Once Lost, Now Found: Louis Marinelli of National Organization for Marriage Has Conversion Experience

The story developing now with a former National Organization for Marriage head honcho, Louis Marinelli, is engrossing.  It's in important respects like a modern-day conversion story, a story of scales falling from the eyes, as a person suddenly begins to realize people he has demeaned and sought to treat inhumanely are human beings, in the same way he's human.

Marinelli explains his conversion experience in a posting at his blog entitled, "I Now Support Full Marriage Equality."  As he notes, he was the key player in NOM's 2010 Summer for Marriage tour, which took the NOM circus on the road and tried to drum up opposition to gay rights across the country last year.  As Jeremy Hooper at Good As You, who broke this story yesterday, points out, Marinelli also created NOM's offiical Facebook page.  Marinelli was, in other words, a big player in the NOM show.

And then here's what happened:

My name is Louis J. Marinelli, a conservative-Republican and I now support full civil marriage equality. The constitution calls for nothing less.

This is the conclusion to Marinelli's statement (first link above) about how he has gone from being a strong, active opponent of same-sex marriage to an advocate.  The rest of the post is about how he got there, and that's where the fascination of this story as a conversion narrative lies, for me.

Marinelli was a true believer doing what true believers do: he took the NOM show on the highway last summer to convince his fellow citizens around the nation to collaborate with him and with NOM in blocking rights for gay citizens, removing rights for gay citizens.  And then he began to meet real gay human beings, particularly in Atlanta, where the turnout on behalf of NOM was dismal, but the vibrant presence of folks protesting NOM was, he found to his surprise, "inspiring." 

And what he saw in that inspirational gathering began to work away in his conscience, with this effect:

Even though I had been confronted by the counter-protesters throughout the marriage tour, the lesbian and gay people whom I made a profession out of opposing became real people for me almost instantly. For the first time I had empathy for them and remember asking myself what I was doing.

Knowing leads to empathy: making real human contact with people you've previously regarded as other and less than you is dangerous if you want to remain a true believer of the ilk who foments bigotry, since knowing opens the door to empathy, to a recognition of shared humanity.  

And now Marinelli is left with a problem: he has to confront the fact that what motivated him in his NOM crusades was not--as Maggie Gallagher and NOM like to pretend--primarily concern to preserve "traditional" marriage, but outright mean-spirited hostility towards gay and lesbian human beings, designed to hurt:

If there is an issue of shame [following my change of mind], it is a result of acknowledging the number of people I have targeted, hurt and oppressed.

And as the scales fell from Marinelli's eyes and he looked at the kind of discourse taking place in the comment boxes at the NOM Facebook page, he began to see that he had surrounded himself with hateful people, with people who were about nothing more and nothing less than hate.  Marinelli returned to the Facebook page as he was experiencing conversion (he had relinquished moderating duties to others), and here's what he now saw:

I was largely taken aback by the fact that the page I created had become such a hateful place. My comments and rhetoric paled in comparison to what that place had turned into. I began to understand why the gay community was out there claiming opposition to same-sex civil marriage was all about hate.

I soon realized that there I was surrounded by hateful people; propping up a cause I created five years ago, a cause which I had begun to question. 

And now I'm wondering if this leaves NOM with a big problem.  Do you suppose what Marinelli may really be saying in this testimony of conversion is that what NOM is really all about and always has been all about is hate?

Because if that's what he's saying--and who would know better than he does?--it contradicts the spin that Maggie Gallagher keeps trying to offer us about her organization.  Which has quasi-official status as a premier Catholic organization defending the sanctity of marriage.

Not attacking, demeaning, and removing rights from gay and lesbian human beings.  And certainly not fostering hate.

Which is tad bit difficult to justify as a Catholic value.

The graphic is Paul Granlund's 1967 bronze sculpture, "Damascus Illumination," at St. Paul's Lutheran church, Madison, Wisconsin.

Andrew Sullivan on Growing Catholic Support for Gay Marriage and His Experience as a Gay Catholic

My posting about Ross Douthat's latest op-ed statement re: why monogamy matters mentions that I responded to Douthat's essay in part due to a comment Andrew Sullivan recently made on his Daily Dish blog about his experience as a gay Catholic.  Sullivan notes just-released poll data showing that a majority of Americans now support same-sex marriage.  As he also notes, the shift towards support for marriage equality has been particularly pronounced, in the very recent past, among white Catholics.

