Letter from Fortunate Families Newsletter November 2009.

www.fortunatefamilies.com/newsletters.htm

‘Dear Bishop … (excerpts)

1-Letter from father of gay son

…. I have … enjoyed more than 53 years of happy marriage…. It has been … an educational journey ….

… there is much in the proposed letter with which I can heartily agree. Most of all perhaps ... the disturbing trends in current culture such as the high divorce rate. My … assessment, however, differs greatly…. your analysis seems little more than a restatement of old platitudes and defunct doctrine.….

My traditional Catholic background … has served me well…. However, I have found new insight regarding marriage and human sexuality. This has resulted in some serious differences between my understanding, and our Church's teaching….

A primary concern … is the absurd focus on genital behavior. The proclivities of sexual libido … are vastly overemphasized by our culture, and by our Church…. The most important characteristic of marriage by far, is unconditional selfless love.… the essential and primary feature of a Christ-driven marriage. Everything else including procreation is ancillary.… The Church's broad obsession with biology and its selective interpretation of nature, is misguided at best, and at worst, very harmful….

I am the father of a gay son…. Church teaching on homosexuality very nearly cost me the life of that only son. As a young teenager, he had heard his unwitting father denounce him as I pronounced Church teaching on homosexuality at dinner … conversations. He heard himself described as objectively disordered and inclined to an intrinsic evil. After a protracted period of silent anguish, at age 18 while away at college, he attempted suicide. It was only through … intervention by a loving God that he survived. He told me later that God said to him: "I made you just the way you are and you are good." ….

The revelation … that my son was gay started me on a journey that continues …. I studied … homosexuality in depth. I … talked to many other parents of gay children, and to many gay people…. I learned … and my Church-formed stereotype was transformed. I gained a new understanding of human relationships….

Having a gay son has helped my marriage - immensely. His 18 year relationship with another gay man is a model of loving unity that many a heterosexual marriage could well emulate. My son is not objectively disordered. His relationship is not intrinsically evil. …it is Church teaching and understanding of human sexuality that is disordered….

When I consider my own experiences of parental and spousal love, I realize that God’s love is more than unconditional. It is unfathomable.… Yet, the Church … implies that while God created LGBT persons, they may not love another person to the fullest. … this is a completely perverse distortion of what Jesus proclaimed. It is certainly not what I have witnessed….


It is Church teaching that is producing intrinsic evil. I have heard and witnessed too many stories of verbal abuse, bullying, violence, suicide, and even murder… which stems from a culture that denigrates folks who are different from the heterosexual norm, and is fed by the self-righteous railing by too many of our religious leaders. The … words of the Magisterium cannot be offset by protestations of "treating the homosexual person with respect." Words matter. Our culture draws its own conclusions - sometimes ones that are unintended.

…. Why is the Church’s solution to marital issues simply to lay on once again heavy and fruitless burdens? Why not begin with an analysis of … contemporary marriage to determine more accurately what causal factors are involved? Contraception is certainly not the issue! Gay marriage is not the issue. I suspect your state of celibacy constricts your understanding. Please! .... Listen. The Spirit speaks to us most often through others….

… the proposed USCCB letter is not pastoral. It … will not help marriage. It is another unwitting assault on simple justice and the love that Jesus gave us. Our mutual challenge is to “Love one another,” but it seems that for some of our bishops, that challenge will require an immense courage…. to examine the possibility that Church teaching needs revision…. My own Cardinal once told me: “Tom, if I could change Church teaching, I would do it in an instant. My response was and is: “If it doesn’t start with you, then who?”

Tom Nelson, Detroit MI’

The luxury of diversity

Actress, campaigner and politician VLADIMIR LUXURIA is in Malta for an international conference on gay rights. She talks to Raphael Vassallo about her struggle against prejudice, both in and outside politics.

There is a certain commotion at the San Gorg Corinthia Hotel in St Julian’s as I arrive for my appointment with Italian transgender celebrity Vladimir Luxuria – currently in Malta for the 31st annual International Lesbian and Gay Association conference, and the first event of its kind to be held locally. The hotel lobby is bustling with activity, what with conference guests arriving by the coach-load, and Malta Gay Rights Movement officials scurrying about to iron out the inevitable organisational hiccups here and there. ILGA members are immediately distinguishable from other guests by means of their plastic name-tags, and even more so by the bright purple sashes to which these are attached.

