From a Catholic Culture summary:
In a powerful editorial for The Anchor, the official newspaper for the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, Father Roger Landry calls attention to the pastoral damage done by priests who refuse to convey the Church’s teaching on human sexuality, fearful of opposition from gay-rights activists.
A sample:
If doctors and nurses at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute were aware that a patient was chain-smoking cigars and out of a desire not to displease him said nothing, they would be guilty of unconscionable neglect. If the patient was flaunting his cigar-smoking and attempting to persuade others that, rather than harmful, cigar-smoking was a great practice deserving of celebration instead of censure, the destructive consequences of their reticence would be magnified. Similarly, pastors and parishes who are aware that parishioners are unabashedly engaging in practices contrary to the practice of the faith and who do not strive, with patient, tender and firm preaching and accompaniment, to help them eliminate whatever in them is leading them to sin, are culpable of the worst type of pastoral malpractice.
25 Comments
Your Catholic dogma is really distasteful considering that no one in the LGBT community is asking for religious legislation. We are asking for civil rights, not religious rights. Get over your self righteous religious bigotry and move on with your lives. You are doing nothing but butting into other peoples legal relationships that have nothing to do with yours.
The priest makes a great analogy. Besides sin, a great follow up would be public health. Taking into consideration your own health. Read the blog carefully and how he describes the cigar smokers flaunting their lifestyle and celebrating it and demanding that it be encouraged to the youth.
This is exactly what the homosexuals are doing in regards to public health. The openly flaunt their very risky and unhealthy sex behavior. They openly promote the practice demanding celebration for it rather than winessing against the conduct. They do not want the destructive nature of their sexual habit to be known.
As a result due to ignorance and lack of education, many straights are led to believe that the practice is harmless and has no effect on your health. Meanwhile we are forced to pay deeper into our pockets for the AIDS and other STD's. The worst part is when they go into the public schools and are allowed to indocrinate our children. We do not allow the Marlboro Man to come into our public schools and recruit our children. Why should the homosexuals have access to the children and convert them to their side?
How bad is it? Consider the health education classes in the public schools. The health teacher has to lie to his students to save his job. If the health teacher tells the truth to his students that homosexuality is harmfull and dangerous to you he gets fired. How many innocent children with this false information end up going into homosexuality and then get the STD's. Only when it is too late, do they find out that the public school system chose to lie to them to appease those flaunting their harmfull sexual conduct.
John Now, homosexuality is not harmful from a public health standpoint--promiscuity is. That is yet another reason why marriage equality is important. We need to promote a culture of monogamous marriage for straight and gay alike.
HEIDI, homosexuality is two of the same sex engaging in a sex act that is medically proven to be unhealthy, there is no way to get around it, no matter how you try to menipulate the facts. In addtition, people have sex for the enjoyment or to make babies not because whether it is good for them health wise, if homosexuality was not a dangerous behavior, are you under the ideal that heterosexuals would prefer homosexiality instead, or that the practice should be forced on them even if they disapprove???
example-when people think of gays-they think of homosexuality, when people think of a man-male species-dad, masculine; likewise woman-female specie=mother-child baring-feminism, etc.
Heidi
Keep in mind, gays would be extinct if it was not for straight people, gays are not second class citizens or a different human species other than male and female.
Heidi: Go and learn science and biology sometime before you post. Your lack of education really shows. The facts are plain and simple. The anal region contains very sensitive and soft tissue and cannot take a hard penis being jammed into it. This causes semem to enter into the bloodstream and thus causes sexaully transmitted disease. It does not matter if one only has sex with one partner. It is unhealthy, disease ridden, and shortens life spans.
Their is no healthy way to engage in anal sex period. You remind me of the smokers who I have met who said as long as they smoked Marlboro and not the unsafe discount cigarretes there is no risk. That is pure bunk.
Homosexual sex is harmfull from a public health standpoint whether you practice fidelity or not. Besides did you not read the blog by homosexual activist Dan Savage who said that homosexaul men will continue to practice sodomy with multiple partners whether they get SSM or not.
TY, can you please cite the medical authority where it's medically proven that an act of lesbian sex is less healthy than an act of straight sex?
