The Intrinsic Disorder Question Revisited (Again)
MarieR, some days ago, during our productive conversation about the church’s teaching that gay persons are intrinsically disordered, I stated that, if there appears to be sufficient interest in continuing this conversation, I would propose starting a new thread. We were carrying on our previous discussion under the auspices of a thread John Allen began about a clerical sex scandal in Italy.
Since six folks ranked my remark a 4, I’ve decided to carry through with my suggestion of starting a new thread. I’m doing so with some misgivings, though.
The older I get, the less certain I am of anything. In starting a thread, I feel an obligation to say something certain and comprehensive. And yet in my inmost self, I know that my own perspective is fragmented, based on particular life experiences. I want to speak out of those experiences and be true to them, to own them as honestly as I can.
At the same time, I don’t want to represent them as normative, as “the” truth. They’re my truth, and to the extent that my story and experience are part of a larger narrative of redemption in the world, I am happy to tell it—as long as no one expects me to have more than my own tiny angle on things.
This proviso will frame how I choose to write on this thread. For our continuing conversation, it may be most useful if I write a series of seeming disjointed reflections arising out of my experience, to illustrate where I’ve been coming from in my critique of the teaching about gay people as intrinsically disordered.
As my last posting to you says, I think that in such conversations—if we hope for them to move beyond mere banter that won’t change anything— it’s crucially important for us to acknowledge our different starting points. Those are rooted in very different life experiences. I’m writing both to you and to many others who may not understand precisely why the teaching about intrinsic disorder is so abhorrent and deeply hurtful for gay Catholics, because your life experiences have been different than ours.
(And this is obviously not to canonize the experience of gay Catholics or to say that our experiences are deeper, richer, more salvific or more important than the experiences of anyone else. They are one part of a larger narrative, but—I would submit—a part of the narrative that the church and world sorely need to hear, because that section of the narrative of salvation history has been so long ignored, shoved out of consciousness, and/or maliciously misrepresented.)
I should also note in this preface that, though I’m addressing you, I’m also entertaining questions and comments that came from others on the thread, and which have also been posted on previous threads about this topic. My remarks here will necessarily be disjointed, because they’re part of a multi-faceted dialogue that has been going on for some time now on these NCR threads, as well as in church and society in general.
So what follows will be soundings, rather than a coherent, carefully thought-through primer to address all questions gay and Catholic in one document. I’ve never been a good systematic theologian, in any case, and not even attracted to that way of doing theology. Though first-person discourse has previously been ruled out in most theological discussions—on the grounds that it is partial, self-interested, and perspectivally influenced—I can’t see talking about theological issues without resorting to our own experiences and our own stories.
And since those are only part of a larger narrative, not the whole narrative, theology done conversationally out of life experiences will necessarily be non-systematic, tentative, and exploratory. But, for all those reasons, it will also be perhaps more meaningful for the real experiences of real people in their real lives than systematic theology ever could be, or dogmatic statements can be. As I’ve noted before, though most academic theologians would probably consider posting on blogs such as NCR’s café a form of slumming, I see tremendous promise for theological thinking among the laity on blogs. The most authentic and church-changing theology around today is happening on threads like these.
Enough provisos: here’s my jumping-off point for addressing the questions we raised in the previous discussion. I begin with the following observation: it totally baffles me that church and social groups can exclude gay human beings, and apparently not feel much remorse for doing so. I’m continuously struck by how easy it is for both church and social groups simply to put those of us who are gay on the outside, while many of those groups claim to love justice and to value inclusion.
We are shut out very easily—all too easily. Our voices are discounted or silenced with a mere dismissive sweep of the hand. We are told not to speak; we are told that what we have to say doesn’t count anyway, since it is flawed, biased, disordered. We are told that our presence makes people uncomfortable, so if we insist on remaining within social or church groups, it is far better that we remain hidden. The price for being tolerated and “included” is to be closeted and to deny the very thing we have to bring to the table, our particularity—our unique way of being human in the world.
It strikes me as strange, indeed, that church groups don’t realize that in behaving this way, they implicitly tell gay human beings that our unique experience of God, which is rooted in our own unique human natures, has no real place in the church—nothing important to say to the church.
I’m shocked that comparatively few Christians seem nonplussed at such behavior. I’m amazed that Christian churches (I should note off the bat that the dynamics I’m addressing are hardly confined to the Catholic church) continue to imagine they can convincingly proclaim messages of social justice, solidarity with the oppressed, and compassion, while behaving this way again and again to gay believers.
I suppose I should not be shocked. We live in a nation that, as de Tocqueville noted early in our history, is marked by a high degree of individualism. The ties that bind us are weak. We do not easily understand how our lives are interwoven, and how the choices that I make affect you, or the decisions you make affect me.
It is far too easy for us to imagine that those whom we place on the outside by cruel and unjust decisions about how privilege and access are allocated deserve to be where they find themselves: on the outside looking in. It is all too simple for us to reduce their marginalization to an imaginary moral fault that has earned them the savage exclusion inflicted on them.
To think otherwise, to question such mechanisms of social control and marginalization, exacts a high price of us. It requires us to begin imagining our social world as constructed, and not as naturally given or divinely ordained. To begin asking such questions implicates us, since we are part of those who have structured our world as it is, and who benefit from how it is set up.
Too much discussion of the “question of homosexuality” in the church—far too much!—has centered on what I believe are simply diversionary issues. These include whether the bible approves or disapproves of homosexuality, or how church teaching has dealt with homosexuality, or whether natural law theology can allow a homosexual option.
While those theological questions have had to be asked, the discussion has, in my humble opinion, long since moved beyond them. (The bible has hardly anything at all to say about homosexuality. It was not a predominant moral concern of either Judaism or Christianity in the biblical period. Jesus never says anything at all on this topic. The term itself was not even coined until the late 19th century, so it couldn’t have appeared in the bible—nor could biblical writers have conceived of what became apparently only in the 19th century: namely, that some people throughout history appear always to have had a constitutional inclination to erotic attraction to members of their own sex.) And I won’t even rehash the other Catholic questions here, which have been hashed through again and again in previous discussions.
In my view, it’s time for the discussion of homosexuality and the churches to make a social turn—to stop analyzing this theological issue so much from the standpoint of biblical evidence, natural law theology, or tradition, and to start employing tools of social analysis. If we make that turn, one of the first things we notice is that gay people are not unique in being marginalized and excluded. Every social organization (and churches follow suit all too often) creates certain groups of people to be garbage-can people, people into whom the social/ecclesial group dumps all of its psychic baggage and its deliberately unexamined moral garbage.
Garbage-can folks serve a useful social function in defusing social tensions, in catalyzing and discharging guilt so that those who construct the social world don’t have to come to terms with their own guilt. It’s far easier for social/church groups to project the guilt of the entire group onto one set of people and then send them packing into the social wilderness—to face the fate they have earned—than to confront and deal with their own guilt, or to face and deal with the unjust ways they have constructed themselves socially.
To concretize this: I’m talking about an area of sociological analysis that is often referred to as “the social construction of reality.” I suspect that, for many of us, it is hard even to grasp that we’re involved with this project of social construction; it’s like trying to walk with an egg balanced on your nose and at the same time look at your feet.
For most of us, the social world we inhabit is a given, something we have inherited—something either nature or God has constructed, and which is just there, to be lived in as we find it. It’s just as given as the ground underneath our feet.
I can certainly attest to the fact that I was raised that way. I am not entirely sure what made me begin to question key facets of the social world in which I came of age—the American South of the latter half of the 20th century. When I did so, however, I began to be aware that everything—literally everything!—that I had previously taken for granted might not be the case, and I had to start re-thinking and re-living very much that I had previously just assumed.