At the risk of sounding politically incorrect, a few are immediately identifiable even without such external paraphernalia. Curiously, however, Vladimir Luxuria herself does not quite fit into that category. For someone best known as an outspoken gay activits and a winner of 2008’s L’Isola Dei Famosi – Italy’s raunchy answer to the Survivor reality show – she is surprisingly inconspicuous in real life. (Note: though Luxuria is physically and legally a man, I have chosen to refer to her in female terms for two reasons: one, out of respect for her own wishes; and two, because gender is invariably more complex an issue than the reproductive organs with which one is born).

“Politics is a cynical and cruel world,” she later tells me, as we finally settle down for an interview overlooking St George’s Bay. I have just asked her about the rather blatant prejudice with which she was received during her brief career as a representative in Montecitorio: a prejudice perhaps best encapsulated by Alessandra Mussolini’s notorious jibe, “Meglio Fascista che frocio” (“Better a Fascist than a faggot”). “If I were the sort of parliamentarian who would be absent more often than present, or who didn’t take my job seriously, then they would perhaps have found other things to criticise me about. But I wasn’t that sort of representative, so they picked on me for the only two things they could – that I’m transgender, and on the Left.”

Vladimir Luxuria can claim the honour of being Europe’s first openly transgender member of parliament, and the second in the world after New Zealand’s George Beyer. Naturally, however, not everyone considers this to be a compliment, and attempts to discredit her as a politician have occasionally bordered on the downright ridiculous. At one point, the Italian parliament even had to pause to discuss her choice of bathroom, after a female Forza Italia MP complained about finding Luxuria in the Ladies (as opposed to the Gents, which – let’s face it – would have caused as much of a stir, if not more). So how does she cope with being attacked on such a trivial level? “Oh, but it’s not trivial,” Luxuria counters. “It is just one more way to try and deprive someone of their identity as a human being...”

Identity issues in fact lie at the heart of Luxuria’s struggle against homophobia. “In Italy there was general agreement in parliament over a law against homophobia,” she points out, “but while politicians on both the Left and Right agreed to include the words ‘sexual orientation’ in an anti-discrimination law, there was no agreement on the words ‘gender identity’. The Right simply refused to accept that there are different ways of identifying oneself with the sex of one’s birth. It is a concept that frightens certain people. To them, you are condemned to the gender in which you are born – regardless of whether your soul is male or female.”

Implicit in these assertions is the existence of a causal link between violence against gays, and recent legislation aimed at ‘normalising’ homosexuality – in Malta as much as elsewhere. For though Vladimir Luxuria concedes that the landscape has significantly changed since the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s – “We are no longer seen as extra-terrestrials, coming from another planet to destroy the sexual order of the Cosmos,” she quips – transgender persons remain particularly vulnerable to discrimination and above all hate crimes, which Luxuria argues have increased in both number and severity in recent years.

“The fact that there is more acceptance of gay issues globally, also means that the people who hate us, who fear us, are now feeling more threatened than before, and therefore have become more radical.”

Another aspect of the shifting landscape concerns a general hardening of the Catholic Church’s stand on homosexuality, ushered in under Pope Benedict XVI. “Papa Luciani – the Pope who reigned for a very short time, and over whose death a shadow still hangs – had signalled a different attitude, when he said that ‘God is both Father and Mother’. But Ratzinger felt he had to publicly correct his predecessor on this point, reasserting that men are men, and women women. Under this new Pope, the Church had stepped backwards.”

Luxuria also identifies a paradox in the evident discomfort of the Catholic Church when dealing with homosexuality in general. “In traditional Church iconography, ‘good’ has always been portrayed in transgender terms,” she claims. “I am reminded of the old Byzantine debates, when the Church discussed whether Angels were male or female. After much debate, they ended up agreeing that they are, in fact, neither...”

More recent developments also suggest an almost comical side to the issue. Luxuria invites me to consider the irony of the Pope’s recent appeal to disgruntled Anglican priests, who were leaving the Church of England in protest at its acceptance of same-sex marriages and the ordination of gay priests.“Pope Ratzinger said that any of these disgruntled Anglican priests could become Catholic priests... even if they were already married. Now, he is facing internal dissent over this issue. But it makes you ask: is the Church’s homophobia so strong, that it has even helped it change its attitude towards celibacy of the clergy?” At this point, I can’t help asking Vladimir Luxuria for her own views on the deep-seated prejudice against persons who do not fit into conventional sexual stereotypes. Why, in her view, is there so much hatred directed towards gays in general, and transgender persons in particular?

