MY HUSBAND, THE CATHOLIC

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)

A “PERSONALITY DISORDER”

According to the latest Vatican leak – to a far-right news service called “Catholic World News” – the new Pope will issue an edict banning all gay men from entering seminaries and the priesthood some time next month. The edict applies to all gay men, even if they are celibate, even if they would make great priests, and even if they have been chaste for over a decade. Money quote:

It will take the form of an “Instruction,” signed by the prefect and secretary of the Congregation: Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski and Archbishop Michael Miller.
The text, which was approved by Pope Benedict at the end of August, says that homosexual men should not be admitted to seminaries even if they are celibate, because their condition suggests a serious personality disorder which detracts from their ability to serve as ministers.
Priests who have already been ordained, if they suffer from homosexual impulses, are strongly urged to renew their dedication to chastity, and a manner of life appropriate to the priesthood.

To recap: the Church’s official position (as of 1986) is that homosexual persons are not sinful; they are “made in the image and likeness of God” and the notion that they cannot control their sex lives is, in the words of then-Cardinal Ratzinger, an “unfounded and demeaning assumption.” The new position is that this “unfounded and demeaning assumption” is now the truth. All gay men are suffering from a “serious personality disorder” and constitutively unable to maintain chastity and perform their duties as priests. What, one wonders, is the nature of this “serious personality disorder”? How does it prevent gay men from being productive members of society? If all gay priests “suffer” from this, then why are any of them still allowed to serve the Church? These are questions lay Catholics must demand of their leaders, as even some arch-conservatives already are. When a group of human beings are demonized not for what they do but for who they are, then we have a right to know exactly what the Pope means.

BIGOTRY SHARPENED: We don’t have the final document yet so we don’t know whether this blast from 1940s psychology will be enshrined in the document. Let’s hope it won’t. But I’m not hopeful. This is, after all, a clarification of the new Benedict XVI position on gays: they they are moral Untermenschen, somehow sick in their very souls, disordered to commit sin, people who must be cast out to cleanse the Church of evil. (The structure of the argument is very similar to that which for so long applied to Jews in Catholic teaching.) The conflation of homosexuality with pedophilia and the equation of celibate, faithful gay priests with compulsive child-molesters is integral to this new policy. In a word, it is inconsistent with previous teaching and morally appalling. And can you imagine what this does to the morale of the thousands of gay priests now serving the faithful? It will be up to the conscience of each, but I cannot see how any moral person can still work for an institution so wedded to the demonization of a whole class of people. Especially if you’re one of them. And what does it say to the gay laity? It says: you’re so sick in the head you cannot lead moral lives. God may be able to forgive you but our job is to protect every other Catholic from your disorder. To say that this is an attack on the core meaning of Christianity – that we are all equal before God – is superfluous. To say that it is a brutal, deep wound to the psyches and souls of millions is equally obvious. But somehow, like all evil, I have a feeling it will become accepted, as Benedict’s church continues its retreat from modernity into the superstitions and bigotries of earlier times. And like all policies of stigmatization and exclusion, it may subtly flatter those left behind and attach them more firmly to the church. As every beleaguered politician has found out, bigotry works. It may indeed work for Benedict as a strategy, especially in the Third World, where hatred of homosexuals is more common. But to rebuild a church on the basis of hate is a truly odious strategy. It may be Benedict’s ultimate legacy.

NOKO NONO

The blogosphere has so far been pretty quiet about the North Korean deal. From what I can glean from the MSM reports, it’s essentially a re-run of 1994: they trade one kind of nuke reactor for another; we pretend not to notice their subterranean nuke development; there’s plenty of space for this thing to fall apart; and Kim Jong Il gets more goodies from the West. Maybe China, Japan and Russia figure that NoKo is falling apart anyway and this kind of engagement makes sense. It might if we had some kind of Gorbachev figure in Pyongyang. But, ahem, we don’t. I know we don’t have many good options here, but it’s hard to avoid the impression that the Bush administration blinked. And if things weren’t going so poorly with Iraq, Iran and domestically, we might have been strong enough to say no. Prediction: this will fall apart because of NoKo’s non-compliance. Even today, according to the Washington Post, “the official North Korean news agency early today quoted an unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesman as asserting that Pyongyang would not give up its weapons program until it received nuclear reactors from the United States.” So the backpedaling is under way. Bush, alas, would rather find a way to blame Kim after the agreement falls apart than have China blame him now for recalcitrance. The fruits of weakness.

BACK FROM THE DOC

Just an HIV update. I’ve been on the new meds for a couple of months now and after a week or so of torpor, have no side-effects that I can speak of. My viral load – i.e. the amount of virus in my bloodstream – went from 141,000 particles per cubic mililiter of blood in late May to 1500 after ten days on June 2 and has now come down to a grand total of 121. Still not good enough. We’re hoping for under 50 at the next count. My CD4 cell count – a sign of the strength of your immune system – has gone back into its normal range. Thank God for the evil pharmaceutical companies. One day, when the history of this period is written, I have a feeling we will look back with astonishment as we recognize that advances in medical science, particularly pharmaceuticals, were arguably one of the most significant developments of this era. And yet the people who pioneered these breakthroughs were … demonized and attacked. Baffling and bizarre. I’m merely grateful the attacks haven’t stopped the research progress. They’ve merely slowed it. Oh, and I talked my doc into giving me a pre-emptive treatment of Tamiflu. I won’t use it, unless the birdpoop hits the fan. But I’ll have it just in case. I’m not relying on president Bush. Not this time.