I remember some key moments. One was a recurrent experience involving my mother’s oldest sister, an unmarried woman who taught grade school for many years. My aunt had a great influence on my life as a mentor-teacher; when my parents didn’t understand my pleas for books on subjects I couldn’t quite explain clearly, I could count on my aunt to do so, and to buy or borrow from a library the exact book I needed.
Again and again in my childhood, as my family drove around our state, my aunt would look out the car window and see convicts working on the state roads. And she would say, “I pity those poor men being forced to do hard work in the hot sun and rain.”
That was it. She said nothing more. But what she taught so succinctly had a lasting effect. It forced me to look. Before, I had passed the “criminals” without seeing them. Didn’t they deserve to be in prison and patching roads, after all? They were guilty of crimes.
What my aunt taught me was first to see, and then to question. Perhaps these men were not all guilty. Why were so many of them black? Why were the overseers on horses, who carried rifles and guarded the prisoners, always white? Even if the prisoners were guilty, did they deserve to be abused and exploited?
One question leads to another: when I was a pre-teen, I had the strange experience, one hot summer afternoon, of looking out the car window when my mother and I were driving home the black woman who did housework for us, and seeing the black children in her neighborhood lining the side of the road. Not only seeing them, but suddenly realizing that I could just as easily be there, with them, as in the comfortable yellow station wagon. Nothing I had done, nothing I was, could account for what had made me white and privileged and on the inside, while these other children were black, poor, and standing by a dusty unpaved road.
Again, questions led to questions: why were those roads unpaved, while all streets in white neighborhoods in our town were paved? While our second mother took care of my brothers and me each day, who took care of her own children?
Start down the path of realizing that the world is socially constructed, and the process of asking questions—and recognizing our manifold complicity in how things are arranged—simply never ends. It becomes a lifelong quest for answers. For me, the questions led me as a teen to a break with my family’s church, which anguished and split over the question of whether to accept black members, and my fateful choice to join the Catholic church, in part, because it was the only “white” church in our town in which black and white members worshiped side by side.
And so to the questions we’ve been discussing about gay human beings as intrinsically disordered: along with many other LGBT Christians, I feel I have no choice except to protest this stigmatizing description of myself, since I experience myself (and my relationship with God and others) through anything but the prism of disorder. I find grace in my life and in how God has fearfully and wonderfully made me: not disorder.
Here’s, then, the reality many of us confront now: we will not and cannot apologize for who we are. We won’t hide. We can’t hide. (The debate in the churches, is, after all, really about making gay people invisible, isn’t it? We’ve always been there. Many of us have taught you, ministered to you, celebrated the Eucharist at your altars. You’ve always known, as some level, that we were there. What you don’t want to do is to confront the concrete particularity of our humanity in your midst.)
We cannot and will not accept the designation of ourselves as disordered. To do so would be to deny what God has done in making us, sustaining us, providing us with loving relationships, informing our life journeys with amazing grace.
At the same time, we find ourselves subject to various forms of marginalization that make it almost impossible for us to remain in your midst—openly and honestly, that is. I could compose a whole litany here of experiences either I or those close to me have had, as gay Christians trying to live with honesty while working in church institutions. I’ll cite only select examples.
Even now, we find that many of the institutions in which we work do not afford us any legal protection against discrimination. We may be fired merely, simply because we are gay. The Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index, released today, shows that nearly 200 major corporations afford full protection for the legal rights of gay employees and gay partners. But both this report and a report just issued by the ACLU find that many organizations still do not protect gay employees from discrimination, and we can still be fired solely because we are gay.
This is, sadly, all the more the case in church institutions, where adopting a non-discrimination policy may result in the loss of church or donor funding on the part of a church-sponsored institution. All too few church institutions even have a basic statement of non-discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation.
Where such statements exist, too, there is still very little recourse for gay employees when specious reasons are trumped up to discipline or fire the gay employee or gay couple, even when there is a professed commitment to justice and inclusion. And, when we are fired, in church-controlled institutions, there is almost never any system of grievance or redress. Most church institutions operate as hierarchically as the Catholic church does, unless local laws require them to behave differently.
Again, I have to return to some previous life experiences to try to describe the dynamics underlying the ease with which churches can treat us so inhumanely, even while proclaiming that they uphold justice and have open doors, open hearts, and open minds.
In the social world in which I grew up, African Americans were said to be childlike, less adept at understanding than white folks are, more prone to have strong feelings and to have their feelings hurt. We were told to speak kindly and gently to African Americans, since they were essentially children and had their feelings hurt easily.
At the same time, precisely because “they” were childlike and “we” were not—and because “they” were said to be over-sexed and immoral—“we” felt totally free to run roughshod over the feelings of African Americans anytime we wished, to lie freely to and about African Americans. They were garbage-can folks, after all, those who bore the sins of all the rest of us. We even found evidence in the bible to support our inhumane treatment of such folks.
As a young adult, when I first read George Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier,” I had an ah-ha insight about the world in which I was raised. I learned from Orwell that all the things I had been taught about African Americans as I was growing up had been said by generations about the working classes in England. That is, these stigmatizing statements were made by the workers about the ruling classes of the British Isles.
Learning this made me begin to see that the garbage-can mechanism is a universal self-justifying social construction. The particularity of those treated this way varies from society to society. How they are treated does not, however.
Those being lied to and lied about, those being stereotyped in demeaning ways, in no way merit the inhumane treatment they receive. There are strong, clear interconnections between how Western societies have treated colonized peoples of the world, in how women have historically been treated, in how people of color are treated, in how poor people are treated, and in how LGBT people are treated today.
My experience as a gay theologian persistently pushed to the margins in church settings is not unique. It links to the experience of many others in the world. My experience is part of much broader dynamics that allow others to be accorded similar treatments to have our talents taken for granted and used, while our contributions are denied and our very personhood is stigmatized, and our human rights are trampled on when it becomes convenient for us to be expelled.
At the same time, my experience does have some areas of uniqueness that have to be acknowledged, if you are to understand fully where I’m coming from. There may be some uniquely difficult blows in store for gay people who ask to be open and visible in Christian institutions, particularly if we are theologians and/or placed in positions where our visibility will shine forth in the institution. These may be problems gay people who work in other fields do not encounter, because their open presence in those fields poses less of a threat to the imagination underlying the controlling sectors of church and society.
There is a strong bias within churches (and our society in general) against permitting gay people to speak the Word. This is similar to the bias against allowing women to proclaim the Word. The two are interconnected. I suspect they arise out of the same gender bias, since much of the resistance to gay people in church life seems to focus more or less exclusively on gay men and not lesbians. I suspect this is because gay men are regarded as those who muddle the male-female gender boundary, and who call into question assumptions of male superiority—and the male right to own, interpret, write, and proclaim the Word.
Among the very particular experiences I have had as a gay theologian are experiences of being told that I am too “sensitive,” too “feeling,” too lacking in aggressiveness: in other words, too “feminine” and too “childish.” I have experienced (and have seen this happen in the lives of other gay males in my field) charges that, if I am assertive, I am being bitchy and emotionally reactive—though I have hardly ever allowed myself to demonstrate in my professional life the kind of anger privileged colleagues are allowed to vent routinely, if they encounter unjust treatment.
If I do protest such treatment, I am likely to be told to stop “pouting,” a word that simultaneously infantilizes and feminizes me, and that reduces my status as a middle-aged professional male with many accomplishments to the level of a child. Though I have a long record of publications and a sterling teaching record, I am often told that my work is riddled with bias because it depends too much on my own experiences, insights, and feelings—which arise from a disordered nature. I am sometimes, astonishingly, treated as if I am not even in the room as I am discussed in third person, or as if I lack the intellect to understand or respond to very blatant acts of discrimination against me.
