Monday, July 29, 2019

A Note About the Timeliness of Ruth Krall's "Historical Meandering: Ideologies of Abuse and Exclusion"



In the second part of her essay entitled "Historical Meandering: Ideologies of Abuse and Exclusion," which I just published, Ruth Krall writes the following:


There is no known or well-documented correlation between the identities of sexual minorities and the criminal behavior of clergy sexual abusers. Yet conservative Catholic media continue to suggest — indeed to insist upon — such a direct correlation. In this view, ridding the clergy of its homosexual priests and religious would end the church's clergy sexual abuse problem once and for all. ... 
In my opinion, the Catholic Church's ideology of LGBTQ people as intrinsically disordered demonstrates its unrelenting and unmitigated hostility towards gay and lesbian individuals. Its politicized forms of address have complicated, undermined, and misled the search to understand the roots of clergy sexual abuse and bishop-led administrative abuses of power.

Ruth's analysis could not be more timely — for me, personally, I mean. Twice now in three days, I have received unsolicited messages, first on Twitter and then on Facebook, from someone using a pseudonym (a different one in each instance) to attack me for, as he maintains, "censoring" stories that make clear that the abuse horror show in the Catholic church is the result of gay priests. This person also attacks me for, as he maintains, linking the analysis of the abuse situation in the Catholic church to a left-wing politics, when, as he maintains, only a resolutely right-wing political option, with a homophobic intent when it comes to ridding the Catholic clergy of gay priests, will solve the abuse problem in the Catholic church.

Since I can see in this person's Twitter feed tweets he has made about how "the Left" is fascistic, and can see that he defends a right-wing fascist approach to solving political and religious problems, in which church and state should, he thinks, be empowered to oppress LGBTQ people and others, I can see clearly where this person is coming from. What he calls "censorship" is the attempt to gather as many facts as one can about the abuse situation in the churches, and face those facts as they stand, dispassionately and without the need to impose some ideological grid on the facts that make them fit preconceived notions — like the preconceived idea that the abuse situation in the Catholic church is the result of tolerance for homosexuality and of gay priests. 

This is evidently someone I have blocked from spreading bile on this blog, and he's furious about that fact. I'm "censoring" him and ignoring "evidence" that the abuse situation in the Catholic church is  all about homosexuality. These notions run very deep in right-wing Catholicism, as does the penchant for a fascist solution to what they see as the problems of church and world, one eager to repress LGBTQ people — even as these folks turn the term "fascism" upside down and try to apply it to any political or religious analysis that does not fit their hard-right fascist parameters.

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