Sexuality
The sin we cannot speak about in Mass
The gatekeepers of liturgical language are so concerned that the average Joe in the pew can’t understand the word “ineffable”, yet we’ve already dumbed down the language into insensibility. Witness today’s second reading, 2 Corinthians 6:18:
Avoid immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the immoral person sins against his own body.
Read at face value, this translation, the New American Bible, seems to say that there are some sins that are immoral and some that are not and that sins committed “outside the body” are not immoral. That makes no sense. But that’s because of the poor translation. The Greek word translated as “immorality” is “porneia”. Look familiar? Look like any English words we know?
This word also appears in several other places in the New Testament. In Matthew 5:32, where Jesus forbids divorce, he says, “Whoever divorces his wife, except on the grounds of unchastity (“porneia”), makes her an adulteress.” It has also been variously translated as fornication or to more specifically refer to homosexuality or bestiality or another sexual perversion. So Paul could be translated as saying, “Avoid sexual perversion. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexual pervert sins against his own body.” While that may be too blunt for a Mass where children are present, it has the benefit of clarity.
Perhaps we could tone it down a bit to “sexual immorality” or even “unchastity.” Oh, but will Joe Six-Pack in the pew be able to understand a subtle word like “unchastity”?
Instead we offer translations of Scripture that obscure meaning rather than convey it because we’re afraid of shocking people with straight talk about sin. Is it any wonder that collectively we’ve lost a sense of sin? Is it any wonder people have abandoned the sacrament of confession?
Photo credit: Arpingstone via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Parents teaching their children about sexuality
Right on line with my previous post on parents abdicating their responsibilities to their children and institutions arrogating it to themselves, I received an email today from Catholic Parents OnLine, which has produced a DVD entitled “A Parent’s Guide: Teaching the Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality.” (There’s a trailer on their site; go watch it.)
The video is based on the 1995 document from the Pontifical Council for the Family entitled “The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality - Guidelines for Education Within the Family”. The document was a response to the growing push for sex education in schools and even in religious education programs, everywhere but in the home. However, this document reiterates the Church’s teaching that parents are the “primary educators of their children,” including in matters relating to sexuality. This is primacy not just in chronology (i.e. because they’re the first to have contact with the baby), but in the order of authority. Not even the institution of the Church can usurp that primacy.
The web site also clarifies that the DVD is not intended as a sex education program, quoting Father Robert Altier:
This video does not attempt to teach sex education not does it attempt to bypass the parents or take their place, rather it is an attempt to provide a context and some confidence to parents as they strive to educate their children.
Bishop speaks the truth in love to NADLGM conference
Coadjutor Bishop Jaime Soto, who will become the ordinary of Sacramento, California, at the end of November, was invited to speak to the conference of the National Association of Diocesan Lesbian and Gay Ministries. These are people who work directly for bishops.
Bishop Soto simply repeated the Church’s teachings.
“Sexual relations between people of the same sex can be alluring for homosexuals, but it deviates from the true meaning of the act and distracts them from the true nature of love to which God has called us all,” Bishop Soto said. “For this reason, it is sinful. Married love is a beautiful, heroic expression of faithful, life-giving, life-creating love. It should not be accommodated and manipulated for those who would believe that they can and have a right to mimic its unique expression.”
At least five audience members walked out during his remarks and afterward he endured a group of audience members who berated him for what he said. A board member of the organization was overheard telling one of the tables in the room: “On behalf of the board, I apologize. We had no idea Bishop Soto was going to say what he said.”
Lawmakers angry at being held accountable
Democrat House lawmakers in Massachusetts are mad at their leadership because they’re being forced to vote on a same-sex marriage bill in an election year.
“He has no concern for the members,” said one legislator, who requested anonymity. “This is stuff we should be dealing with in the first year (of the session). It’s a lose-lose for anyone facing a challenger.”
Let that sink in for a second. Despite their claims, the politicians admit that the same-sex so-called marriage is so unpopular with the voters, even in liberal Massachusetts, that they don’t want to be held accountable for their vote. Instead they’d prefer to expand it into the rest of the United States, but only if they can do so when they have the maximum possible time to let voters forget. Or they could emulate their craven Senate brethren and just hold a voice vote so as to avoid being counted in the crowd.
These are your legislators, ladies and gentlemen. Cowards.
