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This growing acceptance seems to be the case within the Church as well – certainly with the hierarchy and some of the clergy and religious. Less so, I think, within the laity. There are the London Soho Masses http://www.sohomasses.com whose members openly reject Catholic teaching – a fact of which the hierarchy is fully aware. The head of the Soho Masses ‘Eucharistic Ministers’ has a few blogs, which can all be accessed from this one – called “Queering the Church” http://queeringthechurch.wordpress.com They advertise these blogs on the Soho Mass website.
There is also the Leicester Gay Catholics (mostly members of the dissenting group Quest) who were given the go-ahead by the bishop for Masses at the Holy Cross Priory in Leicester http://sites.google.com/site/leicestergaycatholics. The same bishop also publicly supported civil partnerships recently http://marymagdalen.blogspot.com/2010/01/bishop-mcmahon-no-problem-with-civil.html
Now, we have a UK tour this year of the notorious Franciscan priest Fr Richard Rohr. On record as admitting that he does not adhere to Catholic teaching on contraception, the ordination of women to the priesthood, and homosexuality, he has also been known for conducting spiritual retreats where men practice ritual nudism. See http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jan/10012506.html for further details.
Checking out on-line about Rohr, has thrown up some interesting but alarming details. Rohr serves as director for the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC), which he founded in 1987. See http://www.cacradicalgrace.org . The Centre serves as a hotbed for radical dissent. It is a frequent sponsor and constituent of “Call to Action,” an umbrella organisation of dissenting so-called ‘Catholic’ groups.
On that site is a link to another called “Men as Learners and Elders” (M.A.L.E.S.) http://www.malespirituality.org It has branches in various countries, and advocates something called “Male Rite of Passage” or “Male Rite of Affirmation” – rites which are accorded almost quasi-sacramental importance, and which have been instituted by – Richard Rohr.
The website states “Men’s Rites of Passage is not about religion, but about spirituality, about age old traditions that guide us into manhood, about coming to trust that there is something much greater at work in our lives than we could ever imagine.”
If you click on the England link in the M.A.L.Es International Websites
section, you come to “The Male Journey” http://www.malespirituality.co.uk This calls itself a “networking site for MALE’s UK – all those men initiated or interested in the Male Spirituality work of Richard Rohr.” They are asking for help to organise Male Rites of Passage (MROP) and something they call “teenager initiation”. With Rohr’s penchant for ritual nudism, alarm bells really should be ringing by now. I hope all of them have been CRB-checked.Look at Rohr’s UK itinerary on the MALE’s UK site. Apparently, he starts with a MROP in Scotland in July/August, then goes to Oxford & Birmingham, then does a stint at St James’ Piccadilly in London – http://www.st-james-piccadilly.org/rohrintro.html – St James’ being a notorious mecca for new-age devotees and all manner of strangeness – before going on to headline at this year’s Greenbelt festival. Apparently, his tour has been organised by the Third Order of St Francis http://www.tssf.org.uk/index.html. Rohr also has videos on YouTube as well. We need to be aware of these problems.
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kevin1,
What a very helpful comment. I haven’t got further than the link to “Queering the Church” which shocked me to my core. Did you see the bit about the gay wedding at Cana? I can’t believe it.
As it says in the thread article, we really ought to be hearing from priests in homilies about how wrong homosexuality is, otherwise, people are being left with the impression that it is perfectly normal and young people are led into it. I don’t believe the survey at all, that young people are not led into it. It is very noticeable, at the end of the Independent report about the survey, that there are parts of the survey being kept from the public, so we have to be very wary of believing that survey.
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kevin 1,
I forgot to say that I am working my way through the links on your post, so will comment again when I’ve read the rest of it.
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Many people today have no religion, and therefore no objection to homosexuality on moral grounds, but they can and must be told about the devastating medical / physical effects of homosexual practice. A helpful site which gives (very strong) evidence can be found here:- http://www.narth.com/menus/medical.html
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N O T I C E . . .
Read Bishop Fellay’s comments on the SSPX/Vatican talks, delivered during a Conference in Parish early in January.
http://www.catholictruthscotland.com/blog/?p=2383#comment-23843Please post any comments on that topic, at the above linked thread. Thanks.
kevin1,
Not had time to study your post properly yet, since I’ve been out and about most of the day, but I have, coincidentally, had emails from a friend in the USA about the Reverend Rohr, so I’m interested to note that he is coming to Scotland (as if we don’t have enough dissenters of our own). Thus, I’ll be starting there and working backwards, asap! At first skim, though, I have to agree with rebel that you have hit the ground running, with this excellent kick-start to the thread.
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Kevin1 I’m slowly going through your links at present. But from the little I gathered on Father Richard Rohr is that he is in open dissent from the Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception, the ordination of women to the priesthood and homosexuality. That says a great deal about him.
In any case, I found this link about the Church’s teaching on Morality.
http://www.sspxasia.com/Documents/Catholic_Morality-What_is_the_teaching_of_the_Holy_Roman_Catholic_Church.htmI think that the Wellcome Trust was founded in 1936 to administer the fortune of an American born pharmaceutical magnate (Henry Wellcome).
But it certainly is the UKs largest non governmental source of funds for biomedical research (largest Charity in UK), to the tune of £600 million.
That’s quite a resource. But, homosexuality is being pushed over here big time. Catholics due to their lack of knowledge and education in Catholic Doctrine are absolutely susceptible to this influx of homosexuality being the norm.Don’t you find it strange though, that the Mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov refusing to grant a permit for a gay pride parade in Russia’s Capital city?
Whether or not, you believe that Russia is still a communist country and an atheistic one at that, why is a gay pride parade being refused there, and, Catholics, let alone other Christian groups go all politically correct, and say such a parade must go ahead? -
One reason that attitudes towards the sinfulness of homosexuality have changed can be seen in this study.
Hurley, Beth. “Analyzing Attitudes Toward Homosexuality Over Time” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Marriott Hotel, Loews Philadelphia Hotel, Philadelphia, PA, Aug 12, 2005 . 2009-05-25
“A study by Yang (1997) finds that the percentage of American citizens who believe that homosexuality is something people are born with has doubled in recent decades. Furthermore, the proportion of those who believe homosexuality is something people cannot change is now comparable to the proportion who believe that homosexuality is chosen.” (page 6)
If one believes that Homosexuality is innate (or natural, ie one is born a homosexual) then one begins to distinguish between homosexuals (they are just born like that) and homosexual acts (they are sinful).
I reject the idea that anyone is born as a homosexual – God would not create such a human. No, it is learned behaviour and is a sign of retarded development: the homosexual remains at the same-sex friendship attraction stage of the child and never develops proper human relations with the opposite sex.
One can see the idea that homosexuality is innate dominates the thinking underpinning the discrimination legislation. Just as one should not discriminate on the grounds of sex or race because they are not matters of choice but the way one is born so one should not discriminate on grounds of “sexual orientation” as that’s a given rather than a matter of personnal choice.
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My link in my last post seems to have failed. But the gist of it, is that it had several quotes from the the Bible – from Leviticus, the Romans and others, such as: And I quote verbatim.
Genesis XII, 13:
“And the men of Sodom were very wicked, sinners before the face of the Lord, beyond measure”. – These Sodomites were in fact homosexuals, as is proven by Genesis XIX, 1-11.Leviticus XX,13: If anyone lie with a man as well as woman, both have committed an abomination, let them be put to death: then blood be upon them.
Hope this link from Saint Augustine works:
http://www.tldm.org/news7/homosexualitySaint.htmEditor: gloria, kevin1 points out below (9.07 post) that this link you’ve posted contains material from a false seer – a condemned “apparition”. I know you would want bloggers to be alerted to this, if you would all check out kevin1’s post below, before visiting this site. Thanks.
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Well here’s the Jesuit Father Hardon on the question of Sodom.
http://www.therealpresence.org/archives/Chastity/Chastity_014.htm
“55. Is homosexuality condemned in the story of Sodom as described in Genesis (19:1-11) and Leviticus (18:22, 20:13)?
Yes. There can be no doubt that these accounts in the Old Testament are condemnations of homosexuality. They reflect the punishment that God visits on those who commit this sin. Moreover, they show that God excludes from His friendship those who practice homosexuality (HP6).
56. What is St. Paul’s teaching on homosexuality?
That there are three passages in St. Paul on this important doctrine.
In his first letter to the Corinthians (6:9), the apostle identifies homosexuals among those who will not enter the Kingdom of God.
In the letter to the Romans (1:18-32), St. Paul uses homosexual behavior as an example of the blindness which has overcome human beings. Instead of the original harmony between Creator and creatures, idolatry has lead many people into moral depravity. The clearest example of this depravity is the practice of homosexuality.
Finally in the first chapter of his first letter to Timothy, St. Paul singles out the sin of homosexuality as evidence of heretical doctrine (HP6).
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Gloria,
I just tried your link to writings of the Saints on homosexuals
http://www.tldm.org/news7/homosexualitySaints.htm –
perhaps this one will work better…
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Gloria,
Yes that works.
I think the trick with links is never to place the link at the end of a message.
Also write some text after the link -
as my “perhaps..work better” follows the link.
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perhaps this link will work?
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Gloria
That link that you provided – http://www.tldm.org/news7/homosexualitySaints.htm what the saints said about homosexuality – contained stuff from Bayside and Veronica Leuken – a false, condemned seer and apparition. Sorry, but you can’t fight error with error. -
Just as one should not discriminate on the grounds of sex or race because they are not matters of choice but the way one is born so one should not discriminate on grounds of “sexual orientation” as that’s a given rather than a matter of personnal choice.
I strongly disagree. Whether or not homosexuality or homosexual behaviour is by choice is irrelevant to whether or not discrimination against it is justified. Discrimination is only justified when there’s some actual purpose served. For example, the only justification for discriminating against gay people in a hiring situation would be if homosexuality actually prevented suitability for the job (although to be honest, I can’t think of a job for which straight people would be suitable but gay people would not).
[...]the devastating medical / physical effects of homosexual practice.
The site you’ve linked is a very general list of external links, so I’m going to argue generally in response, and make some assumptions about what you’re trying to argue. I apologize if I end up arguing against something that you’re not actually claiming.
Claims of the health risks of homosexuality appear to be divided into two major categories:
1. Mental health issues (depression, alcohol/tobacco dependency, etc.). The typical implication is that homosexuality causes mental problems directly in some physiological/psychological way, but there is (so far as I understand) no plausible medical basis for this.
I find it far more plausible that these effects are due to the additional stress imposed specifically against gay people due to discrimination. This potential explanation relies only on facts we already know to be true: that societal discrimination can lead to stress, and that stress can lead to depression, substance abuse, and other mental health problems. This claim is backed up by at least one of the sites on the index you linked to. Specifically note this quote from that site:
The likelihood of depression or anxiety may be greater, and the problem may be more severe for those men who remain in the closet or who do not have adequate social supports.
2. Sexually transmitted diseases. I have no idea why this is presented as a specifically gay problem, as the very same techniques (safe sex, monogamy, and abstinence, in increasing order of effectiveness) can be used in all forms of sex.
In particular, I find it inconsistent that you do not make the same argument for gay couples that you make for straight couples: namely, that sex should wait until the couple enters a committed monogamous relationship.
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Catholics are not alone in classifying homosexuality as a sin and disorder. The Muslims declare that it is punishable by death! Which brings up an intriguing conundrum: why is the Muslim position on homosexuality completely ignored or suppressed by their liberal champions in the media, academia, government and private foundations?
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At least the Mayor of Moscow has it right: homosexual behavior is closely linked with Satanic rituals. The key to understanding this is their motto and battle cry of pride (“gay pride”), the deadliest of all sins and the sin which above all characterizes the serpent.
Being Satanic, you might surmise that homosexuality plays a large role in the nefarious plans of the New World Order. You would be correct. Here is an excellent article by Randy Engel on the subject:
http://www.stjosephsmen.com/images/Homosexuality_and_the_NWO.pdf
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DSimon,
As Catholics we believe that sex should wait, not until a couple is in “… a committed monogamous relationship” but until they are married. Marriage is a Sacrament, a source of Grace and is only possible between a man and a woman.
The arguments about homosexuals being more prone to physical or mental illness may or may not be true, but even if they are totally fallacious, that does not change the fact that homosexual relationships are wrong. They are wrong because God says that they are wrong, and that is the only reason that matters. If sex between people of the same sex became risk free tomorrow as far as the chance of becoming mentally or physically ill is concerned, it would still be sinful. That is the truth and we cannot change it.
Eileenanne
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DSimon,
My last paragraph arguing that legislation against discrimination towards homosexuals is based on the idea that homosexuality is a not a choice but innate is my conjecture on the origin of this legislation.
I find this article “The History of Gay Rights” says:
“Gayness is considered by opponents a voluntary “act” and “behavior”, which a person can act on. Some opponents go that far that, since homosexuality is from their point of view a matter of choice, their sexual practices are “crimes” which make homosexuals criminals.
On the other hand, gays defend themselves by arguing that homosexuality is a characteristic with which they are attached in the early childhood or even with birth. Gays do not have a choice over their homosexuality as heterosexuals do not have a choice over their heterosexuality. Hence, gayness is a condition over which they do not have, just as no one has control over his or her ethnic race, origin, outer appearance, or the class they he or she is born in.”
I think that is a fair portrayal of the viewpoints.
One can see that arguments in favour of “Civil Partnerships” and “Gay Marriage” assume and are also based on the (false) idea that Homosexuality is not chosen, it’s innate and one cannot stop being a homosexual. It’s a development of the arguments used to gain anti-discrimination legislation.
Am I mistaken in this view of the development of this legislation?
I do not think we would have seen “Civil Partnerships” if it were accepted that homosexuality is a chosen behaviour.
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Sorry link here:
http://www.enderminh.com/minh/civilrights.aspx —–
hope it works.
BTW Has everyone gone to the pub this evening?
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DSimon,
I think you are unlikely to find the site you mention
http://www.glma.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageID=690
The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association
will have views which are consistent with Catholic teaching.
I am not sure who mentioned that site first.
BTW why do you think that attitudes towards homosexuals and acceptance of them has increased over the past 15 to 20 years?
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I’m still working my way through kevin1’s top post, the links are really amazing but a friend sent me this one which is really shocking because it shows the way the transgender issue is really live in the USA and what happens there also comes here. Also, the LGBT initials stand for ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender’ people so these videos should be OK to post on this thread.
http://www.massresistance.org/docs/gen/10a/trans_lobby_day/index.htmlI agree completely with Eileenanne that it doesn’t matter whether or not the gay lifestyle is healthy or unhealthy because it is immoral and that is the real point.
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On the other hand, gays defend themselves by arguing that homosexuality is a characteristic with which they are attached in the early childhood or even with birth.
Benet, that is indeed a fair description of an argument used to defend gay rights, but it not the only one or even, at least in my personal view, a particularly good one. Generally, I see gay rights advocates bringing up the fact that being gay is not a choice as a way of not getting into an argument about whether or not homosexuality is harmful. Their point is that, even if homosexuality were harmful, it wouldn’t be immoral if it weren’t a matter of choice to be gay or not.
To me, this is a side issue. I prefer to address the issue of harm directly: I assert that homosexuality is no more harmful than heterosexuality.
I do not think we would have seen “Civil Partnerships” if it were accepted that homosexuality is a chosen behaviour.
I don’t see the connection between gay marriage/civil unions and the subject of the innateness of gayness. Even if being gay were entirely a matter of choice, what would that have to do with whether or not gay marriage should be legal?
