An LGBT Perspective: Losing One's Faith Trying to "Pray Away the Gay"

Tomorrow is Easter and I will not be going to church - not because churches are closed due to the coronavirus pandemic but because I largely lost my Catholic faith as I struggled to "pray away the gay," something I began to do around age twelve and continued for decades without success.  As a child, I loved Easter, especially at my grand parents' beautiful church pictured at left. That was, of course, before I realized god had made me gay.  Early posts on this blog look at my faith struggle and I talk about it from time to time, usually when I see religion being used to deliberately harm LGBT people.  A piece in an Irish LGBT publication struck a chord with me because the author's experience so closely parallels my own.  

Like me, the author left Catholicism and largely walked away from organized Christianity (I remain technically a member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America - they liberal Lutheran denomination).  Many in the LGBT community have had a similar experience once they shake off the self-hatred their religious upbringing had instilled in them as they come to comprehend the cruel lie that god supposedly loves you and made you in his image yet made you intrinsically disordered per Church dogma. I continue to worry about LGBT youth currently engaged in the fruitless struggle to pray away the gay, likely suffering from self-hate as a consequence.  Here are highlights of the piece which may help straight friends who remain churchgoers to understand why I find religion to be a harmful force for so many:  

I had a number of theories about my sexuality in my early years. At one point, I believed that God had made me gay as a challenge to see if I could overcome my same-sex desire. Later, about a year and a half into my efforts to pray myself straight, I thought that he might have just made some horrendous mistake. But even believing that was difficult, because I knew that God didn’t make mistakes. So, the theory I ultimately settled on was that my attraction to other boys was actually just a phase – it would pass in time and then, finally, I would be just like everybody else. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. 

Today, I am 26 years-old and I am openly and confidently gay. But I still look back on that teenager who so desperately wanted to change who he was and wonder: how did it get to that point? There were many reasons, of course; homophobic bullying, a hostile society – but my intense Catholic faith also played a big part in making me hate myself. My parents, while not exactly devout Catholics themselves, brought us to mass most weekends. We were cultural Catholics, but religion was also a big part of our lives. It was how we came together and it allowed us to connect to something bigger than ourselves. At 11 years-old, when most boys my age started having crushes on girls, I started having crushes on boys. By the time I was 12, my sexuality was in full swing – and I despised myself for it. I ventured onto Google and quickly established that being gay was not only socially unacceptable, but my church – the religion I cared so passionately about – strictly forbade it. I became increasingly aware of just how hated gay people were within Catholicism. It was an incredibly isolating and alienating feeling, to feel rejected from a place in which I had always felt so at home. I was too young to see the Catholic church’s anti-LGBT+ views for what they are: bigoted, normative, hateful. Instead, I told myself that I was the problem – that I needed to be fixed.

It was in that context that I started asking God to help me, to try to pray myself straight. My efforts were not without their complications; by that point, my faith was starting to crumble around me. I had backed myself into a theological corner, and it was patently clear that there was no easy way out of it. If God never makes mistakes, and makes us in his image, how could he have gone so far wrong with me? Why would he voluntarily create somebody who was intrinsically disordered when he makes everybody in his image? And if he truly loved me, as I had always been told he did, then why would he put me through this unbearable suffering? These questions did not have easy answers, and even while I continued to pray myself straight, they pushed me gently towards the exit door of atheism. 

When I was 13, I finally came up with a plan of action – I decided I would ask God to take this burden from me. To my dismay, my efforts to pray myself straight only made me more miserable. I felt utterly hopeless, and started to wonder if I would be better off dead. I contemplated suicide on numerous occasions as a teenager; whether to die or stay alive became a constant grappling point. I often wondered which would hurt my parents more: me dying or me coming out as gay.

Just before my 15th birthday, as I yet again tried to pray myself straight, I told God it would be the last time I would ask him to fix me. I told him I had had enough – I had tried hard enough to rid myself of these feelings. I asked him to rescue me – and he didn’t. That finally put an end to my belief in a higher power.

It is an intensely alienating feeling, standing in a beautiful Catholic church, remembering all the times I tried to pray myself straight, all the times I asked God, Jesus and the Virgin Mary to rescue me.

Today, I am firmly an atheist and the only masses I attend are the odd Catholic wedding. I’m not necessarily happy I’m an atheist, but I am happy that I’m no longer part of an organisation that is not just intolerant, but is actively hostile to LGBT+ people. I now understand that I, like all queer people, deserve so much better than what the Catholic church is prepared to offer us. I still hold out hope that one day, the church will change its teachings on LGBT+ issues, but that hope dims by the day. Every time it looks like Pope Francis is starting to move towards greater acceptance, he imminently throws more discrimination our way.

I no longer care what the Catholic church thinks of me. I keep my hope alive for all the other children growing up in that institution. It breaks my heart that they have to learn that they are not loved unconditionally like their straight and cisgender peers. I hope that one day, young queer people will no longer contemplate suicide because the church that was supposed to love them rejected them. I hope that they will be able to go to mass and won’t feel alienated in the way so many queer people do.

But right now, change looks a long way off. The Catholic church of today is an intensely backwards organisation that endeavours to keep people inside tiny boxes. But queer people cannot – and will not – thrive inside boxes.

 Unlike the author, I do not see myself as an atheist.  Rather, I am perhaps a deist like Jefferson and some of the other founding fathers.  There is a higher power - just not the god of the bible or the Roman Catholic Church.