The point I’m trying to make here, MarieR, is that these experiences are still all too common for gay people working with and in church institutions. They certainly also happen to others—to African Americans and to women, for instance. But the churches have moved down a certain road of critiquing their previous treatment of African Americans and women. They have yet to do so in the case of gay believers.
And sometimes they even play these groups against each other in a divide-and-conquer tactic, implying that the pie of justice and inclusion has just enough slices to go around. This sometimes causes us to vie among ourselves and to betray those with whom we should be allied, if we want the churches to be true to their proclamations about justice and love.
Our experiences have often inevitably led us to encounter the shadow side of the church as it lives its vocation in the world. We notice all too often that the churches’ resistance to gay rights is rooted in concerns about funding. Churches and church leaders frequently violate the rights of gay employees when major funders threaten to withdraw support. We sometimes see principled leaders on whose solidarity we have relied forced into unprincipled positions of compromise, in which we become the sacrificial lambs.
We also frequently discover that our worst enemies within church organizations can be other closeted gay people. No one can treat us more dismissively and viciously than gay people who refuse to come to terms with or who deny their sexual orientation—often, while acting dangerously and compulsively on that orientation in furtive sexual encounters in places like public restrooms.
What we learn from our struggle to find a place within the churches and their institutions is knowledge essential for the healing of the institutions, but it is barred and excluded knowledge. What we know and have learned is too often dismissed as petty gossip coming from vindictive disordered gay people who have a malicious intent to disrupt things as they are.
This conversation is threatening to be a monologue, because I have written at such length. I think I would like to end this first installment with a question: does any of what I have just said afford you a new perspective on why gay Catholics have so intently resisted the designation of ourselves as intrinsically disordered?
Does what I have said make it any easier for you to understand a point I’ve been harping on over and over—namely, that there is nothing crueler than to place people outside social existence, to tell them they do not have a place within the worshiping body and at its Eucharistic table?
In many tribal cultures, which do not think in individualistic terms as Americans do, being expelled from the tribe and its common table is equivalent to death, and those who are shunned in this way often do actually die. For those of us who keep being placed in a similar position by the churches, the struggle to understand and to put all the pieces together in some coherent way, so that we recognize that we have some place in the world and in God’s plan, can be exceedingly hard—so hard that death sometimes seems easier than dealing with the pain.
It shouldn’t be this way, I think. I welcome dialogue….
William D. Lindsey
marie, in the school system
marie, in the school system I work in it is not altogether uncommon for one or two kids in a building to be parented by two same sex partners or a parent coming to terms with sexual orientation, or a parent who was dumped by an opposite sex partner for a same sex partner.
The kids may SEE two same sex adults coming to be with one peer; children (unfortunately) may HEAR teasing or DISH OUT teasing to kids who are being parented by same sex adults; and they may HEAR the comments of their parents on these situations. Many schools may particularly choose to use a story like this perhaps if a young child has two same sex adults in their lives.
If parents are very lucky their child will come home and say maybe something like, "You know that one kid in my class, Joey, has two mommies and today we had a story about a kid with two daddies...that family had a dog named Max, just like us!"
Parents are presented with a surpise opportunity maybe one they didn't ask for or anticipate. I can understand that that is surprising.
Would anybody be happier if we used a social story that made it okay to poke fun of a student that had two mommies or two daddies?
The point I'm trying to make is this. Children will SEE differnt family configurations and they will try to make some sense of it ESPECIALLY if they sense the adults are upset about it. A book like this opens a dialogue. A parent is free to say anything from, "Yep, and they are just no good _______ (fill in the blanks)" or they can say, "Yes Joey has two mommies. Daddy and I think that our family is just the way we like it." You can leave it there, which is neutral response that doesn't give TMI (too much information) or you can add, "Different families are made up differently; you'll notice that as you meet more and more people."
You know anything from the neighbor's cat having kittens, to an older cousin becoming pregnant to a same sex couple parenting a peer at school will offer unexpected and unscheduled opportunities to answer your child's questions simply and honestly. They lay the groundwork for all of the other sexual and moral discussions you will ever have with your child and they are an opportunity to communicate to your child that there is NOTHING you won't talk with them about.
So, feeling off balance or surprised or upset is not unusual. But remember, pretending these situations which happen in children's world's aren't happening also may make the situation more important and loaded than it has to be.
MollyJ, I hope you will
MollyJ,
I hope you will understand my objection better from the posting below. I appreciate that different family arrangements are not uncommon. I think most people, especially children, simply accept what is when they encounter it. The personalities and conduct of the children with whom they attend school has more to do with how the children interact than does the conventionality, or lack thereof, in the homes of those children. If a bully comes from a homosexual household, it will reflect badly on that family arrangement. If a bully comes from a divorced household, that family situation will be blamed. If a bully comes from a conventional household, it will be speculated that not all is as it appears. No amount of teaching about lifestyles will counteract the clashing of personalities that simply occurs when children come together and still need to learns how to be respectful of one another as individuals.
I think you make a good point about the opportunities for sex education coming from the observation of animals. Children in centuries past certainly had an advantage over today's children in terms of being informed of the mechanics of sex without resorting to their parents. Parents, then, only had the duty of teaching how to do relationship and love. I think it used to be easier for people to understand that human beings were a cut above the members of the animal kingdom and why it was taught that man was given the privilege of naming the animals.
These days, there seems to be a bit of confusion over this distinction between human beings and animals that might just be contributing to this misunderstanding of homosexuality, especially when homosexuals themselves point out that homosexuality is found in animals. The important point that needs to be understood, that the book "King and King" likely makes, is that the relationship, not the sexual expression of it, is the significant thing. The reason a man is in a homosexual relationship is not so likely to be for the sex, but rather for the companionship. None of us "falls in love" for purely physical reasons, and we need to respect the possibility that someone's partner is a gift from God to that person.
Marie, thanks for engaging
Marie, thanks for engaging my comment about educating children. I haven't followed the controversy you're outlining about a book that evidently has a gay storyline being taught in school.
Interestingly enough, the one year that I did teach pre-teens (7th grade: never again!), I got myself into hot water for assigning a book and a film recommended for the age group I was teaching. This was in a Catholic school in New Orleans, and the recommendation came from the national Catholic educational association.
The book was "The Diary of Anne Frank." Never in my wildest imagination did I think that, in assigning this recommended group to an accelerated English class, I'd be in hot water. Parents immediately complained: the book mentioned Anne Frank going through puberty; it had her at one point sitting on her father's lap (incest, clearly). I was shocked--at the ignorance. And at the malice. I received instructions from parents that when the class read the book out loud, this or that scene might not be read.
The movie I assigned was produced by a Franciscan catechetics group. It had to do with a young white boy who ends up having to spend the night with a black family--only to discover that it's a family like his. Re: this movie, I was told that it was promoting an agenda, that 7th-graders are far too young to understand matters of race. Never mind that it was the sole religious ed film I showed my class all year that they begged to see twice.
I suppose the point of these stories (or one point) is that we often use our children to fight our adult battles. I did not know when I accepted a job in this parish school that the parish was the sole parish in the city that had managed to maintain its school as all-white by creating a neighborhood covenant to keep black families from moving into the neighborhood. In teaching my students to deal with race, I was stepping into a hornets' nest. I think the sex issues were just tagged onto the race one, frankly.
I saw a report recently--perhaps in Sunday's NY Times--that children ask frank questions about sex at an increasingly younger age. In my view, the school systems need to address those questions even for rather young children, with frank and dispassionate information. They should do so because many families just aren't doing so, and pre-teens are now becoming sexually active. Societies that have realistic, honest sex education in schools have lower rates of teen pregnancy and abortion than ours.