[Homosexual relationships] are wrong because God says that they are wrong, and that is the only reason that matters.
Eileenanne, since I am an atheist, you’ll understand that that argument has no weight with me. For me to accept it, it would be necessary to first convince me that God (a) exists and (b) has absolute moral authority, and such a discussion would be way off-topic in this thread.
However, I think it’s relevant to point out that I’m very confused by this idea of defining morality as”what God wants”, end of line. This is drastically different from typical working definitions of morality, which usually include sections about helping other people, or not violating the rights of other people, or reducing the amount of suffering in the world, and so on.
Is something moral because God says it is moral, or does God say that something is moral because it is moral? In the former case, you allow for anything, including for example the murder, rape, and torture of innocents, to be a moral action provided that God says it is. In the latter case, morality would be seperate from God, and so it would be more accurate for you to say that God relays perfect information about what is moral but that morality can still be independently defined. (Everyone, please forgive me if you’re already familiar with this particular really old argument, but I think it is relevant to bring up again in this context).
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I think you are unlikely to find the site you mention [called] The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association will have views which are consistent with Catholic teaching.
I am not sure who mentioned that site first.
Benet, I linked to that site because it was in the NARTH index you posted. My apologies for any implication that it represented your views or Catholic views in general.
BTW why do you think that attitudes towards homosexuals and acceptance of them has increased over the past 15 to 20 years?
I’d guess that the primary cause has been the widespread civil rights and public acceptance campaign. Regarding the time frame, it makes sense to me that gay rights acceptance would start out slowly and then accelerate as it reaches a sort of “critical mass”, as being accepting of gayness is much easier when there’s already people around you who are accepting of gayness or who are openly gay.
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DSimon,
Thanks for your reply.
My argument would be (bear in mind I am only now formulating the argument) that the argument for “civil partnerships” is that homosexuality is innate and therefore homosexuals should have similar rights (inheritance and to be treated as next-of-kin by hospitals etc) to married couples.
If on the other hand homosexuality is a matter of chosen behaviour and, in effect, one can decide to no longer “be a homosexual” then one cannot enter into a life-long legal commitment – a “civil partnership”.
I am still interested in your views on the growing acceptance of homosexuality since the 1990’s.
Also I am not sure I understand your “harms” argument could you explain- thanks.
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Benet,
Although Eileenanne and rebel are correct to say that homosexual activity is immoral and that is why it is unacceptable, not, they say, because it is unhealthy, really, they are (with respect) missing the point.
If we take as our starting point, the belief that God created our bodies, that He designed them in a particular way, and that if we use them in a way that flouts that design, we will suffer health problems. It’s not about “God says” – God has revealed Himself in various ways and, in this case, we can come to see God’s intention or will for human sexual activity, by our intelligence and reason. After all, anybody examining the male and the female forms, knows that they have been designed that way for a purpose.
And anyone who has ever attended a Weight-Watchers class or a Scottish Slimmers Group (me? never!) will know that the first thing the instructors do, is to spell out the fact that our bodies are like engines and need to be treated in a particular way; we need to eat the right foods, 3 veg, 2 fruits, plenty of water etc. in order to achieve the correct weight and be healthy. You’ll get my drift. If we eat the wrong stuff, don’t exercise etc. then we become unhealthy and it is often there, for all the world to see… remind me to give up meringues for Lent.
The fact is, DSimon, that all the medical evidence supports Catholic doctrine on the immorality of the homosexual act. Homosexual men have a shorter lifespan, they run increased risk of various infectious diseases, suffer mental health issues/suicides – all of this is logged on our website – go to
http://www.catholictruthscotland.com/links.html and you’ll see several links to medical data about homosexuality.One of those links is to the Blood Transfusion Service (BTS). They list various categories of people who can/cannot/may sometimes/never give blood.
In the “never” category is any male who has ever had one homosexual encounter, even using a condom. That is how dangerous this behaviour is. Obviously, the BTS has no discriminatory axe to grind: they want as much blood as they can get – but not infected blood and the risk is so great, that they just will not take blood from a man who has even once been homosexually active and even if he’s used a condom. Can it be any clearer, DSimon, that this “lifestyle” is unhealthy?
And it’s unhealthy, DSimon, because it is not right-ordered. It is not what God intended. Thus, to go against God’s intention (God’s will) for us, is immoral and objectively sinful.
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St Paul’s teaching is sufficient for me.
But I am genuinely puzzled as to how public acceptance of homosexuals has developed from 1990 to today in the UK.
I suspect that the legislation establishing “Civil Partnerships” was a key stage in the process DSimon describes.
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If on the other hand homosexuality is a matter of chosen behaviour and, in effect, one can decide to no longer “be a homosexual” then one cannot enter into a life-long legal commitment – a “civil partnership”.
Benet, wouldn’t this argument apply to heterosexual marriage as well? A man and a woman entering into marriage are creating a “life-long legal commitment” to be faithful to one another. This concept is valid even though it’s physically and mentally possible for them to violate this commitment; the point of the contract is that they will choose not to violate it.
Similarly, if being gay were entirely a choice, it would be possible to violate the terms of a gay marriage contract by choosing to stop being gay, but presumably it would be part of the contract that one wouldn’t do that.
I am still interested in your views on the growing acceptance of homosexuality since the 1990’s.
Well, um, I think that the growing acceptance of homosexuality since the 1990’s is a good thing. I don’t think that’s quite what you’re asking, though.
Also I am not sure I understand your “harms” argument could you explain- thanks.
My view of morality is roughly based on the idea of universal utilitarianism. Basically: actions which reduce harm are more moral than actions that don’t reduce harm, and if those two things are equal, then the action that increases benefit is the more moral action.
By that definition, permitting homosexuality is only immoral if the alternative somehow reduces harm or increases benefit. I argue that not accepting homosexuality neither reduces harm nor increases benefit, and discriminating against homosexuality causes harm, so therefore the former choice is the more moral one.
Editor, sorry but I must respond to your comment at a later time.
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Benet,
I forgot to address you question about how homosexuality got to be so accepted in the 90’s. Briefly, for now, groups like Stonewall got themselves very organised and decided to change the landscape. They knew that the public would not buy into any plans to legalise “sodomy” for example, so language had to be addressed.
I’m racing out to the pubs and clubs right now but will respond to this in more detail as soon as I can, if nobody beats me to it. Please feel free to beat me to it…
Same here, DSimon – don’t get me started on utilitarianism!
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The Catholic Church’s teaching on the matter is that an individual could in fact be born with a predilection for same-sex attraction. The desire or appetite is not a moral matter; what is a moral matter is acting (which includes thinking and speaking) in a homosexual way.
If a person really does find he has same-sex attractions, he is obliged to live a celibate life, and to avoid situations which would tempt him into immoral acts. To moderns who think there’s nothing beyond this life and who routinely gratify their passions no matter what this seems like an unreasonable teaching. To Catholics familiar with happy and contended celibate priests, brothers, and sisters, this is recognized as a trial, but not an excessive one.
There are several reasons why God fashioned sex. The primary, foundational aspect is procreation — i.e. continuation of the species. Secondarily there is the mutual love, affection, and support of couple itself. That is not to say that this the order in which people think of the matter — merely that this is the correct prioritization of factors. This correct assessment enables one to understand why birth control is intrinsically perverse, why same-sex marriages aren’t marriages, and why couples who marry with the intention to never have children are committing fraud.
A sound parallel can be drawn with the consumption of food. The primary purpose of eating is to repair the body. There are other aspects of eating that accompany this main purpose — e.g. the company of good friends, the pleasure to the palate of a well-prepared meal — but these all fall into line behind the main purpose, which is usually just assumed and in fact often receives less conscious attention. To extend the parallel a bit further: copulation deliberately divorced from its normal, natural, healthy objective is akin to chewing up food for the flavor and spitting it out again: in a right-thinking world this is rightly regarded as an eating disorder. Similarly, isolating the pleasure of the marriage act from the purpose so as to dispense with the main purpose is a disordered endeavor.
In college I was debating with a secular New York Jewish chap about “non-standard” marriages. Given his premise that what mattered most was that a couple had sincere affection for one another, I asked if he thought sibling marriages should also be allowed. This caught him off guard him — not surprisingly, he’d never considered it, but then again, most people I come across in favor of “non-standard” relationships are just riding the popular bandwagon anyway and not giving the matter intelligent consideration based on what sex was for anyway, so I wasn’t surprised. Anyway, his disgusting and sick but nonetheless consistent reply was that he hoped such a couple would never have children, but that he couldn’t see a reason to object to it.
In the absence of a proper understanding of human nature and the meaning of human existence, just about anything goes. If one denies the existence of God one will inevitably and necessarily do violence to one’s neighbor, because the foundation upon which everything else stands is gone. It’s not even safe to say that you’re limited by not being allowed to harm your neighbor, because without the correct unchanging foundation of the Deity, it is a simple matter to redefine what it means to cause a person harm (e.g. “your injured conscience over my outrageous conduct is none of my concern; quit bothering me with your pointless scruples”), and even to redefine what a person is (e.g. “the baby in the womb is just a viable mass of tissue, not a human”). As the popular-culture acceptance of same-sex relationships illustrates, when people don’t know their purpose for existing, they can be manipulated like small children simply by the multiplication and repitition of jingoistic propaganda.
Thank goodness for the Catholic Church, whose duty is to remind us of our primary duty to honor God above all else. When we do this, the rest can be fit into its proper place.
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My cousin lived for thirty-five years, until his death, in a same sex relationship. He was a loving, and loved, man – a gentle person who was happy with his partner, as was his partner with him. They hurt no-one; they were good people who were respected by the community; they never imposed their sexuality on others; in short, they were exactly the same as any long-term married couple in a secure relationship.
Anyone who has the audacity to declare that people such as they were engaging in ‘evil’ is truly despicable, and needs help.
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Isaac: “If one denies the existence of God one will inevitably and necessarily do violence to one’s neighbor, because the foundation upon which everything else stands is gone.”
Surely the rest of the readers of this site will agree that the above statement is patently ridiculous?
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DSimon said:
“… since I am an atheist, you’ll understand that that argument has no weight with me. For me to accept it, it would be necessary to first convince me that God (a) exists and (b) has absolute moral authority, and such a discussion would be way off-topic in this thread.”
Fair point, but I think you must then realise that there is little point in trying to engage in debate here since this is a Catholic blog and all discussion therefore begins from the standpoint that God exists, that He loves us, and that the laws He makes are for our ultimate good even if we find that difficult to see.
Eileenanne
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Eileenanne,
There is every reason to engage in debate here precisely BECAUSE this is a Catholic blog. Faith and reason are not opposed and St Paul tells us that we must be prepared to give reasons for the hope that is in us, so it is important to be able to explain why the Church teaches what she teaches. Just saying “God” is the reason, is to do a disservice to God.
Lucky, perhaps you might ask your friend if he thinks Zoophilia should be legalised. The Zoophiliacs are next in the queue and use exactly the same language as homosexuals. Ask him if those loving relationships should be recognised in law.
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Dear Editor – I hope that was an attempt at humour. You know, I think those homosexuals are copycats, too. They tend to use exactly the same language as we ‘normal’ people – i.e., they ‘fall in love’, they ‘want to spend their lives with their beloved’, they feel the need to ‘have a partner’, etc, etc. Shameful, isn’t it? Will they ever learn that an accident of birth marks them out as tarnished forever? The deluded fools.
Who’s deluded, editor?
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Lucky,
Zoophiliacs say they can’t help being attracted to animals. Have you ever listened to their propaganda? Paedophiles say they can’t help being attracted to children.
If it’s all about feelings and “I can’t help it”, who’s to draw the lines and where? If same gender sexual activity is acceptable (when, until a few short years ago, it was an imprisonable offence) why can’t these other minority groups, Zoophiliacs, paedophiles and others – there are others – have the same social acceptability and “rights”? And don’t gimme, “children can’t give consent” cos neither can animals. Yet the Zoophiliacs are very persuasive. Ever heard them making their case?
Isaac, I meant to say in my previous response to you, that although there is a (controversial) sentence in the Catechism of the Catholic Church which gives the “born that way” impression, that is not to say “it is the Church’s teaching”. The sentence reads: “… They do not choose their homosexual condition; for most of them it is a trial”. (paragraph 2358.)
Firstly, to argue “born that way” is a medical judgment which is by no means the universal opinion of qualified medics. The Church is not an authority on medicine, but depends on the findings of medical science. Until they find that “gene” then, the Church is not in a position to pronounce on “born that way”.
Secondly, homosexuals object to this sentence in the CCC because they disagree that “for most of them it is a trial”. A passing glance at any “gay pride” march reveals that it is widely regarded as something to celebrate. Even by “non-gays”! It is certainly not viewed by most as a trial, although by faithful Catholics, seeking to resist the temptation, they do, indeed, view it as a trial. Which reminds me to ask for prayers for one of our readers who is a homosexual, trying his best to live a chaste life. He always asks for readers prayers to help him in this regard.
Unfortunately, we need to keep in mind, always, that this CCC was written at a time of dreadful crisis in the Church and – there is no getting away from it – the homosexual influence in the Church, including in the Vatican, can be detected in that sentence.
The Narth studies, linked to our website and which kevin1 (I think) posted a link to above, covers this “born that way” topic and demolishes the theory.
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I read the blog whenever I can, although my job makes it very difficult for me to make an active contribution.
What I have noticed is that Athanasius no longer seems to be around. Does anyone know why?
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Editor,
It seems to me that you interpret the Catechism of the Catholic Church in a way that is a little too unilateral.
What the Catechism states is compatible also with the theory, held by many psychiatrists to be valid, which holds that homosexuality is the result of psycho-social conditioning in the early years of human development. This is a very different thing from saying that homosexuals were ‘born that way’.
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http://www.narth.com/menus/born.html —
This is the link to articles regarding the born that way theory.
But does anyone have authoritative Catholic teaching to counter Isaac’s view distinguishing between innate homosexuality and homosexual acts?:
“The Catholic Church’s teaching on the matter is that an individual could in fact be born with a predilection for same-sex attraction. “
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Is Sexual Orientation Fixed at Birth?
http://www.narth.com/docs/bornway.html
“The best overall summary of most respected researchers is that homosexuality (like most other psychological conditions) is due to a combination of social, biological, and psychological factors.
Following are quotes from researchers in the field:..snip..
(2) From psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover, M.D.:
“Like all complex behavioral and mental states, homosexuality is…neither exclusively biological nor exclusively psychological, but results from an as-yet-difficult-to-quantitate mixture of genetic factors, intrauterine influences…postnatal environment (such as parent, sibling and cultural behavior), and a complex series of repeatedly reinforced choices occurring at critical phases of development.”
–J. Satinover, M.D., Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth (1996). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books.”This page although it has a germane title is a disappointing selection of extracts from academic studies that say this is a nature and nurture matter. I am surprised that the articles were published between 1994 and 1996. In the light of the developments in understanding in genetics I would have hoped they would have had some more up-to-date material.
To say homosexuality is a result of a mixture of biological and environmental does not help answer the question of whether it is innate.
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@Editor, my point was merely that the Church’s position is that a person *could be* born with a same sex attraction, not that this is a settled matter. Even if it is true, such an attraction is still a problem — rather like being born with a birth defect, but instead of the defect being in the arena of a physical abnormality, it is a moral one, just like having the appetite of a zoophile or a necrophile or being attracted to a sibling.
In my Mass intentions this morning I’ll remember the list member living a celibate life that you mentioned.
@Lucky, you’ve made my point very well: asking us to accept a perverse union as normal because nobody was “hurt” by it is an example of redefining what it means to hurt someone — in truth, telling a fellow to keep quiet about someone else’s public perversity is an outrage.