She almost sighs as she answers, as though pained to have to once again go over the same old hurtful territory. “There are a number of different reasons. The first and most evident is selfishness. Some people have a tendency to define ‘normality’ according to themselves; they love themselves so much, that they consider themselves to be the rule, and everyone else the exception. So if they are straight, it follows that it is ‘good’ to be straight, and that being gay is therefore ‘bad’. This, by the way, is the same attitude that causes discrimination according to race or religion...”

Another issue is that some people have what Luxuria calls “weak personalities”. “These people are afraid of anything that can threaten their sense of identity, because their identity is so fragile to begin with...” However, the most dangerous of all causes of homophobia is sexual repression – people who are themselves homosexual by nature, but have subconsciously repressed their sexuality. “When people like this see others who are free and happy, comfortable within themselves and with own sexuality, it makes them resentful and angry. These are the people who are likelier to resort to hate crimes against gays.” On a more positive note, Vladimir Luxuria is also confident that the international struggle for gay rights has now reached ‘unstoppable’ proportions. “Now, even people within rightwing parties are beginning to change their rhetoric,” she asserts. “In the past it used to be a case that ‘left’ meant ‘pro-gay rights’, while ‘right’ meant ‘anti’. Now the two sides are in competition with one another to win the gay vote, and the political voice against gay issues is losing strength. They can slow us down, but they can’t stop us.”

rvassallo@mediatoday.com.mt
www.maltatoday.com.mt/2009/11/01/t14.html

Other people’s judgments

Articles copied from Fortunate Families Newsletter October 2009 -www.fortunatefamilies.com
___

by John Corvino. Aug. 28, 2009

“You don’t just want us to tolerate what you gay people do,” my skeptical questioner announced, “you want us to think that it’s RIGHT.” Whenever I hear this point–and it’s pretty often–I always think to myself, “Duh.” Of course I want people to think homosexuality is “right.” Why would anyone think I wouldn’t?

Actually, the latter question is not entirely rhetorical. Even my fellow gays ask me why we should care about other people’s moral approval. Beyond the obvious pragmatic advantages – for example, more moral approval means more favorable voting attitudes means more legal rights means an easier life - why should we give a damn what other people think? And while we’re on the subject, why should THEY care? Why are our lives any of their business?

There’s a myth circulating among well-meaning people that “morality is a private matter,” and that therefore “we shouldn’t judge other people.” This is nonsense of the highest order. Morality is about how we treat one another. It’s about fairness and justice. It’s about what we as a society are willing to tolerate, what we positively encourage, and what we absolutely forbid. It is the furthest thing from a private matter.

There’s a story I always tell in my introductory ethics classes about a freshman who wrote a paper defending moral relativism. His paper was laden with references to what’s “true for you” versus what’s “true for me,” what’s “right for you” versus what’s “right for me” and so on. I gave the paper an F. Surprised and angry, the student came to my office demanding a justification. “Well,” I carefully explained, “I graded your paper the way I grade all papers. I stood at the top of a staircase and threw a batch of papers down the stairs. Those that landed on the first few stairs got A’s…then B’s, C’s and so on. You wrote a long, heavy paper. It went to the bottom of the stairs. It got an F.”

“That’s not right!” he blurted out. “You mean, that’s not right…FOR YOU,” I responded, grinning. The moral of the story (aside from, tenured professors do the darndest things) is this: despite all of our talk of “right for you,” deep down we believe in public moral standards. We may disagree about what those are, and about what actions fall under their purview - but we still believe that right and wrong aren’t entirely relative. (For the record, the grading story is entirely fictional.)

One might object that grading affects other, non-consenting people, whereas relationships affect only the people involved. There are two problems with this objection.

The main one is that the latter point is just false. Unless one endorses a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” secrecy, relationships have a public presence and thus public consequences. Gays aren’t waging the marriage battle just so we can all go back in the closet. Like most people, we want to stand up before family and friends, proclaim our love, have it celebrated for the beautiful thing that it is. (At least, that’s what many of us want.)

We want to send the message to young gays and lesbians that there’s nothing wrong with them; that they, too, deserve to love and be loved, and that there’s nothing sinful or wrong about that. We want to be treated equally in the eyes of the law. All of these aims affect other people in various ways.

Second, the objection invites the response, “Says who?” Who decides that only actions affecting other people are appropriate targets of moral scrutiny? Who decides that that’s the right way to look at morality? And there’s no way to answer such questions without engaging in a bit of moralizing. Value judgments are inescapable that way. Those who claim that they’re not taking any moral stances about other people’s lives are, by that very claim, taking a moral stance about other people’s lives – a “tolerant’ one, though not necessarily a very admirable one.