And then Sullivan adds,

The one thing I can say as a gay Catholic is that my fellow Catholics have never felt hostile to me or my kind. I have experienced not one ugly incident or statement from my peers.

And I'm trying to get my head around that comment.  It's possible that Andrew Sullivan is focusing exclusively here on those he calls his peers.  And as I've noted several times in the past on this blog, I often have the feeling, reading Sullivan, that he lives in a very different social and cultural space than many of us live in, in the American heartland.  And so we certainly have different sets of peers.  From the vantage point of his  beltway location and ivy-league educational background, his experience of the United States, and his rather rosy perception of what happens out in the heartland--particularly in its staunchly conservative enclaves--seem to differ considerably from mine, as I actually live in one of the country's flyover spaces.

And since I don't live among the enlightened, among the Lowells who talk only to Cabots and the Cabots who talk only to God, I don't share Andrew Sullivan's experience of never having encountered hostility  directed towards me by any fellow Catholics because I'm gay.  Indeed, unlike Sullivan, I can't read the work of our fellow Catholic Ross Douthat and conclude that Ross Douthat "is not a homophobe"--not when Douthat keeps working posthaste to develop ever more ingenious arguments to attack a civil right for me and for other gay Americans, as that civil right comes closer to us.  As Ross Douthat works to thwart that right specifically as a Catholic . . . .

(If Sullivan means that Douthat, with whom he has collaborated and whom he knows personally, is not homophobic in a personal sense, in his interaction with others, then I take the point.  But I'd respond to it by noting that I've dealt with many white Southerners who are not personally consumed by animus against African Americans, who boast that they have many black friends, but who, qua writers, judges, teachers--you name it--have fought tooth and nail against civil rights for people of color.  Which tends to diminish the claim that they are not personally racist, in my view.)

As I say, I think that, in the final analysis, Andrew Sullivan and I have different experiences of the world, of American society, and the Catholic church.  And his perceptions may well be right and mine wrong.

But if his are correct, what am I to do--and what are American Catholics in general to do--with the kind of things that keep popping up day after day on American Catholic blog sites?  Things that, in my view, are decidedly "hostile to me and my kind."  Statements that are, in my view, absolutely ugly, coming to me from some of my Catholic peers in the U.S.

I mean things like this, published on the very day or so that Andrew Sullivan wrote the preceding comments: 

1. Our old friend John Last Name Unknown at the America "In All Things" blog site, now signing himself as Juan Still Without A Surname, and continuing his attempt to tag me and my kind as mentally disordered, because we are gay;

2. Or Frank C. Tantillo writing in response to a recent America editorial about the situation in Philadelphia, fuming that people are forgetting that homosexuality is all about NAMBLA and pedophilia and the gays are responsible for the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic church;

3. Or Dennis Di Mauro and Jean Raber responding to a posting by Eduardo Peñalver at Commonweal's blog re: an upcoming dialogue sponsored by multiple universities about Catholic stances towards sexual issues, suggesting that the biblical evidence against "homosexuality" is incontrovertible and "the Church" has no choice except to uphold that evidence, no matter how much it wounds those who are gay;

4. Or just about anything that falls from the mouth of Bill Donohue or Maggie Gallagher;

5. Or the countless far uglier and far more explicit homophobic rants that pour forth on a daily basis on the non-centrist Catholic blog sites: the ones I've just highlighted are centrist ones populated by Catholics who purport to have a modicum of education and decency and sense.

As I say, what am I to do with all of this, as I listen to Andrew Sullivan's experience of never having felt hostility from his fellow Catholics to himself as a gay Catholic, or never having heard an ugly statement directed to him by a Catholic peer?  I will certainly grant--and I celebrate this--that a large percentage of American Catholics support the human rights of LGBT persons.

But then there's that group that doesn't.  And to pretend they're not there, and that they don't have influence to make life miserable for everyone in the nation who's gay or lesbian (Maggie Gallagher is crowing about what she and NOM accomplished in Maryland) is either disingenuous or short-sighted, it seems to me.

African-American Faith Communities and the LGBT Community: An Arkansas Church Builds Bridges

National Organization for Marriage chair Maggie Gallagher has recently been crowing that the opposition to marriage equality in Maryland is being led not only by her own Catholic church but by black churches as well.  (Unfortunately for Maggie, her fellow Catholics decidedly do not support her attempt and that of the Catholic hierarchy to block the human rights of LGBT citizens: as Tom Fox noted recently in National Catholic Reporter, Catholic lawmakers and Catholic citizens have bucked the hierarchy to support the marriage equality bill, and polls show 49% of Maryland Catholics supporting marriage equality with 42% opposed--a higher percentage of support than among citizens at large).  