To look at the matter in yet another way: by the time I was a teenager I had long-since accepted my heterosexuality; I was born with my sense of what normal is; I am constitutionally inclined to recoil when I encounter a sodomite couple. Surely if the argument that it’s “nature not noture” applies to homosexuals in love, it must necessarily apply to heterosexuals who are repulsed.
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I’m still working my way through kevin1’s links in his first post and I am completely shocked to read about Bishop McMahon’s saying there is no problem with civil partnerships. I’ve copied the link again in case somebody has missed it.
http://marymagdalen.blogspot.com/2010/01/bishop-mcmahon-no-problem-with-civil.htmlSurely this will come out during the English bishops ad limina – I think they are just before the Scottish bishops. I hope some English Catholics have written about this. Sorry, but I have to ask questions about this bishop’s own personal life.
I read the interview Randy Engels thanks to Torkay posting the link, and she has done great work exposing this in the States but has anybody done anything similar over here? Is is possible to find out how many bishops over here are homosexual?
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Rebel,
If you look at the Pro Ecclesia website you will see that many Dominican priests preside at the SOHO Masses. Dominicans host Quest Masses at their Priory in Leicester. Bishop McMahon is also a Dominican.
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Benet,
what are you saying, then – are these priests and this bishop, running these gay Masses, are they themselves gays? I think we ought to know that.
kevin1,
I’ve checked out the Perth Fr Rohr Male Rites of Passage event and it is very expensive, nearly £400. So, what is it? What are these “rites of passage” that they go through? Is it some kind of initiation into the gay lifestyle or have I misunderstood? I found the language on the link very vague.
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Rebel,
You’ll forgive me for answering your question by referring you to the recent Pro Ecclesia newsletter:
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Benet,
To be fair, I don’t think the Dominicans have the monopoly on this kind of thing – I think you’ll find most of the priests that celebrate the Soho Masses are in fact Jesuits. Having said that, I believe that a lot of the dissent among the Dominicans on this issue (and other issues come to that) has its origin in the wide-ranging influence of one man – the ubiquitous Timothy Radcliffe OP. Radcliffe celebrates some of the Soho Masses. In The Tablet of 28 Jan 2006 he wrote:-
“Let us glance at some touchy issues: sexual ethics, homosexuality and the ordination of women. Christian morality is not mostly about sex, despite the impression given by the media. It is fundamentally about becoming free and happy in God. But if the Church’s teaching about sex becomes radically out of touch with what Catholics live, then there is a problem. Many Catholics are divorced and remarried, or living with partners or practising contraception or are gay. To put it simply: should the Church accommodate her teaching to the experience of our contemporaries or should we stick by our traditional sexual ethics and risk becoming a fortress Church, a small minority out of step with people’s lives? Neither option seems right. In my book, I confess that I do not know the answer.”
In the same article he asks the question about homosexual people:- “Are they to be told that they must for ever be celibate?” He answers it by saying “I must confess that I do not know”. On the ordination of women, he asks the question “Is it then true that women cannot be ordained?” and again answers by saying “I confess for a third time that I do not know”
For someone who doesn’t know an awful lot about fundamental aspects of Catholic teaching, he talks and writes a great deal. He exercises a lot of influence among the hierarchies of various countries and this is very worrying. I recently wrote to Abp McDonald (Southwark) asking him why he was sending his priests on retreat to listen to Radcliffe. The reply was far from satisfactory.
Even more worryingly, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin invited Radcliffe to address the priests of his Archdiocese, after the disclosures of the child abuse scandal. Radcliffe’s address was reprinted in The Tablet over two weeks and featured in this Editorial:- http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/14097
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Rebel,
I think the description of these rites is deliberately kept very vague. Further information can be found in this excellent letter sent by Catholic columnist Barbara Kralis to Bishop Charles Grahmann of Dallas, warning him about Rohr:- http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/abbott/060123 Also, check out http://www.lospequenos.org/RohrDossier These should give you some idea of what these rites are about.
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Kevin1
“If they hear not Moses and the prophets,
neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.”Luke XVI, 19-31.
As a relief from this subject an interesting set of medieval carvings of the Dives and Lazarus story can be found here:
http://www.beyond-the-pale.org.uk/Lazarus.htm –
the rest of that website should be viewed with caution….
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Yes, Horatio, I too have missed Athanasius on the blog. I do hope he is well, should we expect his return anytime soon???
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Horatio and annie2,
From time to time, Athanasius used to email me to ask where this blogger had gone and why that blogger was no longer around. I always gave him the same reply: people will blog when they have time or when they choose. I am not going to chase anyone up or force anyone to blog. The same, Horatio and annie2, applies to Athanasius. He’s made excellent contributions to this blog, as we all know, and he is very welcome to blog here anytime. Hurry back, Athanasius!
kevin1,
Thanks for that brilliant post in which you expose the public dissenter, Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP, quoting him posing questions about elementary Catholic teaching on things like women’s ordination, and sexual matters, while claiming he doesn’t know the answers. This sentence from your first class post, is a classic: For someone who doesn’t know an awful lot about fundamental aspects of Catholic teaching, he talks and writes a great deal.
Absolutely spot on!
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kevin1,
I have just read the Tablet editorial on Fr Radcliffe that you posted and it is terrible to think the Archbishop of Dublin has had him addressing the clergy. I was talking to a friend in Ireland yesterday and the people there are really holding the clergy in contempt because they have lost the faith. Obviously the Archbishop has lost it, too, because why pick this dissenter to give a talk to priests? This will undermine any priests who still have a vocation and want to be faithful. You just wonder where this is all going to end, as I keep saying.
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Indeed one wonders where it will all end – but if any of you find out that Radcliffe is speaking in your dioceses – especially to priests or religious – please write to the bishop concerned and quote Radcliffe’s public dissent as published in The Tablet. See my previous post. Print that quote off and keep it handy – believe me, it will come in useful. Radcliffe is very prolific!!
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The government want faith schools to teach that civil partnerships are fine and homosexuality is harmless – this is in this week’s Herald
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/articles/a0000738.shtmlHow on earth are Catholic parents to react to that?
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Isaac:
If one denies the existence of God one will inevitably and necessarily do violence to one’s neighbor, because the foundation upon which everything else stands is gone.
As an atheist who certainly does not do violence to his neighbours and will never intentionally do so, I find this statement both inaccurate and rather offensive. If you assert that I as an atheist am fundamentally incapable of understanding morality or acting in a moral way, despite the fact that I clearly do so, then I’m not sure we’re capable of actually understanding each other. Frankly, I think you owe me an explanation for this blanket statement about my character.
Editor:
If we use [our bodies] in a way that flouts [God's] design, we will suffer health problems. [...] After all, anybody examining the male and the female forms, knows that they have been designed that way for a purpose.
So you argue that whatever the most natural mode of function for our bodies is necessarily the healthiest? I don’t think this is a valid rule, as there are numerous exceptions even within the two specific areas you mentioned, nutrition and sex:
- We are in general naturally inclined to eat sweet foods, since they are very energy-dense; that’s why they’re so tasty. However, in a modern society where it’s possible to get far too much sugar, this natural inclination backfires and is no longer healthy. Therefore, for the sake of long-term health, we have to act against the way our bodies are designed to crave high-energy-density foods.
- In terms of health, non-procreative sex can be healthier than procreative sex if, for example, a pregnancy would be injurious to the woman, or if having more children would cause severe economic problems for the family and the existing children. Again, here sticking to actions that follow the natural functioning of our bodies can be counter-productive to our health and happiness.
Other ways in which the natural functioning of our body can hurt us: genetic diseases, autoimmune problems (which can lead to everything from minor allergies to death), cancer, and so on.
Obviously, the BTS has no discriminatory axe to grind [in denying men who have had sex with men from donating blood]: they want as much blood as they can getThe claim that people never behave prejudicially against their own self-interest is clearly false. For example, just look at all the businesses a century ago in the US who turned away black customers despite the fact that they had perfectly good money.
I would prefer if we stuck to discussing medical claims directly.
Homosexual men have a shorter lifespan, they run increased risk of various infectious diseases, suffer mental health issues/suicides[...]
Regarding the mental health issues and lifespan, I already mentioned that this can be attributed to stress due to societal discrimination. This is, of course, only one possible explanation, but so is your implied claim that there is a direct physiological link between homosexuality and mental health issues.
Regarding sexually transmitted diseases, I again point out that vanilla heterosexual sex is also quite capable of transmitting all sorts of nasty diseases. Even if we assume that potential for transmission of disease is higher in gay sex, why does a mere difference in degree justify a completely different moral outlook? The Catholic position on mitigating the risk of heterosexual sex is to be monogamous; why abandon this fairly reasonable piece of advice when discussing homosexual sex?
[...]go to http://www.catholictruthscotland.com/links.html and you’ll see several links to medical data about homosexuality.
The link mentioned there is the NARTH index, which I was chastised for quoting from earlier.
Can you link a specific site? I think it’s each our own responsibility to cite our own evidential claims.Editor, I will respond to your second comment at a later time; my comment length is getting excessive as it is.
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DSimon is a hasty Ent.
I said nothing about anyone’s motives or character; I was describing the inevitable outcome of operating from an incorrect understanding of human nature.
To frame the matter in a parallel format: imagine living in a society whose roads had no markers, lines, or signs, and a person was at liberty to drive his automobile as he personally believed to be best. Inevitably there would be someone who chose to take his half of the road out of the middle. When an accident follows, would he be guilty of malice? Not necessarily — but it is only a matter of time before he is responsible for a smashup.
Just so with people who separate the purpose from the pleasure of sex and then dispense with the purpose.
I noticed that when you misread my remarks, you also neglected to address the central point about procreation being the necessary foundation for sex. So it goes.
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Spot on, Isaac.
DSimon, your turn to offer an invalid analogy! The fact that our teeth go bad and we put on too much weight if we indulge in sweet foods too much is yet more evidence that it is unhealthy to go against nature. It is not going against nature to eat sweet things per se – we need a certain amount of sugar, for example.
We used to have a link on our site to a “gay” website, page headed “Ten things a gay man should ask his doctor” or something along those lines. If you Google it, you;ll find it, I’m sure. I’ll try myself later, but on that site, out of their own mouths, did the “gays” reveal the dangers of their sexual activity.
It’s also amazing, DSimon, that you would dismiss as “prejudiced” the National Blood Transfusion Service. That is real head in the sand stuff, and I’m surprised because you are normally, in my view, very honest about evidence. That is a critical piece of evidence from a clearly independent body, with our best health interests at heart. I’m amazed that you won’t accept it as such.
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The remark by Mr Clegg of the Liberal Party that faith schools must teach that Homosexuality is `Normal and Safe` actually shows how little he is concerned with the issue. It is just that to say such things seems politically correct in terms of votes. In fact as Catholic Truth has shown this way of life is far from safe. One only has to ask Mr Clegg if he now intends to remove the ban on homosexuals given blood since their lifestyle is `safe`. Even America with all its gay freedom does not allow this. In other words in the end Mr Clegg and others recognise that the homosexuality way of life is far from normal and safe but they `do not care enough about homosexuals to voice their concern. It is always those who point out the truth that are real friends. Christians do not turn from homosexuality just because it is sin but because sin is destructive. Have you noticed how many pop stars are dying at an early age who are homosexual? These are well documented and proven yet the so called `non-homophobics` turn a blind eye. I sometimes think that gays are treated like animals – an endangered species both by our modernists in the Church and the Government. They are certainly not treated as people we should be concerned about. Just let them play.
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jkearney,
I agree with every word of your post at 9.45.p.m. You made an excellent point about the young celebrities who die early who are homosexual.
Benet,
I thought of you when I found this site because it gives some of the history about the increasing acceptance of homosexuality.
http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-51.htmlI’d heard of the Wolfenden Report but hadn’t realised how influential it has been in promoting the gay lifestyle.
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Benet,
Your question about the rise of homosexuality brought to my mind the book Goodbye, Good Men by Michael Rose. Read this customer review
http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/0895261448/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1Isaac, you won’t find me chastising you for quoting Narth – I think it is the best source of information on this subject, out there. There is a noticeable lack of similar research and study in the UK but then, who’s going to fund such research? The Church? You kidding? When there’s Italian Gardens to be built and churches to be disordered, oops, I mean re-ordered all over the place? It costs money to remove marble altar rails and to organise an annual ceilidh for the extraordinary ministers. Get real, Isaac. What you thinking of? After all, it’s that “everybody” and “nobody” thing again, isn’t it? Everybody else accepts homosexuality is OK and nobody else feels there’s anything to research, so what’s the big deal?
And that is the rub, Issac. How do we classify homosexuality now that it is no longer regarded, in criminal and civil law, as a “vice”. It IS a vice, but soon describing it thus, will be actionable. That’s because of all the nice people who are “gay”. I’ve met some of them myself. They wouldn’t harm a fly. I’ve also met prostitutes by the jeep-load, mind you, and none of them would hurt a fly either, yet prostitutions remains on the Vice-Squad hit list. For now, at least.
No, the Church won’t be funding research into the effects of the homosexual lifestyle. The fact is that the normalising of homosexuality has been aided and abetted by the Catholic Church, certainly in Scotland. We published an article not that long ago, documenting this in Catholic Truth.
The latest comments by Bishop McMahon in England, where he condones civil partnerships (and don’t gimme “he just accepts them, not condones” – he condones them, trust me) is yet more evidence that this vice has taken grip within the Church as well as within secular society.
And so, heaps of coal will pour down on clerical heads when they are confronted, at their judgment, with the countless souls who have been truly confused and misled on this matter, due, in no small part, to the failure of the bishops around the world, to speak out and explain why this is an activity that is abhorrent to God because it flouts His plan for sexuality, which he intended, primarily, as the means by which humans may cooperate with God in procreation.
I think, for example, about Bishop Tartaglia of Paisley who delivered a compelling and urgent homily on the topic, on taking up his episcopal office. He pointed out that we had to be ready to stand up and be counted, unafraid to speak out about the immorality of the homosexual act. After that initial, fiery sermon, he’s gone strangely silent. Why? Let’s see if he writes in to the Catholic press to correct, in all Christian charity, his brother bishop, Bishop McMahon. Next week’s Catholic papers will be interesting.
rebel,
A very useful resource – thanks for that ‘history and policy’ link.
jkearney,
I, too, agree totally with your last post – spot on in every respect.
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(Thanks to the site admin for correcting my tag mistake. Is there some way that the “Preview Comment” feature in WordPress could be turned on? That would help to prevent a lot of these sorts of problems.)
DSimon is a hasty Ent.
I don’t understand what you mean, Isaac. Is this a Tolkein reference? If so, I’d prefer to be a dwarf.
Anyways, to the substance of your comment:I said nothing about anyone’s motives or character; I was describing the inevitable outcome of operating from an incorrect understanding of human nature.
You specifically claimed that atheists are inevitably violent towards their neighbours. This is indeed a claim about character; you are saying that people who are not religious are incapable of having non-violent characters. I am not religious, and I do not have a violent character, so I feel strongly that your claim is inaccurate. Since it is an inaccurate character claim about a group that includes me, I feel justified in getting my feathers a little ruffled over it. However, I’m not so very upset that I’ll ignore your specific request that I respond to your major point:
Imagine living in a society whose roads had no markers, lines, or signs, and a person was at liberty to drive his automobile as he personally believed to be best. Inevitably there would be someone who chose to take his half of the road out of the middle. When an accident follows, would he be guilty of malice? Not necessarily — but it is only a matter of time before he is responsible for a smashup.