I realize that when the gay issue is introduced, all kinds of sensitivities ensue. There's a presumption, unfortunately, that when LGBT adults ask for education about homosexuality and against homophobia in schools, we're somehow "recruiting." I think I can speak for many gay adults when I say that the primary concern here is to prevent the kind of bullying that has just led to the tragic murder of Lawrence King at the age of 15.
I myself was bullied at the same age, tagged as gay before I had any inkling of what this meant. I grew up in a family where sex was a totally taboo subject. Even before listening last night to Anderson Cooper's 360 segment on Lawrence King's murder (which CNN chose to cut out Monday night, though it's online), I had already recognized a typical pattern with this case: namely, that Lawrence King had been bullied and threatened for a long time, with school officials knowing full well what was going on, and some parents knowing. And nobody did anything.
This happens far too often. And it needs to stop. No child needs to be murdered again because his or her actions are considered gender-inappropriate.
I know from your previous postings that you are nervous about seeing children identified as gay before they are even adolescents. And I understand that nervousness. What people need to understand, though, is that this is happening. It happens on the playground and in the classroom and lunchroom. The child who is the object of the scorn and bullying may or may not turn out to be gay as an adult. In the case of boys with strongly effeminate patterns, research does indicate that a majority of these boys will become gay adults.
The point, it seems to me, is that children should be free to be who they are, within certain limits. One limit is, of course, that their self-expression should not harm or threaten others.
Perhaps you're right, and we should leave sex education to the home. But can we realistically and conscientiously leave education about tolerating and accepting others at home? In light of what happened to Lawrence King, I don't think so. In my view, people should have the right to believe whatever they wish, on religious grounds--even that the moon was made by God 2000 years ago out of green cheese.
But in a civil society, there has to be a limit to expressions of religious freedom when those expressions issue in statements and actions of hatred for others. The recent comment of a Seattle pastor that, if another man ever holds a door open for him, he will rip his arm off and beat him to death with the wet end, needs to be soundly condemned. The pastor may believe anything he wants about males and females, about homosexuality and heterosexuality.
But a civil society cannot allow beliefs that issue in hatred and threats to go unchallenged. We need to teach the young to live otherwise, and if the teaching process also means confronting questions about sexuality frankly and with accurate scientific information as early as children begin to ask questions, then I think I'm in favor of such education--and I know I'm in favor of education to teach acceptance!
P.S. Sorry to jump queue with this correction, but I've just noticed I had typed "bet him to death," when I meant "beat him to death"--a big difference in meaning.
William D. Lindsey
Your experience in teaching
Your experience in teaching at a Catholic school is somewhat different from what those of my children who have been in seventh grade at a Catholic school experienced. They read The Diary of Anne Frank and To Kill a Mockingbird, as well as other books to which you might have encountered objection in the setting in which you taught. You do not say how long ago that was, but forty years ago, when I was in public school in Massachusetts, we read The Diary of Anne Frank, and no one objected.
Everywhere I have lived in the US since becoming a parent, it is the case that parents are more protective of their children than they were when I was growing up. One issue upon which all concur, politically and socially liberal and conservative, is that their children are being sexualized by the media long before their biological development would spur them to take interest in this topic.
One commercial that my daughters and I always cringe at is the one promoting abstinence, where a number of children say for parents to tell them they want them to wait to have sex. Another issue that has riled parents where I live now was that Merck had written legislation that was introduced into our state legislature that would have required our preteen daughters to have mandatory Gardasil vaccinations (3 shots costing over $600 total not covered by insurance) in order to attend school. Those who objected were at first portrayed as being in denial of their daughters' future sexual activity. Nevertheless, the legislation was withdrawn. Another big issue is the constant talk about abortion. Anti-abortion zealots, in particular, seem to know no boundaries.
With regards to the reading of the children's book that presents a prince falling in love with another prince, the objection I would have as a parent is no different than it would be if the curriculum included any book focused on falling in love and romantic kissing. I would bet that there are no other such books in the elementary school curriculum in Massachusetts.
In my opinion, the appropriate approach to all these kinds of controversial issues is not to make an end run around the parents as though it must be assumed that they are derelict in their duties, but to contact them directly about these subjects even if that means not getting everyone on board. As I am sure you recognize, anything that controversial taught in school would not get a neutral response at home, the result of which would be a more thorough indoctrination in that anti-whatever position for children coming from such homes.
Until it was decided in Massachusetts that homosexual couples were not to be excluded from marrying under the existing laws there, people only had personal aversions to homosexuality. This is not different from a homosexual feeling a certain revulsion at engaging in sex with a member of the opposite sex. I can't remember how many times lesbians remarked to me about how disgusting heterosexual sex seems to them. I also remember a gay man expressing a revulsion, similar to mine, about a woman's oversized breasts, and asking me how he could be expected to enjoy something like that. Now, however, the issue has taken on many more qualities. Where once people's aversion toward homosexuality occasionally took the form of discrimination in housing or employment, it is now jusitifiable because of the apparent attack against the children's innocence.
Had the efforts undertaken by the homosexual community in Massachusetts been directed at addressing these issues of discrimination or even the issue of violence, it would have been a step toward greater tolerance. However, it was clear from the start, that the uncompromising push to include homosexual couples under marriage laws was rooted in a certain animosity toward society on the part of some of the most outspoken advocates, some of whom I knew personally in college and who often disparaged the fairy tale life that they assumed heterosexual couples would be experiencing. If this effort was intended to promote greater tolerance of homosexuality, it backfired.
I believe children in most places are taught in school to be accepting of people who are different than they are and that teaching about homosexuality in elementary schools is not necessary in order to promote tolerance. It should be accepted that pockets of intolerance will remain, and that this is better than forced uniformity of thought. People on both sides of a controversy need to respect boundaries.
Marie, your
Marie, your comment:
"Another issue that has riled parents where I live now was that Merck had written legislation that was introduced into our state legislature that would have required our preteen daughters to have mandatory Gardasil vaccinations (3 shots costing over $600 total not covered by insurance) in order to attend school."
I wasn't too thrilled about Gardasil and Merck's end run tactics either and I'm a pro-vaccination public health nurse! Often if you can get vaccines mandated, they become covered by insurance and by VFC (Vaccines for Children--ie federal funding). My objections have more to do with strong arming the public health system and I also have my share of cervical cancer tragedy stories but really!!!
All in all, your reply is a nice effort to thoughtfully turn over and examine the subject.
I have to tell you that public health interventions are population based and by and far, public health did not invent the over-sexualized world that is a fact of life for our children (arguably the advertising and film industry did so, with our acquiescence...) but none the less thoughtfully constructing population based interventions around these sexual issues is not easy and is certainly imperfect.
Perhaps, MollyJ, when this
Perhaps, MollyJ, when this country actually begins to provide health care instead of sick care, all vaccines will be governmentally funded and people will be able to avail themselves of those that would be of benefit to them at their choice. With regard to Gardasil in particular, an obstetrician friend of mine recently told me that immunity past five years has not been proven and that because of insurance payment considerations, it is being recommended that 15 year olds get the vaccine so that insurance will still pay and immunity will still be likely in those years during which it is most likely to be needed.
As a matter of public health, however, this is not in the same category as polio.
Marie, all of the things
Marie, all of the things you've cited and a few more are why I was NOT for having gardasil mandated. The typical path for many, but not all vaccines, is that they are made recommended by ACIP (advisory committee on immunization practices/cdc). Physicians groups such as the AAP and the AAFP often then pick them up as a recommended (not required vaccine) and physicians start to recommend them to their patients. Often they may target groups at the highest risk for a given disease entity. This time of the vaccine being recommended gives us time to look at efficacy, side effects, benefits etc beyond that required for FDA approval. This time often serves to build clinicians confidence and desire to see a vaccine utilized. We learn more about who the vaccine best helps and time oriented data would have given clinicians more information about whether the vaccine seemed to impact abnormal pap smears and rates of cervical cancer over time.