And given the persistent attempt of right-wing political and religious activists to drive a wedge between African Americans and their gay brothers and sisters, I think it's important to note that some of the strongest supporters of the movement to protect the rights of gay Americans have been and remain African-American people of faith.  Martin Luther King, Jr.'s widow Coretta Scott King famously stated in 2003 that her own strong support for LGBT rights was an extension of her husband's civil rights activism:

I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people. ... But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream, to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.

Seasoned veterans of the Civil Rights movement including Georgia's former congressman Julian Bond have spoken out forcefully on behalf of the human rights of their gay brothers and sisters, drawing a clear line to connect the struggle for black civil rights and gay civil rights.  As I noted last week, Harvard professor and chaplain Peter J. Gomes, a distinguished African-American theologian and Baptist minister (and a gay man) who died on 28 February, spoke out passionately and repeatedly against homophobia in American Christian churches and on behalf of justice for LGBT persons in noted books about the state of American Christianity (and here).

Since Gallagher and other right-wing political operatives with non-existent histories of any real concern to address racial injustice want to engage in ugly, divisive wedge politics when it comes to the relationship between the African-American and gay communities, I'm happy to report these and other countervailing trends which disprove Gallagher's point--that black people of faith oppose gay rights.  Yesterday, a wonderful black church in Little Rock about which I've blogged before (and see also here) invited Steve and me to speak to their educational group about gay issues.

New Millennium is a black Baptist church (but inclusive: it has both black and white members) that shares facilities with another Baptist church which my aunt attends.  It's pastored by a wonderful, prophetic leader, Rev. Wendell Griffen, who also holds a judge's seat in Arkansas--and whom Steve and I count ourselves blessed to call a friend, along with his wife Pat, a psychotherapist and professor of psychology with whom we worked several years ago at Philander Smith College.  Wendell's stellar blog Cultural Competency is in my Bilgrimage blog list to the side of this posting.

Because Pat, Wendell, and their congregation recognize the need to call African-American people of faith to engage in the struggle against homophobic injustice, the church has undertaken an ongoing study of gay issues and questions, in light of the scriptures, theology, and the tradition of the church.  They've been reading and discussing for some time now studies of what the scriptures have to say about these issues (or what many anti-gay believers imagine the scriptures say), about the political background to anti-gay movements in the U.S., about the connections between those movements and movements that have historically sought to oppress people of color, and about what it means to be church, to walk in Jesus's footsteps, in a culture in which these struggles play a prominent role.

Steve and I felt honored to come to New Millennium and help further the dialogue by talking about own own some forty years of life as a committed gay couple, and about the real and painful experiences of injustice through which we've sometimes walked in those years--experiences made even more painful because they have often occurred at the hands of people of faith.  And we ourselves are people of faith, brothers and sisters of those doing gross injustice to us.  We met in the context of the chaplain's office at a Catholic university, and have, from the start of our relationship, considered our life together a shared journey of faith.

I say we felt honored to speak at New Millennium: we also felt trepidation.  We felt no little fear and trembling.  It is not easy to talk about what is closest to one's soul.  It is not easy to talk about the intimate aspects of one's life and relationship in a culture inclined to overlay gay lives and gay relationships with crude myths about sexual promiscuity, disease, pedophilia, and so forth.

Giving witness to the grace that runs through gay lives and gay relationships can feel like being in a forensic witness stand, with bright spotlights aimed at your face.  And that's, unfortunately, even more the case when the witness stand is in a church.

But the experience yesterday could not have been more positive.  My youngest nephew Patrick, who attends the university across the street from the church--University of Arkansas at Little Rock--got wind of the fact we'd be speaking at the church yesterday, and showed up to support us (and we were very touched by this).  And the community at New Millennium had invited us to worship with them prior to our dialogue with the church educational group, laying a foundation for warm inclusion as we sang and read scripture together, and listened to God's word broken in a sermon followed by the breaking of the bread of the Lord's Supper.