Why wouldn’t this society wouldn’t think to paint lines and make signs themselves? Road laws are a very good example of a self-managed ethical system that doesn’t require an external “source of morality”; people follow road laws because overall harm to everyone is reduced by doing so.
I apply the same standard to other systems of morality, such as those having to do with sex: the best system is the one that reduces harm the most. I can extend this principle to your eating disorder example:
To extend the parallel a bit further: copulation deliberately divorced from its normal, natural, healthy objective is akin to chewing up food for the flavor and spitting it out again: in a right-thinking world this is rightly regarded as an eating disorder. Similarly, isolating the pleasure of the marriage act from the purpose so as to dispense with the main purpose is a disordered endeavor.
I find it odd that you do not describe specifically why chewing up food and spitting it out is a problem. You merely claim that this is so because it is so because it is unnatural and abnormal. There are much better reasons why spitting up food is considered worthy of concern: it’s one part of a well-researched and well-understood psychological pattern (Anorexia nervosa) that leads to self-harm, and also it’s wasteful of a limited resource. Homosexuality, on the other hand, is not (as I understand it) shown by psychological research to be inherently harmful; if you dispute this, please provide a cite.
It is not the case that actions which are unnatural are necessarily immoral or harmful. For example, wearing clothes and debating people on the Internet are not natural actions, but there’s nothing wrong with them (at least, in moderation; wearing twenty sweaters at once would be problematic, and typing too much can give you carpal tunnel syndrome).
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“Isaac, you won’t find me chastising you for quoting Narth.”
I’m afraid I missed that reference. Narth?
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Has anyone read Randy Engel’s book The Rite of Sodomy, which is mentioned in the article I linked above?
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DSimon said, “you are saying that people who are not religious are incapable of having non-violent characters.”
For reference, here’s what I wrote: “If one denies the existence of God one will inevitably and necessarily do violence to one’s neighbor, because the foundation upon which everything else stands is gone.”
DSimon, I think I see where your misunderstanding comes from. Please note the example I used of violence against one’s neighbor: e.g. “your injured conscience over my outrageous conduct is none of my concern; quit bothering me with your pointless scruples.”
Physical violence? Possibly – the officially atheistic states certainly provided plenty of examples of that in the 20th century. But I was using violence even more generally to mean committing outrages against a man’s well-formed conscience. Denying a man public and effective expression of his legitimate concerns is an act of violence against him.
But to address another point you raised: one must allow for people to be simply wrong, and not acting out of malice. Subjectively they could think they’re doing a good thing – e.g. eradicating what they believe to be prejudice – when in fact they are doing something objectively wrong – i.e. trying to “re-educate” a person who has a proper understanding of human sexuality. Christians were warned by Christ that they would experience this sort of thing for their fidelity to Him: the Apostles were told that men in the synagogues would put them to death and think they were doing the will of God. Are such men culpable of malice in that case? Not necessarily, though possibly; they could also just be badly informed and/or gravely mistaken. The violence would remain, even though they were acting with what they understood to be good intentions.
To return to my original point: atheists have an incorrect view of human nature and even reality itself, and because of that incorrect view they will necessarily and inevitably cause injury because they are operating from a mistaken starting point. They’re like a doctor with a flawed education of human anatomy performing surgery: he might intend to plug up a leaky artery, but if he doesn’t know the difference between an artery and a vein, he’s going to hurt someone.
You added, “Why wouldn’t this society wouldn’t think to paint lines and make signs themselves?”
For the same reason they want to throw off the Deity: they find external boundaries constraining, and so they’ve rationalized eradicating them in the name of individual freedom. You still didn’t really address the point I raised.
You said: “the best system is the one that reduces harm the most.”
You’ve yet to identify what standard would be used to recognize “harm.” Without a reliable foundation, the term is terribly elastic. So is the definition of what a “human being” is. I could say I’ve been harmed, and you could say I’m just a hypochondriac. I could say a child in the womb is a human being, a person, and you could say it is just a viable tissue mass. “Reducing harm to people” is thus not a sufficient philosophy.
You added: “I find it odd that you do not describe specifically why chewing up food and spitting it out is a problem.”
If you don’t consume food, you will wither and die. I thought that was rather obvious.
You wrote, “Homosexuality, on the other hand, is not (as I understand it) shown by psychological research to be inherently harmful; if you dispute this, please provide a cite.”
I trust you would concede that homosexual acts are incapable of producing offspring? But you’ve lost the parallel I’d made: chewing up food for the flavor and spitting it out is a misuse of food – it isolates the pleasure from the chief purpose, and then dispenses with the chief purpose. Just so with sex acts that are incapable of producing offspring. Would you agree that the primary (though not only) purpose of copulation is reproduction? If not, then we’d need to spend some time on that topic before going much further.
You concluded, “wearing clothes and debating people on the Internet are not natural actions…”
They’re certainly natural for human beings. Why would you say otherwise? Perhaps we should have a discussion of what the word “natural” means.
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Lucky wrote:
“My cousin lived for thirty-five years, until his death, in a same sex relationship. He was a loving, and loved, man – a gentle person who was happy with his partner, as was his partner with him. They hurt no-one; they were good people who were respected by the community; they never imposed their sexuality on others; in short, they were exactly the same as any long-term married couple in a secure relationship.
Anyone who has the audacity to declare that people such as they were engaging in ‘evil’ is truly despicable, and needs help”
I understand that you care about your cousin, but your words demonstrate false compassion. Yes, they were engaging in evil! Their actions are the sins that cry to heaven for vengeance!
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Editor wrote, “And that is the rub, Issac. How do we classify homosexuality now that it is no longer regarded, in criminal and civil law, as a ‘vice’. It IS a vice, but soon describing it thus, will be actionable. That’s because of all the nice people who are ‘gay’.”
That could be part of it, though I think there’s more. The core of the problem is that society at large has already lost its way, and so it is incapable of sorting out the good from the bad because of its own fatal compromises.
Specifically, I have in mind the widespread acceptance and use of artificial contraception. This prevalent problem has distorted people’s consciences: most people no longer recognize the depravity of what they themselves do; thus, because of the unlawful license they have allowed themselves, they are ill-equipped to deal with the more egregious misconduct of others. A contracepting couple is being hypocritical when it condemns same-sex activity; this contradiction weakens not just their argument, but their powers of reason and discernment.
The solution must include not just resisting the advances of homosexual activists — which is only a portion of the problem — but reminding our neighbors what the proper role of human sexuality is to begin with. I agree, it’s a tricky business.
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Miles Christi Sum” “Yes, they were engaging in evil! Their actions are the sins that cry to heaven for vengeance!”
Such a kind and loving god you worship, MCS. They were not engaging in evil – they were engaging in normal, healthy, consensual sex. Really, many of the comments on this thread have revealed their own authors’ wickedness. The real evil about this issue is not what some people prefer to do with their bodies, but how some people feel they have the ‘moral’ authority (what a joke) to tell others what to do. For shame, MCS – I’d like to think your god would give you a good talking to, but as he/she/it does not exist, it’s really up to you alone to become a genuine, compassionate human being. You’ve got a long way to go, baby.
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Miles Christi Sum” “Yes, they were engaging in evil! Their actions are the sins that cry to heaven for vengeance!”
Such a kind and loving god you worship, MCS. They were not engaging in evil – they were engaging in normal, healthy, consensual sex. Really, many of the comments on this thread have revealed their own authors’ wickedness. The real evil about this issue is not what some people prefer to do with their bodies, but how some people feel they have the ‘moral’ authority (what a joke) to tell others what to do. For shame, MCS – I’d like to think your god would give you a good talking to, but as he/she/it does not exist, it’s really up to you alone to become a genuine, compassionate human being. You’ve got a long way to go, baby.
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Oops, sorry – posted twice. Must have been god wanting me to emphasise the point.
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Sodomy is an assault on human nature because of its perversion of the procreative impulse, without which the race dies.
“This charity, intelligent and sympathetic towards those even who offend you, does by no means imply a renunciation of the right of proclaiming, vindicating and defending the truth and its implications. The priest’s first loving gift to his neighbors is to serve truth and refute error in any of its forms. Failure on this score would be not only a betrayal of God and your vocation, but also an offense against the real welfare of your people and country.”
- Pope Pius XI, 1937, Mit Brennender Sorge
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Lucky – “They were not engaging in evil – they were engaging in normal, healthy, consensual sex.”
Normal does not constitute a body that is ravished by diseases and body parts that are misused and do not function as God intended.
Lucky – “The real evil about this issue is not what some people prefer to do with their bodies, but how some people feel they have the ‘moral’ authority (what a joke) to tell others what to do.”
I’m not telling others what to do. It is God Almighty who commands us to expose their evil ways and to sin no more.
Ezekiel 3:18 If I say to the wicked man, You shall surely die; and you do not warn him or speak out to dissuade him from his wicked conduct so that he may live: that wicked man shall die for his sin, but I will hold you responsible for his death. (and, the death of millions of others who follow him)
Romans 1:27 “For their women have exchanged the natural use for that which is against nature, and in like manner the men also, having abandoned the natural use of the woman, have burned in their lusts, one toward another, men with men doing shameless things and receiving in themselves the fitting recompense of their perversity.” or can end with, receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due.
“If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” [Leviticus 20:13]
Lucky – “For shame, MCS – I’d like to think your god would give you a good talking to, but as he/she/it does not exist, it’s really up to you alone to become a genuine, compassionate human being. You’ve got a long way to go, baby”
As I affirmed earlier, what you demonstrate is false compassion. True compassion would entail warning homosexuals that their lifestyles lead to early death by 20 to 25 years as a result of communicable diseases and suicide, but more important, they will lose their souls.
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MCS – maybe you’ve missed out on a couple of sex education lessons here and there. Anyone can catch a sexually-transmitted disease; you don’t have to be gay, you know. The secret is to take precautions, be monogamous, or be celibate. Otherwise, a gay couple has as much chance of being ‘ravaged by diseases’ anyone else. So can we stop talking pish, now?
And do you agree with Leviticus, MCS? A yes or no answer will suffice.
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Perhaps we should have a discussion of what the word “natural” means.
I think this is an excellent idea, and would be helpful in both my discussion with you and my discussion with Editor. Here’s what I’ve been using as a definition of “natural human behavior”: those behaviors which are not due to culture, but would occur even if human beings didn’t have any technology or society. For example, this definition means that using technology that relies on cultural knowledge, such as clothing, is not natural. On the other hand, eating berries is a natural behaviour; it’s something that humans would do in a “state of nature”.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently good (or inherently bad) about an action being natural or unnatural. However, it’s of interest to our discussion because several commenters now have brought up the idea that immorality has to do with using our bodies in an unnatural way, or in other words a way that’s not directly supported by their “design”.
[They wouldn't paint traffic lines for] the same reason they want to throw off the Deity: they find external boundaries constraining, and so they’ve rationalized eradicating them in the name of individual freedom. [...] You still didn’t really address the point I raised.
My response wasn’t intended to be flippant, and I apologize if it came off that way. I really was trying to address your point.
You seemed to be saying that a system of morality without an arbiter entirely external to the system would result only in chaos and short-sighted selfishness. My response was that systems of morality can and do arise do solely due to the efforts of the people that would be affected by the system, without anyone from the outside having to enforce it.
In fact, behaving morally while driving a car is an excellent example of just such a system. If you ask a typical person why they drive on their side of the road and obey traffic lights, they’ll probably say “Because it’s safer for me and for everyone else on the road”, not “Yeah, I really do want to drive straight down the middle of the road and through red lights at 100km/h, but then the police would bust me”.
My personal experience in situations where traffic systems have broken down bears this idea out. From time to time the traffic lights in my home town broke down. Yet, there were no car crashes; all that happened was that everybody became extra cautious around the busier intersections, and traffic slowed down.
Traffic lights aren’t a mechanism to check some kind of inherent tendency towards violent driving; they’re just an efficiency measure to formalize what would otherwise be the very slow improvised process of figuring out whose turn it is to go through a busy intersection. Most people are perfectly capable of realizing when working together benefits everyone. There’s no need for an external arbiter except to deal with the occasional misanthrope or misunderstanding.
If you don’t consume food, you will wither and die. I thought that was rather obvious.
This applies only to the situation where one never eats any food. I thought your analogy was of someone who eats enough to survive and be healthy, chewing and tasting far more food than they need for sustenance and spitting out the excess. Just so we’re clear, which of these analogies are you presenting?
You’ve yet to identify what standard would be used to recognize “harm.” Without a reliable foundation, the term is terribly elastic. So is the definition of what a “human being” is.
You’re right, harm can be a difficult thing to define. However, I don’t think it’s really advantageous for a moral system to just sidestep this problem instead of addressing it. I insist that reduction of harm needs to be part of the basis of any functioning moral system, as unnecessarily hurting people is almost universally recognized as immoral (though, as you point out, people differ on what “hurting” includes).
My definition of harm includes physical and mental injury, unfairly taking someone’s property (and that includes abstract property such as ownership over the remainder of one’s own lifespan and exclusive control of one’s own thoughts), and violation of inherent rights, such as the right to self-expression and to pursue happiness. Merely being offended doesn’t count as harm, however.
My definition of “person” is very simple: A person is any entity which is capable of (a) experiencing the world and (b) of having coherent thought.
Your hypochondriac example is an interesting one. I would say that if someone felt purely psychological suffering due to action, it would be the more moral choice to not perform that action than to perform it. Even if the pain they experience has no physical basis, it’s still pain. For example, it would clearly be immoral to put a severely claustrophobic person in a small windowless waiting room, even if the room is in actuality entirely safe. However, an even more moral action than just tip-toeing around the problem would be to help them get over it, if it were possible to do so.
Okay, having described my definition of harm in more detail, I’m now ready to address some of your specific claims regarding “violence”, such as this “quote” from a theoretical gay rights supporter that you specifically requested I discuss:
“[Y]our injured conscience over my outrageous conduct is none of my concern; quit bothering me with your pointless scruples.”
You are presenting your opponent as immediately acknowledging their conduct as “outrageous” and a legitimate violation of “scruples”, and having them resort to simply asking you to be quiet. This is clearly a massive strawman, which is why I didn’t pay it any attention before. No actual gay rights supporter would start out by saying that they know gay behavior is wrong; the whole point of supporting gay rights is that one believes homosexuality isn’t objectionable.
Denying a man public and effective expression of his legitimate concerns is an act of violence against him.
This statement on its own I agree with; it is immoral to deny someone the right to express their opinions. However, in its original context, you were implying that people expressing opinions contrary to your own is equivalent to this, and an act of violence against you! That needs a lot more justification before I would accept it.
Finally, here’s the last point (that I can find anyways) that you specifically asked me to address:
<blockquote<Would you agree that the primary (though not only) purpose of copulation is reproduction? If not, then we’d need to spend some time on that topic before going much further.
Sex has many different purposes, not one single “primary” purpose that has to apply to everyone. Some people have sex to procreate, while others have sex because they enjoy it but have no intention of having children. In what way is it inherently harmful for people to have sex without having children?
Some couples just have no interest in raising children. Why should they be banned from entering into committed relationships? Who does it help for them to have children they don’t want? I don’t understand how not having children could be considered a harmful or immoral action, excepting perhaps some kind of science-fiction scenario where a small number of people must repopulate the planet.
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(Oh wow, I had no idea my comment was so long. I’m working on my response to editor now, I’ll try and keep it a little more reasonably sized.)
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And don’t gimme, “children can’t give consent” cos neither can animals. Yet the Zoophiliacs are very persuasive. Ever heard them making their case?