Sometimes, other people’s behavior really sucks, and we should say so. “Saying so” is part of the confusion here. There’s a difference between MAKING moral judgments and OFFERING them, not to mention a difference between offering them respectfully and wagging your finger in people’s faces. The latter is not just self-righteous; it’s generally counterproductive. I suspect when people say that “we shouldn’t judge other people,” it’s really the latter, pompous kind of moralizing they’re concerned to avoid. But we shouldn’t confuse the rejection of bad moralizing with the rejection of moralizing altogether.

In short, we should care what other people think, and do, because the moral fabric touches us all.

********************
John Corvino, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. His column “The Gay Moralist” appears Fridays on 365gay.com.

For more about John Corvino, or to see clips from his “What’s Morally Wrong with Homosexuality?” DVD, visit www.johncorvino.com.

Always and everywhere?

By John Corvino,
Sept. 4, 2009

Marriage equality opponents frequently claim that marriage has been heterosexual since…well, since FOREVER, and that it is arrogant and foolish to tinker with such a pervasive human institution.

Whatever its logical shortcomings, the “always and everywhere” argument is rhetorically effective. Even gay-rights advocates concede that marriage equality seemed unthinkable just a decade or two ago. Imagine how novel it appears to those who, unlike us, have no direct stake in the issue. It’s tempting to respond that lots of things that seemed unthinkable a few decades ago - iPhones, Facebook, Sarah Palin–are, for better or worse, now familiar. But the reluctance to tinker with marriage is deep-seated. The “always and everywhere” argument demands a response that is not only logically sound but also rhetorically compelling. Several responses are worth pondering. I’ve given them each names for convenience:

(1) False premise: The claim that marriage has always been exclusively heterosexual suffers from what should be a fatal flaw: it is simply not true. Same-sex marriages have been documented in a number of cultures, notably some African and Pacific Island cultures. Marriage-equality opponents retort that these marriages are not quite the same as modern same-sex marriages, since they typically involve a kind of gender transformation of one of the partners. But this response is a red herring. Sure, homosexual marriages in these cultures look different from ours in various respects - but so do their heterosexual marriages.

More important, it is doubtful that opponents would abandon their objection to contemporary samesex marriages as long as one partner agreed to be the “wife” and the other the “husband.” The real problem with the “false premise” response is rhetorical:

The response depends on anthropological data unfamiliar to most people, and it appeals to “exotic” cultures whose practices most Americans find irrelevant.

(2) Heteronormativity: Rhetorical considerations would also weigh against using words like “heteronormativity” when responding to people’s basic fears about marriage. But it’s nonetheless true that the “always and everywhere” argument begs the question against those who argue - quite rightly - that the heterosexual majority tends to oppress the homosexual minority always and everywhere. Because of that oppression, recorded history often ignores or erases our lives and commitments.

Keep in mind that just a few decades ago, gays and lesbians were still considered mentally ill in much of the West; even today, gays are stoned to death in parts of the world. Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising that same-sex marriage seems new fangled. The marriage-equality movement owes as much to an improved understanding of sexuality as it does to changing views about marriage.

(3) Not Mandatory: Even granting the (false) premise that marriage has been heterosexual “always and everywhere,” so what? No one is proposing that same-sex marriage be made mandatory. Heterosexual marriage will continue to exist “always and everywhere” for those who seek it, even while society recognizes that it’s not appropriate for everyone. The opponents’ argument seems to play on the irrational notion that giving marriage to gays somehow means taking it away from straights.

(4) Non-Sequitur: Let’s concede to marriage-equality opponents that history and tradition are important, and that we should be cautious about changes to major social institutions. Yet even if (contrary to fact) marriage were heterosexual “always and everywhere,” it does not follow that marriage cannot expand and evolve. One should never confuse a reasonable caution with a stubborn complacency.

Increasingly, that complacency is more than stubborn–it’s unconscionable. Marriage-equality opponents can no longer ignore the fact that we fall in love, just like they do; that our relationships have positive effects in our lives and the lives of those around us, and that we reasonably seek to protect and nurture these relationships. If not marriage for us, then what? Ultimately, the problem with the “always and everywhere” argument is that each new samesex marriage is a living counterexample to it. Whatever happened in the past, we have marriage equality now–in a small but growing number of places. These same-sex marriages are by and large bearing good fruit.

If ignoring tradition is “arrogant and foolish,” ignoring the evidence unfolding before us is exponentially so.

The Good News according to Alison

The Fulcrum of Discovery or:
how the “gay thing” is good news for the Catholic Church

Reinvent the Church

Reinvent the Church