in community, like nuns or monks. Hence "societies." The ceremonies being referred to occurred within the group (and no doubt some hanky-panky may have gone on, homosexuality as behavior being universal). Further, as McGough and other sources indicate, it was a secret society that was not socially approved.

The American Indians described actually point to the opposite. Having "alternative gender roles" proves nothing about marriage and, in the one specific case cited (the Mohave), actually undercuts any claim that any ceremony with two penises or four breasts was "homosexual." Especially if this is occurring in the context of shamanism or multiple-spirit soulcraft. If a biological male has, for whatever reason, been socialized into female gender role, then his marrying a socialized male proves that even a socially-constructed marriage is "male-female."

So I stand by my statement: I am unaware of any society which we know from their accounts had an approved same-sex sexual relationship conceived as a marriage alternative or parallel for a particular class of persons.

"This is London"

The British government officially released the wording of its planned attack on religious freedom sexual orientation regulations. As expected, no opt-out for church schools or social-service offices. By the end of the month, as I explained below here and here, this law will make Catholicism, any other serious form of Christianity, and Islam all illegal in Britain. As this article from Manchester Evening News puts it bluntly, using a type of business that has always been exempt from discrimination laws in the US (for now):

A ban on [Bed & Breakfast] owners refusing gay couples a double room is set to come into force in mainland Britain next month under new rules published today.

It looks like I was wrong below when I said this was the equivalent of passing a committee; it's more like the committee has finished "markup" of the bill (but the point I was making stands; once the ruling party decides what it wants, it almost always gets it). More disgracefully, the Cabinet's Communities Secretary Ruth Kelly, described and this article and many others as a devout Catholic:

I am proud to bring forward practical new protections for lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

There's obviously limits to what a subordinate can say, and Lord knows I detest moralists and should never question anyone else's faith or public standing. But still, the enthusiasm is ... unseemly. Swallow it if you must. Don't be "proud" of it.

No reaction from Britain's bishops that I can tell so far (correction of course welcomed). Still, I found this recent letter from Bishop Philip Tartaglia of Paisley in Scotland (PDF file), which warned of things to come.

We also need to be attentive to the wider issues. We cannot but sense that something sinister is happening. For the first time in the modern era in this country, the Catholic Church is facing the prospect of being forced to act against her faith and against her convictions, or else face legal challenge and possible prosecution. This is a deeply disturbing turn of events and it is not yet clear what kind of precedent this may set for other areas of the pastoral and social activity of the Catholic Church. ...

I am convinced the Church needs to be prepared spiritually to face this new, unexpected and unwelcome threat to our freedom and well-being. ... Our normal and preferred way of working is to cooperate with the authorities for the common good. So we are eprhaps still inclined to deny that government is acting unjustly toward us. ...

Finally, this unfortunate episode may well herald the beginning of a new and uncertain time for the Catholic Church in the United Kingdom.

We already know from other fields that religious-discrimination law will give way to pro-gay thought control in practice, as shown by this case where judges are refusing conscience exemptions to British civil servants. It's important in this case to note that Andrew McClintock was not asking to contravene Caesar's gay-adoption law, but only to be excused himself from certain cases, which would then be handled by others. That isn't protecting homosexuals from discrimination (no gay person would have been affected), but discriminating against Christians in the name of forcing them (us) to approve of homosexuality, i.e., deny Christ.

Caesar even had the gall to tell McClintock he didn't suffer religious discrimination. One could (could) say that he did and that's good, or unfortunate-but-necessary. But saying "no religious discrimination" is bonkers. Or rather only makes sense under a conception of religion as completely privatized, and thus marginalized, while Caesar defines all. The LifeSite quote ends with this quote from Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham:

It is simply unacceptable to suggest that the resources of faith communities, whether in schools, adoption agencies, welfare programmes, halls and shelters can work in co-operation with public authorities only if the faith communities accept not simply a legal framework but also the moral standards at present being touted by the Government.

One might call it "a dictatorship of relativism," the first word from Bishop Nichols and the latter from Bishop Tartaglia's letter.

"This is London" too

There's a round of letters in the Tablet on the gay masses in London, both from the a Westminster Diocese spokesman and the author of one of the two original pieces, John Haldane, rebutting the other, by James Alison. It's available online only to subscribers, but a subscriber sent them to me.

Monsignor O'Boyle insists on the orthodoxy and orthopraxy of the Mass practices (in which case, they are good). Professor Haldane notes that anthropology simply does not translate quickly and seamlessly into ethics and that the Church's moral tradition is what gives facts their meaning.