I am 100% confused and perplexed by this. Are you saying that because the zoophiliacs are persuasive yet wrong that therefore other people who are persuasive are also necessarily wrong? That can’t be what you mean, but I can’t figure out what you’re getting at here.
The fact that our teeth go bad and we put on too much weight if we indulge in sweet foods too much is yet more evidence that it is unhealthy to go against nature.
I think we’re going to have to follow Isaac’s suggestion and work on a definition of “natural” we can agree on. I argue that our predilection towards eating sweet foods is natural because it’s a biological survival mechanism, and that our ability in modern culture to produce far more sugar than is healthy to eat and our cultural mechanisms to therefore reduce sugar consumption are not natural.
You seem to be going in circles with your working definition; you are trying to prove that natural implies good, but seem to be doing so by simply defining anything good to be natural.
It’s also amazing, DSimon, that you would dismiss as “prejudiced” the National Blood Transfusion Service.
I said no such thing, and rather object to having words put in my mouth that I didn’t put there myself.
The entirety of my response to your statement about the BTS was to disagree with your claim that they must be objective because they wouldn’t act in a prejudiced way against their own interests.Anyways, as I’ve mentioned earlier, I think this issue about comparative STD transmission rates is beside the point. We both agree that high promiscuity is dangerous because it provides a vector for the transmission of particularly nasty diseases. However, even if we assume that there is a difference in the rate of transmission between straight sex and gay sex, why does that matter? Both straight and gay couples can avoid this problem entirely by (a) getting tested and (b) being monogamous. What justifies treating the two situations differently?
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Dear Editor & Isaac,
“Isaac, you won’t find me chastising you for quoting Narth – I think it is the best source of information on this subject, out there.”
Sorry for the confusion I may have inadvertently casued. It was DSimon who said he was chastised by me for referring to Narth. I mentioned that his list of 10 health problems for homosexualists article plblished by the Gay & Lesbian Medical Association was unlikely to be approved by the Catholic Church.
The Editor later (I think) referred to this article as a good non-Catholic source for discussion on the health risks of homosexuals.
I hope this clears up the confusion.
DSimon linked to that article here at 10.00 on 29th Jan. when he wrote:
“I find it far more plausible that these effects are due to the additional stress imposed specifically against gay people due to discrimination. This potential explanation relies only on facts we already know to be true: that societal discrimination can lead to stress, and that stress can lead to depression, substance abuse, and other mental health problems. This claim is backed up by at least one of the sites on the index you linked to.
http://www.glma.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.viewPage&pageID=690 –
Specifically note this quote from that site:
The likelihood of depression or anxiety may be greater, and the problem may be more severe for those men who remain in the closet or who do not have adequate social supports.” end of quote from DSimon..
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DSimon, excellent post.
The obsession with sexuality, which many posters on this forum exhibit (and let’s not beat around the bush here – it is an obsession) demonstrates nothing more than a denial about the realities of sexual behaviour. Several posters have quoted, or referenced, the totally discredited NARTH website, an ideological fakery designed to do nothing more than provide pseudo-intellectual support for the morally moribund pastime of gay-bashing.
DSimon, your points about the ‘harm’ of homosexuality are well-made. The question for the gay-bashers is this: point to specific examples of harm done to people because, and only because, of their sexuality. For every example of someone being harmed directly because of his or her homosexuality (a difficult task in itself, considering the abundance of other societal factors impacting on one’s ability to express a homosexual lifestyle), I can show you a myriad of harmful effects of being heterosexual (how many battered wives are out there, for instance?)
The doctrine that sex is prescribed for the sole purpose of procreation does not tally with reality. In fact, it is so far from reality that it finds its inverted effect in the Catholic priesthood’s fascination with abusing children at a rate well above the norm for the rest of society. That fact alone indicates that sexual repression is unhealthy. How much better would it have been for all of those priests to have had healthy hetero- or homo-sexual relationships with their adult peers?
One of the biggest problems for the faithful adherent is to look at the Bible critically. It is almost anathema to suggest to such people that the Bible might have got it wrong. Clearly, for instance, the exhortation in Leviticus to murder homosexuals is now, in modernity, simply laughable. How many modern theists would actively endorse such a stupid and wicked notion?
And, if Leviticus is wrong (as it undoubtedly is), what else is wrong in the Bible in regards to homosexuality? Paul’s epistle to the Romans is just as suspect. Paul, who was almost certainly gay himself, struggled with his own sexuality and expressed his loathing for himself in a set of totally indulgent, self-flagellating diatribes about the evil of sexual thought and expression. Should we pay attention to his epistles now, in an age of vastly more learned knowledge of human sexual behaviour? This is not a hard question, folks, but I’ll give you a clue: the answer begins with “N”.
Strangely enough, the Christian church’s obsession with homosexuality has not much to do with homosexuality itself. It is vastly more geared towards the control of heterosexual behaviour. Make no mistake about it – the church is committed to raising its numbers, and it resorts to the fakery of the Bible as a crutch to support the repression of women, in particular. The only reason the church opposes contraception is that contraception empowers women. The morally bankrupt biblical line on homosexuality is a smokescreen that obfuscates the plethora of human sexual expression that exists in the world. Women who do not conform to the church’s absurd doctrinarian pronouncements are cast into the same mould as homosexuals – they have rejected the teachings of their non-existent ‘god’, and will have hell to pay if they attempt to limit the size of their families.
Is it any wonder that real people are rejecting this massive evil, and leaving the church in droves?
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Lucky,
Regarding your comment on Narth:
“Several posters have quoted, or referenced, the totally discredited NARTH website, an ideological fakery designed to do nothing more than provide pseudo-intellectual support for the morally moribund pastime of gay-bashing.”
Can you cite some evidence to show that this website is discredited ?
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Well, Benet, you could try this site first, and follow the links to the American Psychological Association, as well as the American Psychoanalytic Association: http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_nart.htm
Real psychological science sees NARTH as a fraud. The evidence for this fraud is overwhelming. Don’t ever rely on hearsay for your ideas – just a friendly hint.
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DSimon,
I think your thinking about human nature, or more accurately as you put it “natural human behaviour”:
“…those behaviors which are not due to culture, but would occur even if human beings didn’t have any technology or society”
is far from the classic teaching on Human Nature of St Thomas Aquinas a Catholic would recognise as true:
“By human nature we may mean either that which is proper to man – and in this sense all sins, as being against reason, are also against nature, as Damascene states (De Fide Orthod. II. 30): or we may mean that nature which is common to man and other animals; and in this sense, certain special sins are said to be against nature; thus contrary to sexual intercourse, which is natural to all animals, is unisexual lust, which has received the special name of the unnatural crime (ibid., I-II, q. 94, a. 3).
* “Consequently we must say that the Natural Law, as to general principles, is the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge. As, in man, reason rules and commands the other powers, so all the natural inclinations belonging to the other powers must needs be directed according to reason (ibid., I-II, q. 94, a. 4).
* “The Natural Law dates from the creation of the rational creature. It does not vary according to time, but remains unchangeable. The Natural Law was perverted in the hearts of some men, as to certain matters, so that they esteemed those things good which are naturally evil (ibid., I-II, q. 94, a. 5). – Summa Theologica
http://www.traditioninaction.org/HotTopics/a02jHomo&Clergy_Hospitality_Morella.html
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Thomas Aquinas was nothing more than a posturing prude, Benet – his idiocies resonate in the all-consuming guilt that is the very nature of the modern Catholic. It is tragic and pathetic that such a stupid man should be lauded as the archetype of modern Catholicism. Think for yourself.
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Lucky,
I visited the website you said would discredit Narth and I did not see anything to discredit Narth but it did discredit the APA. This sentence is of special interest because it shows Narth was willing to join the APA to conduct a study but the APA wouldn’t work with them and I quote:
“NARTH offered to join with the American Psychological Association (APA) in conducting a detailed study of the effectiveness of reparative therapy. The APA refused to cooperate. A debate over reparative therapy and the changeability of sexual orientation was scheduled for the APA’s year 2000 convention. However, it was cancelled at the last moment.”
Who cancelled it? If it had been Narth, they would have said so. I went onto that site expecting to see claims that the Narth staff were not qualified etc. but it was the opposite. The staff are very well qualified and from every religion and none.
Thanks for that, Lucky. Your link proves that Narth is a very reliable source of medical and psychological information on homosexuality.
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Rubbish, Rebel. Look a little further. I mean, go and have a REAL look at the evidence, and don’t merely content yourself with something that upholds your prejudices. NARTH is rubbish, and demonstrably so. It conducts no research, is eschewed by real science, and has as much credibility as the Discovery Institute – i.e., none. (And I’m not going to do your homework for you. Check it out yourself, with some honesty.)
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Benet, from your quotes, it seems that Aquinas defines human nature as “that which is proper to man”, but that definition is uselessly circular in the context of our discussion. Part of what we’re debating is whether or not that which is natural is necessarily that which is proper, and using a definition of natural that just straight means “proper” doesn’t add any meaning.
Aquinas also seems to bring up a definition similar to the one I use when he says that human nature is “that [...] which is common to man and other animals”. However, working from this definition it clearly is not the case that something being natural implies that it is good. For example, some species of animals kill one another, and there’s no doubt that primitive, pre-civilization humans fought and killed one another with their bare hands. Therefore by Aquinas’s second definition it would be natural for modern humans to kill each other with their bare hands, but it clearly would not be moral.
I don’t think that nature is a good guide to morality; its a savage world out there. I’m still sticking with my “reduction of harm” model.
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DSimon, (Jan 31st @1.23pm)
If I have understood you correctly (and I am not sure I have) you criticise the above quote from St Thomas because he uses the word “proper” in the sense of “right” or “seemly”. I do not think that is correct – I think the following translation brings out his use of “proper” in the phrase “proper to man” correctly:
“Secondly, there is in man an inclination to things that **pertain to him more specially**, according to that nature which he has in common with other animals: and in virtue of this inclination, those things are said to belong to the natural law, “which nature has taught to all animals” [Pandect. Just. I, tit. i], such as sexual intercourse, education of offspring and so forth.
Thirdly, there is in man an inclination to good, according to the nature of his reason, which nature is proper to him: thus man has a natural inclination to know the truth about God, and to live in society: and in this respect, whatever pertains to this inclination belongs to the natural law; for instance, to shun ignorance, to avoid offending those among whom one has to live, and other such things regarding the above inclination.”
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2094.htm#article6
I must say this is a more hopeful basis for morality than a harm-reduction model.
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You’re right, I seem to have misunderstood that use of the word “proper”. But, I can’t make heads or tails of what Aquinas is talking about here; it seems that a lot of these words have different meanings in a theological context. Can you summarize Aquinas’s position and explain its relevance to claims of homosexuality being immoral?
In particular, I find it very odd that Aquinas seems (though I might be misunderstanding) to be saying that because animals don’t engage in a particular behavior that it is therefore unnatural and therefore immoral. That doesn’t seem like a consistent standard; there are lots of things that animals don’t do that we do and that are considered moral, such as specialized education.
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DSimon,
I will post something next week to respond to your comment. Hope that’s OK.
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“Thomas Aquinas was nothing more than a posturing prude, Benet – his idiocies resonate in the all-consuming guilt that is the very nature of the modern Catholic. It is tragic and pathetic that such a stupid man should be lauded as the archetype of modern Catholicism. Think for yourself.”
Saint Thomas Aquinas is widely recognised, not just in Catholic circles, as one of the greatest academics of all time. I find it very sad and disappointing that someone could make such an unsubstantiated, ill-informed judgement about one of the greatest academics of all time.
Lucky, I disagree with most of what you say, but I enjoy reading your posts because they challenge me and I can see that you stretch the mind of others too. Let’s get back to the academic rigour and not lower the tone with unsubstantiated insults.
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Lucky–”Anyone can catch a sexually-transmitted disease; you don’t have to be gay, you know.”
These two lifestyles are not parallel. You obviously have not read Surgeon Gen.- Nominee Dr. Holsinger’s work. I would provide the link, but the language that he rightfully has to use is so repugnant in describing sick homosexual acts, that it would make the majority sick to their stomachs.
Lucky– “The obsession with sexuality, which many posters on this forum exhibit (and let’s not beat around the bush here – it is an obsession) demonstrates nothing more than a denial about the realities of sexual behaviour.”
We are not obsessed with sex, we only converse on the matter because SEX is what homosexuality is al about.. The homosexuals know this and that is why they prefer the terms gay, or lesbian. Yet, I identify it by its factual name- homoSEXuality.
*In the future, please refrain form addressing God with lower case letters.
It is an insult to Him. Thank you. -
“Saint Thomas Aquinas is widely recognised, not just in Catholic circles, as one of the greatest academics of all time. I find it very sad and disappointing that someone could make such an unsubstantiated, ill-informed judgement about one of the greatest academics of all time. ”
Ditto! Well said!
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Lucky says:
In fact, it is so far from reality that it finds its inverted effect in the Catholic priesthood’s fascination with abusing children at a rate well above the norm for the rest of society.
in an effort to link celibacy (or sexual repression as he calls it) with child abuse.
If he were to read Michael Rose’s book Goodbye, good men he would find that there was a period when homosexuality was not only heavily promoted in seminaries, but that seminarians who would not accept that line were told they had no vocation or that their views rendered them unsuitable candidates for the priesthood and they were expelled.
Now, if one of the requirements for membership of a club were that everyone had to be five feet tall or less, would it be a surprise to find that the number of members below the norm for average height was high? So if you only recruit homosexuals as Catholic priests, would it be a surprise to find that the rate of abuse was above the norm for society in general?
No, Lucky. Celibacy in the priesthood is not the reason and your conclusion is based on a false premise.
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In the same post, Lucky ends:
Is it any wonder that real people are rejecting this massive evil, and leaving the church in droves?
by which he seems to be attacking the encyclical Humanae Vitae.
The real reason people are leaving the Church in droves is the poisoned fruit resulting from Vatican II and the almost unchallenged suppression of Holy Mass as a sacrifice, replacing it instead with the Protestant idea of a celebratory banquet. The loss in Grace which has resulted is the real reason people are leaving the Church in droves, not the encyclical Humanae Vitae.
There seems to be a tendency among people who do not understand to think that if they write a long script, it will hide their ignorance, when in fact it merely exposes it.
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the convert –
That was an excellent post regarding the real reason people are leaving the Church!
Standing Ovation!
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rebel
I hope you will not allow yourself to be cowed or bullied by Lucky’s supercilious tone. He has made it clear that he is not here to learn anything, but only to demonstrate his own moral and intellectual superiority by heaping scorn on Catholics and their faith.
He has failed miserably in both aspects of his project, because he is a bitterly angry individual who carries a heavy load of emotional baggage regarding the Church, and also because he feeds that anger by adopting and repeating every politically correct propaganda cliche on the subject at hand. He then insulates himself from the truth by dismissing refutations of that propaganda as some variation of “not respectable.”
(And by the way, handing you links to entire websites as “proof” is like directing you to an entire floor of the library and saying “I told you so!” Notice that no specific proof, chapter and verse, has been given.)
Perhaps one Christmas Eve he will be visited by 3 spirits who will direct him to the source of his bitterness.
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Lucky, you are clearly not an academic or you’d know that St Thomas Aquinas is respected and studied, not just by theology lecturers, professors etc. but by philosophers of every hue.
Petrus and Miles Christi Sum, not to mention my beloved the convert, also make excellent points, to which I can add very little (especially since I’ve been out on the town and need a wee cuppa).