It was clear that Merck wanted to fast track this vaccine for mandatory status and they heavily marketed to legislators, the public, physicians and public health officials. Most of us public health types are generally pro-vaccine but we see the benefit of that period of time where a vaccine is recommended. Additional time helps us see if this is a resource that we want to use precious, limited public health dollars on. To my way of thinking, and I speak only for myself, this seemed to be a determination to fast-track that benefited primarily Merck. I actually think the vaccine isn't badly put together, targeting the four main types of HPV that often progress to cancer but I wanted more time to see if the vaccine would ultimately impact the rates of abnormal paps and progression to cervical cancer. Cervical cancer is not a benign cancer but it is, in fact, more likely to show up (particularly at an advanced stage) in women who do not have access to pap smears and routine care. These may also be people least likely to get vaccines such as gardasil. School mandation would help to reach some of those very poorest folks (over time) but again I wanted more information about efficacy and impacts before we spent ALOT of money on it. Merck made it, I believe, one of the priciest vaccines ever.
So, you've probably now learned more about the topic than you wanted to know!!!
Marie, you're right to note
Marie, you're right to note that the experience I had with assigning Diary of Anne Frank happened some time ago--that is, you imply this with your question. It happened in 1973. And I would certainly hope much has changed since then.
My point in telling that story was not to suggest that this is how things happen in schools nowadays, but to use the story to make a point: that is, that these battles over books and other educational materials are quite frequently adult battles that don't really have a lot do with the children's needs.
I'm not sure, though, that the school system throughout the U.S. would even now be anywhere near so enlightened as what you describe in Massachusetts. There are still very fierce battles about books and plays in our schools throughout the nation, and often these are battles about books and plays that really have nothing at all to do with sexuality or homosexuality. The movement to try to control what children read or the ideas to which they have access is still quite strong and very organized in many places.
You say, "With regards to the reading of the children's book that presents a prince falling in love with another prince, the objection I would have as a parent is no different than it would be if the curriculum included any book focused on falling in love and romantic kissing. I would bet that there are no other such books in the elementary school curriculum in Massachusetts."
I'm not in touch with elementary education, but I somehow doubt that the curriculum for school children is devoid of books focused on falling in love and romantic kissing (I assume you mean here, heterosexual falling in love and heterosexual kissing). I would imagine that if one looked for such scenes in much of the literature children read, it's surely there. It's certainly there in the media they watch, and I don't mean graphic sexual portrayals, but the "normal" boy-girl interaction that is taken for granted as the ideal to which children should attain, as they grow up. It's so much all around us, we rarely pay much attention to it, and how it models what children think of as normative (or what we all think of as normative). I would propose that the other kind of relationships leap out as "sexualized" or "politicized" statements precisely because they jar, in their unexpectedness, given what we take for granted.
I would gladly relinquish education about matters of sexuality to the family, provided we have assurance that families actually do take such education seriously for their children. I suspect that's not always the case. And there are millions of children growing up in less-than-ideal family situations in which the kind of home education middle-class families take for granted is simply not possible.
What I think we can't fail to do, regardless of where we come down on issues of sex education, is to teach children to understand and accept those who are different. Another child shot in an American school for being considered gender-appropriate is one child too many.
William D. Lindsey
The unfortunate incident in
The unfortunate incident in Florida is not really connected to a lack of sex education, I think. It has everything to do with people failing to observe Commandment 5.
Everyone eventually learns the facts of life, but some, apparently, fail to learn the facts of relating to others. I think relationships are addressed to some extent in public schools, but not to the degree that they should be, nor to the degree that they are addressed in our children's Catholic school.
The fact is that children are socialized in schools by default, and therefore a considerable amount of formal attention should be given to lessons of how to properly interact with others--making friends, resolving conflicts, finding the good in others, putting oneself in another's shoes, etc. This should be step 1 in making sure no child is left behind educationally, simply because a child that is treated with respect and love learns better.
I think properly socialized children would never accost another child over something that cannot be helped, but would intervene against the type of behavior exhibited by those who do behave antisocially.
PS I don't think there are any books in the curriculum specifically focused on heterosexual love and romance. Where these are depicted, they are incidental to the other courses of events in the plots, as in the book I read to the third graders yesterday about Alladin that was part of an internationally focused author's week. Even then, when we got to the part about Alladin falling in love with the Sultan's daughter, there was a lot yuck being expressed. What children know of heterosexual love and romance, I think, comes from observing the people in the world around them--parents, grandparents, older siblings, cousins, etc.
I'm wondering if some of your concern over the lack of sex education is a reaction to your own experience during a time when sexual matters in general were much less openly discussed. Nowadays, the subject is difficult to avoid, and it becomes necessary to tell children that when they see sex on TV, as in ads now for "The 40 Year Old Virgin", they are not seeing the way things really happen in life. Those who have no one to tell them that generally find out the hard way that sex outside of relationships is self-inflicted pain. When they become older, they will likely advocate for greater chastity education--or perhaps they already are.
Marie, I think we may be
Marie, I think we may be talking about two different incidents. The one in which a young boy was shot in school was in Oxnard, CA. The child's name was Lawrence King. There was, indeed, a subsequent shooting of a young gay man aged 17 in Ft. Lauderdale, but my understanding is that this young man--Simmie Williams--was shot on the street.
As we talk, I realize yet again that we are presuming very different life experiences. Unlike you, I don't have children of my own (though I've considered my students my children throughout my teaching career, and have a strong vested interest in helping raise my nieces and nephews). So I don't have the direct existential commitment you have to watching what goes on with a child of one's own, in these areas.
There's also the difference in our locations. From your recent aside stating that you live in Massachusetts, I now realize that the schools your children attend are perhaps--and I have to be frank about this--a lot more enlightened in many respects than schools in many parts of the country. That's certainly the case in Arkansas. Here, attending a Catholic school is not necessarily an assurance that a child won't experience homophobic bullying.
One of my nephews quit a local Catholic school two or three years ago, due to the bullying he experienced there. At the time, we had no clear idea of what was going on, though I called his guidance counselor to express concern, and his parents also made many visits to the school. He did not tell us the full story until recently. He was bullied very specifically because he was identified as gay (he does not identify himself that way; he's 19). He told no one. I became very concerned when he took two overdoses of pills as he was going through all of this.
His report is that the teachers did nothing to stop the bullying. I tend to believe this. I do in part because I have no real reason to doubt my nephew, and also because I know some of the teachers and think it's very possible they would engage in homophobic behavior. The majority of the students in the school are also politically very much to the right, and my nephew and his parents are not, so there may have been a sense that they were upholding family values of some sort in bullying him.
I think that, on the whole, I'm in favor of franker sex education in all schools. I am in favor of this because I'm not sure I agree that "everyone eventually learns the facts of life"--not even in this hyper-sexualized age. You're right, my own upbringing was positively Victorian in contrast to that of my nieces and nephews. It took a college biology class to set straight the misinformation I had gotten from the schoolyard--my sole source of sex education.
And yet, though images about sex are everywhere now these days, I'm not confident that even today, all children get accurate sexual information from the streets. And, though I've been contrasting sex education and attitudinal education in this exchange, I think that many parents (and their children) also lump the question of education about gay people and our lives into the category of sex education. It shouldn't be that way, but it is, unfortunately. This means that a lack of sex education both hampers youths' ability to obtain accurate information about sexuality itself, but also to obtain accurate information about different sexual orientations.
And given the taken-for-granted "normativity" of heterosexual representations that children see and hear all around them, in the absence of such education, they will not have information to deal with, categorize, and understand the reality of gay lives--which they'll soon encounter in their own experience--without some kind of educational process.
