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Okay, we're doing a gay Catholic thread. Here's the tea. Once you read this, you are a fully certified expert in Gay Shit and have no need to listen to anyone or anything else ever again.
[extremely kidding, I am one dude, please listen to other people]
[extremely kidding, I am one dude, please listen to other people]
The Catechism enjoins "respect, compassion, and sensitivity" for gay people. And honestly? I think most Catholics are okay at the compassion part. The problems come in at the sensitivity part, and get huge at the respect part. (What follows also applies, mutatis mutandis,
to my experiences in evangelical circles, before and since I swam the Tiber.)
Sensitivity becomes an issue because few Catholics actually take time to intelligently imagine what a gay person's life is like. They could in principle learn it from books, films, &c by gay artists,
Sensitivity becomes an issue because few Catholics actually take time to intelligently imagine what a gay person's life is like. They could in principle learn it from books, films, &c by gay artists,
but -- for culture war reasons -- this is almost universally dismissed as a source of knowledge. We'll be coming back to that. What Catholics tend to do instead is try and figure out whatever the nicest way of phrasing Catholic teaching about homosexuality is, and put that first.
This is a terrible approach for several reasons.
1. We know already. There are people who don't know about the Real Presence or the Resurrection, who know that the Church forbids gay sex. Putting it first comes close to insulting gay people's intelligence (Catholic or not).
1. We know already. There are people who don't know about the Real Presence or the Resurrection, who know that the Church forbids gay sex. Putting it first comes close to insulting gay people's intelligence (Catholic or not).
2. There *is* no nice way to put it. Even on a secular showing, gay people get a raw deal (being different sucks sometimes, especially when you usually realize you're different in high school of all places). On a Catholic showing, marriage, family, and professional ministry --
i.e., the things Catholics think of as "most versions of a meaningful adult life" -- are *all* effectively closed to gay people. Trying to put that "nicely" comes across as the person saying it trying to make themselves comfortable, instead of giving us space to hurt and grieve.
3. It assumes that sexuality is the thing we're most preoccupied with. For some of us, that's true; it's also true for some straight people. For others, it's not. Considering how often gay people are told not to identify with their sexuality, having that assumption thrust upon us
is more than a little exasperating.
4. It frames a deeply personal, relational question in purely intellectual terms. Obviously there's an intellectual side to it, as there is to marriage. But few men propose by reading from the Summa, and few women want them to. Same rules here.
4. It frames a deeply personal, relational question in purely intellectual terms. Obviously there's an intellectual side to it, as there is to marriage. But few men propose by reading from the Summa, and few women want them to. Same rules here.
5. It asserts authority over people's lives without first earning their trust. The people who most fervently proclaim "the truth about homosexuality" are, in my experience, people whom that truth costs nothing. Someone like me has to pay for it. Their words feel counterfeit.
And that feeling has *nothing to do* with whether I agree with them, and everything to do with whether I trust them to care about me.
These are points that few straight Catholics have ever thought about, because they don't have to. That results in insensitivity; note the word:
These are points that few straight Catholics have ever thought about, because they don't have to. That results in insensitivity; note the word:
"insensitivity," not malice. It's a lack of awareness of something, a dulled nerve that isn't carrying a message to the brain. You don't have to *mean* to be insensitive. In fact people rarely do; keeping the analogy, stinging remarks normally *hit* a nerve, on purpose.
Here's where we circle back around to "respect." In my experience, Catholics rarely think about the real experience of gay people (Christian or not) because they actively resist being told about it unless it fits a very specific, very comfortable narrative for them. Ex-gay crap
is the extreme version, but any story about "leaving behind tHe LiFeStYlE" will do. LGBT art, film, and literature are not just criticized (which is completely fair and needed), they're resolutely ignored; the very word "gay" elicits endless lectures about identifying with sin,
without first finding out what gay people mean by the word "gay" and whether it has anything in common with the assumptions Catholics make. (In its way, this behavior is very like that of fundamentalists overhearing Catholic terms like "Mother of God" and calling us idolators,
while refusing to sit still for an instant to hear what "Mother of God" actually means.) Listening to gay people is treated as superfluous. That demeans us -- treats us as incompetent, deceitful, or both.
That is, so to speak, the problem with compassion separated from respect:
That is, so to speak, the problem with compassion separated from respect:
compassion is good, but it isn't a threat to our own ego or our sense of security. The idea that Catholics *do* often mistreat LGBT people is not a comfortable one for most Catholics to hear. Far easier to claim it's all a kulturkampf against the Church.
But that's not how Christians should operate. "We're right and everyone else sucks," with an occasional side of "poor things," is exactly what the religious elite in Christ's day were doing: "This people which knoweth not the Law are accursed." And He had no time for that.
The idea that we may have something to repent of, even and *especially* in how we treat people who transgress, is baked right into the Gospels. Distinguishing between authentic moral and religious principles and mere social customs, and being willing at times to flout the latter,
was a huge part of Christ's ministry.
It felt super weird to end such a long thread with such a short tweet but I think I'm done for right now.
It felt super weird to end such a long thread with such a short tweet but I think I'm done for right now.
Postscript. On rereading, the pronoun/POV shifts in this are kind of a mess: I'm part of two groups (LGBT and RCC) that are often at each other's throats in our culture, which can be a little dizzying that way. Sorry and oh well; Twitter has no edit button, I'll clean up later.