So, Lucky, I think you ought to revise your opinion of “The Angelic Doctor” as a “stupid man” – he is anything but. Which is more than can be said for a lot of men, she said provocatively…
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I was interested in the question of how homosexuality gained acceptance since the 1990s in the UK. I’m not sure about the UK but in the States Marshall Kirk and Hunter Marsden published ‘After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 1990s.’ I haven’t read this but I understand this had enormous influence in changing attitudes to gays in America. From the title alone I assume certain strategies were advocated and wonder if these, or some equivalent, were as potent in GB as in the US, eg attaching the ‘bigot’ label to anyone disagreeing with homosexuality.
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Gee, I touched a raw nerve with my criticism of Aquinas, didn’t I? I wonder why? (Well, I don’t really – I know exactly why.) Aquinas provided the catholic church with a set of powerful doctrinarial ‘philosophies’ which were seized upon as being beautiful ‘proofs’ of the moral value of authoritarian paternalism. Suited the church down to the ground.
The fact that Aquinas’ ideas have been comprehensively refuted by philosophers in the ensuing centuries matters nothing to the still mediaeval mindsets of those who wish for a return to the glory days of popes as moral kings.
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Editor – FYI, I am rather well qualified in Philosophy; it is, after all, the discipline I have been studying for forty years.
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Just imagine – studied philosophy for 40 years, and as far as saving his soul goes, does not seem to have learnt a thing.
I wonder if he read St. Alphonsus in his studies?
How many in the world are well in literature, in mathematics, in foreign and ancient languages! But what will all this profit them, if they know not the love of God? Blessed is he, said St. Augustine, who knows God, even if he knows nothing else. He that knows God is more learned than the learned who know not how to love God.
Here is a link to a 39 page .pdf booklet which tells all about a plan to popularize homosexuality in the United States.
It is called “The New Order of Barbarians”.
http://uscl.info/edoc/doc.php?doc_id=89&action=inline
Its accuracy of its predictions chilled John Vennari to the bone.
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Sorry, the convert – I don’t need my soul saved. Your quote from Alphonsus contains one glaring, humungous logical error. See if you can guess what it is!
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In the English county of Yorkshire there is a saying: “There’s none so blind as them that won’t see”.
We are told by Lucky that he does not need his soul saved, despite the Church’s very clear teaching as to what is likely to happen to his soul if he dies with that attitude intact.
The only question I have for Lucky is that of why he posts to this blog, given that it is primarily an educational blog for those who do want to see their souls saved, and who do wish to know how to go about it. This blog is not excelled by any other in terms of pointing searchers towards where they may find what the Church teaches on all manner of issues that may be of concern to them.
Keep reading the blog, Lucky. Who knows, you might have your very own Damascene moment, and may it not be long in coming.
God bless you during your wait.
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Lucky,
So, you’ve been studying philosophy for forty years and are well qualified in it? Well, as I once said to a very naughty pupil who waited behind after lesson once to tell me, very confidentially, that he was a Christian: “don’t worry, darling, it doesn’t show”.
I’d be very interested in the philosophers you claim have “comprehensively refuted Aquinas”. Names, please, and quotes that clearly refute Aquinas, please.
Oh and Lucky, please watch your tone and style please. Everybody knows I’m big on tone and style…
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Kevin1, sorry to have taken so long in replying to your posts. Thanks for the information on the links I put earlier on this thread. I didn’t take time to check them out properly.
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We’ll let it go this time, gloria, but if you’re serious about that pay rise…
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Editor – you know my tone is only strident when stridency is called for, as in the case of attempting to educate people who refuse to see reason.
Try Hobbs, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Copleston, Clarence Darrow, Hick, Ernest Hagel, Russell – each of these have taken Aquinas apart.
Even Frederick Copleston, a priest, saw through Aquinas, and his “Commentary on the Five Ways of Aquinas” is a masterpiece of forbearance. He doesn’t want to say that Aquinas was full of it, of course, but the implication is there, loud and clear.
Finally, might I take you to task, Editor, for ignoring your own warnings and deliberately insulting me. You should send yourself to the sin-bin. Tell you what – I’ll moderate your posts from now on.
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Lucky,
I did not insult you. Believe me, when I insult you, you’ll know. You need to tell the difference between a wee bit of humour and an insult. Dope. (couldn’t resist that bit of ‘humour’…)
Thanks for the list of names (do you really take those people seriously??? Hume? Kant? Come on…) but where are the quotes?
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Hume, Kant – well, they are widely recognised as two of the most important philosophers of all time, Editor. I believe Hume was from your neck of the woods, too. Must have been a bit of alright, surely.
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Lucky still hasn’t provided Mistress Editor with the quotes she requested, when he earlier said:
Try Hobbs, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Copleston, Clarence Darrow, Hick, Ernest Hagel, Russell – each of these have taken Aquinas apart.
It was God who put St. Thomas Aquinas together, and let no man split asunder what God hath joined together.
They can put their views forward, but they might as well cry to the moon. What do they know about knowing God?
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Well, I’m not doing your homework for you, convert, go look them up yourself. It takes a fair amount of reading. You don’t get to demolish a point of view in one or two pithy sentences. It takes years of reading and studying to form sound, rational ideas.
“It was God who put St. Thomas Aquinas together, and let no man split asunder what God hath joined together.”
See, that’s what I mean. That is a completely vacuous statement. It is meaningless.
“They can put their views forward, but they might as well cry to the moon. What do they know about knowing God?”
Again, vacuity. What do you know about ‘knowing God’, convert? All you know is the combinations of electro-chemical vagaries adrift in your brain that somehow convince you that a ‘god’ is at the seat of it. You have nothing in the way of proof or demonstration of this preposterous thesis, and all the chintzy platitudes you sprout get you nowhere with people who can actually think. It’s total nonsense, from start to finish, and when you really think about it, you know that is the truth.
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Lucky,
Listen: if you – a long-time student of philosphy – can’t cite a single sentence in the works of any of the philosophers on your list, people whom you allege have “comprehensively refuted” Aquinas, then please don’t expect the rest of us to take you seriously. Why should the convert plough through those writings looking for a quote to refute Aquinas (which clearly doesn’t exist) when you, having academically studied them, can’t find one?
As for Hume – yes, he certainly is a fellow-national, more’s the pity. I’m sticking with Alexander Graham Bell, who, although he’s listed as an American inventor in a museum in the USA (according to a report on Radio Scotland last week) is a Scotsman who achieved something that allows us to communicate with one another following a loud “dring, dring”. Hume’s work, on the other hand, is full of quite different bells – alarm bells.
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The convert, the pdf you linked is an extremely poor source. It is self-described as a transcription of a recollection of a “loose conversational monologue” given 19 years prior. The original lecturer is dead now, but was alive at the time of the document’s creation, yet no measures seem to have been taken at the time to have the contents of the transcription verified by him! The fact that no verification was attempted is particularly troubling since the person recollecting the lecture is explicitly described as having memory that is “somewhat dimmed by the intervening years”.
No citations whatsoever are given, nor is any external evidence of the content offered whatsoever. Furthermore, many of the conclusions stated by the transcription have nothing whatsoever to do with the original recollected speech, and are better described as merely wild, unsubstantiated guesses.
The document does not appear to have even been edited; every page has at least one major spelling or grammar error, and if the publisher couldn’t even be bothered to check for correct English, it’s highly doubtful that some kind of unstated fact checking was done.
The convert, that you would link to such an incredibly bad source makes me seriously doubt your ability to evaluate the credibility of information!
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DSimon,
I’ve not studied the document linked by the convert, but I skimmed it just now for key points and from what I can see, every single objective stated has been achieved.
Would you correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems very clear to me, that the homosexual lobby, the Stonewall Brigade, set out to change the sexual mores of our society and – WOW – did they succeed.
Signed, a former nominee for the Stonewall (entirely INtolerant…)
Bigot of the Year Award -
Editor, some of the things “predicted” in that document (increased acceptance of homosexuality, increased use of contraception) have indeed happened. I use quotes around “predicted” because the information at the meeting described in the document was (as described in the introduction to the PDF) reconstructed from memory well after many of these cultural changes had occurred or started occurring.
More to the point, the fact that a document says “there is a conspiracy to do X” and “X” occurs is not evidence for the existence of the conspiracy.
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DSimon,
Perhaps the convert rather took for granted that the homosexual groups have been very open in their campaign – I’ve lost count of the number of documents I’ve read on “gay” websites (and the number of blog comments) that applaud the success of their moves to have homosexuality normalised.
In that context, the convert’s document was as good as any for the purposes of this debate. I’m racing out now (pubbing and clubbing even earlier than usual) or I’d try to find one that you might find more convincing.
The proof of the pudding, however, DSimon. The proof of the pudding…
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Editor, I agree that it’s clear that gay acceptance campaigns have been very visible and active (and I personally laud such efforts). This is quite different from the shadowy organization alleged to exist by the linked document, which supposedly is also engaged in such activities as secreting away the cure for all cancer (unfalsifiable conspiracy theories inside, that there would be such a single cure in the first place is as silly as the idea that there would be a single cure for all viruses).
[F]or the purposes of this debate[...]
For the purposes of any debate, what’s important is that we start out by using information that comes from a known, verifiable origin.
If you’re willing to defend any source at all that supports your argument, regardless of whether the source is at all legitimate, then that severely weakens your position, no matter what position that is. I get on the case of humanists, atheists and skeptics who cite poor sources too, even if (in fact, especially if) those sources support my positions.
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How can you justify the bible as you source of authority when it comes to homosexuality and not be in favor of slavery? Only, and only those that come out in full support of slaving fellow human beings and using them as beasts (as the bible approves over and over again) have any credentials when it comes to using the bible as a source of their social framework. All the rest are utter hypocrits.
Oh yeah, what did Jesus say about homosexuality? I seem to have misplaced that reference.
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bbrand
You must remember that there are many things in the Old Testament that pertained to the Old Law, wihch was fulfilled with the coming of the Messiah. Tithing is one example, along with certain laws on fasting. Remember, when Saint Peter claimed that he couldn’t eat unclean food, God told him that he could eat food that God had made clean. So, there is a clear development of ideas from the Old Testament to the New.
Unfortuantely for some, the same cannot be said for homosexuality. From the Old Testament all the way through to the epistles of Saint Paul, the Bible condemns homosexual acts over and over again.
As for the sarcastic “oh yeah, what did Jesus say about homosexuality” (sarcasm is the lowest form of wit, you know), well, Our Lord said a whole lot about marriage and love, namely that a man leaves his father and mother and takes a wife. i always wonder if “gay Christians” ever ask themselves this, if God did intend for homosexuals to get married, why didn’t Jesus mention this? Of course, they prefer to focus on the fact that Christ didn’t specifically mention homosexually. Hardly an endorsement, is it?
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Ho hum. I see that you @Lucky take life incredibly seriously to the exclusion of humour. Humour is often used by Mistress Editor to take the steam out of matters that are heating up.
My reference to “let no man put asunder what God has joined together” was intended to allude to your claim that the philosophers you listed had “taken St. Thomas Aquinas apart”.
Perhaps if I write “Joke” at the end you would be less inclined to describe my subtle humour as “vacuous comment”.
You then claim further vacuity with the following:
What do you know about ‘knowing God’, convert? All you know is the combinations of electro-chemical vagaries adrift in your brain that somehow convince you that a ‘god’ is at the seat of it. You have nothing in the way of proof or demonstration of this preposterous thesis, and all the chintzy platitudes you sprout get you nowhere with people who can actually think. It’s total nonsense, from start to finish, and when you really think about it, you know that is the truth.
That is your view, but it does not make my statement vacuous. Dismissive comments like yours just reveal the shallowness of your thinking in that you have dismissed my view without any substantiating evidence of your own. My evidence is to be found in the history of the Catholic Church down the ages.
As for “knowing God”, the peace I have found since discovering the teachings of the Catholic Church is all the proof I need that I am getting “to know God”. For your part, you decry the existence of God, and thereby cannot get to know Him in your present frame of mind, and so I repeat: “What do you know about knowing God?”
And by the way, it wasn’t ever my homework to research your philosophers. It was yours, set by Mistress Editor and still not handed in.
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There are a number of offences which, according to the Bible, attract capital punishment. I’m sure traditionalists would be happy to support them – after all, it is the duty of good Christians to obey the word of their Lord. So gather up some rocks, people, and start stoning those homosexuals! And adulterers. And virgins raped within the city walls. And those wearing multi-materialed garments. etc, etc…
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DSimon
I’m quite surprised that such a learned man would make such an elementary error. I’m not doing your research for you, but why don’t you type ‘gospel of Luke parable’ into google and see how you get on.
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“That servant who knows his master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what his master wants will be beaten with many blows.”
Fair cop, guvnor.
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This parable is not about slavery in the way the world understands it. It’s about judgement. Surely you must see that!
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Has Lucky got anything constructive to contribute to this blog, or is he just going to mock from the sidelines? If the latter, why doesn’t he busy himself at something more akin to his ilk?
Alternatively, let him lurk for a few months and see whether what he reads here from the faithful might just influence his outlook for the better – it has been known to happen before.
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leprechaun,
May I explain that Lucky is in moderation (because of a comment that was blasphemous or pretty close to it).
So, when I release his posts,such as those above, it is because they reveal a certain ignorance that I’m hoping someone will correct.
Everyone is welcome on this blog, as I’ve said before, and I know leprechaun (as his final sentence confirms) welcomes everyone too. However, Lucky, leprechaun has a point in that you must show some goodwill by asking serious questions in a serious manner. Take DSimon for your model – he is eminently courteous in his interaction on this blog without giving any quarter to views and beliefs with which he disagrees or about which he requires further clarification. He takes robust criticism without threatening to throw his rattle out of the pram. He is much respected on this blog – albeit we seldom agree with what he says! A marriage, you might say, that could only be made on the Catholic Truth blog! Over to you, Lucky…
DSimon, slavery, in ancient times, as recorded in Scripture, was, as you will know, part of the culture of the day. As the Church developed, the Magisterium condemned it and forbade Christians to engage in slavery at any level. We’ve posted details of papal pronouncements on this elsewhere on the blog in days of yore. I’ll quote them for you if you wish, but later, as right now, I’m up to my eyes in racing to get the March newsletter finished and to the printers. I really shouldn’t be here at all right now.
But, to link back to the thread topic, notice that the Church has never, at any time in her history, show any tolerance whatsoever of any flouting of the sexual mores established in natural law. From the beginning, contraception and abortion were condemned (they didn’t have the pill, of course, but women were quite imaginative in trying to prevent or end pregnancy) and homosexuality – no question about it. The fact that these immoral behaviours have become accepted in our society – for the first time in history – does not mean they are now, suddenly, moral acts.
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I’m not doing your research for you, but why don’t you type ‘gospel of Luke parable’ into google and see how you get on. [...] This parable is not about slavery in the way the world understands it. It’s about judgement. Surely you must see that!
Petrus, I did as you suggested (and also some alternate searches such as “gospel of luke lashes”), but was unable to find an explanation as to why the bit about lashing disobedient slaves must be interpreted metaphorically rather than as direct advice on how slaves are to be treated.
With respect, I think the ball is in your court now. I presented a piece of scripture and its most obvious interpretation, one that is in line with the cultural mores of its time, and I think it’s now up to you to provide evidence to back up your assertion that that interpretation isn’t correct.
DSimon, slavery, in ancient times, as recorded in Scripture, was, as you will know, part of the culture of the day. As the Church developed, the Magisterium condemned it and forbade Christians to engage in slavery at any level.