When parents keep saying that this is an area that must be left to the family, but children are still being accosted and even killed in our schools, I think we need to take a more clear-eyed look at educating children to understand that there simply are gay people in the world, that gay people are people first and foremost, and that hatred or discrimination is not an American value (in the case of public schools) or a Christian value (in the case of Catholic ones).
William D. Lindsey
William, Just to clarify, I
William,
Just to clarify, I lived in Massachusetts through college, but have since lived in the Southeast, Southwest, and Appalachia. My children have attended public, private, and Catholic schools in these areas.
Despite regional differences, there is these days an overriding education of children occuring through the media. As you point out, this is not accurate sex education. It is certainly not accurate relationship education.
I think what you and I both would advocate is for children to be given the insight that comes from having learned the connection between sexuality, sexual activity, and relationships. Unfortunately, I don't think this is something people are able to be taught. It must be lived to be understood, and that includes the possiblity of getting it wrong at points along the way.
I am not saying that this must be left to families so much as that the efforts parents are making to teach their children should not be undermined by people who think they know better. If there is one thing all parents eventually learn, it is that there is no such thing as perfect parenting. Most parents, thus, come to realize that the faults of their own parents are not something that can be eliminated in the next generation. It was always thus, and we can only ask for the grace to overcome the negative effects of this imperfect parenting both in our own lives and in our effect on our children.
HopingvsHope, your words to
HopingvsHope, your words to here today helped me to realize my absence from this thread and the need for me to voice a position. At the very beginning of the thread, you were gracious enough to mainstream and outline your thoughts at my request, then I simply did not engage in the dialogue. While my reason for staying out of the thread may differ from here today's (surprise, surprise), nevertheless, as a somewhat regular poster, I should voice a comment.
This issue of the church's marginalization and condemnation of a person as being intrinsically morally disordered is one of the greatest errors and sins of the Church in all of its 2000+ years. I count it up there with Galileo, slavery, and indulgences. I believe it has thwarted an academic and scientific discussion of sexuality and the issue of culpability as well as induced shame, fear, and exclusion in to a population already all too familiar with shame, fear, and exclusion. It clouds those, whose sexual orientation is homo- or bi-sexual, ability to feel the unconditional love and acceptance of God and, therefore can lead to self-loathing and self-hatred.
How many young people have committed suicide because of the growing awareness of their sexual orientation? How many crimes of hetred have been committed against those who are homosexual? The Church has the blood of those people on it hands!
When you think about it, if one in ten men are gay, then there is a good chance that one of the apostles was gay. Since Jesus traveled with such a diversse group of outcast and sinners, I'm sure he had gay friends. And, if one of the disciples was gay, could this be used as an argument for acceptance of gays into the priesthood?
The issues of the church meddling into the bedrooms of married people and partnered homosexuals makes me think of all the frustrated celibate men, straight and gay, who have not dealt with their own issues and take it out on others. Many of you may remember the thread I started entitled, "Which pill is tearing families apart more." As one who works daily with those living with addictions, I believe it is public sin that diocesan budgets can spend hundreds of thousand of dollars preaching and promoting natural family planning which has less than 10% compliance and acceptance when there is not even a line item expense planned to address the epidemic problem of addictions in the family caused by substance abuse.
I truly understand and believe the church needs to promote and teach healthy sexuality and its proper moral expression. But lets involve those who are practicing it to have a voice in the conversation. Pope Paul VI did a great disservice to the church when he outwardly rejected the input and recommendations of the laity involved in the discussions before he published "Humanae Vitae." Why do we continue to build on a flawed foundation?
Indeed! What if Jesus were
Indeed! What if Jesus were *gay*? Or for that matter, as a fully incarnate Being, did Jesus have any sexual 'orientation' at all?? [a WWJB question rather than a WWJD question.] Would such a query help us with the 'intrinsic' exploration at all???
The Rev. Dr. E. McCoy
"If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness ..." (Isaiah 58)
Jstab, your posting is
Jstab, your posting is another that seems to have slipped under the wires of the "Recent Comments" tab. I didn't see it until yesterday, in fact.
What a powerful and very clear statement, informed by your own work with people dealing with addictions--which are all too often fueled by shame and the internalization of self-loathing imposed by oppressive social groups.
There is much that deserves close attention in your posting. First, I like very much the following observation: "I believe it has thwarted an academic and scientific discussion of sexuality and the issue of culpability as well as induced shame, fear, and exclusion in to a population already all too familiar with shame, fear, and exclusion."
I agree with you. The church's adamant no to further discussion of the natural law basis of sexual ethics has definitely "thwarted an academic and scientific discussion of sexuality" and has left many Catholics in a kind of twilight zone. For many of us, our personal graced experience is so much clearer and trustworthy than what the church tries to make us believe about that experience.
What you are saying implies that it's not just LGBT Catholics who have a vested interest in calling for open discussion of sexual ethics. It's all of us. The whole church is harmed when such a central aspect of magisterial teaching simply doesn't fit the graced experience of millions of believers.
And it's harmed when there's no forum for open discussion--another point you raise. I completely agree: Paul VI did the church a tremendous disservice when he called for an advisory forum before Humanae Vitae, and then totally ignored what that forum advised him. That is, he totally ignored the sensus fidelium on these issues.
He did so because the fear was that if the church can admit it is wrong in one area, it may have to admit error in other areas. Yes, as you say, the church WAS wrong about slavery and whether the earth is the center of the universe, and has had to admit it was wrong. There are precedents for the church admitting that its understanding of an issue has been imbued with worldviews that are no longer tenable.
This overweening need to be totally right, never to admit the possibility of error: it's like the worst kind of parenting possible. The church claims to be a devoted and solicitous mother. But in refusing dialogue, wagging her finger at millions whose graced life journeys lead them to question the wisdom of the church's sexual ethic, in saying no and no again (and in saying the answer is no because I told you so), the church behaves like a very unwise and uncaring mother.
Thank you for your statement of support for what I've posted on this thread. I have to keep giving witness, no matter how little my words seem to count, because that's part of our calling as followers of Christ: to witness to the grace within our own lives.
William D. Lindsey
I just found this post and
I just found this post and response by accident while checking a recent comments posting. I previously had looked to see if my comment had made it on the site and couldn't find it for days. You found it before I did!
Nevertheless, there is so much that can be written and discussed about the church's position on sexuality and its lack of a DESIRE to understand. Maybe in our lifetime we will get the opportunity to look back and say that our hours of blogging actually made a difference somewhere.
William, I want to thank you
William,
I want to thank you for writing and sharing your views so honestly. It has helped me to understand you and the gay community of faithful in a way that I never could have understood. By your writing you are a shepherd of Christ. You belong to Him. No one can take that from you, unless you let them. I'd like to share with you some insights that I have and I hope you don't mind me sharing.
The hierarchy is a corporate body of people, who are sinners just like everyone else; they just don't see it that way. They think they are more superior. They are not and we know it and God knows it.
Their lack of introspection and thoughtfulness of others is problematic and hurtful for a great number of people, and even moreso on themselves. We cannot let those problems that belong to them become ours. They have too much time on their hands and like the Pharisees desire to make more laws to make things more comfortable for themselves in order to not deal with their own erroneous judgments and deal with the real issues. Their fundamental idea of shepherding is being problematic and laying burdens on others. This way of their traditional behaving will always take the focus off themselves. It is easier for them to behave in such a way than in doing the hard work of working out their own salvation.
