Homosexuality

Misuse of Orlando

On the day after the Orlando bloodbath, I read in Crux Edward Beck’s scripted recollection of the homily he delivered in church the previous morning. The two did not quite square. Between the spoken address and the published account, something crucial was omitted and something ugly added. As can happen with Fr. Beck’s homilies, the gospel becomes a vehicle of persuasion in favor of his personal preoccupations. Edward Beck is a visiting Passionist priest who offers the noon Mass at my parish every Sunday. Continue Reading
The Michael Voris Affair

The Catholic blogosphere has been in a whirl since Michael Voris outed himself on Church Militant a few days back. Voris claimed to have gotten wind of a noxious plot by the New York Archdiocese to leak stories of his sinful homosexual past in a move to discredit him:
We have on very good authority from various sources that the New York archdiocese is collecting and preparing to quietly filter out details of my past life with the aim of publicly discrediting me, this apostolate and the work here.
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If I had been born ten years later, I might’ve lived my life as a gay man. —Roy Strong Is homosexuality innate? Is there a gene for it? If not a complete molecular unit, then perhaps some partial genetic link? And if a link, would this sectional fragment prove a determinant to sexual preference? Or would it hover in our DNA with all the other unfinished suggestions that move each of us past the many roads not taken? The findings of Dean Hamer, the American geneticist who claimed to have discovered a “gay gene” in the Nineties, has never been replicated. Continue Reading

Homosexual behavior has been with us forever. Homosexuals elevated to an ethnicity separate from the rest of us—a Queer Nation—are recent phenomena. The successful fashioning of homosexuals as minorities, its members akin to a racial group or a protected species like pandas and black rhinos, trumps what is left of a normative approach to sexuality and sexual ethics. The roots of our Foucaultian “reverse discourse” are deep and tangled. Civil society has a critical stake in recognizing their origins and implications. Continue Reading