GLBT Rights, Tolerance, and Religious Freedom

Dawn Eden explains.  Excerpts:

...I’ll let Deacon Greg tell you the details about the outrageous effort by gay-rights activists to put a stop to the phenomenal work this holy priest is doing for the Kingdom. But I will state the obvious, that the motive of the persecution is truly not about gay rights, nor is it about the right of people who have same-sex attraction to be treated as human beings possessing human dignity. It is about destroying the Church.

The agitators are unable to silence their own conscience, so they seek to silence the “meddlesome priest” who brings them the truth of Christ.

And when I say that, I’m thinking of this quote from the student leading the assault on Father Greg, who, after Father Greg told him that his homosexual behavior would prevent him from having a priestly vocation, became a priest in a schismatic sect:

“[Father Shaffer] is making me choose between the church and my sexuality, but my sexuality isn’t making me choose between it and the church.”

That tells you to whom, or rather what, the student bows. It also tells why he and those who share his concept of “gay identity” are compelled to see the Church’s moral authority removed from every place where it might trouble their conscience. These people subscribe to what Frank Weathers termed the mainstream-media Catechism:

“Who made you?”

“My sexuality made me.”

Pray for Father Greg, for his persecutors, and for courage for all Catholics as we enter further into this era of martyrdom...

The GW student newspaper gives a rundown of the situation. I have to say, this is a very thoroughly organized campaign they're aiming to run to get Father Shaffer removed. I'm impressed. Of course, the difficulty they're going to run into is that he's following the teachings of the Church in his preaching. I can't speak to his pastoral style, but if they want a Newman Center that is not run according to the teachings of the Church, they're going to have to break off the Newman Center from the Church.

And a sidenote on gay marriage.  Excerpts:

Last month, at a Sydney Writers Festival panel discussion on the question, “Why get married when you could be happy?” Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen had this to say about same-sex marriage:

It’s a no-brainer that we should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist [cheers from the audience].

That causes my brain some trouble. And part of why it causes me trouble is because fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there—because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out thirty years ago. I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally….

[After my divorce,] I met my new partner, and she had just had a baby, and that baby’s biological father is my brother, and my daughter’s biological father is a man who lives in Russia, and my adopted son also considers him his father. So the five parents break down into two groups of three…. And really, I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality. And I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage...

On a related note, Terry Nelson on the hazards of blogging about gay issues. Excerpts:

...First, why do I hate writing about gay stuff?

Because no matter what I say, it will be opposed.  I will be accused of self-hate if I refuse to identify as gay.  If I use the word gay, I will be corrected that I need to use the term SSA.  If I say I'm against homosex... well, you know ...  If I question anything the 'new gay and Catholics' write, I'm stuck in a former generational mindset, unduly influenced by Catholic bigotry.  I hate writing about the subject because I'm not scholarly enough, and I can't hold a candle to the experts. I also don't want to offend people who are being called to repentance, or come off like Michael Voris and others even more severe, who insist they hate the sin but refuse to accept the person they deem disordered.  Likewise, the "new still-queer and Catholic" keep coming up with new explanations why gay is normal. And people are buying into it. It's almost as if a new species has been discovered.

Recently, another blogger excused himself from writing about gay marriage because he might lose his straight friends - and gay ones - who approve of same sex marriage.  I laughed to myself because it is not uncommon for formerly active gay people, who return to the Church - to lose all of their gay friends in the process, and have trouble keeping their new Catholic ones - when and if the new friends find out they were, are, or maybe always will be - gay - even if they don't identify as such, or experience the same temptations.  Damned if you do, damned if you don't.  (The same guy has posted snarky comments on this blog.  God love him.)

BTW.  The friends who approve of same sex marriage usually approve of divorce and remarriage, contraception and abortion, euthanasia, IVF, gender reassignment surgey, embryonic stem cell research, and a wide variety of other practices condemned by the Catholic Church.  It's a package deal usually...

Why Make Intellectual Defenses of the Faith?

