To summarize (and perhaps clarify) my ongoing critique of American Catholic centrism, with its strange fixation on long-since-talked-to-death ethical and theological issues, while the centrist powerbrokers are more or less oblivious to their LGBT brothers and sisters and our struggle against real, measurable oppression:
It's an echo chamber. The centrist conversation is reaching no one except other centrists and those on the right, who constantly monitor and try to censor that conversation.
For the rest of us--for the vast majority of American Catholics--the theological, moral, and political conversation has long since moved on. If we advert to the conversation at the center at all (and, increasingly, many of us don't), we do so simply to marvel at the fact that, while gay human beings struggle for fundamental human rights today, our centrist brothers and sisters are wondering how to define the role that religion played in the debate about slavery.
In this respect--in its echo-chamber nature--the American Catholic conversation of the center is no different, of course, from the mainstream political and media conversation. Those, too, are echo chambers in which the same limited voices keep rehashing the same issues among themselves.
As if they represent all the rest of us, and the world in is entirety.