Editor, slavery was just as immoral in ancient times as it is was when it was first condemned by the Church (the earliest potential date for Catholicism supporting the abolition of slavery I can find is 1435). If the Bible were truly a source of ultimate, absolute moral authority from the very start, why was there this long wait, and why was a secondary system necessary? Why didn’t the Bible simply condemn slavery from the start?
Given that it was totally wrong about slavery for a significant period of time, why should this system of morality (the Bible as interpreted through the official stance of the church) be considered an unquestionable moral authority on anything else, including homosexuality?
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DSimon,
I have to be quick about this but since nobody else has responded, here we go, in haste…
The Bible contains warnings about practising slavery. The prophet Amos warned Gaza and Tyre against slave-trading (Amos 1)
The Book of Revelation (Rev 18:13) also warns that participating in the slave-trade is to court disaster.
St Paul told believing slaves to seek freedom if they could (1 Cor).
However, remember, the word (slavery) was not applicable solely as we understand it today – some people opted, for various reasons, into servitude and there were good Masters as well as bad.
The entire ethos of the gospel, clearly reveals God’s will that “we treat others as we wish to be treated ourselves” (Matt 7 – all these biblical quotes from memory, so forgive absence of precise verse – 10/12, I think, around there)
So slavery, as we understand it today, would clearly not be in conformity with the will of God, and – based on what IS found in Scripture, the known cultural mores at the time and natural law – formed the basis of the development of the Church’s doctrine, later articulated in formal papal pronouncements on the subject.
You think Pope Eugene IV’s condemnation of 1435 is rather late, but you and I live in an age of global media communications. Not so, then. The fact is that as soon as the Pope got wind of the fact that slavery was happening, he pronounced definitively on it and left nobody in any doubt that it was completely unacceptable for Christians (there weren’t any Protestant yet!) to take slaves or in any way participate in the slave trade. There can be no doubt at all, that slavery has never been approved within the Christian community – not from the earliest days.
In Scripture we read, for example, that both slave and free are called to receive the gospel of Jesus Christ. The message was clear: in Christ, social distinctions such as slavery no longer apply – recall St Paul’s words, misused by the feminists “In Christ there is no male or female, slave or free…” (because) in Christ all are equal. That is, all of us have equal access to God’s grace – we can all become saints whether male or female, free or slaves. Remember, the first Christians understood, a great deal better than contemporary Christians do, that it is our spiritual state and relationships that matter, not our social positions. St Paul emphasises that it is in Christ that this revelation about divine equality is realised when he said: “Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ” (Gal 4:7).
This is in much haste as I really must get on with other things, but hope it answers your question in essence. It is important to recall that the Scriptures must be interpreted by the Church – that is because the Church has, at its disposal, the great minds, intellects and scholarship to interpret, in the light of the ancient cultures, how God is revealing Himself to the world. It is the Protestant error of private interpretation that leads people to cite a particular verse to either prove or disprove something. That is the danger of private interpretation – that verses are taken out of context or given a false meaning.
For example, recently, in conversation with an acquaintance about parenting skills and the rights and wrongs of smacking, he cited the Old Testament as saying “beat” your children. Now, obviously, God doesn’t want us to go about beating anyone! The verse merely reveals that God wants parents to discipline their children and “spare the rod and spoil the child” means, simply, do not fail to discipline your children. That will mean different things in different cultures and at different times in history. I was given the belt at school (for talking, mostly, would you believe) but, really, a quiet word to shame the socks off me, would have worked just the same. Indeed, some of the loveliest, best behaved children I know, have never been smacked. Incidentally, I’m not actually against smacking per se, but simply making a key point about the interpretation of Scripture.
Clearly the Bible cannot be used correctly to “instruct” parents to beat their children, or even to smack them. It can only be used to teach that God does expect parents to discipline their children.
The same thing applies to various other issues, slavery included.
Highlighting verses from Scripture about the treatment of slaves, without recognising the nuances – both cultural and religious – is to go off in the wrong direction.
There is no contradiction: slavery, as we think of it (enforced enslavement, bad treatment of another human being etc) has always been wrong and is not condoned in the Bible. Later Church documents gave clear articulation to this – it did not, suddenly, decide that enforced slavery was immoral; that was always the case. People opting into servitude, much like maids and servants who choose to be thus employed, were (and remain) in a different category.
So, you see, DSimon, the Church has never been wrong about slavery. The Bible is not a variation on the old “yes and no” interlude game. It needs interpretation. Name me the enforced slave of any Pope, from Peter onwards, and I’ll concede the case you make, game, set and match!
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Madam Editor – I don’t remember a comment that was blasphemous. If I did blaspheme then I apologise for any offence. I’ve been playing by the rules, I believe.
Editor: well, Lucky, I believe you. I think it is so much second nature to you to speak profanely about Our Lord, that you don’t really mean any harm. But as any judge in any court will tell you, that is no defence. It’s up to you to think before you submit a comment containing any reference – whether direct or oblique – to Christ on the cross. Best you try to avoid making such snide remarks and stick to the issues. After all, we don’t preface or conclude our responses to your posts by calling you “a man who thinks he was once a monkey” or other similar jibe.
Leprechaun – read my post on this thread from January 31, 2010 at 12:12 pm. It’s serious. Ignore my snipes if you like – it’s just that, as an atheist, I find some of the comments by the religious here so weird that they call for a little sarcasm.
Editor: a little sarcasm is fine. We love it. Just don’t be rude, with it.
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Lucky:
I have re-read your post from January 31, 2010 at 12:12 pm as requested.
The Church’s position on homosexuality is that it is a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance.
There is no connection between the emptying of churches and the dogma that used to be taught there. The emptying of churches has come about because dogma is no longer taught there.
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That is well spoken, leprechaun. “The emptying of the churches has come about because dogma is no longer taught there” not the other way round. That’s it exactly, leprechaun.
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Thank you, Rebel.
I am sorry not to have made your acquaintance at the September conference but I switched from the Rennie Mac at the last minute, and was unfortunate not to catch up with you later.
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The Tablet’s homosexual manifesto
The Tablet’s deceitful homosexual manifesto means churches should unsubscribe, writes John Smeaton in his SPUC Director’s blog.
(The reason why the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality is so important for the pro-life cause can be found in Pope John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae. In paragraph 97, Pope John Paul teaches that it is an illusion to think that we can build a true culture of human life if we do not offer adolescents and young adults an authentic education in sexuality, and in love, and the whole of life according to their true meaning and in their close interconnection. )
The Tablet’s latest editorial, ‘Deepest human desire’, argues that ‘the Church [should] move on with confidence, if not doctrinally then at least pastorally’ on the subject of homosexuality’. Among other things, it:
” implies that the Church is open to the charge of ‘anti- homosexual prejudice, even bigotry’
” says that the Church should ‘move beyond a sterile state of disapproval’ of homosexuality, lest it ‘lose the sympathy of wide sections of the public’
” criticises ‘the Church’s inability to comprehend and value [homosexual persons'] emotional lives [and] their relationships’
” implies homosexual love ‘is to be treasured and respected’
” insists that homosexuals must be defined ‘positively . . . by their affections’
” claims that there are homosexual couples who ‘demonstrate a constancy and a stability in their partnerships that, rather than causing scandal, set an example to their heterosexual friends and relations’
” questions whether homosexual men or women are unsuitable parents
” questions whether homosexuality is unnatural, and implies that homosexuality is innate rather than acquired
Most perniciously, The Tablet’s editorial attempts to co-opt Pope Benedict, the late Cardinal Hume and the former Master-General of the Dominicans. Whilst the quoted words of the latter two leave (to say the least) a lot to be desired, in no way can any words of Pope Benedict be used to endorse homosexuality. The editorial nonetheless claims that ‘the reintegration of erotic love into Christian spirituality’ in his encyclical Deus caritas est ‘has a direct relevance’ which provides a ‘compelling’ basis for normalising homosexual love. Although the editorial admits that ‘[t]he role of eros in homosexuality the Pope leaves alone’, it still uses the Pope’s reflection on eros to promote a pro-homosexual agenda, even though the Pope clearly stated that his definition of eros is ‘love between man and woman’ [Deus caritas est, 3]
The Tablet’s editorial goes beyond mere opinion, and is in fact a manifesto for homosexual equality. To that end, it is part of a softening-up and consciousness-raising exercise within the Church. It is clear that The Tablet intends to use the months leading up to the Pope’s visit as part of a media campaign to entrench an anti-life and anti-family agenda within official Catholic circles. In The Tablet’s 30 January edition, Sue Gaisford, The Tablet’s literary editor, writes about Kay Gilderdale, who helped cause the death of Lynn, her daughter who had ME:
‘[S]he was innocent of attempted murder. Nor – and this is harder – do I think that what she did could be considered sinful. ‘
In contrast, Pope Benedict made clear in his ad limina address to the Scottish bishops that: ‘Support for euthanasia strikes at the very heart of the Christian understanding of the dignity of human life. ‘
One hundred years ago, St Pius X, a similarly courageous pope, rejected the very essence of Tablet-think when he taught that Catholic teaching ‘[does not] evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously’
and
‘may [not] be tailored according to what seems better and more suited to the culture of each age’.
It is simply a matter of historical fact that official Catholic teaching on pro-life and pro-life family matters has never changed. Some of the Church’s earliest documents condemn abortion, euthanasia, contraception and homosexuality.
The only reason I am subscribed to receive (a single copy of) The Tablet is so I can expose its deceitful agenda. For a parish priest, however, to take (i.e. subscribe to) The Tablet in bulk for sale to his parishioners is like a psychiatrist ordering cyanide capsules in bulk for sale to his depressed patients. The Tablet isn’t known as ‘The Bitter Pill’ for nothing, not least its notorious dissent from Humanae Vitae.
Some may argue that it’s wrong to seek to restrict The Tablet’s distribution, arguing that there are other publications on sale at churches which offer a counter-balance to it. Yet, again, it makes no sense to supply poison liberally simply because there are antidotes available. Pope Benedict made this clear in his ad limina address to the English and Welsh bishops:
‘[I]t is important to recognize dissent for what it is, and not to mistake it for a mature contribution to a balanced and wide-ranging debate. ‘
We should prepare for Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain in September by honouring that teaching and by deleting The Tablet. I am therefore today joining Fr Tim Finigan’s campaign ‘Tabula delenda est’ to encourage churches and other Catholic points of sale to cancel their bulk subscriptions. [SPUC]
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kevin1,
Thanks for posting that statement by John Smeaton, Director of SPUC, calling for the sale of The Tablet in Catholic outlets to be withdrawn.
Co-incidentally, I’d posted a thread on this statement, headlined
SPUC: Ban Tablet (Catholic Truth: NOW!)
http://www.catholictruthscotland.com/blog/?p=3759#commentsHowever, since The Tablet is seeking to make homosexuality acceptable within the Church, I think it is perfectly in order to post comments on the Smeaton statement here as well.
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You think Pope Eugene IV’s condemnation of 1435 is rather late, but you and I live in an age of global media communications. Not so, then. The fact is that as soon as the Pope got wind of the fact that slavery was happening, he pronounced definitively on it
Editor, even without cell phones, just under a millennium and a half is a rather long response delay! Are you seriously proposing that the Catholic church was completely ignorant of the existence of slavery during all those years, and suddenly that year they “got wind” of it for the first time?
I think I’m probably just misunderstanding what you’re saying.
Highlighting verses from Scripture about the treatment of slaves, without recognising the nuances – both cultural and religious – is to go off in the wrong direction.
The larger context of that Luke passage is Jesus explaining that there’s a difference between deliberately disobeying instructions and merely disobeying them out of ignorance. He points out that a “servant” who fools around instead of working will be “cut to pieces”, but that a servant who makes a mistake unknowingly will be “beaten with few blows”.
The cultural context is that beating ones “servants” wasn’t considered immoral, or else that would’ve been an implicit part of the analogy: it would’ve been a story about how the master was behaving immorally by keeping slaves and beating them, not about how the slave was behaving immorally and got the treatment he deserved.
Only in the context of slavery is poor job performance proportionately handled by beatings and lashings.
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DSimon,
For the record, I wouldn’t rely on the KJ Bible – sorry. We use the Catholic (Douay Rheims).
In any event, in this case it is of no great consequence because I think you are misunderstanding the verses.
If you refer to Luke 12:45 ff, that is not an injunction by Christ to beat slaves, as you appear to think. It is an analogy, referring to the punishment awaiting those who “knew the will of his lord and prepared not himself…” (i.e. who knows God’s will but does not prepare for his judgment… thinking it is a long way off, he lives an immoral life).
Christ, like all good teachers, uses the things that are familiar to his listeners. Without doubt, they would be familiar with the beatings meted out to slaves by their masters and he uses a scenario, perhaps all too familiar, to his audience to drive home teaching about being watchful and prepared at all times to meet the (most important of all) Lord. Not just the human master/owner. It doesn’t meant that Christ approved the behaviour – not every word that Christ said is recorded in Scripture anyway (St John tells us at the end of his Gospel that if everything Jesus said and did had been recorded, the world itself would not be big enough to hold all the books that would have to be written). Whatever, it is very clear from the entirety of Scripture – and early Christian history – that slavery was not approved and eventually disappeared.
To interpret the parables literally, is to misunderstand their nature and purpose. Esewhere, for example, Christ teaches that it is better to rip off our limbs and pluck out our eyes, rather than use them to commit sin – but He doesn’t mean that literally (thank goodness!) merely to drive home the very serious nature of offending God. He doesn’t bother to explain that it is immoral, in fact, to rip off limbs and pluck out our eyes. He seems to take it for granted that the moral law is written into our hearts, as the Old Testament teaches, and gives his listeners credit for knowing right from wrong in these obvious cases.
About that millenium…The fact is, DSimon – and I accept that I didn’t explain this clearly in my original posting – that by the fifteenth century, slavery had all but died out in Christendom – hence Pope Eugene’s horror at discovering it in a particular location and denouncing it, outright, with very severe penalties attached to those who disobeyed.
Scripture makes clear that slaves were to be treated humanely and that, in Christ, all such social distinctions were null and void. Indeed, the principles of equality (before God) and humanity implicit in the New Testament were so effective that slavery, so obviously unjust, was immediately undermined and gradually fell into disuse.
As well as manumissions in life, it soon became common practice for Christian owners to emancipate slaves through their last will, so that on the death of a Christian owner, the slave went free. Given that slavery was widespread in the Roman empire (at least one third of people at that time would have been slaves) this was no small achievement for the young Church. Cutting through the culture of the day, as in our times, was not easy but the fact remains that there is nothing in Scripture to encourage the idea that slavery is a positive good and plenty of evidence to show that it was, in fact, a practice that was undermined (and gradually erased) by the Christian ethic.
I’ve already explained that the infant Church was dealing with the reality of the cultural acceptance of slavery. If, as I’m sure I’ve already said, you can point to any place in Scripture, or anywhere else, for that matter, where the Church taught that beating slaves or beating anyone was a good thing, or even acceptable, then we can talk. The Church has never taught that, and even if a majority of the early Christians DID do that (no evidence that they did, of course) it wouldn’t change the fact that they were not reflecting the teaching of the Church. Let me give you a modern analogy.
Today, I think it is clear, the majority of Catholic couples cohabit before marriage and use contraception. “Gay” Catholics are coming out of a million closets. You know and I know – and even the British Humanist Association knows – that the Church does not allow that and, on the contrary, condemns it.
