Tuesday, November 19, 2013

More Head Scratchers about Gay Marriage from Catholic Right: "God Rejoices in Everything That a Married Man and Woman Do." But the Gays? Hateful and Violent



In a previous posting today, I asked how right-wing Catholics justify exorcism ceremonies aimed at those who are gay on the ground that homosexual acts are gravely sinful because they are non-procreative, when a large percentage of heterosexual Catholic married couples use contraceptives. Which are designed to prevent procreation.

The argument advanced by many right-wing Catholics who are totally silent about the grave sinfulness of acts of contraceptive use while they can't say enough about the sinfulness of each and every homosexual act is, you see, that the latter are inherently selfish. They're selfish because they can't produce children.

Which is, oddly enough, just what contraceptive use is also about: contraceptives are designed to prevent procreation. But, curiously, one never hears many right-wing Catholics calling for exorcisms to cast out the demons of contraceptive use by Catholic married couples, and one never hears about how the sexual acts of heterosexual married couples using contraceptives are inherently selfish, nothing but mutual masturbation. 

And so to repeat: in my previous posting about this, I asked how Catholics opposed to gay marriage on the ground that it multiplies inherently selfish and gravely sinful acts by gay couples justify the singular focus of this critique on gay couples when a majority of heterosexual Catholics use contraceptives. I now have an answer to my question.

Here's one Purgatrix Ineptiae holding forth at National Catholic Reporter this morning:

God rejoices in everything that a married man and woman do in the privacy of their bedroom to give joy and happiness to each other, provided neither harms or demeans the other. All these things support and strengthen the life-giving relationship between them, from which their children are born. Even if they are no longer capable of producing offspring, through the example of their love and devotion, they give life to other couples' marriages and children. 
The marital act renders all that a man and woman do holy and fertile. The non nominandum renders all that those who commit it do hateful and violent. There could be no more profound difference.

For those not versed in the many ugly slurs used by right-wing Catholics about those who are gay, non nominandum is Latin shorthand for "the sin that is not to be named." "The non nominandum renders all that those who commit it do hateful and violent," Purgatrix Ineptiae declares: everything gay folks do is "hateful and violent." But by contrast, "God rejoices in everything that a married man and woman do in the privacy of their bedroom to give joy and happiness to each other."

Got that? Man + woman: good. God rejoices.

Woman + woman: bad. Hateful and violent. Not to be named.

Or, as Purgatrix Ineptiae puts the point in another pronouncement in the same thread

It is genuinely tragic that the homosexual condition so often causes those who suffer from it to mistake their disordered desires for love. Real love, the kind a man and a woman can share, is something truly great, heroic, sacred and ennobling; to usurp the word as homosexuals do is a horrific blasphemy.

Man + woman: real love. Man + man: disordered desire for love, which it's "horrific blasphemy" to name as love. And then there's more from the same poisonous well of wisdom in the very same thread:

Real marriage is hard. Men and women bring very different needs and wants to a marriage, biologically, economically and socially. Reconciling those conflicting demands is stressful, especially in an environment where the marketing/media/pornography industrial complex spews a constant stream of deceit, corruption and defilement over public life. It is not surprising that many couples are not able to perform such a difficult feat. 
Two over-grown teenagers masturbating with each other and playing house is easy. It's not love. But it's not stressful, difficult or heroic.

Got that? Real marriage only occurs between a man + a woman. A man + a man? Playing house. Over-grown teenagers engaging in mutual masturbation.

"It's not love."

Real marriage, it turns out, isn't primarily about procreation at all for right-wing Catholics opposed to the "playing house" of gay "marriage." They've now ditched that argument, which is central to magisterial teaching and is, we've long been told, the primary reason the Catholic magisterium opposes same-sex marriage, for the argument that you can't have real marriage without having a man and a woman.

Because what two men do together or what two men do with each other isn't love. It's play-acting. It's selfish mutual masturbation. It's hateful and violent.

As compared to what a man and a woman do together, even when their sexual activity is the kind that ostensibly causes society to fall apart and irks God--when it's not open to conception because the couple are too old to bear children, or one or both of them can't conceive, or even because they use contraception!

If there could be a clearer illustration than Purgatrix Ineptiae's arguments of the bald, poisonous prejudice that lies behind the crusade of many Catholics against same-sex marriage (and same-sex human beings), I honestly don't know where to find it. It's not about safeguarding the link between conception and marriage at all.

It's about demeaning, punishing, and hating those who are gay. The rhetoric this blogger and some others at the NCR site employ against their fellow human beings who are gay is downright violent and downright hateful, and I continue to be perplexed that NCR gives these folks carte blanche to spread their toxins. And that participants in dialogues there continue to treat these very malicious human beings as people with respectable ideas for the most part, albeit a tiny, forgivable quirk when it comes to how they treat those who happen to be gay.

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