There is one particular thing that illustrates better than anything else the unreasonableness — and some would say gall — of homosexuality activists. It’s not demanding that bakers, shirt printers, and wedding planners be party to events and expression deeply contrary to their principles, as offensive as that is. What I speak of is something even more fundamental, something again brought to light by the recent Vatican synod on the family.
As many know, the synod made news with an unwisely released and widely misrepresented mid-term report containing language that the secular media interpreted as signaling church capitulation on the matter of homosexuality (an excellent article on this by Paul Bois is found here). And when it emerged that the language was the handiwork of just one or two individuals and was roundly rejected by the bishops, melancholia — and Machiavellianism — defined the media. “What a shame it is that the Church rejected the more welcoming tone,” we heard. “We thought tolerance and deference to the times were winning out, but then the voices of prejudice quashed progress.” They thought? Insofar as these leftists think at all, they do it all wrong.
The media’s notion that the Catholic Church isn’t “welcoming” to people with same-sex attraction (PSSA) is at best due to ignorance, at worst driven by insidious manipulation. Just consider the following passage — which expresses a long-held church position — from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.
What about that sounds “unwelcoming”? Let me add that for nigh on 20 years I’ve attended Mass every Sunday and on Holy Days in parishes all over my area and in other parts of the country, and I have never, ever heard a priest rail against homosexuality; in fact, lamentably, I can’t even remember a priest mentioning it during a sermon, let alone talking “about these issues all the time,” as one rather prominent Catholic put it last year. In other words, the notion that priests are smoking PSSA out of churches with fire-and-brimstone, acid-tongued preaching is a media assumption — and invention.
It’s also quite stupid. Does anyone think the church turns away adulterers, fornicators, artificial-contraception users or self-gratifiers? So why would anyone think it’s at all different with PSSA? In accordance with Jesus’ saying that “the healthy are in no need of a physician,” that God rejoices more over one lost sheep found than 99 who were never lost, the church’s business is attracting sinners. And, of course, since she teaches that we’re all sinners, she’d have to close her doors if her market were confined to angels.
The reality is that homosexuality activists and the media (redundant, I know) are guilty of projection. They’d have us believe that the church and other traditionalists can’t stop talking about PSSA, when they’re the ones who cannot. Much like a man who rains down unprovoked blows upon another and then screams “Why are you so violent!?” when the victim merely raises his arms to block, they start a fight and then are shocked when others defend themselves; not only that, they then portray their offensive against tradition as defense and the defense of it as offensive.
But the church exercises no double standard. Her teaching lists homosexual behavior as just one of many behaviors at variance with God’s plan for man’s sexuality. It’s homosexuality activists who have the double standard, and this brings us to what they really want. Since the church has always welcomed PSSA, the issue is not one of accepting “homosexuals.”
The activists want the church to accept homosexuality.
Perhaps this is stating the obvious for many, but framing this properly illustrates its absurdity. The activists want a special dispensation from church sexual teaching — and, of course, this can be applied to all of traditionalist Christianity — for their particular behavior. But consider where this leaves us:
Is the church supposed to say adultery is a sin, fornication is a sin, self-gratification is a sin, viewing pornography is a sin, but homosexuality is, what? A lifestyle choice, sort of like living on a houseboat?
This would be comical to anyone who didn’t fail at mastering childhood categorization problems (i.e., what things belong together?). It would be like saying that devil’s food cake didn’t belong with sugar cookies, petits fours, Napoleons, and ladyfingers in the category of desserts because it’s the favorite of some corpulent, Jabba the Hut-looking slob who’ll feel better about himself if it’s classified as a vegetable.
So in essence, what homosexuality activists are asking is that the church scrap all of its sexual teaching to accommodate their wishes. It doesn’t matter that the teaching is the product of ages of thought, scholarship, discernment, and divine revelation; that it’s promulgated in numerous official documents such as Humanae Vitae; or that it’s considered infallible, as it reflects Truth. You want it gone? We’ll get right on that for ya’.
To echo Bois in the earlier referenced article, that’s not happening — end of story.
Insofar as some PSSA are sincere in their conflation of acceptance of their behavior with acceptance of themselves, the psychology is no mystery. They identify so closely with their sin that there is little, if any, separation between it and themselves on an emotional level; thus, they view any rejection of their sin as a rejection of themselves. This is why I’ve generally avoided using the term “homosexual” in this article: the word too often carries the implication that it defines the person who thus identifies himself. And this is why homosexuality activists can, in certain cases, quite sincerely equate their movement with that of black civil rights. They tend to see their sexual impulses as integral to who they are and “homosexual” as their master status in the same way many blacks believe their race defines them (not that we should be consumed with race, either).
Yet there is even more going on when the Church is labeled “unwelcoming.” Some in the media do truly conflate the sin with the sinner; others are simply so ignorant of Catholic teaching and realities on the ground that they actually believe the fire-and-brimstone stereotype. But then there are the vile propagandists. They know something, something Bois mentioned when writing, “[T]he Catholic Church has lost its prominence in the West due to cultural acceptance of homosexuality and [‘gay marriage’].” And, no, that’s not the only reason. But it is a big one.
Think about it: If you can successfully portray rejection of homosexual behavior as analogous to rejection based solely on skin color — if “homophobia”=“racism” — the Catholic Church=the KKK. Of course, I don’t believe this, but it is how people imbued with homosexuality doctrine will view it.
This explains not only the utility of misrepresenting the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality, but also why this tactic is ideal not just for homosexuality activists but all anti-Christian agitators. The more you can cast the church as a fire-and-brimstone rejecter of PSSA, the more you push it into the hate-group category in modernists’ minds (note that overseas “hate speech” laws often prohibit criticism of homosexuality). And since the church cannot bend on definitive teaching, she can do nothing to extricate herself from this category. It’s brilliantly devious — some would say devilish.
The good news is that “a lie has speed, but Truth has endurance,” as the proverb goes. Leftists are fond of saying about the church, and traditionalists in general, that they’re on the wrong side of history. But the church has been around for 2000 years and has often found herself on the “wrong side of history” — until that history became history and we found out it wasn’t history at all but just current events. And the church will be around long after the current current-event commissars, and their ideas, are dust.
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