What are students of religion, though, to make of this, 100 years from now? They’re going to be blogging their socks off, producing surveys to prove that Catholics, like everyone else, used contraception, cohabited and even had abortions and “gay” relationships. Hence, no matter how many claims you find that this or that Christian family owned a slave in the first century, it is meaningless. Only clear evidence that the Church approves and taught that slavery is a moral good, would be proof positive that, from the outset, the Church taught that something so obviously unjust and against natural law, was a positive good.
Similarly, those bloggers 100 years from now will have a future editor of Catholic Truth telling them to go and find a document or a statement from a Pope permitting contraception, abortion, “gay” relationships etc. They won’t be able to – as even the British Humanist Association knows.
And who knows, maybe there will be a priest or two who have decided to obey the call of Pope Benedict to spread the Faith by blogging and he/they’ll be able to post comments to prove that, just as the Church has never condoned slavery or promoted it, so, too the Church has never condoned or promoted, contraception, abortion, homosexuality etc.
And one final thing, DSimon. Your final call tor the Bible “to be treated as a source of perfect moral information” reveals a basic error. That is NOT the purpose of the Bible.
The twin towers upon which Christianity is built, are Tradition and Scripture. Tradition came first. Not everything is in Scripture (Pope Eugene’s condemnation of slavery for starters!)
This is why Martin Luther and his merry men have done so much damage to Christendom. They chose to ditch Tradition – which is the beliefs held by the first Christians up to the death of the last Apostle. That is the public revelation entrusted to the Church by Christ. Scripture is build upon Tradition and they are given equal weight but it is a mistake to try to find in Scripture – which has to be interpreted by the Church – prescriptive answers to every religious and moral question. THAT, DSimon, is the task entrusted by Christ to His Church: “Thou art Peter and on this rock I will build My Church”. “Peter” (Pope) unlocks the mysteries of the Faith to us, not the Scriptures.
It is that truth that the Protestant Reformers rejected and hence they can only ever enjoy half of the answer to any question.
I hope this clarifies the Luke passage for you – I’ve got to get my head down now to work on the March edition, way behind as usual, so it may be a while before I get back to my slavery…!
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leprechaun,
I didn’t make it to the September Conference. I haven’t been to any of the meetings, due to different things, mostly complicated family situation/health matters, things like that. Still, maybe one of these days, who knows. Thanks for saying that, though – it would have been nice to meet you.
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Editor, I must say that what you’re talking about seems much more like “amendment” than “interpretation”. That is, rather than clarifying questions about content, it seems like the process you’re describing is about adding new content. Is this as intended?
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Regarding historical church support of slavery, a Google search returns this quote from the Decretum Gratiani, which became law as of 1226 (under Pope Gregory IX):
Therefore we declare that [those who help the Saracens] should be cut off from the communion of the church and be excommunicated for their wickedness, that catholic princes and civil magistrates should confiscate their possessions, and that if they are captured they should become the slaves of their captors. [emphasis added]
My source is here. There seem to be a lot comments on that page, but the comment-management site they’re using (HaloScan) isn’t working for me right now, so I don’t know if there’s additional information (whether contradictory or supporting) in those comments.
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DSimon,
I am really busy now trying to finish the March edition so I don’t have time to write a lot at the moment. In any event, I am getting the feeling that no matter what I say, you will go off on the Google again!
By the way, I do not understand your comment about “amendment” versus “interpretation”. I think my post above is self-explanatory for anybody seeking to understand the particular verse from St Luke about slavery”, cultural context etc.
The Church is both a spiritual and a temporal power. Church authorities decree many matters of temporal discipline which are not binding forever – take fasting laws, for example. At one time these were extremely strict, perhaps harsh. But they changed over time. I’ve already said that Catholics like everyone else no doubt had slaves (indeed we know that the early Christian owners had their slaves baptised). It was, however, the civilising impact of Christianity that led, ultimately, to slavery dying out.
Slavery was a social/cultural/secular institution – not a religious one. That it was tolerated by the early Church does not mean that “the Church” approved it.
The example you cite is not evidence of “historical church support of slavery” as you seem to think. It is an example from the 13th century of poor governance and a pope erring in a matter of culture – much like Pope Benedict’s willing acceptance of the “green” movement. Nonsense. Patent nonsense. Yet here we have a Pope urging us all to “go green”. Nutty.
Popes since the Second Vatican Council have exercised poor governance, DSimon – that is why Catholic Truth exists! They have tolerated dissent and now, as we know, chaos reigns supreme.
As I have already said, DSimon, you need to find a document, not of a Pope indulging his own personal whim, but a document positively teaching that slavery is a good to be embraced by all the faithful.
There isn’t one, DSimon, so why don’t we just move on – there’s a new thread coming tomorrow that you will love – indeed, you’ll think it’s a dream!
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[...] I am getting the feeling that no matter what I say, you will go off on the Google again!
Editor, if I’m creating the impression that I’m not paying attention to your responses, I apologize! I try to only bring in new sources when I feel it’s necessary to continue the discussion; if you feel that I’m “Gish Galluping” (introducing new information as a way of avoiding having to directly respond to a point you bring up), please let me know and I’ll try to more specifically address your statements.
By the way, I do not understand your comment about “amendment” versus “interpretation”. I think my post above is self-explanatory for anybody seeking to understand the particular verse from St Luke about slavery”, cultural context etc.
I made this comment to re-emphasise my earlier point about that verse from St. Luke, that (a) even in context the verse completely fails to show slavery as anything but morally neutral, (b) if the Bible were a source of moral authority, it would have an overall context of slavery being wrong (i.e. any story about a slave not obeying the will of his master would not imply that the slave was morally wrong for doing so, as the Luke verse certainly does), and therefore that (c) declaring slavery to be immoral contradicts the Bible rather than clarifying it, and therefore is amendment and not mere interpretation.
I have to confess that I don’t understand how your response about the Church being both a temporal and spiritual power addresses this. However, I understand that your time is short so maybe we should move on from this point.
Slavery was a social/cultural/secular institution – not a religious one.
Whether or not slavery is a “religious matter” is not relevant to this discussion unless you’re claiming that homosexuality is more of a religious matter than slavery or murder or any of the other things the Church claims to have moral authority on.
That [slavery] was tolerated by the early Church does not mean that “the Church” approved it.
The quote I supplied above goes far beyond mere tolerance! It is a a specific, official instruction in Church law for Christians to take slaves under certain circumstances.
[...] [Y]ou need to find a document, not of a Pope indulging his own personal whim, but a document positively teaching that slavery is a good to be embraced by all the faithful.
How is the Decretum Gratiani not a document teaching that slavery is a good? Wasn’t that document part of official church law?
You’ve stated that for each individual to attempt to determine the rules for themselves is fallacious (specifically pointing this out as the basic error that you believe the Protestants are making). However, you’re now also saying that the Pope, the highest earthly authority in the Church (correct?), putting into church law a document not just tolerating but specifically instructing slavery under certain circumstances, does not constitute the Church having ever been wrong about slavery.
What’s left, then?
What is this perfect source of moral information that are Catholics supposed to use to make their ethical decisions, if both their own interpretation of morality as well as Church law’s interpretation are fallible?
If there is no such directly infallible source of morality, but rather it is always distorted by the imperfect interpretation abilities of humanity, could not the Church also be wrong about homosexuality?
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Anyways, I agree that it might be time for us to move on, since I think we’ve both said what we have to say. As always, I enjoyed our discussion a great deal. I look forward to what’s coming up tomorrow.
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Deal, DSimon! Although I will post some clarifications, given your response to me above. I’ll try to make it short and sweet, though because really, I do feel that the Church’s position is very clear. Slavery is not comparable to homosexuality and I see that I need to explain more clearly, the nature and limits of the Pope’s authority/documents etc. There are key distinctions to be made but I’ll try to clarify that for you tomorrow, at some point.
It’s at times like this, that I get most frustrated with the clergy. They can all find time to play golf but not to blog, DSimon. Anyway, you’re stuck with me and I’ll do my best to clarify things tomorrow.
I’ve just posted the new thread. It should be fun. On the other hand, as I warned Torkay, it might fall flat on its face (or go to sleep….)
But not, I hope, before someone has guessed the answer to the Editor’s Teaser…
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DSimon,
you wrote:
“that verse from St. Luke, (a) even in context the verse completely fails to show slavery as anything but morally neutral…”
that’s because the text is not about “slavery” but about Judgment and possible consequential punishment. I think I pointed out that Jesus used what was familiar to his listeners. He spoke about unjust stewards and ungrateful guests etc. without making any moral pronouncements about injustice per se or ingratitude per se: his parables are largely warnings about putting this world and its goods above spiritual goods and, often, warning of the Judgment. I really can’t explain it any more clearly than that. I think I’ve already said that the Bible is not “a prescription pad”. It requires interpreting by the Church.
…(b) if the Bible were a source of moral authority, it would have an overall context of slavery being wrong (i.e. any story about a slave not obeying the will of his master would not imply that the slave was morally wrong for doing so, as the Luke verse certainly does)
The Bible (NT) is simply a record of the life of Christ, reporting his words and actions which took place against the cultural and political backdrop of the times. There is clear evidence, for example, that Christ refused to get caught up in the political arguments of the day: He refused to condemn the Roman occupation, for example, but I am sure you wouldn’t use that fact to argue that Christ prefers dictatorships.
Also, DSimon, I disagree that the Lucan story implies that the slave was morally wrong for not obeying the will of his master. Christ was teaching about judgment and using an analogy of a slave disobeying the owner, because that was a scenario where severe punishment was known to His listeners. Just as Christ made no moral comment on the immorality of tearing off our limbs and pulling out our eyes in that parable, so he stuck to the point of his parable (the severe punishment to be expected if we disobey God, just as the slave expects severe punishments for disobeying his master. It is to underline the severity of the judgement – not to condone slavery – that Christ uses this particular analogy). It cannot at all be interpreted either as treating slavery as morally neutral or condoning it. The subject of Christ’s parable was not slavery but judgment. There’s no getting away from that fact.
…and therefore that (c) declaring slavery to be immoral contradicts the Bible rather than clarifying it, and therefore is amendment and not mere interpretation.
No. It is the Church’s task to interpret the Scriptures but the Church cannot “amend” or change Scripture. Enslavement, while very commonplace in the early Roman Empire as we’ve already noted, because, remember, it was legal, and although possibly widespread within the early Church, certainly known to have happened within the early Church, is still against natural law and – put together with the entirety of Scriptural revelation, including in the Old Testament – the Church could do nothing else BUT condemn slavery.
But it really is not possible for you to accept this,without accepting the Catholic Church’s authority to interpret Scriptures. I understand that. As St Augustine says: “I would not understand the Gospel, if I did not first accept the teaching authority of the Catholic Church”. That is the key.
I mentioned that the Church is and was both a spiritual and a temporal power, to highlight the fact that Popes were sometimes acting in a political, and not a religious sense. For most of our history, remember, monarchs and politicians turned to the Pope to settle disputes, land disputes, for example. That is why I mentioned the dual nature of the Church as both a spiritual and temporal power.
…”How is the Decretum Gratiani not a document teaching that slavery is a good? Wasn’t that document part of official church law?”There is a distinction to be made – a key distinction – between infallible documents of the Church which concern faith and morals and documents of lesser weight like the Decretum Gratiani which was the equivalent of what we now call Canon Law.
Important as it is, Canon Law is put together by popes and theologians for the discipline and governance of the Church and is not infallible. Canon Law was amended as recently as 1983. Previously, it was amended in 1917. Some changes are awful, such as the permission now given in Canon Law for priests to be allowed to administer the Sacrament of Confirmation in (supposedly) cases of serious need; in fact, here in Glasgow, every priest received a notice that he can administer the Sacrament of Confirmation. I’m sure that pertains everywhere else as well now. Future Church historians will look with horror at this all but universal application of what is supposed to merely an exceptional permission. The point is, Canon Law, while it demands obedience in matters of discipline, is not on the same level as infallible definitions of dogma.
How do we know the difference? Well, firstly, take e.g. the document Humanae Vitae which was restating a moral teaching that has always been held in the Church from the beginning: restating the immorality of preventing births using drugs and devices. It’s always been held to be immoral and that is communicated clearly in the document. Ditto the statement issued from the Vatican that the Church does not have the authority to confer priestly ordination on women. Appeal to Tradition. Secondly, the manner of delivery. The Pope will say clearly in a document that is binding on the faithful – such as a document or papal bull articulating a dogma always held by Christians but not yet defined, such as the Assumption of Our Lady – he will clearly state that this is a teaching that is binding on the faithful. We must, therefore, accept this newly defined (but not new) dogma. There CAN be no new dogmas.
I’ve not been able to study the command you quote from the Decretum Gratiani, but whatever, at best it is an isolated example of medieval Canon Law (which is not infallible teaching) being used to apparently condone slavery in a particular political situation. You won’t find it in the 1983 code of Canon Law! Here’s a useful resource to show the consistency of the Church’s condemnation of slavery.
http://users.binary.net/polycarp/slave.htmlAnd finally, DSimon, you wrote:
“What is this perfect source of moral information that Catholics are supposed to use to make their ethical decisions, if both their own interpretation of morality as well as Church law’s interpretation are fallible?
If there is no such directly infallible source of morality, but rather it is always distorted by the imperfect interpretation abilities of humanity, could not the Church also be wrong about homosexuality?”
But there is a directly infallible source of morality, DSimon – it is the Pope – primarily – teaching in conformity to the whole of Tradition. Anything that contradicts what has been handed on to us from the time of Christ and the Apostles, is not infallible. So, no, the teaching on homosexuality will never change, nor will moral teaching on the other controversial moral issues like abortion etc.
To show that the Church has got it wrong on homosexuality, you’d need to find some example from the first century AD which demonstrates acceptance, by Peter and the apostles, of the homosexual lifestyle and Google till the cows come home, DSimon, that you will not find. It’s really very simple, DSimon. The central body of the Church’s teaching is traditionally called “the deposit of Faith” because it refers to the teachings that have come down to us from the time of the Apostles. After the death of the last apostle, there could be no new public revelation.
There is no verse in the New Testament (and I’m sticking with the NT now, to highlight Catholic authority) about the evils of abortion, euthanasia, contraception or homosexuality per se, because it was left to the authority of the divinely mandated Church to pronounce on slavery, along with the other moral issues. It’s not, as some folk mistakenly claim, that “Jesus never said anything about these issues” – He did: He said “You are Peter…to you I give the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven…he that hears you, hears me…”
If any pope introduces novel teachings (such as ecumenism, condemned by St Paul and every Pope in Christendom until our times) then Catholics are free to (indeed obliged to) reject them.
If the Pope were to announce that he was going to “OK” homosexuality (which the Holy Spirit will prevent him doing) we would be obliged to reject that, as well. St Paul teaches that sexual sin is more serious than any other sin, because every other sin is committed outside the body. When we sin sexually, he taught, we sin against our own bodies, which are the Temple of the Holy Spirit. That includes homosexuality.
Since the beginning of Christianity, sex outside marriage has been condemned. The fact that Christ does not list the couplings to be condemned is irrelevant. He mandated His Church to do the prescription work, using Tradition, the entire revelation of Scripture and the natural moral law, written into the human heart.
Now, DSimon, none of this will convince you, but it’s the best I can do. And be impressed that I’ve taken time away from my Valentine chocolates to put this together just for you…
In summary – without the Church, as St Augustine says, we cannot properly understand the Gospels.
Come on in, DSimon! We need you!
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Here’s some news on the diseases front, from the CDC
http://americansfortruth.com/news/gay-mens-hiv-rate-44-times-that-of-other-men-syphilis-rate-46-times-higher.htmlVery clear cause for concern for homosexuals.
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