The fact is that they know that if they let democracy actually work, they would never be able to push their re-engineering deconstruction of society forward. This is why they also hide behind legislative tricks and gimmicks to avoid allowing a popular referendum on a constitutional amendment. It’s the traditional disdain for the average voter inherent in the liberal worldview. They see all of us as so bigoted, so stupid, so incapable of doing the “right” thing— as they envision it—that they must circumvent our right to self-governance and impose the solutions of a minority on the majority. We don’t live in a democracy nor a constitutional republic anymore. We are ruled by oligarchs who blind us with bread and circuses, or to use a more updated phrase, earmarks and pork-barrel spending.
The good news is that the legislators are feeling the pressure and are worried that going on the record today will affect their electoral chances in November. It means that constituents are contacting their legislators. Some representatives’ offices are reporting that calls, emails, and letters are coming in 6-1 against the bill that would repeal a 1913 law that keeps Massachusetts from spreading her errors.
(The law makes it illegal for out-of-staters to be married in Massachusetts if the marriage would be illegal in their home state. Homosexual lobbyists make much of the fact that the law’s original intent was to prevent “miscegenation” or mixed-race marriages. Whatever the original intent of the law, it’s effect today is to prevent out-of-state homosexuals and lesbians from getting marriage licenses in Massachusetts and then suing back home by invoking the “full faith and credit” clause of the US Constitution. The clear propaganda goal here is not just to repeal the law, but also to create the mental equivalence in the minds of the public between race and sexual preference.)
Photo: Kjetil Ree (Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 3.0)
Willful blindness on women’s cancers
As we were driving to and from the farmer’s market Saturday morning, all of the intersections in Salem were clogged with pink-shirted peddlers raising money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation. Melanie and I agreed that until the group —and other groups supporting research—was truly open to looking at all the possible sources of breast cancer, such as birth control pills, we were interested in giving them our money.
I’m not saying that I’m convinced that the Pill is the source of breast cancer. It’s much too complex for a layman like me to draw a conclusion like that. But it’s ideology, not science, that prevents organizations like Komen and the American Cancer Society and others from even being open to the possibility.
But even a cursory glance at the scientific data shows that something is up. Consider the Global Cancer Statistics, 2002 in “CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians”, published by the same American Cancer Society. Look at the incidence of breast cancer across the various regions of the world. North America is number one with 99.5 per 100,000 women, while Middle Africa is lowest. The most developed countries are all grouped at the top of the chart, while the least developed are at the bottom. The same goes for ovarian cancer, with almost the exact same chart. Why?
There could be many factors, including diet, exposure to chemicals prevalent in First World consumer goods, etc. But when you consider that 22.9 percent of all women in the US 15-44 years old use a form of chemical contraception, (PDF from the Centers for Disease Control’s National Survey of Family Growth; see Table 56, “Number of women 15–44 years of age and percent distribution by current contraceptive status and method, according to age at interview: United States, 2002”). Another 16.7 percent seek surgical sterilization. In what ways do these artificial frustrations of the body’s natural systems contribute to cancer in a part of the body intimately associated with the reproductive process?
(Incidentally, I’ve found a number of online sources that claim 80 to 90 percent of women 15-44 use contraception, which is only true if you include all forms of regulating births, even natural family planning! This “90-percent” is used to push young women into accepting prescriptions for the Pill, convincing them that “everyone’s doing it” and that it’s completely normal and safe. I’ve known young, faithful Catholic women who were convinced by their doctors to take the Pill to regulate and suppress their periods. Anything to get them on the Pill.)
The fact is that while liberals have blasted conservatives for introducing ideology into vital health education with regard to abstinence-only sex education, it is liberals who have put ideology ahead of science in cancer prevention and research. God forbid that one should suggest that perhaps unfettered sexual license does have consequences. For too many of them the Pill represents freedom from male oppression, freedom to emulate the worst impulses of the male psyche. Well, that “freedom” comes with a price.
Why they want to indoctrinate your kids
They see her six-year-old’s innocence, as they see all innocence, as a rebuke to their depravity. Hating that innocence, which must pain them whenever they encounter it, they want to extinguish it as soon and as thoroughly as possible. That’s why they want into the first grade classroom.
- Diogenes on the moral nihilism of sex educators and AIDS activists.
Bottom line: they want to turn love and marriage into a disease-riddled, emotionally empty, mechanical exercise of selfishness and physical activity. Who values sex more? Those who want to cherish it in the protected context of marriage and love and family or those who want to debase it and strip it of mystery and higher purpose?
But we’re the ones who are sexually repressed.
Using sex to sell the charity car wash
Since when has “pimping out” your kids become acceptable behavior?
