Andrew Sullivan on Letter to English Catholics about Marriage: They Cannot Speak Our Name

Why has it taken liberal Catholics so long to begin seeing what many of us have seen for some time now? I just wrote.  And as I dealt with that question, I suggested a compelling answer to it: liberal-centrist Catholics have, for far too long, simply pretended that the brother and sister Catholics on whose backs the papal and episcopal whips fall are not there.

We're not in the room.  We don't count.  Our testimony is tainted by the bias of our messy lives, while the testimony of objective centrists remains pure and untainted by bias to the extent that the centrists dissociate themselves from the mess of those shoved to the margins.

Here's the testimony of one gay Catholic, Andrew Sullivan, about who the Catholic leaders are and what the liberal-centrists have been colluding with: Sullivan is writing about the pastoral letter attacking marriage equality read to English and Welsh Catholics yesterday, which does not even speak the name of the gay human beings it attacks: 

This is a church now intent on erasing from visibility a small minority of human beings, while waging a campaign to keep them as second class citizens in their own countries and as subhuman "objectively disordered" beings in their own church. They cannot even speak our name. Because were they to see us as the human beings we are, if they had to confront the actual experienced reality of our lives, if they actually had a conversation with us, and engaged the problem rather than dismissing it as "madness", their pretense would be exposed.

Sullivan is correct.  Remember when that paragon of American liberal-centrist Catholic values, the journal Commonweal, for which E.J. Dionne frequently writes, finally deigned to editorialize last year about marriage equality in New York state--and when it never once spoke the name of gay and lesbian human beings, except in a single quotation?  But chose, instead, to speak of "the aspirations of homosexual people"?

Who obviously aren't Catholic people or Commonweal people, but some kind of race apart.  A sub-group of humanity.  A sub-group whose name for itself--gay--cannot even be uttered by a Commonweal editorial.  In an editorial addressing the issue of gay marriage.  Which chooses to address that issue by entitling the editorial, "Protecting Religious Freedom"!

There is no crueler way to dehumanize any group of human beings than by pretending that that group of human beings is not in the room--not there, not capable of speaking for itself, unable to articulate insights worth hearing.  And there is nothing less authentically catholic than behaving as if a group of human beings we have made non-existent did not ever count for the definition of authentic catholicism.

This is how the leaders of the Catholic church have been behaving towards gay and lesbian human beings for years now, while the liberals of the Catholic intellectual and media center have continued to pretend that these leaders have moral credibility, and that their "religious liberty" crusades are about the praiseworthy goal of safeguarding Catholic freedom to engage in works of mercy without government interference.

A pretense with which some of us have never had the luxury to collude, since our human dignity and our very lives are at stake in these discussions, in a way in which the human dignity and lives of the liberal centrists are never at stake . . . .

The "invisible" elephant in the room is by British artist Banksy.