Tag Archive for: behavior

The Special Treatment Homosexuals Demand

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.

synod

2014 Synod, Rome.

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 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.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

Judge Richard Posner Ignores Empirical Evidence of Ex-’Gays,’ Wrongly Calls Homosexuality ‘Immutable’

Author of key “gay marriage” ruling espouses unproven “born gay” theory.

Judge Richard Posner needs to meet some EX-"gays.:

UNINFORMED: Judge Richard Posner needs to meet some EX-”gays.”

It is no small thing to accuse renowned legal scholar Richard Posner, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and author of a recent controversial ruling in favor of homosexual “marriage,” of being ignorant—but it appears that is the case when it comes to Posner’s assertion that homosexuality is “immutable.”

It has been said of the prolific Posner, author of nearly 40 books, that he ”writes the way other men breathe,” but apparently the judge has never breathed in the wonderful reality that many men and women have overcome the destructive pull of homosexuality in their lives. Posner writes in the Appeals Court decision September 4, 2014 striking down Wisconsin’s and Indiana’s pro-traditional marriage laws:

“The challenged laws discriminate against a minority defined by an immutable characteristic…And there is little doubt that sexual orientation, the ground of the [anti-“gay marriage”] discrimination, is an immutable (and probably an innate, in the sense of in-born) characteristic rather than a choice” [pages 7, 9]

Such simplistic and unproven assertions cover over a multitude of politically incorrect facts and nuances that contradict the “gay” activist claim that “sexual orientation”–itself a tendentious social construct–is inborn, innocuous and unchangeable. This false narrative conveniently serves homosexual activists who insist theirs is a “civil rights” movement akin to Black Americans’ noble struggle for equality.

The problem for LGBT advocates is that while race and ethnicity are truly immutable–there are no “ex-Blacks” or “former Hispanics”—some people do change their sexual self-identity and behavior. (Not to mention their “gender identity”—the transgender “T” in “LGBT”—which progressives reflexively regard as fluid.) There is ample evidence that many homosexuals “acquired” their identity as a defensive maladaptation to the abuse, alienation or other trauma they experienced during their childhood. One example: CNN’s Don Lemon, who considers himself proudly “gay”–despite acknowledging that as a young boy he was sexually molested by an older teenage male in his neighborhood.

David-Kyle-Foster-small

CHANGED MAN: Former homosexual David Kyle Foster runs the Christian “Mastering Life Ministries,” which teaches people “how to heal sexual brokenness”–including those trapped in homosexuality.

Perhaps Judge Posner could deepen his understanding of homosexuality by visiting PFOX’s “Ex-Gay Awareness Conference”today and tomorrow in Washington, D.C. There he could meet real, live *former* homosexuals like Greg Quinlan and Christopher Doyle–who give the lie to his claim of immutability.

Or Posner could simply watch ex-“gay” testimonies like David Kyle Foster’s online [click HERE or go to www.PurePassion.us].

Moreover, Posner should consider that it is not only conservative Christians who speak to the reality of ex-“gay” change and evolving “sexual orientation”: former “lesbian” Chirlane McCray abandoned that identity when she fell in love with and married the future Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio.

Lesbian author Camille Paglia said McCray’s lesbian past was ignored in the mayoral race “because it upsets the current ideological applecart. Everyone from the mainstream media to Lady Gaga is preaching the ‘born gay’ gospel, but nobody is born gay, and no scientific study claiming that has ever held up to later scrutiny.”

Judge Posner should take heed. He himself wrote in 1998: “It is the lack of an empirical footing that is and always has been the Achilles heel of constitutional law, not the lack of good constitutional theory.” (New York University Law Review“Against Constitutional Theory”).

Unfortunately, Posner has allowed his own bias in favor of “innate” homosexuality to negate the empirical evidence that “gayness” need not be permanent in a person’s life.

For information on AFTAH’s Oct. 25, 2014 banquet with Dr. Michael Brown CLICK HERE.

RELATED VIDEO:

Billy Graham’s son Franklin: Homosexuality is ‘a sin,’ and ‘I want to warn people’

“In a Meet the Press interview Sunday, Franklin Graham, the son of famed preacher Billy Graham, refused to back down from his Biblical stance against homosexuality. “It’s sin,” he said, and added that he wanted to warn people about it because they will have to stand before God who will judge,” Life Site News reports.

The younger Graham was speaking in the NBC interview about his father’s legacy, as the elder Graham, 95, is ‘very weak’ and eating little. He described how he helped to arrange a final sermon for his father that aired in November. He felt it was God’s will that he help his father “finish well.”

In the context of about Pope Francis’ “who am I to judge” comment, Franklin Graham was asked if he would shift his position on “gays.”

“God would have to shift, and God doesn’t,” Graham replied. “God’s word is the same yesterday and today and a million years from now, that it’s sin.”

“To wink at sin, and to tell somebody that it’s okay, I know the consequences of what will happen one day when they have to stand before God,” Graham continued. “I want to warn people.”

But, he added, “I think the Pope is right when he says he is not the judge. He is not the judge. God is the judge.”

Graham’s stance is the same as that of the Catholic Church.  A Vatican document on the pastoral care of homosexual persons notes that, “There can be no doubt of the moral judgement made there against homosexual relations.” The document, written under John-Paul II and signed by Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict), notes that the Bible “in the course of describing the conditions necessary for belonging to the Chosen People, the author excludes from the People of God those who behave in a homosexual fashion.”

That 1986 Vatican document also encourages speaking out on the immorality of homosexual activity as the younger Graham has done.  “No authentic pastoral programme will include organizations in which homosexual persons associate with each other without clearly stating that homosexual activity is immoral,” it says.

The document stresses, “we wish to make it clear that departure from the Church’s teaching, or silence about it, in an effort to provide pastoral care is neither caring nor pastoral.” It adds: “Only what is true can ultimately be pastoral. The neglect of the Church’s position prevents homosexual men and women from receiving the care they need and deserve.”

For Graham, it’s also a matter of truth. “I’ve never really been one to try to be politically correct,” he said. “I just feel truth is truth, and sometimes I probably offend some people.”

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