On the main road into Salem, which is both Route 114 and North Street, there is a large car wash. As you might expect on Sunday mornings, it’s not too busy so the owners generously allow charitable groups—sports teams, youth groups, and so on—to conduct charity car washes. The kids do all the labor and they get a sizable cut of the proceeds.
Now, in order to bring in the customers at this slow time (and let’s just skip for now the discussion about more and more events taking up what was once the sacred Sunday morning church time), some of the kids stand out on the street with signs and gesticulate and plead with passing motorists to pull in.
It all sounds so innocent and wholesome so far, doesn’t it? It would except that nearly invariably the kids chosen for the enticement duty are teenage girls in bathing suits or halter tops and shorts. Madison Avenue has taught them well: Sex sells.
What really bugs me are the parents, especially the dads. Are fathers okay with this these days? I would never, ever allow my daughter to be used as some kind of sexual advertising gimmick for anything, charity or no.
Yet you see folks who are apparently okay with it.
As a society we’ve hypersexualized our children, yet we’re shocked that the moral fabric is decaying. We allow them to be used in a sexual manner to peddle a product, yet we’re surprised when perverts prey on them.
Here’s my message to all you dads out there: Don’t let your kids be used this way. (And this isn’t limited to girls either; your sons should not be used in this manner either.)
Children do not exist for the gratification of adults, in any way, shape, or form. Protect your kids from it.
Technorati Tags: teens | car wash | charity | advertising | parenting |
New Surgeon-General attacked for opinion on homosexuality
President Bush has nominated a new Surgeon-General and, as usual, liberals wants his scalp because he doesn’t embrace homosexuality as emblematic of all this is good and true in the world.
Dr. James Holsinger wrote in a paper in 1991 that homosexuality is unhealthy and unnatural. Well, when you get into the physical mechanics of it, um yeah, putting that, um, there is not healthy. In addition, two men or two women trying to have sex is unnatural since in fact sex is a procreative act and, by definition, sex between two men or two women is not procreative.
Ah, but for the sheer temerity of once stating what is blindingly obvious, Holsinger is to be tarred and feathered. Oh, and he is to be ridiculed because (snicker, snicker), he used an analogy that compared male and female genitalia to pipe fittings. Geez, people, grow up. It’s an analogy.
Holsinger, 68, presented “The Pathophysiology of Male Homosexuality” in January 1991 to a United Methodist Church’s committee to study homosexuality. (Read the paper here.) The church was then considering changing its view that homosexuality violates Christian teaching, though it ultimately did not do so. Relying on footnotes from mainstream medical publications, Holsinger argued that homosexuality isn’t natural or healthy.
Meanwhile, the pundits are telling Bush that he should pull the nomination: “A confirmation fight is exactly what the administration does not need,” said Republican turncoat David Gergen. Actually, it is exactly what the administration needs. What Bush does not need is to appear to be distancing himself even further from his political base of conservatives, not after everything he’s done to spite conservative principles. And canning another major nominee because of his conservative views on homosexuality would do exactly that.
Let's not forget Jocelyn Elders
Technorati Tags: surgeon general | Holsinger | homosexuality | nominee |
Dignity’s true colors
If anyone was still under the misapprehension that Dignity, the homosexual-activist Catholic group, was in fact Catholic, the fact that they have a pretend-ordained woman set to preside over their Gay Pride “Mass” should dispel that notion.
Dignity/NY, the LGBT Catholic group, will have a woman preside over its Gay Pride Mass for the first time on June 23 at 7:30 p.m. at the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square South. She is the Reverend Victoria Rue, a Roman Catholic womanpriest who was ordained by three Roman Catholic womenbishops in 2005.
Here’s hoping that the “menbishops” of the Church in the US once and for all order all of their diocesan ministries to homosexuals to sever all ties with Dignity, because it is a heretical group.
Technorati Tags: Catholic | Dignity | homosexuality | heterodox | dissent | women's ordination |
You can’t “keep your eyes on Christ” by ignoring His Church
Here’s an example of the woolly thinking evident among so many Massachusetts Catholics who justify their dissent from God’s revealed truth as being somehow consonant with God’s love. In this case, it’s a contributor to the liberal political blog Blue Mass Group who says he’s converted from being against the legal fiction of same-sex marriage to being in favor of it, despite his Catholic faith, because his mother told him so. She said:
“What does the church care what they do? Gays can take it up with God when they die. Otherwise, let them do what they want if it doesn’t hurt you. Just keep your eyes on Christ.”
