This post is a follow-up to Homosexuality Is Abnormal, Unhealthy & Unfortunate — In The Church & Everywhere. See at the bottom for answers to that post.
Here is all we need know about Father James Martin, SJ:
During an interview for his book, Fr. James Martin, SJ was asked what he would say to one who identifies as “LGBT” and is struggling with this. Martin stated, “God made you this way. You are wonderfully made just like Psalm 139 says you were knit together in your mother’s womb … this way. This is a part of your identity.”
These are lies, hideous lies. Damning lies.
God did not make necrophiliacs. God did not make a man want to simulate sex with dead bodies. God did not make zoophiles. God did not make a man want to simulate sex with animals.
God did not make it part of a person’s identity to want to have sex with pre-pubescent children. God did not make it part of a person’s identity to want to have sex other men’s wives. A person who engages in serial self-abuse is not wonderfully made: he is broken. Are we to look forward to Incel pride parades?
God did not create the desire for a man to masturbate into the colon of another man. (Fr Martin said the word sodomy is “offensive and needlessly hurtful”; hence this replacement which I learned from P.T Carlo.)
All of these are sins. All of these can be overcome. All can be forgiven. But to overcome and be forgiven of these sins requires acknowledging these sins are sins. It requires acknowledging that the desire for sin—any kind of sin—is not part of our identities. It is sin and nothing more than sin—a violation of the natural law.
There is nothing super extra special fabulous about the sin of masturbating into another man’s colon from other sexual violations of the natural law. Having this particular desire does not imbue any man with secret insight or give him extraordinary powers. Would we say the same of necrophiliacs? Homosexual desire does not in any way make a man better. It makes him worse. Worse than the man he ought to be. That we are all worse than the men we ought to be does not in any way excuse any sin.
We are not our sexual desires. Are sexual desires are not our identities. We are men—nothing more, nothing less.
Because sin is sin, it must always be hated. Sin can never be loved, or cherished, or celebrated, or countenanced or encouraged in any way. Hate is always a proper response to any sin. (I hate my own sins most of all.) Just as forgiveness is always a proper response to repentant men. And if he trespass against thee seven times in a day, and seven times in a day turn again to thee, saying, I repent; thou shalt forgive him.
Since hate is a proper response to sin, it is therefore insane to call a man “necrophobic” because he calls out the sin of necrophilia. It also be insane to hire a prideful self-labeling necrophiliac at the funeral home or morgue.
It is insane to call a man “homophobic” when he calls out the sin of sodomy—a sin that cries out to Heaven for vengeance. It would be just as insane to hire a prideful self-labeling homosexual as a priest or as a teacher or to other positions where he might easily indulge his desires.
Fr Martin is therefore insane when he calls out “homophobic” pastors, as he did to large and adoring audiences. He is simply wrong, wrong fundamentally, in his talk “Showing Welcome and Respect in our Parishes for ‘LGBT’ People and their Families”.
There are no such things as “LGBT” people in an essential sense. If there are LGBT people, then are also pedophiles, woofies, necrophiliacs, pansexuals, objectum sexuals, and on and on. There is no coherent way to draw a line separating homosexuality with any of these other (so-called) sexualities in Fr Martin’s philosophy. Men wanting to masturbate into other men’s colons do not somehow have a superior position among those with non-procreative sexual desires. Every sexual desire must by Fr Martin’s philosophy become a type of human creature (vaguely or never defined). All sexual desire must also be seen as equal in value in his system. It is only prejudice which judges any sexual desire as being immoral.
And that is insane.
It is insane for Fr Martin to call for the Church to apologize to its treatment of sinners. That is the Church’s job. It is no coincidence that when Church leaders gave up calling sin sin its priests and bishops began to increasingly indulge themselves in the sins which were no longer called sins.
Don’t listen to me. Listen to Joseph Sciambra, a man who gave up the “homosexual” label. He is angry with Fr Martin for promulgating lies.
Fr Martin is the “Catholic Church’s Lady Gaga in a collar” and “a self-satisfied disruptive force”, Sciambra says. “James Martin leads the LGBT community to a candy-covered cottage in the forest”, a path which leads “directly to the grave.”
Fr Martin, we remember, looks forward to the day a man pretending to be wedded to another man can kiss in Church. At the holy sacrifice of the mass. Call it the kiss of death.
Answers to Homosexuality Is Abnormal
There was some good commentary, and some natural questions, arising from the original post, along with some idiotic comments and questions. Let’s handle the dumb ones first.