Andrew D
are you implying that lasbian sex is health?
The LGBT community is NOT interested in equal rights under the law. They want "special" rights. No matter what they claim, marriage is an institution between a MAN & a WOMAN. Biologically, it's a "natural" fit. From my perspective, recreational sex is wrong, as are multiple partners & same-sex partners. Many who claim to be 'homosexual" have been indoctrinated in school. My niece is a prime example. At age 16, she "came out" proudly stating that she is lesbian. For many years she she put on a "proud" face. Now at age 25, she attributes it to youthful rebellion. She's also madly in love with a very nice young MAN. For the first time in years, she is truely happy!
Most if not all fail to address the basic fact that in the area of sexual expression, man was made for woman and woman made for man. By definition, homosexuality is perversion. The argument then is to what degree is society willing to accept, may I say "tolerate" aberrant behavior.
Actually the homosexual community has done a great job in numbing America to homosexuality's sexual practices.
Meanwhile, much of America gets caught up in TV, sports etc.
The maxim is true, for evil to triumph, good men need to do nothing.
For myself, I will continue to tell people that homosexuality is perverse. Will it do any good? Only time will tell. But facts and religion and morality and truth are on my side.
TY, you've claimed that homosexual sex was "medically proven" to be unhealthy. I am merely asking you to show medical proof that lesbian sex is any more unhealthy than straight sex.
Mary F, your niece sounds bisexual to me. I have a friend who exclusively dated women for 10 or more years but ultimately fell in love with a man. I did the exact opposite: dated men exclusively but ultimately fell in love with a woman. Both my friend and I are bisexual. Interestingly enough, she admits that she is still primarily oriented toward women, and I am still primarily oriented toward men, although both of us are happy in love with our respective partners and we practice monogamy. It just goes to show the power of love to surprise you! In any event, your niece's experience does not prove that homosexuality is contagious or the result of environmental influences as opposed to being an immutable trait. Instead, your niece's experience merely shows the reality of bisexuality for a given percentage of the population. I suspect that many in the so-called "ex-gay" movement who are involved in heterosexual relationships are not gay at all, merely bisexual. My partner is as gay as one can get, and even her Southern Baptist parents can admit that she was born that way and that as much as it is difficult for them to understand, they can look back on her childhood and see the early signals. They sent her to therapy when she was 8 to try to "fix" her. Not only can you not fix what is not broken, but you cannot change what is intrinsic in a person. Bisexuals don't choose their sexual orientation any more than straight or gay people do, they are simply the only group that has any real "choice" in their sexual identity and expression. Your niece is a classic example of bisexuality.
"Bisexuality" is a concept gay activists use to rationalize changes in one's sexual behavior in order to support the scientifically unfounded belief that homosexuality is genetic.
If people change their orientation because they are "bisexual" then why is it that they don't feel sexual attraction to both men and women at the same time? Was MaryF's niece lying when she said she was a lesbian? Why wouldn't she say that she was also attracted to men during that time? Why wouldn't anybody?
And how do you explain all the thousands of identical twins out there where one's gay and the other's straight? Are all sets of those identical twins actually bisexual and are lying about it for some reason?
The entire rationale is flawed!
"I am merely asking you to show medical proof that lesbian sex is any more unhealthy than straight sex."
Lesbians experience many more health problems than heterosexual women. Even the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association admits the following about lesbian women:
Lesbians have the richest concentration of risk factors for breast cancer than any subset of women in the world.
They have higher risks for cervical cancers.
They are more likely to be obese.
They use more tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drugs.
A study of over 1,400 lesbians found the following:
Lesbians experience higher rates of bacterial vaginosis and hepatitis C.
http://www.forplu.com/community/gals-like-us/10things.htm
http://www.corporateresourcecouncil.org/white_papers/Health_Risks.pdf
They have more than twice the number of male partners than heterosexual women (only 7 percent who identify themselves as lesbians never have sex with men).
They are 4.5 times more likely to have fifty or more male sexual partners in a lifetime.
They are three to four times more likely to have sex with men who are at high risk for HIV—homosexuals, bisexuals, and IV drug users.
They are six times more likely to • abuse drugs intravenously.