The Intensely Personal Struggle of "Coming Out"

The New York Times is running a lengthy piece entitled "Pete Buttigieg’s Life in the Closet- 

And Why It Took Him Until He Was 33 to Come Out" that looks at the presidential candidates struggles with who he was and, at least based on the title, suggests he should perhaps have come out earlier.  As the title of this blog notes, I did not come out until mid-life - age 49 in fact - after basically 37 years of struggling with accepting I was really gay. Recently, the husband and I have met two nice, highly successful men who, like me did not make the decision to come out until around the age 50 mark. Like myself, both had married women and father children and it took decades for them to realize that their efforts at conforming to the heterosexual norm simply had not and was not working.  While "coming out" is supposedly easier nowadays, the reality is that there are still huge societal, religious, and family pressures to conform and be straight.  The result is that many of us engage in incredible - and self-delusional - mental and psychological gymnastics and contortions to avoid admitting the reality that we are gay and will always be gay no matter what we try to do about that reality.  In my case, it ultimately was a choice of coming out and dealing with it or suicide.  I ultimately did come to terms with it and found a comfort in my own skin that had eluded me most of my life, but I did have two suicide attempts along the way.  As long as there is not rank hypocrisy involved - think closeted anti-gay Republicans and closeted anti-gay religious charlatans - no one has the right to tell someone to come out or to criticize them for when they decide to come out.  Here are article highlights:

The closet that Pete Buttigieg built for himself in the late 1990s and 2000s was a lot like the ones that other gay men of his age and ambition hid inside. He dated women, deepened his voice and furtively looked at MySpace and Friendster profiles of guys who had come out — all while wondering when it might be safe for him to do so too.

Chris Pappas, who was two years ahead of Mr. Buttigieg at Harvard and is now a Democratic congressman from New Hampshire, said he arrived at college “pretty much convinced that I couldn’t have a career or pursue politics as an L.G.B.T. individual.” Jonathan Darman, who was one class ahead of Mr. Buttigieg, remembered how people often reacted to a politician’s coming out then: “It wasn’t a story of love but of acknowledging illicit desire.” And Amit Paley, who graduated in Mr. Buttigieg’s class, recalled that “it was still a time where vocalizing anti-gay sentiments was not only common, but I think pretty accepted.”

The thought that 15 years later someone they might have shared a dorm or sat in a lecture hall with would become the first serious openly gay candidate for president of the United States never crossed their minds. But no one would have found the possibility more implausible than the young man everyone on campus knew as Peter.

Mr. Buttigieg, now the mayor of South Bend, Ind., struggled for a decade after leaving Harvard to overcome the fear that being gay was “a career death sentence,” as he put it in his memoir.

Mr. Buttigieg spent those years trying to reconcile his private life with his aspirations for a high-profile career in public service.

Attitudes toward gay rights changed immensely during that period, though he acknowledges that he was not always able or willing to see what broader social and legal shifts meant for him personally.

“Because I was wrestling with this, I’m not sure I fully processed the idea that it related to me,” he said in an interview.

More than most people his age — even more than most of the ambitious young men and women he competed against at Harvard — he possessed a remarkably strong drive for perfection. He went on to become a Rhodes scholar, work on a presidential campaign, join the military and be elected mayor all before he turned 30. After being deployed with the Navy to Afghanistan in 2014, he said he realized he could die having never been in love, and he resolved to change that. He finally came out in 2015, when he was 33.

Few experiences in his young adulthood were as formative in shaping his identity as the hypercompetitive environment he encountered at Harvard. Even liberal Cambridge, where meeting a gay student or professor would have been fairly unremarkable, did not always nurture the sense of confidence that he and many of his gay classmates felt they needed to be themselves. At times their surroundings seemed to do just the opposite. Mr. Buttigieg took a long and fraught path from life as an undergraduate who once had a girlfriend to a presidential candidate who travels the country with his husband in tow. While he was still in the closet, the country became a different place very quickly. And to understand Mr. Buttigieg’s journey is to understand the microgeneration in which he came of age. When members of the Harvard class of 2004 were juniors in high school, Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay man from Wyoming, was bludgeoned, tied to a fence post and left to die in a murder that shocked the nation’s conscience. By the time they shipped off to Cambridge, few would have any gay friends — at least ones who were open about it. And the idea of a man marrying another man, or a woman marrying another woman, seemed almost absurd. The closest thing gay men and lesbians had to marriage was a civil union, which in 2000 was legal in exactly one state: Vermont. 

One thing no one seemed to peg him for was someone wrestling with being gay. He was so discreet that many of his friends and classmates said in interviews that they never would have guessed he was hiding anything until he told them. He left the testosterone-fueled campus sex banter to others. Hegel and de Tocqueville were more to his conversational tastes.

There was a small, close-knit social circle of L.G.B.T.Q. students. But they existed a world apart from Mr. Buttigieg’s Harvard.

“We were definitely on opposite ends of the gay spectrum — he was closeted and I was literally the campus drag queen, Miss Harvard 2002,” said William Lee Adams, who graduated in Mr. Buttigieg’s class and is now a broadcaster at the BBC World Service in London.

At the time, Mr. Adams said he was somewhat resentful of his peers who kept their identities hidden, having been bullied at school while he was growing up. Now, however, he is far more sympathetic because he better understands how personal it is to come out. “I felt a great sense of freedom at Harvard that I had never felt before because I could be out and not have food thrown at me,” he said. “Whereas Pete must have felt trapped, like he was in a straitjacket.” Mr. Flood, who wrote for The Crimson and knew Mr. Buttigieg as a friend, said that someone who worked so hard and thought so intensely about his future had to feel frustrated as he realized there was this immutable aspect of his life he was helpless to change.  “It’s like the one thing he couldn’t control about who he was and how he was going to present and how he was going to do all these things,” he said.

But when Mr. Buttigieg and his peers left college and started embarking on their professional lives, the country was changing in significant ways, jolting their sense of what it could mean to be openly gay and have a high-profile career. Many closeted people found their plight more difficult during the early years of social and legal change, as they wrestled with whether to finally open up after years of trying to maintain an impression of themselves that was false.

Mr. Paley, who was Mr. Buttigieg’s college classmate, remembers sitting in his dorm room in 2003 as a closeted junior and crying as he read Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s opinion in the landmark case Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down bans on intimacy between homosexuals on grounds that such laws were an affront to their dignity. “That helped me realize I can’t live my life this way,” he said of hiding his sexual orientation. It took Mr. Paley until the end of his senior year to fully come out, and he now serves as chief executive of the Trevor Project, an organization that works to advance the rights of L.G.B.T.Q. youth.