It is not uncommon to hear something like “Since you condemn homosexuality, you must secretly wish for it.” This is so stupid that I hesitate answering it lest future stupid comments are encouraged. But it’s so very common, I’d better.
First, suppose it’s true. Suppose the man condemning, say, child molestation secretly desires to molest children. Does this man’s desire make child molestation therefore good? I will ban anybody who needs this rhetorical question answered.
The opposite is true: those who support, say, homosexuality wish for it.
Second, a related non sequitur. “You have committed sexual sins, therefore you cannot condemn them.” This is really the same argument as the first. If this argument works, then it works, for instance, on ex-inmates who lecture school children on evil ways. Because these men (and women!) have fallen, their warnings have no value. Therefore these men (and women!) must be banned from warning anybody what sin leads to. And that’s stupid.
Third, as hinted, why draw the line at sodomy? Is there something especially wonderful about it? If the argument from secret desire works, then nobody could come out against anything anywhere lest they reveal themselves as desiring their object of condemnation.
Like I said: stupid.
A slightly better, but still poor, argument is that a chaste bachelor has the same reproductive effect as an exclusive male homosexual; therefore, at least with regards procreation, there is no difference.
If that silly argument works, then it is also true that the man who does not try to kill himself is the same as the fellow who holds an accidentally unloaded gun to his head. Both have the same survival effect. The question whether non-procreative simulated sexual acts are moral is—do I really have to say this?—not the same as whether abstaining from all sexual activity is moral.
Now for the better argument, or rather disagreement over the term non-procreative simulated sex and natural law. It’s too long and prone to misunderstanding. I prefer perversion, but like I said, that causes people’s ears to stop up.
A mated male and female can copulate and not know they will conceive; indeed, there are times and reasons to expect conception unlikely. But it is never impossible. Here is the terse definition: All sex open to the idea, however remote, of conception (and eventual parenting) is pro-creative: anything else isn’t.
Medical knowledge is incomplete and fallible.
Sarah was listening to this conversation from the tent. Abraham and Sarah were both very old by this time, and Sarah was long past the age of having children. So she laughed silently to herself and said, “How could a worn-out woman like me enjoy such pleasure, especially when my master–my husband–is also so old?”
Sarah had a son a year later. Vasectomies, hysterectomies, run ins with sharp-toothed Dobermann pinschers, whatever. If water can turn into wine, a barren womb can be filled.
There are sorts of niceties and peculiarities of custom and culture and parenting to add atop this, enough to please any lawyer or nitpicker. But you get the idea. A certain vagueness in the term does not, in some unstated way, excuse necrophilia, bestiality, masturbating into another man’s colon etc. etc. etc. Stop carping about the term and tell us just why having simulated sex with a tree isn’t perverse.
Also, it is worth pointing out that pederasty is the main problem with priests, not pedophilia (via the Maverick Philosopher).
A slightly better, but still poor, argument is that a chaste bachelor has the same reproductive effect as an exclusive male homosexual … The question whether non-procreative simulated sexual acts are moral is—do I really have to say this?—not the same as whether abstaining from all sexual activity is moral.
So finally you come to the real objection: homosexuality is immoral. That business about reducing the odds of species survival was a red herring.
As for abnormal, stamp collecting, which occurs within the population at roughly the same rate as homosexuality, is not a mental disease but homosexuality is.
So what makes homosexuality immoral? Can a person inflicted with a mental disease be immoral wrt the disease? Are they somehow choosing to be inflicted? Is the answer not that it is a mental disease but homosexuals are choosing do engage in it?
So what then is morality and who gets to define it?
DAV – There’s a fairly comprehensive listing of what is and is not moral in a book we call The Bible. It’s sort of the point.
If you want to say that homosexual behavior is immoral because your religion says so, that’s one thing. There is no point in arguing about that. It’s when you offer reasons for this judgement, or, in this case, for calling certain activities “perverse” that things go off the rails. You say that coitus between a man and woman is never non-procreative, and therefore not perverse, because anything is possible because God can work a miracle and, presumably, cause a womb to appear within a woman who has had hers removed. But sex with a tree is perverse because now anything is not possible and God is not able to work a miracle to transform the tree into a fertile woman. I have no problem in judging sex with a tree as, if probably mostly harmless (aside from splinters), perverse. But I don’t see how you can manage it, if anything is possible and therefore this arboreal intercourse might lead to a bouncing baby Christian.
@Lee Phillips
There is no requirement for a religion to have an explicit list of sins.
Thanks for pointing that out. Because without your admonition I could have easily fallen into the common error of believing that there was a meta-religious rulebook containing, among its requirements, the rule that a religion must have an explicit list of sins. Any other completely random tidbits of wisdom you feel generous enough to share today?
