Notre Dame Tennis Star Player Comes Out As Gay

Slowly but steadily gay athletes are coming out of the closet.  Having been in the closet for 37 years myself, I know full well the toll it takes on one's soul and the sense of isolation that one must live with as one is always afraid of letting anyone too close lest they discover the secret.  For those making the bold move, it is in someways only the beginning of the journey since in today's society we have to come out over and over again as we meet new people and enter new situations.  But that said, coming to terms with one's self is the critical first step.  Among the latest athletes is Notre Dame tennis star Matt Dooley who has admitted that he once sought suicide as his solution to his sexuality.  Again, having traveled that route myself, I do understand how one can reach that point.  Fortunately he has put that behind him.  Here are highlights from HuffPo:

Notre Dame tennis player Matt Dooley said the hardest person to tell he was gay was himself.

"Saying gay for the first time was extremely tough, almost choking, because you know your life will never be the same. That was the hardest part, to move forward from there," the 22-year-old senior said Thursday. "For me at least, every part of my being was like, 'No, no you're not.' But I talk about growing. You learn to accept what you can't change, and this is something I can't change."

Dooley says he has received "overwhelmingly positive" feedback since disclosing publicly on Monday in an article posted on Outsports.com that he was gay. He had told his coaches in August and his teammates on Sept. 16, the two-year anniversary of trying to commit suicide by overdosing on pills because he was struggling with who he was.

"That day I wanted nothing more than to escape the anguish of coming out to my family, my friends, and, in a way, myself," he wrote in the article. "Death was better than accepting — or revealing — that I was gay."

Even after the suicide attempt, he ostracized himself from his family for more than seven months because he feared their reaction and because he was still struggling to accept who he was. He wouldn't return his family's phone calls or emails and stayed away when they tried to visit, even though they were fully behind him when he came out.

"It's internal homophobia," he said. "Often time it's more of what you think of yourself."

Dooley's disclosure comes a matter of weeks after Missouri football player Michael Sam came out publicly, setting himself up to perhaps be the first openly gay player in the NFL. Jason Collins recently became the first openly gay player in the NBA and just signed a second, 10-day contract with the Brooklyn Nets.

Dooley is working with the university's student welfare and development office to produce a video involving all teams at Notre Dame that will promote the You Can Play initiative, which fights sexual orientation discrimination. Members of PrismND, the first official organization dedicated to serving the gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning students on campus, were pleased to see Dooley come out.

"It's hard to imagine something like that happening even a couple of years ago, receiving the support he did from students on campus and the administration," said Bryan Ricketts, co-president of PrismND, which started last year.

Coach Ryan Sachire said it's been business as usual with the team.  "The guys have said, 'OK, it's part of Matt, it's who he is, that's great. We love him. He's still a great teammate of ours and we're going to move forward as a team and not think about it,'" he said.

Dooley, who is from New Braunfels, Texas, said he's received support from around the country and hasn't heard anything negative. Still, he sometimes struggles with certain thoughts, such as the idea he may never have children.

"I've come a long way and I'm comfortable with who I am. But I also wanted to explain that I'm not perfect. I'm not completely free from any pain from it. It's still there. Still at times it just hurts. Certain issues are still just painful," he said.

The most important message he wants to get out is to let people struggling with their identities know that they will be accepted.

Kudos to Dooley.  I hope in time he will find more peace with who he is and let go of negative feelings that come from our still too homophobic society not to mention anti-gay institutions like the Roman Catholic Church.  He is absolutely right that coming out to one's self is perhaps the hardest thing of all.  In your heart you know the truth even though you don't want to.  Being able to stand in front of a mirror and say "I'm gay, and it's OK" is a huge step.

 

Catholic Political Divide Over Obama at Notre Dame

Also involving religious insanity is the debate over President Obama's invitation to give the commencement address at Notre Dame University, a Catholic university that seems to attract Catholic extremists who see the world solely through the lens of abortion issues. For the record, I am not one who favors abortion and I have a low view of women who use abortion as a method of birth control rather than properly using other birth control methods. However, I do not believe I have the right to dictate to others that they can never have the right to an abortion regardless of the circumstances. Not so the Catholic Church or the Notre Dame fanatics many of whom I have known believe that popping out baby after baby every 15-18 months is proper family planning. Fortunately, not all Catholics fall into this extreme category as highlighted in this Washington Post story:

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A campaign by outraged Roman Catholics to keep President Barack Obama from delivering the commencement address at Notre Dame shows that the gulf between the church and backers of abortion rights remains deep. Yet the effort to get the school to rescind its invitation to Obama also highlights a political disconnect between the conservative Catholic hierarchy and millions of U.S. Catholic voters.