For readers who may not have followed this blog from the beginning, it occurs to me to mention something I mentioned frequently in some of the initial postings at this Bilgrimage site: this is that the single factor which, above all, drew me to the Catholic church as a teenager was the Eucharist.  The Southern Baptist church in which I grew up celebrated the Lord's Supper only infrequently, four times a year.  Those celebrations were always solemn and deeply meaningful, amd were preceded by a time of preparation rooted in Anabaptist theology, which stresses the communal aspect of communion--the way in which eating the one bread and drinking from the one cup both makes us one, but also reflects our communion in the body of Christ.  And so it's important, in Anabaptist theology, to try to become the body of Christ by healing division before one celebrates the unity of the body of Christ in the Lord's Supper.

And, frankly, because these solemn celebrations meant so much to me growing up, I wanted more.  When I encountered it, I cherished the Catholic tradition of daily celebration of the Eucharist.  The warm-hearted piety of the evangelical tradition in which I had been nurtured, which views the life of discipleship as an intimate walking with Jesus, found a new expression in the thought of such intimate union with Jesus that one could eat his body and drink his blood--and be nurtured and strengthened in a premier way as one walked the journey to the cross with him.

And so far and away, the most painful aspect of finding ourselves pushed to the margins of our church has been, for Steve and me, finding ourselves shoved from the table of the Lord.  As I've shared in previous postings, for us, the breaking point came when Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina fired first me and then Steve on specious grounds (in my case, no reason at all was given for the firing), and when we tried after that to go to liturgy at the abbey church that belongs to the Benedictine monks who own Belmont Abbey College.

Seeing the very men who had spearheaded our unjust expulsion from the college community stand at the altar and preach about the human rights of everyone, about justice for all, and then break the Lord's bread and offer it to worshipers, when they had removed us from the table of daily bread by taking away our livelihoods, our health insurance, our vocations, was too much for us.

It was impossible for us to believe that Catholic priests who claim to believe in the Eucharist can really or effectively believe in what they proclaim each time they offer the Bread of Life to others, when they can so cavalierly remove others from the the table of daily bread, while enjoying secure lives with assured housing, jobs, health insurance, etc.  The table of the Lord's bread and the table of daily bread are intimately connected.  When the church itself breaks the connection by violating the human rights of lay believers, it undermines everything it wants to proclaim about the Eucharist--and it does so in a very stark way.

And so being invited to the table of the Lord's Supper yesterday at New Millennium, as a preliminary to our sharing our lives in the educational session, was profoundly meaningful to us.  The sharing created a communion on which we built in the dialogue about gay lives and gay issues that followed.

(An aside, but a pertinent one: in the strictest canons of Baptist belief, many Baptist churches practice what's called "closed communion."  This means that not only do they exclude Christians of other denominations from their celebrations of the Lord's Supper; they also historically excluded even other Baptists who did not belong to their particular church.  According to the traditional Baptist theology with which I grew up, each Baptist church is autonomous, and the practice of closed communion safeguards the beliefs of the individual Baptist church celebrating the Lord's Supper--since its beliefs may not agree in every respect with those of another Baptist church.

And so when I was a child and before I became a church member at the age of 8, my parents and other adults in my family would not allow my brothers or me to participate in the Lord's Supper.  With one exception: the aunt about whom I blogged some days ago when I noted that, in my view, the principle that should govern adult interactions with children is the principle of doing no harm--my aunt Kat--did allow us to have a share of the bread and grape juice as it passed to her during the Lord's Supper.  She'd invariably take a tidbit of her bread and offer it to us, along with a sip of the juice.

Doing no harm meant, in her worldview, including.  Not excluding.  Though we children were not yet professed and baptized members of the church, worthy members.  And I thought of all of this, all over again, yesterday as we shared bread and the cup at New Millennium.)

And what to say in conclusion?  Simply this: it's important that churches like New Millennium are inviting openly gay people and gay couples to talk back and forth with members of their congregations.  As one of the church members who came up to thank us for our presentation yesterday said, these dialogue sessions are absolutely essential so that we can get to know each other as human beings . . . 

When many folks, including many people of faith, know their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters only as stereotypes.  As false stereotypes.  It is harder to hate and do injustice to someone when one sees the human face of the person one wishes to treat as an inhuman object.  And the people of God at New Millennium yesterday could not have been warmer, kinder, more inclusive--and well-educated about the issues we were discussing, in ways that should set a standard for other church communities.