Once he [Buttigieg] came out, she said that being gay was never the first thing he wanted people to see when they met him — a veteran, Rhodes scholar, polyglot who was first elected mayor of South Bend when he was 29. “While it’s an important part of who he is, it’s not the only part,” she said. When he first ran for mayor in 2011 and won, he was closeted. A local gay rights group did not initially endorse him in that race, opting instead for a candidate with a more established track record on the issues. Mr. Buttigieg endured some awkward moments, like signing a city law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in 2012. To not think about how the law directly affected him, he acknowledged, “took a little compartmentalization.”

His employees and constituents saw an eligible bachelor in their young mayor and wanted to set him up with their daughters. Some on his staff even joked about his old light green Ford Taurus as a “chick magnet.” He did not bother to correct them.

When he did come out in the summer of 2015, the forum he chose was an op-ed for The South Bend Tribune. “It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am,” he wrote.

He may have waited far longer than most young gay men today. But ever the overachiever, he made record time in setting a new bar. In less than four years he went from being single and closeted to being married and out as a gay candidate for president.

Anyone who has endured the coming out journey is, in my view, likely to have engaged in more introspection and thoughtful analysis of religion and societal issues than most straights will ever experience. For me, that is precisely the type of individual that we need in the White House - especially when contrasted  with the malignant narcissist who currently occupies that hallowed residence.

The Oxymoron (and Internalized Homophobia) of Gay Republicans

Being gay and being a Republican, in my view, ought to be mutually exclusive.  Why support a party that actively supports discrimination against you and seeks to roll back your civil rights (the Trump/Pence Justice Department has just filed a brief opposing LGBT workplace protections).  To me, it is akin to being a Jew in Germany in the early 1930's and being a member of the Nazi party. Yet based on 2018 results, roughly 18% of the LGBT community voted Republican seemingly either out of internalized homophobia or greed and a lust for lower taxes.  Some prominent members of this group are affluent gays who seem to believe that their financial/social status protects them from the results of the Trump/GOP anti-gay agenda even as they throw others in the LGBT community under the bus. They might do well to recall that wealth did not protect wealthy Jews during the Holocaust (I'd recommend the watch the movie, The Woman in Gold, if they need a primer). Now, with the surprising rise of Pete Buttigieg in the Democrat nomination contest we see these same individuals attacking Buttigieg even as they rally to defend Mike Pence, one of the worse homophobes in the GOP.  A piece in Politico looks at this phenomenon: 

Pete Buttigieg is creating a split-screen moment for gay Republicans: The rising 2020 presidential contender speaks passionately about the military, God and efficient government. Some gay conservatives have spoken positively about Buttigieg — a moderate-sounding Midwesterner who married his husband last year — being a leap forward for gay Americans and politicians.

But the South Bend, Ind., mayor’s public squabbles with Vice President Mike Pence are pushing some gay Republicans to fire back at Buttigieg to defend a leader of their party. The dust-up is riling up parts of the right and serving as a high-profile test of how the broader electorate might handle the nation's first prominent gay presidential candidate.

“What’s intriguing about this particular candidate is that he’s running on really, you could say, the ‘gay conservative platform,’” said Richard Tafel, who helped launch the Log Cabin Republicans and authored “Party Crasher,” a book about being a gay conservative activist. “He’s talking about his military service. He’s talking about his faith. And he keeps saying we should make a moral argument. So on those things that also makes him somewhat attractive to gay conservatives.”

The 37-year-old Buttigieg's rising stature within the Democratic presidential primary has moved some gay Republicans to defend him on a key front where he's vulnerable, pushing back against anti-gay attacks and sharing their own experiences. Their outspokenness could help shift conservative views on gay marriage and ultimately help Buttigieg connect with voters who would otherwise never give a gay candidate of either party a second look.

Guy Benson, a prominent conservative commentator who is gay, has jumped into Twitter debates to challenge derogatory statements about Buttigieg. When Republican E.W. Jackson said that a Buttigieg presidency would turn the country into a "homocracy," Benson commented he was "proud to have voted against this person."

“I think by just existing and doing his thing, it’s a step forward for the community,” Benson said in an interview. “It just kind of seems normal, which is I think indicative of progress. In terms of him as a candidate I think he is undeniably very bright. I think he is interesting. I think he can be very thoughtful on topics and deeply informed on a number of policy areas.”

“The perspective from which he speaks is one that I relate to, but his opinion on some of the policy issues I differ from greatly,” said Jerri Ann Henry, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans. “But I still think I would rather have a debate with someone like him than someone like a Bernie Sanders, who I can’t even figure out where he’s coming from — a millionaire who rails against the 1 percent.”

Buttigieg's recent public skirmish with Pence, one of the nation's most prominent social conservatives [religious extremists] who worked with the mayor when he was Indiana governor, has fueled an early backlash on the right. Buttigieg rose to the upper tier of the Democratic race in part by criticizing Pence and Trump last month in a CNN town hall. The broadside, and others that followed, energized Buttigieg’s fundraising and jolted his campaign out of the bottom rungs.

“I think he made a crucial mistake when he started attacking Pence,” said Chadwick Moore, a prominent gay Republican who supports Trump. “They had a close working relationship in Indiana. It was somewhat close. Pence has been nothing but respectful and courteous to him and I think when he came after Pence it made him look opportunistic.”

The squabbling has rallied some gay Republicans to Pence’s defense, arguing that Buttigieg is trying to pick a fight with the vice president to cement his bona fides among gay liberals and the broader Democratic community.

Among gay Democrats, Pence is often criticized as the highest-ranking anti-gay official in the country. Pence was in the national spotlight as governor of Indiana in 2015 for pushing a controversial religious freedom bill that rallied gay Republicans and a wide swath of businesses against it.

Buttigieg, then a relatively unknown mayor even in the Midwest, offered a polite but public rebuke of Pence’s push — in line with the relatively cordial relationship between the two officials, despite their opposing views on some major policy points.