They cannot bring themselves to understanding about what it is to be gay, so they dismiss it as an "intrinsic disorder." They have not consulted with God about this, but have picked out what they believe are apropriate passages in the Bible to suit their own pathologically distorted beliefs. The real intrinsic disorder is within them, not you, not gays. Their disorder is their refusal to consult with God, Jesus Christ, and truly unite themselves with the spirit of Jesus Christ. They are so busy running around looking into archives of Canon Law to find ways to justify what they want to believe and push that all on the "sheep" who will believe just about anything they say for fear they might have to do some independent thinking on their own for a change and they are not willing because the flesh is weak. There is a lot of spiritual laziness in the Church. Too often many consult the Catechism for an "answer" when there is no substitute for actually asking God in prayer for the answer. The truth is, they don't really think that God will give them the answer and they are not patient to wait until God answers back. And, it is possible that God will never given them an answer back and sometimes the answer back is not the one they want to hear.
What I have found most helpful in understanding is that we are not fighting flesh here, we are up against evil powers and principalities of darkness. There are legions and legions of evil that keep people in darkness and in racist attitudes, homophobia, all sorts of phobias, anti-this, anti-that, pro-this, pro-that; all essentially boil down to non-life-giving entities ruling over the soul and spirit and out into the world. Our central focus should be on Jesus Christ and his merciful sacrifice to all of us on the cross. It is He who delivers us from all evil, not some corporate body of opinionated and misguided quasi-intellectuals who want to make a name for themselves in the book of the Church.
We were not made for the Book of the Church, but to be in the Book of Life. Our life is in Christ if we are doing what His will is for us, and that we know is to love one another. It has nothing to do with who we are in a monogomous relationship with and sleep with or have sex with or not. This is what they fail to understand. This is their intrinsic disorder that they need to take ownership of, but they are passing the buck to us on many fronts so to speak.
I'm sure you have read St. Teresa of Avila's book, The Interior Castle. Do not let the anti-Christ bring you back into the first room she talks about with all the crawling creatures and serpents that bite and wound the soul. Her metaphors are beautiful for our understanding how to cope with the snakes and the devious and deceptive tactics of evil that will do anything to prevent us from being with God and in keeping the true spirit of Jesus Christ out of the Church. We must move out of that serpent filled room and follow Jesus and find God through Him at the center of our very soul. If we find ourselves back in the room filled with serpents, with practice, we will learn to laugh at them, as St. Teresa of Avila says she learned to do.
I hope this is helpful William. God Bless!
Dear Butterfly, I appreciate
Dear Butterfly, I appreciate your response very much. I sometimes think that, by blogging about these issues, I'm committing the unpardonable sin of being humorless. I bore even myself, repeating the same mantra over and over!
So I tell myself to stop blogging, do something I enjoy doing (my rose bed really needs to be tidied for spring; haven't been to an art museum in aeons), and let the issues resolve themselves.
But then I read the news, and I feel I have no choice except to keep speaking out, tedious though I may be even to myself. The morning's news brings reports of assaults on the house of a gay couple in Northern Ireland, with death threats against the couple. One of the men is disabled. At the same time, a group calling itself Christian Congress for Traditional Values has put up huge signs in London claiming that the aim of gays is destruction of the "traditional family." The signs show a beaming young couple (white) with two children--as if the middle-class nuclear family is the end-all and be-all of the gospels and of what Jesus proclaimed. (The signs have been judged by the courts to be hate speech, by the way, and are to be taken down.)
Put the two stories together, and you have the nexus from which my concern to keep on shouting flows. When the church speaks hatefully about a stigmatized minority, when its teaching demeans and assaults that minority, when it lies about that minority, it becomes a vehicle for violence. And that's something the church ought never to be.
There is a link--and a very clear one--between what churches say about and do to LGBT people, and social violence against LGBT people. Creating linguistic structures of violence (e.g., calling gays intrinsically disordered) lays the foundations for overt expressions of violence, especially when the one fabricating the linguistic structures claims to speak in the name of God.
Fortunately, even as it seems there's a worldwide attempt to adopt American-style gay-bashing for political ends and to ratchet up the anti-gay agenda even in countries where this has not been a major issue, some ministers are now courageously speaking out. An interfaith group of ministers in Sydney calling themselves 100Revs has just issued a statement apologizing to the LGBT community for what the church persists in doing to us. The statement is on the group's website at http://100revs.blogspot.com/2008/02/100revs-statement.html. An excerpt:
"As ministers of various churches and denominations we recognise that the churches we belong to, and the church in general, have not been places of welcome for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people. Indeed the church has often been profoundly unloving toward the GLBT community. For these things we apologise, whatever the distinctive of our Christian position on human sexuality – to which we remain committed. We are deeply sorry and ask for the forgiveness of the GLBT community. We long that the church would be a place of welcome for all people and commit ourselves to pursuing this goal."
It's noteworthy that this statement comes from Sydney, where Anglican bishop Peter Jensen has just announced he will not attend this year's Lambeth Conference as a protest against acceptance of openly gay ministers, and where Cardinal Pell, a close friend of Pope Benedict, has been less than supportive (to say the least) of gay/lesbian Catholics. Sydney has also seen a spike in violence against gays this year, with reports that the police have been very slow to investigate the problem or offer assistance to the gay community in combating the violence.
As I think about all these stories, I suppose what constantly puzzles me is the inability of some Christians to see that this affects all of us. We have to take a stand. Where people are being assaulted--simply because of who they are--we cannot stand by in silence. Not once we see. We cannot shrug our shoulders and pass by.
Seeing, hearing, understanding implicates us. And, of course, that's an uncomfortable place to be, and we would like to do all we can to distance ourselves from the voice that persists in telling us to keep our eyes and ears open.
I understand that tendency myself. Some of the most brutal experiences I have had in recent years, as a gay man, have been at the hands of two African-American women. I wish I could respond to those experiences by washing my hands of African Americans and of women. I wish I could simply conclude that I have been misled in seeing people of color and women as oppressed. I would like very much to shrug my shoulders and dig up my rose bed, visit the local art museum.
I can't do that, unfortunately. I have to distinguish between two individuals who, for whatever reason, seem not to have learned from their own considerable oppression that others can suffer, too, and a whole group of people--people of color and women--with whom I still must stand in solidarity. I have to do that because I cannot stop seeing the oppression of black people or of women, or hearing the voices that call out for my solidarity.
What puzzles me in the church is the ability of so many of us just to walk past and do nothing, to shut the church door and drown out that voice of the outsider that makes us uncomfortable as we are at our prayers.
Thank you, Butterfly, for prodding me (even if that wasn't your intent) to keep on flapping my wings....
William D. Lindsey
Dennis, thank you for
Dennis, thank you for reminding us very eloquently that the pope and other high church officials play not merely a religious role, but a political one, as well. You say,
"When the political, administrative, institutional dimension of church becomes an issue or their ends are pursued or challenged, 'love' as you call it, is not an issue. It is the cold, calculated, power pursuit that tolerates, without counting collateral damage, justified by the end objective of 'bringing Christ's kingdom to fruition'."
When church leaders behave more politically than pastorally, surely they deserve the same unvarnished scrutiny we'd give to any political leader--regardless of the cloth the church dignitaries wear. I've just read the following eye-opening sentence in Bruce Bawer's marvelous book, "Stealing Jesus":
"The questions that reporters ask people like Cardinal O'Connor and Pat Robertson are rarely as tough as those they ask of politicians; yet these men are not only religious leaders but political leaders who head up organizations with explicit political agendas."
