A footnote to what I published earlier today about Jamie Manson's powerful statement at NCR noting that it's justice that LGBT Catholics need, not mercy. I've just posted the following observations to my set of friends on Facebook:
I linked earlier to Jamie Jamie L. Manson's important, powerful statement at NCR about the need for justice, not mercy, for LGBT people in the Catholic church. As the day goes on, the knives are out in the thread responding to this. There's the condescending concern troll whose posting history at various sites shows he's deeply homophobic, who invites Jamie and others who dissent from Catholic teaching about anything at all to leave the church.
Wouldn't you like to know what he himself does not accept in Catholic teaching? Did you ever meet someone who hates on the gays who really accepts Catholic social teaching about how we should treat all those on the margins of society? Did you ever meet anyone who really accepts Catholic teaching in all its entirety, literally, just as the Catechism dishes it out?
And then there's the condescending Aristotle expert who once came to my blog to correct me about something — she implied I couldn't understand Spanish news articles while she can, since she reads Italian — and who turned out to be totally wrong. I was correct. She was wrong. Did she ever admit this and apologize for questioning my intelligence and integrity? Not on your life.
She's one of these people who claims to "see both sides," to be "balanced" and "objective," but when all is said and done, she persistently attacks the tesitmony of LGBT Catholics who say we experience abuse in our church, and defends a heterosexist complementarianism that gives her and her husband special rights denied to LGBT people in her Catholic club. She has a particular animus against Jamie Manson, it has long seemed to me, and does everything in her power to undercut Jamie's first-hand testimony about the unjust way the Catholic church frequently deals with her and other LGBT people.
Then there's the simpering knife-in-the-back suggestion that gays be invited through the door of "mercy" and told to repent — and then we'll give them justice. Slaps disguised as "mercy." Self-righteous condemnation masquerading as "concern." Not a scintilla of love, compassion, or justice in sight in these comments.
Wouldn't you like to invite these folks to consider walking through the door of repentance themselves, before they pass judgment on others? The longstanding tradition of Catholic moral thinking is very clear on the fact that sins of the spirit — self-righteous pride above all — are far more deadly to the health of the soul than sins of the flesh. And on our obligation to leave the judging of other folks' souls to God . . . .
What I ask myself as I read the many ugly comments shrouded in pseudo "charity" and pretend "objectivity": how can a moral tradition with such rich resources for really serious moral thinking, gathered over many centuries, produce such morally stunted, immature moral thinking thinking? I truly don't get it. Above all, I don't get the lack of compassion among many Christians when these issues are raised, and the lack of respect for the first-hand witness of LGBT Christians about what we experience from the churches.
This graphic apepars to be everywhere online; I don't spot its original source.
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