In interviews, multiple gay Republicans likened the situation facing gay Republicans today to what black Republicans felt during the 2008 presidential campaign when confronted with the prospect of Barack Obama becoming the nation's first African American president.

The Conundrum of Gay Republicans - Delusional, Self Loathing or Racist?

The 2018 midterm elections are two (2) weeks away and once again one is confronted with so-called gay Republicans who whether due to delusions or internalized homophobia and self-loathing are poised to vote for candidates of a political party that have more or less declared war on LGBT citizens.  With the passage of the Trump/GOP tax cuts last year, the fig leaf of supporting "fiscal conservatism" was wiped away.  Then there's the myth that the GOP supports "smaller government" even as it pushes to control women's bodies and regulate people's bedrooms.  And, if one cares about the environment, Trump and the GOP are (i) denying climate change is real and (ii) slashing regulations that protect us from air and water pollution. Not exactly responsible "smaller government."  So what motivates these gay Republicans - many of whom are privileged white males - if the GOP smaller government and fiscal responsibility they claim to support doesn't exist?  I have my theories and, my gut reaction is that it comes down to racism.  How else to explain these individuals supporting a party headed by a regime that has taken the following actions against LGBT Americans:

1.The Department of Health and Human Services is seeking to eradicate federal recognition and protection of transgender Americans by redefining gender to be based solely on a person’s genitalia at birth.

2. The Department of Labor is developing a rule to allow federal contractors to fire LGBTQ people even as Trump has sought to bar most transgender recruits from serving in the military

3. The State Department has began refusing visas for same-sex partners of U.N. diplomats and U.N. workers if they are not legally married in their home country (even those from countries where same-sex marriage is not legal).

4.The Department of Health and Human Services with the assistance of the Trump/Pence Department of Justice is allowing health care providers to discriminate against LGBTQ people on the basis of “moral objection.”

5.  Betsy DeVos, Trump's Secretary of Education, and the Department of Education  have refused to protect transgender students from bullying and harassment.

6.  The Bureau of Prisons eliminated Obama-era policy protecting transgender prisoners

7.The Department of Justice gutted policies that protect transgender people from employment discrimination and has filed legal briefs supporting the right of employers to fire LGBT employees based on anti-LGBT animus.

8.  The Department of Justice dropped a lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s anti-transgender “bathroom bill.”

9.  The Department of Commerce removed sexual orientation and gender identity from the proposed 2020 Census survey.

10.  Trump announced the “Deploy or Get Out” rule, which could remove HIV+ military personnel from service.

11.  The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to allow businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ people.

12.  Trump/Pence has created inhospitable work environments for LGBTQ federal employees.

13.  The Trump White House has yet to appoint an LGBTQ liason.

14.  The Trump White House refused to acknowledge Pride Month for the second year in a row.

15.  Trump has appointed two (2) anti-gay justices - Gorsuch and Kavanaugh - to the U.S. Supreme Court who, with the other "conservatives" could roll back past court rulings affirming LGBT rights. 

 As I note above, there would appear to be no reason for any gay individual to vote Republican unless they are either (i) subsumed with greed and place tax cuts above their own civil rights and dignity, or (ii) subscribed to the white supremacy that now is a main plank in the GOP agenda.

Catholic Church Perpetuates Sex Abuse Crisis Through Its Own Policies

I have followed the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal closely since it first exploded in Boston in 2002. Indeed, I have a Google Search agent that sends me daily up to a dozen stories from across the globe on the still roiling scandal that has begun to claim high Church clerics who participated in the abuse or aided and abetted it. The Church hierarchy and right wing Catholic extremists (e.g., the site Church Militant) have made a concerted effort to blame the abuse epidemic on gay priests and homosexuality rather than the western rite celibacy requirement and the Church's utterly bizarre stances on sex and sexuality - the true cause in the minds of a number of mental health experts and the Australian Royal Commission investigating the scandal in Australia.  Now, a piece by a long time journalist for La Croix International, an online Catholic paper republished in the Washington Post belatedly throws responsibility back on the Vatican and its perverse and bizarre policies.  While the author addresses some of the root problems in Church, he overstates the role of homosexuality.  Most experts classify the predator priests and pedophiles and/or psycho-sexually maladjusted, not gays in the common sense.  Nonetheless, it is refreshing to see someone correctly pointing the finger at the Vatican and its unsound polices and dogma.  Here are excerpts:

The Catholic Church is being rocked — again — by high-level sexual abuse scandals, with allegations in recent weeks surfacing in Chile, Honduras and the District [of Columbia], home to Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a once-super-popular cleric who is facing accusations by five males of harassment or abuse.

And again, people say they are shocked and outraged, which shows how Catholics still refuse to see that there is an underlying issue to these cases. It is the fact that almost all of them concern males — whether they are adolescents, post-pubescent teens or young men.

And while no adult who is of sound psychosexual health habitually preys on those who are vulnerable, there is no denying that homosexuality is a key component to the clergy sex abuse (and now sexual harassment) crisis.

But let me be very clear: psychologically healthy gay men do not rape boys or force themselves on other men over whom they wield some measure of power or authority.

However, we are not talking about men who are psychosexually mature. And yet the bishops and officials at the Vatican refuse to acknowledge this. Rather, they are perpetuating the problem, and even making it worse, with policies that actually punish seminarians and priests who seek to deal openly, honestly and healthily with their sexual orientation.

Our problem in the Church is of the abuse of power, an abuse that happens as a result of homophobia that keeps gay men in the closet, bars them from growing up and results in distorted sexuality for many gay priests. We need to address this elephant in the rectory parlor. They are products of a clerical caste and a priestly formation system that discourages and, in some places, even forbids them from being honest about their homosexual orientation.

Sadly, many of these men are or have become self-loathing and homophobic. Some of them emerge as public moralizers and denouncers of homosexuality, especially of the evil perpetrated on society by the so-called gay lobby.