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One Catholic leader, Archbishop Raymond Burke, accused Obama of pushing an anti-life, anti-family agenda. Burke, the first American to lead the Vatican supreme court, said Friday it was "a scandal" that Notre Dame had invited Obama to speak.

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Yet polling and other evidence shows that Catholic voters have a largely positive view of the president, closely tracking other national polling. Obama's standing is more evidence that U.S. Catholics don't always follow the Church hierarchy, whether on issues such as abortion and contraception or political preferences. Also, the president's community service background and his opposition to the Iraq war appeal to some Catholics. . . . Obama is also widely popular among Hispanics, a fast-growing growing Catholic population in the U.S.

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Patrick Whelan, a physician at Harvard Medical School and president of Catholic Democrats, said that by taking such a hard line against Obama, bishops and other conservative leaders risked driving Catholics away from the church rather than cool their support for the president. "There are unintended consequences to this kind of angry, vituperative language about their opponents," Whelan said. "By making themselves pawns of the conservative right, the bishops are playing into a cycle of decline for our church."

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Increasingly, the Roman Catholicism is becoming a third world religion with observance in modern, educated counties declining. Only uneducated and extremist followers tend to still blindly follow a corrupt and out of touch hierarchy that continues to act as if we were living in the 13th century.

Notre Dame Hypocrisy

I have not said too much about the continuing swirl of protests from the pedophile priest loving set at Notre Dame University that has its panties in a knot over Barack Obama's selection as the commencement speaker this year. These folk who worry only about children before they are born continue to brown nose and ass kiss the members of the Church hierarchy who deliberately covered up sexual abuse of minors and callously reassigned predator priests to new parishes. Equally bad, these folks had no apparent problem with welcoming the Chimperator to the campus even though the Catholic Church in theory opposes the death penalty which Bush authorized more than any other governor. At times I truly wonder how these Catholics got their heads so far up their own backsides that they cannot see the hypocrisy in their double standards. What is shocking about the Chimperator - as is brought out in a New York Review of Books column - is just how little he carried about those he was sending to to be executed. Or maybe it's not shocking coming from the man who took the nation to war in Iraq based on lies and who has responsibility on his hands for the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqi civilians. Here are some column highlights:

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In the twenty-first century, a state governor represents the last vestige of the "divine right of kings," because he has absolute power over life and death—especially when such power is entrusted to politicians motivated more by expediency than by conscience. . . . All governors claim to agonize over death penalty decisions. All claim to scrutinize every possible angle of the cases of condemned persons facing execution under their watch.

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George W. Bush during his six years as governor of Texas presided over 152 executions, more than any other governor in the recent history of the United States. Bush has said: "I take every death penalty case seriously and review each case carefully.... Each case is major because each case is life or death."

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He might have succeeded in bequeathing to history this image of himself as a scrupulously fair-minded governor if the journalist Alan Berlow had not used the Public Information Act to gain access to fifty-seven confidential death penalty memos that Bush's legal counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, whom President Bush has recently nominated to be attorney general of the United States, presented to him, usually on the very day of execution. The reports Gonzales presented could not be more cursory.
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Take, for example, the case of Terry Washington, a mentally retarded man of thirty-three with the communication skills of a seven-year-old. Washington's plea for clemency came before Governor Bush on the morning of May 6, 1997. After a thirty-minute briefing by Gonzales, Bush checked "Deny"—just as he had denied twenty-nine other pleas for clemency in his first twenty-eight months as governor.

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But Washington's plea for clemency raised substantial issues, which called for thoughtful, fair-minded consideration, not the least of which was the fact that Washington's mental handicap had never been presented to the jury that condemned him to death. Gonzales's legal summary, however, omitted any mention of Washington's mental limitations as well as the fact that his trial lawyer had failed to enlist the help of a mental health expert to testify on his client's behalf.

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When Berlow asked Gonzales directly whether Bush ever read the clemency petitions, he replied that he did so "from time to time." Instead, Bush seems to have relied on Gonzales's summaries, and they clearly indicate that Gonzales continuously sided with the prosecutors.

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Berlow writes, "The fact that courts have rejected a defendant's legal claims arguably places an added burden on a governor—as the conscience of the state...—to conduct a scrupulous review." How, then, could Bush's legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, systematically neglect to provide mitigating evidence or "new facts" that the petitioners' juries had never heard? For the man who said that the nature of the war on terror "renders obsolete [the Geneva conventions'] strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners" and called the conventions "quaint" when issuing guidelines for the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo, this is not surprising.

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There is more, but you get the drift. Bush uncaringly and irresponsibly deprived condemned individuals from having a chance to either prove their innocence or at least mitigating circumstances. Believe me, the more exposure I have to the trial process, the less faith I have in the court system. The outcome of a case is often a crap shoot and is decided more by the prejudices of the judge and/or jury than the true facts of the case.