Sam Jones, I would encourage you to thoroughly research the fact of bisexuality before making the assumptions that you do. Bisexuality is nothing more and nothing less than the capacity to find emotional/sexual satisfaction with a partner of either sex. Because human sexual orientation is a spectrum and not a dichotomy, it is easy to understand why MaryF's niece thought she was lesbian instead of bisexual. Like I stated above, my close friend also thought that she was a lesbian until she met a man that she fell in love with. She still identifies primarily as female-oriented, but is committed to her male partner.
Some bisexuals fall toward the gay end of the spectrum and some fall toward the straight end of the spectrum. Some are attracted to both sexes at the same time.
As for twins and homosexuality, here is a fascinating article that discusses the issue and various studies about it:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2005/08/14/what_makes_people_gay/
I believe that claiming to be homosexual or bisexual is just an excuse to behave immorally. We currently live in a very loose moral world where we are told to be accepting of EVERYONE and judge NO ONE lest they get offended.
If what you say is true, Heidi, then what is the difference between being bisexual and the ability to choose one's orientation?
@Sam Jones, the second report you cited there shows serious signs of a preexisting prejudice against homosexuality. It compares homosexual behaviour to pedophila which is ridiculous. A scientific study should not set out to reflect the author's views, but rather show the facts without bias.What Diggs did in that report was fit the evidence to his views, rather than his views to the evidence. He distorted sources and used highly outdated studies and terms to fit his picture (eg. the term 'Gay Bowel Syndrome' hasn't been used in the medical community since the early 80s).
"It compares homosexual behaviour to pedophila which is ridiculous."
How about comparing traditional family values to racial segregation? That's at least as ridiculous, so who are you to talk?
Clearly you will interpret every report and study that doesn't support your activist bias as "prejudice" and "bias" as a rationale to dismiss things you don't want to hear or know. There are numerous medical sources that confirm the dangerous health risks of homosexuality, whether you want to hear them or not.
BTW, the term "gay bowel syndrome" wasn't withdrawn as "outdated" until 2004 by the Canadian Association of Gastroenterologists, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control described the term as informal and no longer in use in 2005. Diggs report was written in 2002!
Sam Jones, "Lesbians experience many more health problems than heterosexual women." That doesn't address the question of whether lesbian sex is unhealthy compared to straight sex. Just like, if African-Americans have a statistically higher crime rate, that doesn't mean the skin color makes one a criminal. Correlation does not equal causation.
"Just like, if African-Americans have a statistically higher crime rate, that doesn't mean the skin color makes one a criminal. Correlation does not equal causation."
False analogy. Being black is a physical trait while homosexuality is a behavior. And behavior very often produces causation.
Both can produce causation. The point is that the data you quote doesn't establish any causation. Where's "medical proof?"
"If what you say is true, Heidi, then what is the difference between being bisexual and the ability to choose one's orientation?"
Sam Jones, the difference is that bisexuality, like heterosexuality and homosexuality, is an innate quality. A bisexual does not choose to be bisexual any more than a heterosexual chooses to be straight or a homosexual chooses to be gay. The only "choice" that exists for a bisexual is the "choice" to have a male partner, a female partner, or perhaps in some circumstances, both at the same time. For those of us bisexuals that practice monogamy, we choose to remain faithful to just one male or female partner. Just because a bisexual is capable of being sexually attracted to, and sexually intimate with, either sex does not mean that he or she is involved with multiple partners at any given time. Just like a man can be married to a woman but may occasionally find other women sexually attractive even as he chooses to remain faithful to his wife, so too can a bisexual be attracted to other persons (male or female) but make the choice to remain faithful to one partner.
Hope that helps you understand a bit better.
There is no big brother in the sky. It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us, waking and sleeping, who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime, who can—thought crime, just for what we think, who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams, who can create us sick, as apparently we are, and then order us on pain of eternal torture to be well again. To demand this, to wish this to be true it to wish to live as an abject slave. It is a wonderful thing, it is a wonderful thing, in my submission, that we now have enough information, enough intelligence, and I hope, enough intellectual and moral courage to say that this ghastly proposition is founded on a lie and to celebrate that fact and I invite you to join me in doing so. Thank you.