As noted in several past posts, the jihad against homophobia did not arise until the Middle Ages and it began in Europe as a handful of ascetic - and I would argue mentally unstable - earlier Catholic Church fathers became obsessed with stamping out all things sexual. As noted, even a husband and wife were to have sex ONLY to create a child and they were NOT supposed to enjoy it lest they be "fornicators" and damned to an eternity in Hell. The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Society traces this neurosis and how it spread through the Church as the Vatican sought to enforce priestly celibacy - in no small part to keep control of Church wealth - and imposed rigid conformity with control by an ever more imperial papacy. Once established within the Church, early missionaries took this neurosis with them around the globe and in time obliterated widespread social acceptance of homosexuality. It wasn't just small pox and measles that these "servants of God" took to native peoples. A piece by blogger friend Jeremy Hooper (we first met at the 2008 LGBT blogger summit in Washington, DC) looks at how this religious based neurosis about sex continues to motivate the anti-gay forces. Here are some excerpts:
If there's any name that modern Americans associate with the wrong side of the marriage equality debate, it's Maggie Gallagher. She will likely go down in history as the most prominent face of that cause. Maggie got there early and she was really loud about it. The National Organization For Marriage co-founder essentially shaped the talking points that the "protect marriage" movement uses to this day.
And as I knew then, Maggie's advocacy and overall view on marriage was largely guided by the fact that she, like most everyone involved at NOM, is a deeply devout Roman Catholic. In her latest column for National Review, which she titles "Why Catholic Marriage Matters" and in which she argues that divorce and remarriage is a sin, Maggie makes this very canonical root very apparent. . .
It's pretty clear that if Maggie had never come back to the Catholic church (her mom left it when she was a kid), then she never would have taken on this pet cause. It's possible that she would have gotten involved, but it's not probable. Maggie makes it clear that her views on marriage—from who can enter it, how two people conduct themselves within it, and how they dissolve it (if they even can)—are much more informed by the confessional than they are by the constitution.
So much of what those of us who have had the focused conversation about civil marriage equality have had to take on and refute has been a wholly (and hole-y) faith-driven viewpoint that movement masterminds like Maggie—and Robert George and Brian Brown and Salvatore Cordileone and Ryan T. Anderson and...—then back up and reshape into something they think they can sell to the public. They sell special exceptions for tax-subsidized Catholic adoption agencies as "religious freedom;" sell resistance to fair employment protections as "coercion;" they sell the denial of thousands of state and federal rights to certain couples, many with children, as "protecting marriage and family." But no matter the packaging, it's always a religious view. It's a moral stance. It's a personally-held conviction that they, the ones who choose to subscribe to a certain orthodoxy, then pit against the shared public policy of a nation with supposedly distinct lines between church and state. And increasingly, with Bishops acting like lobbyists and the NOM that Maggie co-founded pretty much operating as a wing of the Vatican, it's a very Catholic view.
In essence, marriage inequality doyenne Maggie and her merry band of devotees have demanded—stealthily and strategically—that we all give currency to specific convictions that may or may not have any weight within our life. And worse yet? They love to accuse us of only thinking of ourselves.
Jeremy is right. The selfish ones are the Christofascists who demand that others live by their rules in large part so that they can avoid facing the growing scientific and historic proof that they are living their lives based on myths concocted my ignorant herders from over two millennia ago. The ultimate irony - and perhaps hypocrisy - is that super Catholic Maggie Gallagher, a former unwed mother, is married to a Hindu (I have nothing against Hindus and have many Hindu clients who from my experience are far, far more moral in their conduct than most "godly Christians" I encounter). Maggie Gallagher's unwed pregnancy seems to have unhinged her and she bizarrely sought solace in Catholicism. Then, because of her own personal demons, she sought to force all others to live by her neurotic moral code. Sadly, she continues this agenda and works hand in hand by Catholic clergy who close their eyes to the rape and abuse of children and youths while seeking to punish those who have thrown off the shackles of the Church's truly Middle Age view of sex.
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