As recently as 2005, just a few months after the election of Benedict XVI, the Vatican issued a document that reinforced the “stay in the closet” policy by saying men who identified as gay should not be admitted to seminaries.

In fact, one of the prime authors of that document — Monsignor Tony Anatrella, a priest-psychotherapist from Paris — was recently stripped of his priestly faculties after being credibly accused of abusing seminarians and other young men in his care.

[A]ll gay people, indeed the entire Church — would benefit greatly if these healthy gay priests could openly share their stories. But their bishops or religious superiors have forbidden them from writing or speaking publicly about this part of their lives.

This, too, only encourages more dishonesty and perpetuates a deeply flawed system that will continue to produce unhealthy priests. 

 Having been raised Catholic, I am all too aware of how badly Catholicism's approach to human sexuality can screw one up.  I was in therapy for a couple of years to undo the damage.  Trapped in seminary high schools and colleges, then seminary, where sex - and women - were viewed as sinful in almost every respect, it is little wonder so many priest were psycho-sexually damaged.  

Pope Francis: Same-Sex Families Deserve No Recognition

Since his rise to the throne of St. Peter I have founding it beyond annoying to see Catholic gays who cannot let go of their internalized homophobia and walk away from Catholicism gush and swoon over Pope Francis.  Indeed, these individuals cling to unofficial comments made by Francis to try to convince themselves that Francis might be less extreme than his two predecessors.  In the process, of course, they strive to ignore the reality that Francis has done NOTHING to change official Catholic Church dogma that condemns every LGBT individual.  Now, perhaps statements made by Pope Francis at an event for Catholic families in Italy will wake these individuals and Francis apologists to the reality that the Church is incapable of change - at least absent massive defections of members and plummeting parishioner collection revenues.  What did Francis say?  That same sex headed families  - and by extension, their children - deserve no recognition.  Only heterosexual headed families and their children merit recognition and support.  Metro Weekly looks at Francis' revelation of his true deep seated animus towards LGBT individuals and their families. Here are excerpts:

Pope Francis has condemned same-sex families, saying they do not deserve to be recognized in the Catholic Church.

Francis made the comments at an event for Catholic families in Italy, saying that opposite-sex parent families are the only partnerships that should be recognized by the church.

“It is painful to say this today: People speak of varied families, of various kinds of family [but] the family [as] man and woman in the image of God is the only one,” he said, according to ANSA News Agency, who published the remarks on Saturday.

Francis apparently also said that abortion should be considered the modern-day Holocaust.  “In the last century, the entire world was scandalized by what the Nazis did to ensure the purity of the race,” he said. “Today we do the same, but with white gloves.”

The Pope even praised spouses who stay with partners that are unfaithful, saying that it’s more holy to wait for them to stop cheating rather than seek a divorce. “Many women — but even men sometimes do it — wait in silence, looking the other way, waiting for their husband to become faithful again,” he said, adding that it was “the sanctity that forgives all out of love.”

[L]ast month, the Pope warned Italian Bishops to monitor for any gay applicants trying to join the priesthood and to not allow them into the church.

And in 2015, he said that conservative Christians should be allowed to refuse to issue same-sex marriage licenses if doing so violates their personal religious beliefs. That same year, he said that the institution of marriage was threatened by redefining sexuality.

Remember this: Francis could change this within a matter of minutes if he chose to issue a reversal of the Church's poisonous doctrine while speaking "ex cathedra."  He chooses not to and, thus, if one is gay and unfortunate enough to have been born into a Catholic family, there truly is only one solution: walk away and convince as many family members and friends as possible to walk away with you.

When Will the Catholic Church End Its War on Gays?

Recently through one of the Google search agents I use to aggregate news stories, I came across a review of the movie "Call Me By Your Name" in the National Catholic Register - which is NOT to be National Catholic Reporter which realizes it is the 21st century, not the 12th century - wherein the reviewer was responding to attacks by Catholic extremists for not strongly condemning the movies strongly enough.  As I am inclined to do, I left several comments on the piece which were for the most part were not greeted kindly (frankly, I was surprised the moderator even published my comments).  

What struck me by many of the comments was an apparent need on the part of many to have someone to condemn and look down upon in order that they could feel superior - much like poor whites that my southern belle grandmother would have deemed "poor white trash" that desperately need to discriminate against blacks due to a similar desperate need to feel superior to someone else. 

The second thing that struck me was the blind embrace of ignorance and a refusal to even slightly admit that medical and medical knowledge has progressed light years from what was know at the time the Church fathers - many of whom seemingly needed mental health care themselves by modern standards - concocted the Church's bizarre rules on human sexuality.  Some even cited writings of the far from holy John Paul II to justify their hatred and bigotry, conveniently forgetting that Popes have proven wrong on moral issues before - e.g., the Popes that issued determination upholding slavery.  The truth is that the Church is wrong in its anti-gay animus and that it is causing countless  younger Catholics to leave the Church.  A piece in the National Catholic Reporter looks at the dilemma facing the Church which could well decide whether the Church largely collapses in modern nations.  Here are excerpts:

In a recent radio interview, Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich-Freising said the Catholic Church needs to provide better pastoral support for lesbian or gay people but stopped short of endorsing blessings for same-sex couples as a general practice or policy.

At the same time, he appeared to leave open the possibility of such blessings in individual cases. Marx is the third German bishop, and the highest-ranking by far, to have raised the possibility of same-sex blessings in recent months.

Marx, the archbishop of Munich, is one of the most influential leaders in the Catholic Church. He serves on Pope Francis' Council of Cardinals, heads the German Bishops' Council, and is president of the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community.

Marx's struggle to articulate a coherent strategy for addressing the needs of the church's gay and lesbian members (the interview does not seem to have included any reference to transgender, intersex or bisexual people) once again shows the dilemma for those trying to work within the framework of current doctrine, church structure and political polemic of institutional Catholicism. There seems to be a recognition by the cardinal that current dogma and practice are failing many in the church, and a desire to find ways to respond to their needs. Marx sees pastoral responses to individual situations as the solution.