LETTERS

Pastoral provision for gays.

In the light of your two articles (3 March) concerning pastoral outreach to Catholic homosexuals, the Diocese of Westminster wishes to emphasise the following points.

The 5pm Mass celebrated at Our Lady of the Assumption, Warwick Street, Soho, is part of the normal provision for Sunday Mass in that parish and open to all. From now on it will at times have a particular sensitivity to homosexual people who congregate in that area and who have asked for pastoral provision from the Church. The announcement concerning these masses made clear the Church's teaching that sexual intercourse finds its proper place and meaning in marriage alone. The Church does not share the assumption that every adult person needs to be sexually active.

Every person, whether homosexual or heterosexual is called to chastity. They are helped to do this through friendship, prayer and sacramental grace. Homosexual people are rightly given pastoral care within their own parishes. It is the expectation of the Cardinal that all who attend these Masses in Soho wish to live in full communion with the Church and also strive to live by the Church's moral teaching. While the Church continues to uphold objective moral norms, it is also wise, compassionate and understanding of the difficult challenge that many experience in living the kind of chaste life to which the Lord calls us.

(Mgr) Seamus O'Boyle
Vicar General, Diocese of Westminster
London SW1


I read with interest James Alison's essay "On Helping the Faithful Negotiate Confusion" (3 March), which I presume he had been invited to prepare as a response to my own article ["Faith, gays and chastity"] submitted under the title "On Attending to the Faithful in Parts [should read "Matters"] of Chastity". That in turn was intended to echo "On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine". These connections are relevant to the matter at hand, namely how to understand the basis and status of Church teaching on sexual ethics. In the editorial introductions, I am described as a "leading philosopher and pontifical consultor", James Alison as "one of the younger generation of Catholic theologians". These terms may suggest a clash between staid Roman orthodoxy and fresh thinking. In fact, however, Fr. Alison and I are of the same generation, and if there is a relevant difference in stances it may be between contrasting modes of philosophical analysis and theological reflection.

Fr. Alison quotes from a 2006 address in which Pope Benedict spoke of "authentic breakthroughs of human knowledge" but also of how "scientific advances have sometimes been so rapid as to make it very difficult to discern whether they are compatible with the truths about man and the world that God has revealed". Preparing to apply this to what he describes as "an emerging anthropological truth" about homosexuality, Alison writes that there is nothing to indicate which advances or breakthroughs are referred to. In fact, however, context and references indicate that the Pope was speaking of the relation between religion and science in such fields as genetics and evolutionary biology.

These bear upon rival metaphysical claims about creation and human origins and they are silent on the matter of sexual ethics. The relation between anthropology and ethics is important but it is not of a form that allows easy derivations from what occurs to what ought to be. Indeed, to evaluate the moral significance of empirical data one needs an ethical theory. Catholicism fashions the latter out of scripture, tradition, and philosophical reasoning. In this connection it would be idle for Fr Alison or me to pit our wits against the settled teachings of the Apostles and the Fathers and Councils of the Church. They, as Newman recognised, are our teachers, not we theirs.

(Professor) John Haldane
University of St Andrews, Fife

Well ... nobody's perfect

After watching an old movie by Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder, it's easy to say of Hollywood comedies that "they don't make 'em like that any more." Actually, they do, it's just that Paramount has moved downtown, to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, where it's producing the long-running "Comedy of Errors." The latest performance was last weekend at the Anaheim Convention Center (for an out-of-town opening, I guess), but given this description of the panel, “Ministry with Lesbian and Gay Catholics: Insights for the Whole Church,” perhaps a better comparison would be "Some Like It Hot." What can one do but laugh? (BTW ... the Curt Jester is awesome. And thanks to the anonymous poster who alerted me to this.)

(I should note a perpetual caveat ... that I'm obviously relying on a secondary source and everything I say comes with the stipulated condition that the reporting is accurate. Correction with primary sources is welcomed.)

Panelist Tom Baudoin, a professor at Santa Clara, says he wants ...

my 20-month old daughter Mimi to grow up to affirm, with the U.S. bishops, that, quote, 'it is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object of violent malice in speech and in action.'

