Myth: People are not born gay, they are conditioned to be gay.
Fact: People are not born Catholic, they are conditioned to be Catholic.
Try preaching that truth to the Vatican, where the Ansa news agency reports:
Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan said that while the Church regarded homosexuality as an "insult to God", this did not justify discrimination against gay and transsexual people.
"Transsexuals and homosexuals will never enter the kingdom of heaven and it is not me who says this, but Saint Paul."
St. Paul also told people not to get married because he believed the world was coming to a quick end (1 Cor 7:8). And furthermore, why would we homosexuals and transgendered people want to spend an eternity in a heaven full of homophobic, closeted clergy? That is, assuming, of course, that they would be there.
Barragan continues:
"People are not born homosexual, they become homosexual, for different reasons: education issues or because they did not develop their own identity during adolescence. It may not be their fault, but acting against nature and the dignity of the human body is an insult to God."
I am the perfect example of why his reasoning and psychology are wrong.
I grew up in a very Catholic family, in small town conservative Iowa, and did not have any gay role models, family members, or friends. I was formed in the church's seminary system (in which Barragan was also formed), had a decade of Catholic spiritual direction and psychological counseling, and even had a Catholic counselor that tried to help me "recover my lost heterosexuality."
Everything in my childhood rearing was set up to raise me as a straight Catholic boy, but throughout , I never had sexual fantasies about women, I never masturbated thinking about women, I never had wet dreams about women (save for one, when I was 18), and I remember being attracted to males and not females since I was in preschool and kindergarten. I never made a choice to be gay.
The only choice I made was to come out of the closet and challenge the psychological and theological violence and shaming that the Catholic church hurls upon homosexuals in the name of a loving god.
Also, does Cardinal Barragan not realize that he just condemned a large percentage of the Catholic clergy and religious that have lived throughout history? What a hypocrite!
Nice Ruby slippers, John Paul.
Did Judy lend you those?
Did Judy lend you those?
4 comments:
For a brief moment I thought I was in the 1950's while reading what Javi said about homosexuality.
Is this princess of the church for real?
"I never had wet dreams about women (save for one, when I was 18)"
Fess up--was it Ariel!
I wish it would have been about Ariel!
It was actually a nightmare and not very pleasant.
In real life, I had just been betrayed by a female friend of mine, who'd broken a confidence. I had this nightmare that I raped her. It was quite disturbing.
And that, is the only hetero wet dream I've ever had. In seminary, one of my counselors (in Iowa in pre-theology) tried building on that dream in my "reparative" therapy, in addition to having me imagine what it would have been like to not have been sexually abused by the pediatrician. This particular counselor, whom I dumped after a year, blamed my being gay on the fact that I was sexually abused by a man, even though before I was sexually abused, my attractions were already exclusively same sex attractions. The counselor also counseled me to masturbate thinking about women, which didn't work either. He fed me some really messed up shit.
I should write a blog post about this and the giant red stop sign in my mind that another counselor tried to get me visualize every time I had a (homo)sexual thought.
I would like to read that blog post. And because you mix serious with humor so well, I can't wait to hear about all of the girls that just didn't work.
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