Carl Olson has answers. Excerpts follow:

...The heart, let me emphasize, that speaks to other hearts. The man who loves something wants to know about it. He wants, as far as the subject allows, to think about it, to analyze it, to understand it deeply. He will use that knowledge to come to its defense when it is misunderstood or misinterpreted or publicly derided or denied. This is even truer when he loves someone. If he doesn’t want to know, he doesn’t truly love.

That is where the new anti-apologists go wrong. They are right that argument mostly begets argument, and that arguments by themselves rarely change anyone’s mind. But they are wrong to dismiss apologetics for that reason. They’re not thinking clearly about what people who believe do, and how people come to believe. People want answers, and for some, as far as we mortals can tell, the answers make or break the sale.

Read the entire column, "The Reason the Heart Wants".

Having been involved in apologetics for many years now, I've come to the startling (ahem!) conclusion that some people—including a few well-meaning apologists-in-the-rough—are fairly clueless about what apologetics are; some people dislike apologetics for what they (mistakenly) think apologetics are; and a few people do indeed dislike apologetics because they involve a combination of argument, logic, debate, and so forth. I've discovered that there is a huge swath of Catholics who feel that offering up any arguments or defense in favor of Catholicism smacks of triumphalism and arrogance; such folks, when pressed, usually hold to a vaguely indifferent form of "faith" that is heavily reliant on secularized understandings of "tolerance" and "equality". Many will argue that arguing is bad, and will do so without any recognition of the contradiction between their actions and their worlds. Granted, some apologists can be combative and even obnoxious, but that hardly does away with the need for apologetics...

As Is Appropriate for Advent

we turn our minds to the end of the world.  Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman delivered some famous sermons on the Antichrist.  Here's the first one:

...As long as the world lasts, this passage of Scripture will be full of reverent interest to Christians. It is their duty to be ever watching for the advent of their Lord, to search for the signs of it in all that happens around them; an above all to keep in mind this great ans awful sign of which St Paul speaks to the Thessalonians. As our Lord’s first coming had its forerunner, so will the second have its own. The first was “One more than a prophet,” the Holy Baptist: the second will be more than an enemy of Christ; it will be the very image of Satan, the fearful and hateful Antichrist. Of him, as described in prophecy, I propose to speak; and in doing so, I shall follow the exclusive guidance of the ancient Fathers of the Church.

I follow the ancient Fathers, not as thinking that on such a subject they have the weight they possess in the instances of doctrine or ordinances. When they speak of doctrines, they speak of them as being universally held. They are witnesses to the fact that those doctrines having been received, not here or there, but everywhere. We receive those doctrines which they thus teach, not merely because they teach them, but because they bear witness to all Christians everywhere then held them. We take them as honest informants, but not as a sufficient authority in themselves, though they are an authority too. If they were to state these very same doctrines, but say, “These are our opinions: we deduced them from Scripture, and they are true,” we might well doubt about receiving them at their hands. We might fairly say, that we had as much right to deduce from Scripture as they had; that deductions from Scripture were mere opinions; that if our deductions agreed with theirs, that would be a happy coincidence, and increase our confidence in them; but if they did not, it could not be helped-we must follow our own light. Doubtless, no man has any right to impose his own deductions upon another, in matters of faith. There is an obvious obligation, indeed, upon the ignorant to submit to those who are better informed; and there is a fitness in the young submitting implicitly for a time to the teaching of their elders; but beyond this, one man’s opinion is not better than another’s.

But this is not the state of the case as regards the Fathers. They do not speak of their own Private Opinion; they do not say, “This is true, because we see it in Scripture”-but, “this is true, because in matter of fact it is held, and has ever been held, by all the Churches, down to our times, without interruption, ever since the apostles: “Where the question is merely one of testimony, viz., whether they had the means of knowing that it had been and was so held; for if it was the belief of so many and independent Churches at once, and that, on the ground of its being from the Apostles, doubtless it cannot be true and Apostolic.

This, I say, is the mode in which the Fathers speak as regards doctrine; but it is otherwise when they interpret prophecy...

The rest of the sermon is at the original link.