It’s no good, Briggs. They are the blind led by the blind.
All,
Thanks for the implicit agreement that masturbating into the colon of another man is equivalent, morally, to necrophilia, bestiality, and so on. I would have guessed there would have been a push back to that idea. But no one, in this post or the previous, touched on this most obvious point, even though I highlighted it ad nauseam.
Progress! Next step: believing in miracles.
@ Lee Philips
The rulebook is called the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
I trust that anyone here who knows how to think knows that not bothering to engage a particular point does not mean agreement, disagreement, nor anything else, implicitly or otherwise.
Pederasty, not pedophilia. Thank you for the clarification; I was using the wrong word. The Catholic Church is rife with pederast priests. They have broken their vows and lied about it. Those are also sins. The sinning compounds. That’s not the way to run a religion. They are killing the Church with sin. Not a good thing for humanity in general, even for non-Catholics.
DAV,
Abnormality is not defined by statistics. A behavior is not abnormal merely because it is engaged in by a minority.
On a related issue, perversion is defined by an essential self-contradiction in the behavior itself. To do something in a way that frustrates the goal of that action is self-contradictory.
Nah, this article, as far as half way, was more of the same. Begging for another chance of the church to ‘mess up[ again. Mercy begged from the merciless.
It’s like the abusive husband who keeps asking for another chance.
I hit you! I set out to break you! But I hate myself for it because you’re going to tell a bigger man than me.
I say to the true believers, walk away or change the thing in such a way that it cannot happen. You can be miserable enough on your own without the help of pedophiles and misogynists, sadists and masochists, narcissists masquerading as carers for the human spirit.
God gave everyone innate abilities to think for themselves. That was his intention, anyway.
God is ultimate goodness, truth and beauty. Beauty can be found in the smallest things. Only greedy people aren’t satisfied with little things.
Those who missed out are victims of natural evil. Like those born without eyes at all.
A catholic once tole me that there is a saying in Ireland. If you want to curse a man, wish for him to have a pretty wife. That says it all.
Catholic thinking is not thinking.
It is jealous, proud and hateful…not to mention greedy and self loathing.
God is love. The atheists seem to have grasped this one. Even may Dad.
Lee, Dav and Uncle Mike are correct.
There is love in morality. It is not about duty alone.
Duty is informed by love.
All sin is not equal, either except in it’s very broadest sense. Which is why it is fertile ground for the sophist.
Here is a case where the presence or absence of the Oxford comma changes the meaning. Is Joy telling me that Dav and U.M. are correct, or is she saying that all three of us are correct?
“Catholic thinking is not thinking.
It is jealous, proud and hateful…not to mention greedy and self loathing.”
As the Millennials say, “Wow, just……………….wow!”
I actually wrote down that example of Joy thinking for the times I need a laugh.
Then I was going to write a list of Catholic “thinkers” but we are admonished
not to cast pearls before swine.
Hmm, Lee, I don’t know you better ask her…
Lee and Dav and Uncle Mike.
are correct.
TF:
He pretends to hate his own sin the most!
How well thought through do you think that remark actually was? Do you feel sorry for him? Is that some kind of admission? Given the list of crimes, not just sins, crimes, he lists?
Can you explain why Briggs thought he had made progress?
He is not thinking straight. Worse. He is doing it on purpose. Otherwise I’d feel sorry for him.
The Odious Ideas Of Father James Martin
Unless there is an objective, absolute, Nature and Purpose for being (natural order) then any talk about morality, rightness or wrongness, good and evil, sin, etc. is merely anyone’s idea of their social, personal, convenience or pleasure. For the purpose of this discussion, the protagonists of “sexual liberation” regard genitals as only a pleasure organ that may have an inconvenient side-effect of procreation (according to fashionable ideologies).
In other words, if Nothing turns itself into Everything for no reason (purpose) then Aleister Crowley’s precept “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law” (if thou can conveniently get away with it) i.e. the only restraint is personal or social convenience which, of course, needn’t stop at sexual self, or mutual, abuse. If there is no transcendent purpose for human existence then the only “rights” one has is what is arbitrarily conceded by custom or privilege, both of which are liable to change according to fashions and power elites. In which case social order degenerates into a might is right struggle… those who can, take what they want; those who can’t, wear it. New World Order, here we come! A self-styled elite of narcissistic perverts of wealth and influence want to own and control everyone and everything in the world with all the rest amused with “bread and circuses”.
We have to come to the Odious Ideas Of Father James Martin.