The problem with this approach is that it reinforces the church's official view of lesbian and gay individuals and same-sex couples as less than full members of the body of Christ. It requires priests and other pastoral workers to determine whether an individual situation merits the risk of a secret blessing, and implicit validation of the person's sexual orientation and intimate relationships.

Perhaps the only way for the institution to change is through an incremental approach, whereby the number of individual cases gradually increases, and the experience of those involved somehow convinces a sufficient number of those in authority that a change in doctrine is merited. Then the process of debating the theology and tradition that might support such a change could begin. How long such discernment might take is anyone's guess.

In the meantime, the official church's persistent inability to fully embrace LGBTQI people and their families will continue to drive away not only many of them, but also many members of their extended families, friends, and allies — not to mention massive numbers of young people in general.

It bears noting that, in the United States and many other parts of the world, the people of the church are far ahead of its leadership on LGBTQI issues. In countries where same-sex marriage is legal, tens of thousands of Catholics have rejoiced in witnessing the civil marriages of their children, grandchildren, parents, siblings, cousins and friends, many in ceremonies that include a spiritual blessing.

Countless others, especially where marriage equality has yet to be achieved, have joined their loved ones in rituals that celebrate the commitments lesbian and gay couples have made to each other. Their presence and pledge to honor and support these couples represent the triumph of love over law.

It is a hopeful sign that Marx, other German bishops, and indeed numerous Catholic Church leaders around the world are grappling openly with the place of LGBTQI people in the church. An even more hopeful step will occur when church leaders finally engage the true experts in this struggle in genuine dialogue, and we begin to work out solutions together.

Personally, I view anyone who is LGBT that remains in the Catholic Church as engaging in a form of masochism or still suffering greatly from internalized homophobia (sorry, Andrew Sullivan, but why continue to torture yourself?).  Indeed, one former acquaintance continues to remain a Catholic and not surprisingly has the attendant emotional psychological conflicts and damage one would expect.  The simple solution is to walk away.  As for family members of LGBT individuals who remain in the Church, deliberately or not, they are harming their LGBT relatives.   Only massive losses in membership - and most importantly, revenues - will hasten change in the Church.  

Are Gay "Conservatives" Finally Realizing Trump Has Betrayed Them?

As a former Republican who witnessed first hand the beginning of the Christofascist takeover of the Republican Party base and closely followed the animus of Christofascist towards LGBT individuals, I long ago decided that being gay and being a Republican was somewhat akin to being a 1920's German Jew and belonging to the Nazi Party.  Sadly, a relatively small percentage of the LGBT community failed to accept that reality and supported Trump and the GOP in general.  Whether motivated by their greed and the allure of tax cuts, an inability to fully let go of homophobia that had internalized during their childhoods, or attracted by the racism that is a key component of today's GOP, these individuals backed a man and a party that are more or less their sworn enemies.  Now, as the Trump/Pence war against the LGBT community continues, some have seemingly pulled their heads out of their asses and are realizing that they betrayed not only themselves but the rest of the LGBT community.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at this awakening that should have been obvious from the very beginning.  Here are article excerpts:

During his run for office, Donald Trump positioned himself as a champion of gay rights, someone who would bring the Republican Party into modernity on an increasingly settled civil rights cause. But well into his first year in the White House, those who hoped for the best have been disappointed and those who assumed the worst say their fears are realized.

The Trump administration’s record on LGBT issues has been defined by retrenchment, both sides concede. Many of the advances made under the Obama administration have disappeared, replaced by policies and directives that could have been written by an anachronistic social conservative instead of the cosmopolitan New York businessman occupying the Oval Office.

Among gay-rights advocates, few had higher hopes for this White House than Barron. He was largely responsible for arranging for Trump to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2011—an event credited with helping bring the reality TV star into the GOP mainstream. And though the activist occasionally soured on Trump’s campaign, Barron also launched an LGBTers for Trump group and championed the argument that the Republican nominee would be inherently better for the community than Hillary Clinton. After the election, Barron wrote that Trump would be an ally, friend, and advocate.

Instead, Barron and others are alarmed at the direction the administration is taking. Trump is responsible for some of it, having signed a directive banning the recruitment of transgender troops. But much of it has originated from his agencies. The Justice Department has changed its position on whether sexual orientation is covered under the Civil Rights Act, withdrawn federal protections for transgender kids in schools, and said it will not prosecute organizations who cite religious objections when declining to serve gay customers.

Recently, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services quietly withdrew a 2014 rule that would have required longterm-care facilities to recognize same-sex marriages when deciding visitation rights and decision-making responsibilities (PDF). . . . .This week, the National Park Service abruptly decided to withdraw its sponsorship of New York’s pride flag, which had been dedicated at the iconic Stonewall National Monument.

“Trump’s supporters like to say, ‘It’s not what he says, it’s what he does that matters.’ That’s definitely the case when it comes to issues affecting LGBT Americans,” said Jimmy LaSalvia, who started the now-defunct conservative gay rights group GOProud along with Barron. “I never thought that Donald Trump was an anti-gay homophobe. I certainly didn’t think that when I met him back in 2011. But we’ve all learned a lot about who he really is since then. With his political pandering and posturing to endear himself to the intolerant wing of the GOP over the last few years, it doesn’t surprise me that this administration will go down as the most anti-LGBT in history.”

It was certainly not supposed to have played out this way. During the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump vowed that he “would do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of the hateful, foreign ideology [of Islamist terror].” When the conservative crowd applauded, he paused and added, “I have to say, as a Republican, it is so nice to hear you cheering for what I just said, thank you.”

“He will be the most gay-friendly Republican nominee for president ever,” Gregory T. Angelo, the president of the Log Cabin Republicans, insisted to The New York Times in April 2016.

Those who warned that Trump’s pro-gay rights rhetoric was just empty bluster are more heartsick than content when they say, “I told you so.”

