An emailer writes:
“I’m biased of course, but I know my partner, Gustavo, is a truly wonderful person. He is one of those people who truly don’t have a malicious or bad bone in their body. He emanates a gentleness, a caring and a sweetness which is quite rare, and virtually everyone we know, even just simple acquaintances comment on this very soon after meeting him.
As such he is a truly wonderful doctor, with an overflowing practice. He practices psychiatry, and his patients come from every background in our lovely City of Angels – Jews and Catholics, Asians and WASPS, everybody. They all love my husband! From an immigrant Mexican family, with 2nd grade educations, he worked his butt off at school, managing to get 4.0 GPAs, won scholarships to UCLA, and eventually made it to medical school, against all odds.
He has told me many times that his faith got him through all of this. He was born in the US but spent the first few years of his life back in Mexico, where his grandmother took him to the small Catholic church in their village every single day. He treasures those memories.
He believes deeply, and he was in fact a priests’ assistant, and seriously considered the priesthood. His love for his religion is great, and so many of his beautiful qualities were supported and enhanced by the teaching of the Catholic Church. He is all good, my man, and I treasure him.
After the death of John Paul, we were at a dinner party with another gay couple, and he got very angry when they started making derogatory comments about the pope’s treatment of homosexuality. Now, with Benedict, he is going through a slow mourning as he realizes that he is slowly losing his religion, or rather I would say, his religion is losing him quite rapidly. What a terrible loss for Catholicism to lose people like Gustavo, who are so much children of God. Strangely, I have grown closer to my own Jewish faith in the eight years of our relationship, because faith was always such a beautiful, wonderful thing for Gustavo, and he helped me overcome my own cynicism.
And so Benedict, supposedly a man of God, pushes away good people from this church. I have no doubt in my mind that what Benedict is doing now is a crime, a crime against God. If this were discrimination against Jews or blacks or any other group, it would be classed as fascist bigotry, and eventually the perpetrator would be brought to task by society in an appropriate way and exiled from their institution. Pope Benedict cannot get away from this crime against humanity. Whatever his or others’ personal views against homosexuality, to discrimate against a group in an institutional form is apartheid, is Nazism, is fascism, and nothing less.”
A pope dedicated to demonizing and excluding people from the unconditional love of God? It beggars belief.
YGLESIAS AWARD NOMINEE: “Both political parties are now willing and eager to spend tax dollars as if they were passing out goody-bags to grabby four-year-olds at a birthday party. The Democrats are already forging their 2006 and 2008 message: We will spend just as many trillions of dollars as Republicans, but we will spend them better than they do. After witnessing the first few Republican misappropriations for Hurricane Katrina, the Democrats may very well be right.” – Stephen Moore, Wall Street Journal, today.
(The Yglesias Award is given to individuals brave enough to tell their own political side some uncomfortable truths)
The Dish 