April 05, 2024
Interesting Quotes
From a Star Tribune profile Aaron forwarded to me last Friday on a mother with a gay son who attended a recent anti-gay rally at the Minnesota State Capitol:
"We're a good Christian family," she said. "My daughter tells me that we're the strictest parents she knows."
She dug out the sign she carried for the first time at last year's gay pride parade and headed for the Capitol in St. Paul, where 3,000 opponents of gay marriage were gathering."Your son is a fornicator," a smiling woman told Holmvig. Another person asked about her son having sex with animals. Another implied that her son is a threat to children.
Later, 21-year-old Edwin told his mother he was proud of her and grateful for her support.
"But why would you go there?" he asked her. "Why would you expose yourself" to such hostility?
"I wanted them to see my face," she said.
"It was far worse than I expected, but I had to do it. They don't know my son -- they don't know his morality or his dreams -- but they call him a deviant."
And later in the article ...
"The thing that was most hurtful to me, and what made me decide to go home, was when a nice-looking young woman walked up and ... asked me when my son knew he was gay. I told her: 14. She said he must have been pretty active sexually at that age to figure that out."I told her, 'No, you don't know my son. He's a good son. He's such a good guy: really smart, a fine person. He really cares about people and their lives. That's how we raised him -- to care. He hasn't hurt anybody in his life."
Via a Guardian UK article, Going straight, on a new wave of therapist-gurus, who, spurred on by the religious right, claim they can 'cure' homosexuality:
One participant agreed to speak to me if we used a pseudonym. Ben Newman was a married man from Virginia who came to reparative therapy seven years ago, after his wife had discovered yet another gay affair. "I was living a double life," Newman said. "Happy husband and father, church-goer and successful professional on the outside, rabid homosexual sex addict on the inside. Suicide was becoming an increasingly appealing option. But I really resented the suggestion that the only politically correct solution for me was to abandon my wife and children, and throw myself into the gay life. That wasn't what I wanted."Most psychiatrists will say, your sexual attitude is immutable - it's a fact - so adjust your beliefs to suit it. But I was saying, it just doesn't feel right. Being gay doesn't feel like me at my core. It's not a fact I feel comfortable with. I wanted to change my sexual attitude instead." He says he now has a happy marriage, although, like many ex-gays, his opposite-sex attraction has so far been confined to his wife.
From another Guardian UK article on the polarisation [sic] in U.S. politics, Culture war casualties:
At the core of this struggle lies longstanding tension between religiosity and modernity that makes the US exceptional among western nations. In no other country with America's wealth and constitutional guarantees of individual liberty and regional autonomy does religion play such a central role, with 86% of people believing in miracles, 89% believing in heaven and 73% believing in the devil and hell.As a result, the culture wars are not just about competing world views of people who read different books and watch different films. They are waged by people who, for the most part, occupy entirely different worlds. This is true not only culturally but geographically too. Broadly speaking, along with a handful of cities like Chicago, the coasts to the west and northeast are predominantly liberal, while the huge swath of the rural Midwest, Great Plains and mountain states in between are overwhelmingly conservative. The result is a dislocated and at times dysfunctional national political culture, where people share a political and cultural space (everyone gets to vote for the president and watch network television) but few common reference points in their daily lives.
Snippets from Censorship for Defenders of Our Lady at Notre Dame; Free Press for Sodomites at Notre Dame?, a rant posted by Thomas A. Droleskey, Catholic Journalist, Ph.D., whose advertisement criticizing Notre Dame's Queer film festival was rejected by the newspaper.
As though the blasphemy being committed against Our Lady at her school, the University of Notre Dame du Lac in Notre Dame, Indiana, by the celebration of perverse evil this week is not enough, my effort to place a half-page advertisement in the Notre Dame Observer newspaper to ask Catholics to make acts of reparation for this outrage was rejected...“...the Catholic Faith is not a matter of ideology: it is a matter of Revealed Truth, Deposited in the Mystical Bride of Christ by her Divine Bridegroom, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity made Man. The text of my advertisement was spiritual, not ideological. Only at a campus known for attacks upon the Deposit of Faith by faculty members and priests can an appeal for reparations to the dishonor given the Mother of God by the promotion of sin be considered a matter of ideology...
“You folks seem to have been shifting grounds to justify your refusal. Let's face facts: you simply do not want to offend those who are steeped in acts of unrepentant perversity. You would rather that the Mother of God and her Divine Son be blasphemed by the promotion of sin than run an advertisement that is dismissed by the use of leftist sloganeering as ‘ideological’ and ‘politically charged.’ A festival celebrating perversity and abject evil is not inflammatory; an advertisement exhorting Catholics to make reparation for the promotion of the sin of Sodom on a campus named for Our Lady is considered inflammatory. How very hypocritical and duplicitous. How very diabolical.