... which sort of makes you wonder what world the professor is living in. Does anybody seriously think there is any doubt that anybody in the whole Church is likely to lack that insight but for gay and lesbian ministry? Where is this rampant Church lobby group that says that homosexual persons should be the object of violent malice in speech and action? Did I miss the Feast of St. Russell Henderson or the prayers for the canonization of Venerable Aaron McKinney? Where were the demonstrators picketing the last Courage conference (oh ... them)? How did I escape the lynchers waiting outside our last chapter meeting to grab us and take us to the stake for the appropriate Ann-Coulter-approved, no-rehab-here faggot burning?

The account of the conference goes downhill from here:

[Father James Martin, SJ, and of America magazine] drew audience laughter and applause by saying he hoped Beaudoin’s daughter would grow up to become a U.S. bishop.

What does one say but "ick"? How is this not public dissent, given that it's a priest speaking that he hopes the Church will change a teaching that has been constant for its whole history and reiterated as not even open to debate, all appearances and insistence to the contrary, just last decade by the Roman Pontiff himself (i.e., just last week, historically speaking). Maybe "Victor/Victoria" (about a woman who pretends to be a man) would be a better analogy for "Bishop Mimi."

The problem with these sorts of meeting and statements are that things like this are said:

One homosexual gift, said [Father] Martin, is “resilience.” “Emotionally healthy gays and lesbians,” he said, “have successfully emerged from a childhood where they have felt marginalized; a young adulthood where they have felt confused; and an adulthood where they have had to forge a sense of self-acceptance and self-motivation.” This makes them “able to stand without self-pity before the world, confident in the dignity of their God-given humanity, a fundamental attribute of a mature Christian.” “The mature gay person,” said Martin, “brings a unique strength, a special kind of personal resilience, to the role of apostle.”

There's more of the same as you read down. Now, some of this is quite possible, even plausible. It is undoubtedly the case that growing up with knowledge of "that" shapes your personality in ways innumerable, and, since not reducible to the sin of sodomy, can be used by God as all human traits can.

But the devil (literally) is in the details. What does Father Martin mean by "the mature gay person" and "emotionally healthy gays and lesbians." One hardly wishes to make the case for immaturity or emotional sickness (though Kierkegaard might), but my "Code Word Alert" is off-the-meter. Even apart from the semantic issues over whether "gay" always and everywhere implies an embrace of the lifestyle. Does he mean practicing sexually and openly identifying with this practice as part of one's constitutive nature? Certainly that's what Dignity, SoulForce et al would mean (though my experience of the emotional maturity of practicing gays is more like this). Or does maturity or emotional health involve -- well, to use any Christian anthropology whatsoever -- dying to self, the embrace of chaste celibacy, and coming to the Cross to crucify one's bad desires? There's no way to tell, but why am I suspicious about a Catholic priest who publicly hopes for female bishops? And who also says ...

“Gay and lesbian Catholics” have the gift of “suffering” because they “know firsthand the emotional pain that comes from being a misunderstood minority,” said [Father] Martin. Homosexuals “will often experience rejection in the Church ... What does it mean to be called ‘disordered’?

I know that Jebbie-bashing is the leading participant sport at St. Blogs and thus somewhat cheap ... but good gawd, does stuff like this justify it. Remember when the Jesuits used to be known for intellectual precision. Saying that the Church calls homosexuals "disordered" is simply a lie. Yes, a lie. This has been reiterated and reiterated (just four months ago). Going into copy-and-paste mode:

No, what brought tears to my eyes was this on page 6:

It is crucially important to understand that saying a person has a particular inclination that is disordered is not to say that the person as a whole is disordered. Nor does it mean that one has been rejected by God or the Church. Sometimes the Church is misinterpreted or misrepresented as teaching that persons with homosexual inclinations are objectively disordered, as if everything about them were disordered or rendered morally defective by this inclination. Rather, the disorder is in that particular inclination, which is not ordered toward the fulfillment of the natural ends of human sexuality. Because of this, acting in accord with such an inclination simply cannot contribute to the true good of the human person. Nevertheless, while the particular inclination to homosexual acts is disordered, the person retains his or her intrinsic human dignity and value.

I can't tell you how annoying it is to listen to pro-gay folks ignorantly (on this subject, that's an objective fact) saying "the church says I am intrinsically evil" or "I'm not objectively disordered," etc. No. It. Doesn't. The distinction is right there. Reject it if you like, but don't lie about what the Church teaches in order to boost up your Right-to-a-Hissy-Fit quotient.

To show how far I'm bending over backwards, I understand that the term "disordered" is Natural Law-speak, and thus modern people without philosophical backgrounds usually misunderstand it. Thus, in pastoral situations in the current context, it generally should be avoided.