The likes of Martin are not Catholic in the sense that is summarised in, say, the Apostle’s Creed… or the unchangeable continuity of belief handed down from the Apostles and their successors. Martin and his like are Catholic only in worldly appearance as determined by association and dress. Catholic Christianity is preeminently a system of belief that is, by definition, Apostolic in that nothing can be added or taken away from the deposit of Faith that was bequeathed to the Apostles of the Second Person of the Triune God to be taught to “all nations”. However, Judas the Iscariot was included to indicate that some utterly perverse minions of the Enemy could, and would, be traitors even though they looked the part but had their own (Messianic) agenda.
I will contend that the self-righteous, sanctimonious, washed-to-their-elbows, grandiose pretenders, are disciples of fashionable Masonic ideologies that seek to “update” Christianity to antiquated self-worship.
The Church has consistently proscribed sexual and ideological perverts from its ministers or religious. Any man proposed for orders must be a real man with proper manly dispositions (even eunichs are not “valid matter” for Orders). In fact, a never repealed (that I know of) prescription that any clergy (and, presumably, Religious) accused and found guilty of “sins aganist nature” should be immediately “irregularised” (defrocked?) and handed over to the secular authorities even if the punishment is death. (A prescription that has been ignored for several hundred years).
Anyhow, if it was possible to examine the ideological basis of the many perverts infesting the clergy it will be found that they all subscribe to the current Materialist ideology and most (if not all) of them are Freemasons. My prediction!
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“God did not make necrophiliacs…”
Let’s get away from sexual issues. What causes psychopathy? What cures it? Psychopaths are notoriously difficult to treat.
What is God’s responsibility for congenital defects?
“Sarah had a son a year later. Vasectomies, hysterectomies, run ins with sharp-toothed Dobermann pinschers, whatever. If water can turn into wine, a barren womb can be filled.”
One should not be making policy—not even the Church—based on the idea that a miracle might happen.
When a priest does not suffer in his priesthood, he causes others to suffer.
It’s remarkable how often explicit sexual acts – even ones that consume a fraction of a percent of a couple’s relationship – become the primary focus of those who oppose civility (let alone equality) for same gender couples. If that minuscule part of a relationship is what causes same gender relationships to be deemed “immoral,” the whole argument is doomed. Likewise, consensual sex between adults will never be the same as beastiality, pedophilia or pedeastry because children and animals cannot consent to sexual acts. Nor is it inherently akin to marital infidelity in that no vow is being broken. Much as the author might consider it “silly, stupid, or idiotic,” words he seems especially fond of given the number of times he uses them, the objective reality that same gender relationships will not biologically result in the creation of children is, indeed, the same reality of celibacy. Unless someone can prove that sexual orientation is either chosen or contagious, there is no objective harm of same gender relationships. Hence the harkening back to the great mind reading capability of people who thousands of years ago decided with absolute accuracy what God thinks, wills, desires and condemns.
I thought that we were talking about the perverse acts against the natural order that Martin and his myriad ideological cronies are advocating. There is plenty of evidence that sexual perversity is, indeed, contagious and that the infected are Hell bent on spreading the contagion with their very aggressive campaigns; of particular note being the “sex ed” being forced upon even toddlers.
Not to mention, of course, the institutionalised grooming and seduction that is practically ubiquitous in “entertainment” and “news” media.
That a few women, considered barren or beyond normal child-bearing age, have conceived and borne children is not perverse… it’s just unusual. Not relevant to this argument.
If anyone still tries to pretend that sexual perversity is not a transmissible psychological disease I invite them to explain the purpose of this stuff:
https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/the-latest-lgbt-lunacy-transgender-puppet-to-teach-kids-about-gender-issues
John is right.
It’s not necessary to share a world view on the existence of God to agree on this.
To appeal to natural law is to appeal to anarchy. That is the appeal for fundamentalists and rabble rousers, aka radicals. It’s the same appeal for the far left!
Natural law is inescapable. Not up for discussion. Doesn’t need your help. Aspects of nature matter not the laws.
Discussions of God are made irrelevant by invoking ‘natural law’.
Those who use civil and criminal law in the absence of the assumption of God are also in a pickle, which is where many countries are now, introducing hate laws and attempting to mandate love.
Nature wins. There are negative feedbacks obvious to anyone who’s considered or studied ecology.
The same is true for human ideas. There are feedbacks through time which prevent tyranny and preserve goodness.
The truth can’t be enforced by fear. That is to abuse nature’s warning signal.
It’s a perversion of the truth.
There is natural and there is moral evil.