The Catholic Church’s Gay Obsession

Having been raised Roman Catholic and indoctrinated with the Church's obsession that sex is dirty and that gay sex is particularly evil - it took several years of therapy to get over the psychological damage or dare I say abuse - I also learned that few institutions are more filled with hypocrisy.  Prissy old men in dresses, most of whom have no clue about living in the real world, purse their lips and feign piety even as they ruin the lives of countless individuals.  In reality, they are petty, power mad and seek to control the sex lives of others even as they are miserable in a supposed life of celibacy.  Divorce, contraception and homosexuality are constantly on their minds and in their pronouncements, but it is the gays that get particularly horrible treatment even when a blind eye is turned towards other sexual transgressors since the financial cost of driving those people away might jeopardize their far to pleasant lifestyle.  A column in the New York Times looks at the Church's hypocrisy and anti-gay obsession.  Here are excerpts:

REPEATEDLY over the last year and a half, I’ve written about teachers in Catholic schools and leaders in Catholic parishes who were dismissed from their posts because they were in same-sex relationships and — in many cases — had decided to marry.

Every time, more than a few readers weighed in to tell me that these people had it coming. If you join a club, they argued, you play by its rules or you suffer the consequences.  Oh really?

The rules of this particular club prohibit divorce, yet the pews of many of the Catholic churches I’ve visited are populous with worshipers on their second and even third marriages. They walk merrily to the altar to receive communion, not a peep of protest from a soul around them. They participate fully in the rituals of the church, their membership in the club uncontested.

The rules prohibit artificial birth control, and yet most of the Catholic families I know have no more than three children, which is either a miracle of naturally capped fecundity or a sign that someone’s been at the pharmacy. I’m not aware of any church office that monitors such matters, poring over drugstore receipts. And I haven’t heard of any teachers fired or parishioners denied communion on the grounds of insufficiently brimming broods.

About teachers: When gay or lesbian ones are let go, the explanation typically cites their contractual obligations, as employees of Catholic schools, not to defy the church’s strictures, which forbid sexual activity between two men or two women.

But there are many employees of Catholic schools nationwide who aren’t even Catholic, who defy the church by never having subscribed to it in the first place. There are Protestant teachers. Jewish ones. Teachers who are agnostic and, quite likely, teachers who are atheists and simply don’t advertise it. There are parish employees in these same categories, and some remain snug in their jobs.

The blunt truth of the matter is that during a period when the legalization of gay marriage has spread rapidly in this country, from just six states in 2011 to more than three times that number today, Catholic officials here have elected to focus on this one issue and on a given group of people: gays and lesbians.

Their moralizing is selective, bigoted and very sad. It’s also self-defeating, because it’s souring many American Catholics, a majority of whom approve of same-sex marriage, and because the workers who’ve been exiled were often exemplars of charity, mercy and other virtues as central to Catholicism as any guidelines for sex. But their hearts didn’t matter. It was all about their loins. Will the church ever get away from that?  Pope Francis seems inclined to do so . . .

The pope’s actions don’t jibe with the way many Catholic leaders in the United States are treating gays and lesbians. The National Catholic Reporter said recently that it could find, since 2008, about 40 public cases of employees’ losing jobs at Catholic institutions in this country because of issues connected with homosexuality or same-sex marriage. Seventeen of these occurred just this year.

“The bishops have picked up gay marriage ever since the 2004 presidential election as a special cause that they are against,” Cahill [Lisa Sowle Cahill, a professor of theology at Boston College] noted. She said that they were “staking out a countercultural Catholic identity” that doesn’t focus on “social justice and economic issues.”

“It’s about sex and gender issues,” she said, adding that it might be connected to the disgrace that church leaders brought upon themselves with their disastrous handling of child sexual abuse by priests. Perhaps, she said, they’re determined to find some sexual terrain on which they can strike a position of stern rectitude.

“They’re trying to regain the moral high ground, no matter how sure it is to backfire,” she said. Having turned a blind eye to nonconsensual sex that ravaged young lives, they’re holding the line against consensual sex that wounds no one.

What’s happening amounts to persecution. And it’s occurring not because the workers in these situations called any special attention to themselves or made any political fuss. No, they just loved in a fashion displeasing to many church officials, whose concerns with purity are spasmodic and capricious.

My advice to gays raised as Catholics is to walk away from the Church, shaking the dust from your shoes as you do so.  There are plenty of gay accepting churches out there and, if you long for the rites of the mass, the ELCA and Episcopal churches provide a near identical service but with out the hypocrisy and outright evil that pervades the Catholic Church hierarchy.  I have never regretted leaving the Catholic Church for even a single day.