Monday, June 10, 2019

Pope Francis Opts to Choose Ignorance With Respect to Sexuality

The Catholic Church has a centuries, if not millennium, long history of rejecting science and modern knowledge rather than admit that its antiquated dogma is flat out wrong. In the past, the Church's leadership refused to concede that the Earth revolved around the Sun instead of vice versa, it insisted that the Earth was flat, previous Popes supported slavery, and now, fast forwarding time-wise, Pope Francis is rejected modern medical and mental health science on sexual orientation and gender identity.  

Other than quacks funded by right wing groups or religiously affiliated institutions, the consensus among the medical and mental health professional community is that both sexual orientation and gender identity are set in utero BEFORE children are born as a result of hormonal influences that impact on both physical development as well as brain development that sets once sexual orientation and ones gender identity - the latter being the cause of individuals being transgender.  Like it or not, some people ARE born with mismatched physical attributes and gender identity.  Others are born gay.  Now, Pope Francis in true knuckle dragger form has dismissed the fact that a person’s gender can differ from the assigned sex at birth.  Anything rather than admit that the Church's ignorance based 12th century dogma on sex and sexuality is simply wrong.  No one "chooses" to be gay or to be transgender.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Francis' decision to place the Church once again on the wrong side of science and, down the road history.  One can only hope that Francis' wrongheaded decision will only serve to accelerate the flight from the Church.  Here are article excerpts:
Warning of a society “without sexual differences,” the Vatican on Monday dismissed the idea that a person’s gender can differ from the assigned sex at birth and said a fluid idea of identity was not “based on the truths of existence.”
The right to “choose one’s gender,” the Vatican said in an official document, is in “direct contradiction of the model of marriage as being between one man and one woman.”
The document, released as a guide for Catholic educators, held firm to the religion’s traditional teaching on gender and sexuality. But ­LGBT members of the faith said it put an official and updated stamp on viewpoints they had hoped were changing.
“This casts everything back to the Dark Ages,” said Marianne Duddy-Burke, the executive director of ­DignityUSA, a group that advocates for ­LGBT equality and inclusion in the church. “I think it is incredibly insensitive, to be talking still about gender and sexuality as a choice and a momentary whim rather than a fundamental God-given identity.”
The document, released by the Vatican office that deals with education, coincided with a month of Pride festivities in many countries around the world. It was not signed by Francis, but rather by two high-level officials — Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi and Archbishop Angelo Vincenzo Zani — in the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s bureaucracy.
The church’s retrenchment hints at one of the challenges it faces at a time of growing secularization — when many of its teachings on sexuality are being ignored as out of date. Francis has expressed an interest in outreach to ­LGBT followers, but he has also taken a clear stance on gender identity, decrying that children are taught in schools that “everyone can choose his or her sex.”
The church made a case that children had the right to grow up in a family “with a father and a mother,” and the document quoted an earlier Francis speech about how children benefit from seeing masculinity represented by the father and femininity represented by the mother. Traditionalist groups lauded the 31-page Vatican document, titled “Male and Female He Created Them.”
The Rev. James Martin, a prominent Jesuit who has advocated for the church to more openly welcome ­LGBT members, said on Twitter that the document calls for dialogue and listening “but sets aside the real-life experiences of ­LGBT people.”
“Sadly,” Martin wrote, “it will be used as a cudgel against transgender people, and an excuse to argue that they shouldn’t even exist.”
The good news is that the Church is hemorrhaging members.  In my youth, all of my family was made up of church-going Catholics.  Now, none of us remain in the Church and the newest generation has not been baptized at all.  This experience is not unique to my family.  Francis seems hell bent to cling to ignorance and, if it continues, the Catholic Church will one day be a church centered in the most ignorant and uneducated parts of the world, namely Africa and limited parts of South America. Given the evils the Church has done in the past, the collapse of the Church in the developed world will be a positive development.

1 comment:

EdA said...

Sadly again, a never answered question put to reactionaries who purport to "think" that sexual orientation is a "preference":

-- When did you decide to be straight?