The ongoing developments in Italy seem to me to bear the point out. For the "Clerical Whispers" blog's take on the situation today (Jan 29), see "Vatican Assaults Prodi--Again" at http://clericalwhispers.blogspot.com/2008/01/vatican-assaults-prodi-again.html. And I've just read the following fascinating bit on the Towleroad blog, linking to an article in the Jan. 28 "Washington Blade" by Lou Chibbaro, Jr., entitled, "Anti-Gay Slurs Hurled in Italian Parliament" (www.washblade.com/thelatest/thelatest.cfm?blog_id=16214):
"A member of Italy’s Parliament was spat upon and called a 'faggot,' a 'fairy' and a 'traitor' after he broke ranks with his small Catholic-oriented party and announced he would vote to defend Italian Premier Romano Prodi against a resolution aimed at bringing down his center-left government." The gentleman in question is Senator Stefano Cusumano of the Christian Democratic Udeur Party, to which Clemente Mastella belongs. It was Mastella's resignation, after he and his wife were charged with participating in a money for favors scheme, that brought down the Prodi government. As I noted over on John Allen's canary in a coal mine, the Italian newspaper La Stampa has reported that before resigning, Mastella consulted with the leader of the Italian bishops' conference, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco.
Political? I think so. Homophobic? Well, when a senator resisting the attempt to oust Prodi is spat upon and called a “frocio" and a "squallida checca," and when his Catholic party leader has to be restrained while lunging at him on the Senate floor, I find it hard to see what's happening in any other terms. The "dirty queen" slur came from Nino Strano, a member of the far-right (some would say overtly fascist) National Alliance Party, who joined in the fray on behalf of the Christian Democrats.
Christian? Pastoral? Umm, I don't think so.
The church should be in the business of healing hurt, not adding to it. Otherwise it forfeits its claim to be motivated by concern for folks' pastoral care and reveals itself as more interested in politics, even when the political movements it consorts with utterly betray its core values.
P.S. I somehow seem to have jumped this reply to you, Dennis, to the head of the thread. I actually meant this to go beneath your Jan. 28 posting. Please read it as a reply to that particular posting, all blog friends.
William D. Lindsey
In this posting, I'm trying
In this posting, I'm trying something novel. I'm posting this simultaneously with another comment on a different thread. This posting is intended to be read as a diptych along with one I just placed on John Allen's canary in a mine thread. That posting is a critique of the recent overt political involvement of the papacy in the political life of several European nations that have moved towards greater tolerance of gay rights. I would like to propose that this posting be read in concert with that one, and vice versa.
Here, I'd like to address two recent happenings that at first blush might appear to have nothing at all to do with each other. Yet, in my mind, they are linked. These are the instructions of Pope Benedict to the Society of Jesus as it elected its new general, and the death of actor Heath Ledger, along with some of the reactions to this tragic event.
On January 10, Pope Benedict sent a message to the 35th general convention of the Society of Jesus, as the Jesuits gathered to elect a new Father General. The letter was made public on January 18.
In general, the letter calls on the Jesuits to renew their fidelity to the papacy. In particular, it addresses the Jesuits' position regarding certain "neuralgic points" in the dialogue between the church and contemporary culture. These include (and I'm quoting directly from Benedict's letter), "the pastoral care of homosexual persons."
I must admit that when I first read those words, I was astonished. I asked myself, "Can that be what Pope Benedict thinks his position regarding gay folks in the church has been all about--from his document in the 1980s defining us as intrinsically disordered, through the suppression of Dignity and the punishing of Jeannine Gramick and Bob Nugent, up to the current attack on gay rights laws in Spain? Can Benedict truly think that the church's stance towards gay folks has been about pastoral care?"
From where I stand, neither care nor pastoral concern seem to have much to do with how the church has decided to treat gay persons at this point in history. Care has to do with solicitude, with binding up wounds. The word is etymologically related to "cure," to healing. And pastoring has to do with shepherding. Anyone who herds sheep is concerned to keep the flock healthy, alive, together--to seek out the wounded or lost sheep.
Attacking people at the very core of their being by defining them as intrinsically disordered, telling people to be invisible, tacitly encouraging openly gay people who will not apologize for being gay to disappear from the flock: surely that's about neither care nor pastoral leadership, about neither healing wounds nor maintaining the flock.
It strikes me as doublespeak of a particularly insidious kind to warn a religious community that tries to find ways around cruel linguistic and institutional obstacles to engage in effective pastoral outreach to gay people to be faithful to the Vatican's concern for "pastoral care for homosexuals."
And so to Heath Ledger's death. Almost as soon as the tragic news hit the media, ugly comments about Heath Ledger's role as a gay cowboy in "Brokeback Mountain" began to proliferate on internet message boards, in radio talk programs, on television. Commentators on some blogs have wondered whether God punished Mr. Ledger with death for playing gay. A church community has announced its intention to demonstrate at Mr. Ledger's funeral, to remind the mourners that God hates gay people. A commentator on a well-known right-wing American network aired a hideous segment yesterday, mocking "Brokeback Mountain" and seemingly taking glee in this young actor's death.
If nothing else, these reactions to the sudden death of a talented actor are shocking, revelatory reminders of just how much care--how much healing, how much curing--remains to be effected in our society. Homophobia remains an ugly wound in our society, and one that few people seem willing to address directly. It is a wound that churches have an obligation to heal, not to deepen.
And it is a wound that affects the real lives of real people. Those of us who are older and who have become inured (as much as one can ever become inured) to being the object of hate have developed ways to cope with it.
But young people have not. Recent studies show about 14% of American adolescents either defining themselves as gay or entertaining that possibility. Studies also show alarmingly high rates of suicide or attempted suicide among gay youth.
For many young Americans who are gay or disposed to tolerance towards gay people, "Brokeback Mountain" was a breath of fresh air. It represented a respect for the real lives of real gay people many of these young folks know and love. It treated the relationship of two gay men as a relationship of love, and not merely of carnal gratification.
What message do we give those impressionable youth when we mock the death of an actor who played in this movie? What message do we give when we tolerate such a hateful response to a young actor's tragic death? What hope are we providing the gay youth of the future when we stand by in silence while our culture engages in such hateful rhetoric and action?
And where are these youth to turn, when the churches' "pastoral care" is non-existent?
The church should be in the business of healing hurt, not inflicting it.
William D. Lindsey
P.S. Sorry--again, not trying to jump queue, but reading the posting after it was posted led me to a very garbled sentence I just didn't see when I wrote this.
William, I am the least
William, I am the least competent person to venture into discussion on this contemporary conundrum for I have only in recent times become aware of the community of good people who have different sexual orientations than I do. I simply have lived in cultural circumstancess where I have no social exchange with gays and lesbians.
I am hurt for the hurt they all suffer from the Church's fixations against them. Calculated insensitivity toward anyone is unacceptable and is to be decried. The insenstivity of the Church is, it seems to me, driving this community of good persons to do and say things, out of sheer self-defense of their own humanity, which they otherwise wouldn't do, except for the putdown they are forced to endure.
I wasn't sure where best to
I wasn't sure where best to comment about here today's reference to the book "King and King" (not "The Prince and The Prince") and your comment, William, about educating children.
"King and King" is written for 4 to 8 year olds. At these ages, children are not yet critical thinkers. Being opposed to children this age having this read to them in school is somewhat different from being opposed to middle or high school students reading and discussing "To Kill a Mockingbird".
In my opinion, there is an agenda behind reading such a book to children of this age under the circumstances found in Massachusetts. The court's opinion was that it was being read to foster tolerance for the reality of homosexual marriage in Massachusetts. My opinion is that it was being read so that children would not grow up expecting to be heterosexual--and thus spared the disappointment that homosexual people experienced when their lives turned out not to conform to the fairy tales of their youth. (My opinion is based on personal acquaintance with some of the lesbians who led the battle to win the right for homosexuals to marry in Massachusetts.)
I think parents of young children have a right to expect that schools will not teach their children about matters of sexuality without their consent. This is not because of one kind of sexuality being right and the other wrong, but simply because parents know their children best at this age and know whether the topic of sexuality would be more upsetting than enlightening at this point. Parents of children this age typically are advised to respond to children's questions forthrightly, but not to overwhelm them with information. From this perspective, the book would be a wonderful tool for two men raising an adopted daughter to use with their child, or for someone who knows such a family to use.