“As the Russia investigation heats up and as his failures at basic governing pile up, I think gays will more and more become scapegoats. It’s a pretty old, standard playbook for political bullies,” said Richard Socarides, who served as White House special assistant and senior adviser to President Clinton. “Anyone who thought Trump would go easy on the gays was clearly wrong. The question now is not whether he will set us back, but how far.”

 esterday it was confirmed that Trump will be the keynote speaker at the upcoming "Value Voters Summit," a confab of many of the most strident gay-haters in America.  With his support shrinking, expect Trump to pile on more and more anti-gay attacks as he strives to keep evangelical Christian support.  I saw all of this coming and I have nothing but contempt for gays who are stupid enough - or perhaps bigoted enough - to have voted for Trump and who remain Republicans.  They are harming all of us. 

Pulse Anniversary: the Catholic Church Continues to Harm Gays

Within the last week I wrote a post about the phenomenon of LGBT individuals supporting anti-LGBT Republican candidates who push an agenda diametrically oppose to LGBT equality and equal human dignity itself.  A similar bizarre phenomenon can be observed with members of the LGBT community who remain members of the Roman Catholic Church, or worse yet actively support the Church and its anti-gay hierarchy financially.  Having been raised Catholic and having spent 37 years to "pray away the gay," I know first hand the ability of the Church to screw one up psychologically and to instill unlimited amounts of self-hate and internalized homophobia.  But I grew up in a pre-Internet age when homosexuality was classified as a form of mental illness. Today, there is so much access to accurate information that never existed when I was a youth or even college age.  And then there is the sex abuse scandal that revealed the utter moral bankruptcy of the Church hierarchy. Thus, I am continually amazed at those who remain in a church that condemns them and denigrates them, especially when alternatives such as the Episcopal Church and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America are readily available.  Meanwhile, as a piece in the National Catholic Reporter sets forth, the Catholic Church continues to wound LGBT individuals and harm lives.  Here are excerpts: 

When Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 48 others inside a prominent gay night club in Orlando, Florida, a year ago this week, the city's Catholic bishop, John G. Noonan, denounced what he called a "massive assault on the dignity of human life." The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops lamented the "unspeakable violence." The Vatican's press office released a statement decrying "such terrible and absurd violence." Among these sincere expressions of grief, not one recognized the fact that this assault on human dignity and this horrific crime had targeted gay people specifically.

The first step in what will be a slow healing process is for Catholic leaders to acknowledge the church plays a role in wounding LGBT people by using dehumanizing language.

While the Catechism of the Catholic Church rejects violence and "unjust discrimination" against LGBT people, it also calls homosexuality an "inclination" that is "objectively disordered." Before he was elected Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger led the Vatican's chief doctrine office for more than two decades. In a 1986 "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons," Ratzinger described homosexuality as a "tendency toward an intrinsic moral evil." Seventeen years later, he wrote that growing recognition of same-sex civil unions legitimized the "approval of deviant behavior." Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, even celebrated a public exorcism in 2013 to protest the Catholic governor's signing a same-sex marriage law.

Dehumanizing language has consequences. "It doesn't reflect that our experiences as gay and lesbian persons are a gift, something that brings us closer to other people and to God," said Francis DeBernardo, executive director of New Ways Ministry, an organization that works to build bridges between LGBT Catholics and the church. "People are alienated by this language and feel rejected. It ends conversations rather than begins conversations." San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy, . . . . he called that terminology "very destructive language that I think we should not use pastorally." He explained that "in Catholic moral theology it is a philosophical term that is automatically misunderstood in our society as a psychological judgment."

For a pope, the way that Francis speaks about gays and lesbians is nothing short of revolutionary. "A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality," the pope said in a 2013 interview. "I replied with another question: 'Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person? We must always consider the person."

But these expressions are the exception, and not the rule. Over the past decade, at least 50 LGBT Catholics have been fired or forced to resign positions in Catholic schools after public disclosures of same-sex relationships. Students and families rally behind these teachers and administrators, who are often beloved leaders and role models with years of experience. While in most cases the school has a legal right to act, the firings leave Catholic institutions that want to teach students about mercy and justice looking blithely indifferent to those values. Contracts or "loyalty oaths" that some Catholic teachers are required to sign are often hyper-focused on sexuality. This disproportionate focus on sex and sexuality as the defining marker of Catholic identity is problematic. It eclipses the church's expansive social justice teachings that are rooted in the Gospel's focus on people who are poor, excluded and marginalized by the powerful. . . . . These firings tear apart communities that are filled with faithful people. The church is sending a contradictory message. We're told we are made in the image and likeness of God, but these kind of firings say that isn't true."

According to research, a majority of Catholics support same-sex marriage. Many church leaders usually interpret this evidence to assume there has simply been a failure to effectively teach and reach the faithful. Doubling down with the same message, however, has cost the church. Research shows that the growing number of Americans — especially Millennials in their 20s and early 30s — who no longer identify with any religion are especially turned off by what they consider to be unjust positions toward LGBT people. Those raised Catholic, according to data from Public Religion Research Institute, are more likely than those raised in any other religion to cite negative religious treatment of gay and lesbian people as one of the primary reasons they left the church.

If they want to retain the next generation of Catholics — including LGBT people and their allies — Catholic leaders should listen more closely and learn from the experiences of gay and transgender people. When more than 100 bishops and other Catholic leaders met in February for a conference organized by the National Catholic Bioethics Center, one of the top items on the agenda focused on how increased calls for transgender rights will impact Catholic hospitals, schools and parishes.

If Catholic bishops really want a church that listens, heals and goes to the margins as Pope Francis does, it's far past time to build a culture of encounter with the LGBT community. I recently met a Catholic deacon from St. Petersburg, Florida, who had a wake-up call after his son transitioned to a transgender woman. "I was blissfully ignorant of all things LGBT until it came to my family," Ray Dever told participants at a conference, "LGBT Catholics in the Age of Pope Francis." The Catholic father and others like him have a lot to teach bishops and priests who have rarely if ever sat down with a gay or transgender person. "There are so many families who reject their LGBT kids and that's tragic, especially when that is done in the name of faith," Dever said. "I'm no expert, but what these families need to hear is God created these kids just the way they are and that God loves them."

