News After You, Father
posted by on November 15 at 9:48 AM
You have to love those whacky U.S. Bishops. This header/subhead combo in this morning’s New York Times made me laugh out loud in the campus coffee shop where I was eating a bagel.
U.S. Bishops Adopt Guidelines on GaysUrging celibacy for gay men and lesbians, and rejecting artificial contraception
Hm. Celibacy. Doesn’t the Catholic Church in the United States have a wee credibility problem where celibacy is concerned? Considering the inability of the Catholic Church to keep its own priests celibate, I don’t think think the sour-faced U.S. Bishops seen above are really going to have much luck with rank-and-file gay and lesbian Catholics, to say nothing of gay and lesbian non-Catholics.
Like most gay and lesbian readers of the New York Times, seeing today’s headline about the U.S. Bishops’ unwelcome, unsolicited plans for my life (loneliness, misery, and lifetime of sexual frustration—sign me up!), only reminded me of this headline from yesterday’s NYT:
New York Priest’s Sex-Abuse Trial Begins, in Pennsylvania
Celibacy? Get your priests to honor their own vows of celibacy and then maybe—maybe—we’ll consider contemplating your advice for us. (We’ll still reject it, of course, but we’ll contemplate it.) Until that blessed day arrives, well, let’s just say my first impulse on reading the story in the New York Times today was not to call my boyfriend and break up. I laughed—and not just at your proscriptions for gays and lesbians.
The guidelines welcome gay people, but they also affirm church teachings that “homosexual inclinations” are inherently disordered. While having such inclinations is not sinful, gay sexual activity is, according to the core teachings. The guidelines, called “Ministry to Persons with a Homosexual Inclination,” passed by a vote of 194 to 37. They also speak out against same-sex marriage and adoptions by gay men and lesbians….The bishops also adopted “Married Love and the Gift of Life,” which is meant to explain church teachings about contraception for engaged and young married couples.
The document asserts that artificial contraception introduces a “false note” into a marriage and has led to a decline in respect for life in society. Catholics use birth control to the same extent as other Americans; only 4 percent, the document said, use natural planning, the type of birth control backed by the church.
Archbishop Joseph F. Naumann of Kansas City, Kan., said on Monday that gay Catholics who are not celibate and married Catholics who use artificial contraception should not receive Holy Communion.
Wow! How can I ever thank you guys for linking your sex-phobic, ill-informed, thoroughly-backwards and completely idiotic gay bashing with your equally sex-phobic, ill-informed, thoroughly-backwards straight bashing? By tackling both issues at once, by linking homosexual activity and heterosexual activity like this, you all have demonstrate that your issue isn’t really with homosexual sex, per se, but sex, period. And, I’m sorry, but your credibility on contraception isn’t much better than your cred on gay sex. Ask the average straight American Catholic what a priest might recommend as a birth control method and you’re likely to hear, “Come on the altar boy, not in him.”
And did you catch that, U.S. Bishops? Only 4% of straight married Catholics use “natural planning.” Do you really intend to deny Communion to 96% of American Catholics? Are you double agents working on behalf of the Lutheran Church or what? Are you trying to make Protestants of us all?
And speaking of “natural planning,” I guess the U.S. Bishops missed the big news about how many fertilized eggs—you know, human beings with souls and shit—wind up dying as a result of “natural family planning.” Also from the NYT:
A philosopher in Britain has ruffled feathers on both sides of the Atlantic by suggesting that the rhythm method of contraception may increase the risk of early embryonic death.Luc Bovens, a philosopher at the London School of Economics, argues in the Journal of Medical Ethics that couples who try to prevent pregnancy by avoiding sex during the woman’s most fertile time of month may be more likely to produce embryos that do not develop or implant in the womb.
If this is correct, he writes, then “millions of rhythm method cycles per year globally depend for their success on massive embryonic death.”
"The Galgamak vagina is 10 feet wide and lined with razor sharp teeth! We can't possibly be expected to have sex with that!"
hey, they just make the rules, they don't have to follow them.
And what is wrong with celibacy? Sure, the sex thing is out, so that has to be gotten over, but so are pick-up games, flirting games, hook-up games, "where will I stick this" games, and so are the "go home or is breakfast included" games. Monogamy is slightly better, but the games are still played, its just that the winner has already been pre-decided.
The worst part of it all is that if the Catholic Church were to just reverse position on homosexuality, birth control, abortion, female clergy, and other gender related issues, they would be a remarkable and beautiful ally for progressive causes. The companion statement about Iraq issued by the USCCB, for example, speaks to that, as does the church's position on the death penalty, foreign aid work, (most) human rights, and so on.
And from my experience, the idea that the Catholic Church is the only religion that has a problem with paedophilia/pederasty is *definitely* bogus. The only difference here is that the Catholic Church has a much more rigid hierarchy that can be held to account for the impropriety.
My hometown, for example, had a rather messy incident where a married UCC minister was accused of sexual impropriety with members of the congregation, and was later charged with child molestation. However, the results were the same as with the cases in the Catholic Church: the bastard was reassigned, and the whole case was swept under the rug. He even managed to beat the child molestation charge, despite the fact that some of his former clergy members were probably covering for him to keep his ass out of prison.
But in the end, it didn't matter that the UCC had a more liberal bent, or that they allowed married clergy and now advocate for gay marriage. If you are a sick and twisted fuck in a position of power over people (child or adult), you'll abuse that power for your own satisfaction, and the people above you have a vested interest in keeping negative publicity under wraps.
Hey Dan,
You don't have to be JUST catholic or protestant. The Episcopals consider themselves small-c catholic AND protestant. Part of tracing the Church of England back to when St Augustine of Canterbury landed in 597... :)
I appreciate the fact that US Catholics are more independently minded than most other religious folks, but why would any self respecting gay man or lesbian ever want to be Catholic?
The Catholic Church has absolutely nothing to offer us, other than hypocrisy, lies, soft hatred (we love you but you're disordered) and condemnation of course. It’s just so self destructive.
If you’re determined to be religious, why not go with MCC, UCC or Episcopalian?
I think the church may be making a slow three-point turn on this issue, and right now we're seeing them at that awkward moment where they're crosswise to traffic with their front wheels against the curb.
Hi, everyone. Thanks to Mr. Savage's excellent commentary, doesn anyone need to know why I'm an ex-Catholic who considers himself an intellectual free agent? And I agree with Arthur C. Clark: Carl Sagan's book, The Demon-Haunted World should be required reading in all high schools and colleges. It's a brilliant treatise on religious and pseudoscientific tomfoolery.
A note to Father Ted who complained about all the "games" that go along with sex: the Christian religion gave us the rules for those self same “games”. They are the ones who taught us the slave mentality and it is the powerless person who uses manipulation to gain their desires.
So be celibate if you want to. Why not? Just don’t go pushing it on me.
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