But what does it mean for a Jesuit ... one of the men who educated me and millions of other Catholic boys for centuries ... to make the same elementary error, excusable only by philosophical ignorance? Particularly since, by his apparent position of authority and the intellectual cachet that "Jesuit" still has, Father Martin is perpetuating and compounding this gravely-dangerous and objectively-counterwitnessing lie? It's just beyond depressing. If St. Ignatius Loyola were alive, he'd be turning over in his grave.

More about Ann

Earlier tonight, I watched both the O'Reilly Factor, where Michelle Malkin was discussing L'Affaire Ann, and Hannity & Colmes, which had the Blond Diva herself on. (Story here and the link to the tape is there too.) And the whole reaction proves several points about how conservatives react toward homosexual persons.

First of all, Malkin noted a certain double standard:

"Here's the difference between the left and the right. Far more conservatives have condemned Ann Coulter's poor judgment than liberals have condemned not just Bill Maher,¹ but many people who engage in assassination chic, and people like John Edwards who hired those godbag-spewing bloggers. At the time, not a single liberal [protested]."

But there is no rational standard by which using the word "faggot," even in malice, is worse than the Edwards bloggers.

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?
A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

OR

One thing I vow here and now–you motherfuckers who want to ban birth control will never sleep. I will fuck without making children day in and out and you will know it and you won’t be able to stop it. Toss and turn, you mean, jealous motherfuckers. I’m not going to be “punished” with babies. Which makes all your efforts a failure. Some non-procreating women escaped. So give up now. You’ll never catch all of us. Give up now.

... which is simply vulgar anti-Catholic hate speech. Yet I can't think of an important liberal who didn't for a time (even Edwards himself) try to change the subject to Bill Donohue of the Catholic League or "the right-wing noise machine" or the "fascist Godbag Patriarchy." In other words, the right is populated with adults, the left by adolescents. Even when we think bad thoughts, we still recognize the p's and q's. It's one thing to say the kind of things Coulter says at the bar over beer with friends, but we have manners for the public. Still, as Dale Price rewrote it (thanks for linking today, BTW), Edwards provided a perfect form of apology:

The tone and the sentiment of some of Ann Coulter's comments personally offended me. It's not how I talk to people, and it's not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that kind of intolerant language will not be permitted from anyone on my campaign, whether it's intended as satire, humor, or anything else. But I also believe in giving everyone a fair shake. I've talked to Ann; she has assured me that it was never her intention to malign anyone's sexuality, and I take her at her word. We're beginning a great debate about the future of our country, and we can't let it be hijacked. It will take discipline, focus, and courage to build the America we believe in.

The criticism keeps flowing in. Most in St. Blogs who said anything -- Rod Dreher (more here), Mark Shea, Dale, and most everybody in their comboxes, was critical (the strongest defense was to say more-or-less what Malkin did about double standards). Albert Mohler and Marvin Olasky said Coulter had gone too far. A slew of conservative bloggers, including Ace of Spades, Instapundit and Captain's Quarters put up an open letter saying "the Age of Ann has passed," and the host (Sean Hackbarth at the American Mind) said that he had so "underestimated the response" that he probably wouldn't be able to meet his original promise to link to everyone who signed it.

But more importantly, in the matter of homosexual persons, was a clip from earlier in the speech (played by Sean Hannity; go to this page; I can't link direct to the segment clip) in which Coulter says the following:

I'm not antigay. We're against gay marriage. I don't want gays to be discriminated against. We have the progay position, which is anticrime and for tax cuts.

Now you can dismiss this argument as ridiculous or whatever (I don't really buy what she's saying about tax cuts being pro-gay, e.g., though "tough on crime," sure). But what the clip from CPAC proves is that when she said Republicans oppose discriminating against homosexual persons, that the reaction was applause. Not boos or laughter, but applause.

It proves again what I've said it many times before. Conservatives, both religious and political, simply do not look down on or detest homosexual persons, contrary to the self-serving fantasies of the liberal gay establishment or the psychotic leftist nutroots. I have had years of experience as a conservative and a Catholic. We just don't -- too many of us have colleagues or friends whom we know aren't demons but also know or "know" are either like myself or even practice the gay lifestyle. If the question is one of "tolerance" and "social freedom" for homosexual persons rather than "approval" or "social preference" for homosexuality, that battle is over. There is no "other side" any more.
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¹ In the context of the Taliban's assassination attempt on Cheney, Maher undisapprovingly cited others regretting its failure and said Cheney's death would be good.