The Church cares what they do because the Church loves all of her children as a Mother and when you’re standing before God at your judgment is too late to realize that disregarding the Church’s warnings all these years was the path to damnation. You may as well say, “What does your mother care what you do if you want to take LSD and drop acid? You can take it up with the doctor in the emergency room when you’re overdosing and on death’s doorstep. Otherwise, she should let you do what you want if it isn’t hurting anyone else. Just keep your eyes on whatever makes you happy.”
By saying “keep your eyes on Christ” while contradicting the Church’s teaching shows a seriously flawed understanding of what it means to be a Catholic and the nature of the Church.
Our canon law experts would be interested in the blundering attempts to apply canon law and the Catechism to the matter. A Catholic untrained in canon law who tries to interpret the law for himself may have a fool for a client. Most importantly, it may have eternal consequences.
Technorati Tags: Massachusetts | politics | same-sex marriage | Catholic | homosexuality | doctrine | dissent | canon law | liberal |
San Fran Catholic Charities supporting moral violence to children
Last year, when the Vatican issued a definitive statement that Catholic agencies were not to facilitate adoption by same-sex couples, Catholic Charities of San Francisco crafted a “compromise” that only served to compromise Catholic values and ignore the substance of the Vatican directive.
What they did was put their adoption staff and money spent on them under the umbrella of a group called Family Builders that not only facilitates adoptions by same-sex couples, but aggressively seeks them out for adoptions.
This is direct material cooperation with evil. Of course, this is not a surprise since the SF Catholic Charities executive director has been an apologist for such homosexual arrangements and is apparently dissenting from the Church’s teachings on the subject.
Now we’re getting a clearer understanding of just what kind of organization the Archdiocese of San Francisco is working with in Family Builders.
Local adoption and foster care agency Family Builders by Adoption unveiled an edgy new marketing campaign targeting LGBT people Monday, May 21 that puts a new twist on language often used by conservatives
The ads feature same-sex couples and their adopted children standing behind the slogans, “Family Planning” and “Intelligent Design.” Underneath the slogans are the phrases, “Our family was no accident – we planned for it,” and “Before we started our family we considered all the options.” The city of San Francisco paid for a portion of the ad campaign, as part of a $100,000 contract.
[…]
Supervisor Bevan Dufty spoke in support of the campaign at a news conference held Monday at the LGBT Community Center. The new interpretation of traditional right-wing phrases is expected to draw heat from conservative groups. “The religious right … only seems to care about how a child gets here, and once they’re here, they’re somebody else’s problem,” Dufty said.
Mutual love: Family Builders and CC
Technorati Tags: Catholic Charities | homosexuality | same-sex adoption | adoption | San Francisco | Vatican |
DePaul University to host “queer” conference
LifeSite News is reminding us that DePaul University in Chicago, a Catholic school, is hosting a large homosexual activist conference in October. I originally wrote about this last November and have some details of what they plan on discussing.
The conference, whose full title is the Conference of Scholars and Student Affairs Personnel Involved in “LGBTQ” (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and queer) issues on Catholic Campuses, is being organized through the DePaul Women’s and Gender Studies department. It is scheduled for October 19-20, 2007 and is calling for submissions for papers and workshops.
The first Out There conference was held at Jesuit-run Santa Clara University in 2005 in California and attracted 150 students and faculty from 40 different schools, including the Universities of Georgetown, Loyola Marymount, Gonzaga, Fordham, DePaul, La Salle, Marquette and Emory, as well as Boston College, and College of the Holy Cross. The Santa Clara conference was praised by gay activists as opening a new door between the homosexual activist community and the world of Catholic education.
Of course, what do you expect from a Catholic college that now offers a minor in gay studies?
Oh, and what do all those listed colleges in the quote above have in common besides being putatively Catholic schools. Hmmm, let me think. (Actually, La Salle is not like the other Catholic schools in one important respect and Emory is not Catholic at all, but was founded by the Methodists. But the rest have a commonality.)
Technorati Tags: Catholic | college | homosexuality | doctrine | dissent |
Gays don’t want marriage after all
So why are we going through all this trouble anyway? According to state statistics, gays and lesbians just don’t want to get married. While there was a rush of marriage licenses in the seven months of 2004 that they were being issued to same-sex couples—6,121 in all—the numbers have dropped precipitously since then.
In 2005, only 2,060 received licenses; in 2006, just 1,427; and this year until the end of April, only 87. Maybe they all want to be June brides.
