The Catholic Clerical Sexual Abuse Crisis, Clericalism, and Pope Francis: Michael Boyle's Take — "The Problem Is an Elevated Theology of Who Priests Are"

In February this year, I recommended to you the four-part series by Michael Boyle on his A Sound of Sheer Silence blog site entitled "How Did This Happen?" In these valuable essays, Michael walks through an assessment of the clerical culture that produced the crisis around sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic church, and its cover-up. He's responding to the report of the Australian Royal Commission on Abuse. 

Garrard Conley's Boy Erased: Template for Understanding Religion-Based Homophobia and Its Assault on Queer Humanity

I mentioned a few days back that I was reading Garrard Conley's book, Boy Erased (NY: Riverhead, 2016), which recounts his experiences growing up as the son of a Missionary Baptist minister in small-town Arkansas in the final decades of the 20th century and the start of the 21st century. As my previous reference to the book notes, it's primarily a memoir of his experiences at the "ex-gay" reparative therapy outfit Love in Action in Memphis, to which his parents sent him after he was outed to them as gay. Mama vomited on hearing this news, Papa threatened, and Conley had no choice except to go to LIA, if he expected his father to continue to claim him as a son and to help pay for his college education (he was in college when this happened).

"LGBT Experiences Have Been Erased and Nullified": More on Who's Erasing Queer People from Discussion of a Massacre of Queer People, and Why This Is Being Done

More observations on who's erasing queer people from the massacre of queer people in Orlando, and why they're doing this:

Ongoing Discussion of Possibility Omar Mateen Was Gay and Self-Hating: "Makes the Attack More About Homophobia, Not Less," "Nor Is This Unique to Islam"

Meditation point 1: we Americans now live in a political-religious-cultural context in which some citizens sincerely claim to believe that the children ripped to death by bullets at Sandy Hook did not die. That this was a big mock-up exercise arranged by the Obama administration to justify taking our guns away. The human lives of those murdered children and the suffering of their families do not matter. They take second place to the racist political need to demonize the nation's first African-American president and the party he represents.

Colleen Kochivar-Baker on Michael Voris Story: "Voris Very Much Reminds Me of the Donald . . . a Walking Talking Personality Disorder"

Colleen Kochivar-Baker's stellar comment here yesterday, in response to the story about Michael Voris revealing his gay past that I posted on Friday:

Michael Voris of Church Militant Addresses His Gay Past in Shocker Video Statement

Does this come to the rest of you as the shock it is to me? 

Pathology of Internalized Homophobia in Gay-Bashing Catholic Clerics: "How Strange Their Psyches Must Be As a Result...and Sometimes Dangerous As Well"

The synchonicity of conversations on the worldwide web never fails to intrigue me — discourse community linking to discourse community when they're to all appearances not connected at all. As Mary Q pointed out in a comment here two days ago, at the same time (roughly) that I was having a conversation with Chris Morley here about the peculiar pathology of the Roman Catholic clerical system, which intermixes hypocrisy (especially about matters sexual involving the clergy) with power and the abuse of power, with the ravening desire of career clerics to be at the top of an ecclesiastical ladder in which being on top means using, hurting, throwing away a lot of folks at the bottom, a reader of Jennifer Haselberger's blog was leaving a comment there very similar to my statements to Chris.

Joel Burns, Fort Worth City Council Member to Gay Teens: It Gets Better

Joel Burns' testimony (I'm using that religiously charged term deliberately here) at a recent Fort Worth city council meeting in Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project is circulating around the internet right now, and deserves serious consideration.  It's a powerful testimony, heart-wrenching and mind-altering to witness.