As I have noted previously, I left the Catholic Church and my best advise to LGBT Catholics is to walk away.  If you need/want a liturgical church,  I highly recommend the  Episcopal Church  or Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.  As for the Catholic Church, history has shown two things are what really forces the Church to reform: rapidly falling membership numbers and falling revenues. Rather than staying and "working for reform from within", walk away and urge as many family members and friends to do likewise.  That will bring the most rapid reform and an end to anti-gay animus. 

Alt-Right Gays Mock Blacks and the Transgender at NYC Confab

I left the Republican Party years ago before I publicly "came out" when it became crystal clear that (i) being gay and being Republican were inherently incompatible, (ii) being a Republican was incompatible with supporting constitutional rights for all citizens, and (iii) being a Republican and being a truly moral person were likewise incompatible. Things have only gotten worse over the intervening years.  Indeed, in my view, being gay and a Republican in the age of Trump is akin to being a 1930's German Jew and actively supporting the Nazi Party.  I truly do not grasp what would motivate one to want to remain a Republican other than some sort of lingering internalized homophobia and/or religious brainwashing. Some friends will no doubt take offense at this assessment , but seriously, they need to take a look in a mirror and ask themselves WTF are they doing.  A gathering of gay "conservatives" at a Republican gathering in New York City underscored the ugliness and moral failings of these "gay Republicans. Both BuzzFeed and The Daily Beast have pieces that look at the general misogyny that marked the event.  Here are excerpts from BuzzFeed:

A forum at the Metropolitan Republican Club in New York City on Thursday night was billed as an "all-star" collection of activists in the "new gay movement in the Republican Party." And indeed, panelists inside the tony brownstone on Manhattan's Upper East Side were among the country’s most notable conservative gay-rights activists.

But rather than detail how they were building a new movement — or discuss their influence in the nascent Trump administration — the gay men on stage spent most of two hours ridiculing the left while peppering their speeches with cheap cracks about transgender people.

They mocked President Obama’s LGBT liaison as "the most unattractive tranny," joked that Caitlyn Jenner hadn't had "the operation," and said Obama-era rules to protect transgender students were “horrifying.”

People of color and women fared little better with the all-white, five-member panel. One claimed the gender wage gap was "a total fucking myth," while another opined that black people don't face oppression because they aren't enslaved. Then he laughed about adopted Asian babies.

This week, nearly 100 days into Trump’s term, these gay Republican activists had a chance to assess their success.  Or they could make fun of people.

To illustrate the left’s knee-jerk histrionics over Trump, Lucian Wintrich, who led a project during the campaign called Twinks for Trump, blasted Obama's LGBT liaison — a transgender woman named Raffi Freedman-Gurspan.

“Begrudgingly, I’ll say ‘she,’” said Wintrich, implying that he didn’t consider her a woman. He went on to call her “the most unattractive tranny," a line that cast the packed room of Republicans into guffaws under golden chandeliers and star-spangled bunting.

BuzzFeed News followed up with [Fred] Karger about whether anti-transgender slurs and comments from other panelists would actually entice young voters to the party.  Karger said he’d tuned out those comments.

Sadly, such behavior is the norm for the Republican Party base: greed and inhumanity, if no outright hatred towards others are pillars of today's GOP.  In my view, no one moral and decent - much less LGBT - can be a Republican.  

Fear of Being Outed Prompted Killing by Aaron Hernandez

Internalized homophobia is a horrible thing.  It impacts individuals in varying ways: (i) it causes some individuals to be overwhelmed with self-hate and resort to suicide, (ii) others lash out against others in the LGBT community by embracing anti-gay politics and religion, and (iii) others take desperate steps to conceal their "secret."  New reports indicate that  former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who hung himself in his solitary jail cell, took deadly action and killed a one time friend to prevent being "outed."  A sad end to a sad story and life.  Tainted because of religious fueled homophobia and the internalized self-hate that it causes in so many LGBT individuals.  Science tells us that sexual orientation is not a choice, is set before we are born, and is a normal aspect of biology.  Yet, ignorance embracing religion demonizes same sex attraction and continues to destroy lives across the world.  The Advocate looks at Hernandez' disturbing tale.  Here are excepts:

Newsweek confirmed that Hernandez, 27, left a suicide note for his female fiancee, his daughter, and the boyfriend he met at the Souza Baranowski Correctional Center in Shirley, Mass, where he was serving a life sentence for murder. Hernandez's boyfriend, who has not been named by the media, is under suicide watch.

Hernandez was convicted for the murder of his one-time friend, Odin Lloyd. A motive for the 2013 killing was never clear, but Newsweek and other outlets reported that Lloyd was aware Hernandez was bisexual and had carried on a long-time affair with a male friend from high school. At the time of his death, Lloyd was dating the sister of Hernandez's fiancee; it's believed Hernandez was fearful word of his bisexuality would reach his fiancee.

Lloyd also allegedly called Hernandez a "smoocher," which the football star believed was an antigay slur. Later, a man accused of helping Hernandez attempt to conceal Lloyd's murder told his girlfriend he would not have helped him had he known he was a "limp wrist."

Hernandez, born in Bristol, Conn., in 1989, lost his father at the age of 16. Even with a promising football future at the University of Florida, Hernandez could not escape a life of crime and violence. He was accused of taking part in a 2007 double-shooting that left two men injured in Gainseville, Fla.; he was not convicted. Five years later, he was connected to a shooting in Boston that left two men dead, but was found not guilty of that crime five days before he committed suicide. 

When Hernandez's body was discovered this week — the same day his former teammates traveled to the White House to celebrate their Super Bowl win in February — he had a Bible verse scrawled on his forehead and red ink on his hands and feet, imitating the stigmata.