But the reality is that there was a small minority of homosexuals—themselves a tiny minority of the population—who even wanted to marry. Ask any observer of the homosexual scene and they’ll tell you that monogamy is the exception, not the rule, which is why everyone always makes a big deal about the very few gay couples who’ve been together for 10 and 20 years.
Also interesting to note that 64 percent of the same-sex marriages were lesbians. I guess some stereotypes remain true. It’s a fact that the man-woman marriage is a civilizing influence on society because it’s the woman’s impulse to marry and settle down that keeps us from being free-wheeling barbarians.
So what we have here is a fundamental re-configuring of the very basic foundations of society and civilization, creating a fiction known as same-sex marriage, for a group of people who—by and large—don’t want to be married. Why?
Perhaps, apart from the small number who sought the licenses, the real goal has more to do with undermining those structures of society that they resent. After all, it’s a fairly common term of derision for homosexuals and lesbians to call mothers and fathers “breeders”, as if we’re no better than animals.
It’s the same impulse that bring radical homosexuals out to protest against pro-lifers at abortion clinics. You’d think that it would be a non-issue for them—not ever having children after all—but there they are. Why? the same reason you’ll find the Socialists and Communists and Spartacists. Again, to attack the very foundations of society, to disrupt them and create an atmosphere free of any of the old traditional mores and “patriarchal” forms of civilization.
Civil unions will never be enough
Those who seek compromise on the gay marriage issue often advocate “civil unions” as an alternative that they think would be palatable to both sides. From my point of view civil unions are just marriage by another name, the creation of a legal institution with all the legal rights and benefits of marriage.
On the other side, most homosexuals and lesbians don’t want civil unions either, as seen in a case before Connecticut’s supreme court.
After 16 years together, Stephen Davis and Jeffrey Busch made their relationship official last spring under Connecticut’s two-year-old civil union law. They invited no guests and did not even kiss at the ceremony, they said, because the milestone seemed such a pale imitation of marriage.
“It felt like a learner’s permit instead of a driver’s license,” said Busch in an interview yesterday after a lawyer argued on the couple’s behalf in a hearing before the Connecticut Supreme Court.
Ben Klein, the attorney representing eight same-sex couples who are seeking the right to marry, argued that the state’s civil union law is unconstitutional because it established a separate and therefore inherently unequal institution for a minority group.
“Jeff Busch doesn’t want his young son Eli to have to explain to his friends that what his parents have is ‘almost’ a marriage,” said Klein, senior attorney for Boston-based Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders.
As marriage defenders have been saying all along, civil union and domestic partnership compromises do nothing but delay the inevitable and give traction to those who want to strip marriage of its meaning. Homosexual activists will not be satisfied by civil unions but will use the leverage created by its existence to continue pushing the envelope.
Technorati Tags: marriage | same-sex marriage | homosexuality | civil unions | Connecticut |
Mass. AG says amendment, if passed, not constitutional
I have to wonder whether Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley understands the constitutional form of government or have all the liberal politicians in this state decided that the work of transforming society to their utopian vision is too important to trust to the hoi polloi?
Coakley said this weekend that if a constitutional amendment to protect the definition of marriage is passed she lead efforts to have it declared unconstitutional.
“I think we can easily anticipate that if the proposed amendment was successful, there would be protracted, hard-fought litigation about the constitutionality of such a provision,” she said in a speech at the annual dinner of the Massachusetts Lesbian & Gay Bar Association. “If that battle is necessary, you have my support.”
Now correct me if I’m wrong, but I always thought that a constitutional amendment, if enacted according to the provisions laid out in the constitution, is de facto constitutional since it is the constitution. That would be like declaring the First Amendment unconstitutional.
This is either naked political corruption by a politician who is promising to blatantly defy the will of the people and the rule of law or she’s simply so incompetent as to not know that a constitutional amendment is, by its nature, constitutional.
Perhaps Coakley plans to challenge the process by which the amendment is passed, which is also strange since it’s not passed yet. If she knows of funny business in the process so far, why hasn’t she brought a legal challenge? Or maybe she’s just anticipating finding a dishonest and politically convenient pretext on which to bring a challenge later.
Coakley is making a transparent political play to elevate her own profile and pander to a small minority of well-connected and deep-pocketed liberal elites. (Also keep in mind that the attorney general of Massachusetts is an elected, not appointed, constitutional officer.)
Boston College Law prof supports Coakley
Technorati Tags: Catholic | Massachusetts | same-sex marriage | constitution | Boston College |