When Steve and I returned to Arkansas in 1997 to provide care for my mother in her final years, in a setting familiar to her and close to her siblings, I went to a number of leaders of churches in this area, to ask if they would consider doing precisely what New Millennium church is now doing.  I asked if they would consider helping me organize a speakers' bureau of local gay and lesbian people of faith (and also those scarred by encounters with faith communities, who have understandably distanced themselves from these communities), who would be available to go from church to church simply to meet and talk to people in each church.  About our lives.

No church took me up on my offer.  None wanted to deal with the pushback that always comes when churches in our area open their doors to gay and lesbian folks who are out of the closet, and, more importantly, when faith communities demonstrate solidarity with gay people in the struggle for human rights.

In a heavily churched part of the world like Arkansas, where churches wield enormous cultural and political influence (and where, according to a Pew study whose results were released last fall [see also here], people's religious knowledge is nonetheless abysmally low), initiatives like the one New Millennium church has begun are enormously important.  This small, prophetic African-American church is leading the way among Arkansas churches right now, when it comes to building effective bridges between the gay community and people of faith.

I can only hope that other churches will get the word and begin to do likewise.

Obama Administration Won't Defend Unconstitutional DOMA: Official Catholic Reactions from U.S. Bishops and Maggie Gallagher

In case you're wondering what the moral teachers of the Catholic church in the U.S. have to say about the decision of the Obama administration yesterday no longer to defend the Defense of Marriage Act--because enshrining discrimination in federal law is unconstitutional!--wonder no more.  The bishops hastened to get out a press statement right away.  Their take?

1. "Traditional" marriage has always been one man with one woman (memo to bishops: you may want to double-check those stories in your holy scriptures about, oh, Abraham and Solomon and David and all the biblical patriarchs--the fathers in faith, as we like to say in the Catholic church--and their many wives).

2. We don't discriminate.  We loves us some gay folks.  But our right to religious freedom trumps your alleged human rights.  And we're all about defending and promoting human rights.  For everyone.

Will American Catholics listen to this toxic brew of nonsense?  Not likely--not most American Catholics, who staunchly oppose discrimination against gays and lesbians, for the most part, and who move closer and closer to a majority acceptance of same-sex marriage with each poll that solicits their input on that topic. 

Will that deter the bishops from continuing to fight for their "right" to discriminate, while they claim that they deplore discrimination?  Not in the least.  After all, remember that they are the teachers.  They do the talking.  We do the listening.  And how they themselves behave as moral exemplars in, say, their cover-up of cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests doesn't, in their minds, have anything to do with what they teach.  Or with their credibility as teachers.

Though the rapid mass exodus of Catholics from the church of which these bishops are pastoral leaders says otherwise.

And lest you wonder what Maggie Gallagher might have to say about the president's decision not to defend DOMA, wonder no more.  Since she's the first person to whom FOX news turned for commentary when the announcement came down.  They turned to Maggie for "the" Catholic reaction to the decision.  

And Maggie didn't disappoint.  Rather than address the argument on which the Obama administration bases its decision no longer to defend an unconstitutional law, Maggie simply tries to turn the tables.  She accuses Obama of being "unconstitutional."  As her reply makes plain, she simply does not and will not accept the argument on which the decision rests: namely, that it is impossible to make a strong or credible case for excluding gay and lesbian persons from the legal defenses afforded by the equal protection clause of the constitution.

When we can all easily see that gay and lesbian persons are, indeed, a stigmatized minority in the United States, subject to discrimination solely because they are gay or lesbian.  Solely due to an innate characteristic over which they have no more control than someone does of her gender or his skin color.  An innate characteristic that ought not, in any universe calling itself moral, to matter, when it comes to doling out rights or shielding a minority from discrimination.

It is this--it is this hateful discrimination--that the U.S. Catholic bishops are defending by their statement, and intend to continue defending.  And it is this hateful discrimination that the Catholic-inspired, Catholic-funded National Organization for Marriage and Maggie Gallagher exist to spread around anywhere their deep pockets can gain them influence in the U.S.

And that's, of course, precisely why FOX turned immediately to Maggie.  Her agenda fits theirs, hand in glove.  And the deep pockets funding her agenda of discrimination and demonization matter intently to FOX.

P.S. To read the map that is the graphic for this posting, simply click on it to enlarge it.

Anti-Gay Initiatives Across U.S. State Legislatures: Gays Not to Take Them "Personally"

When I look at the pictures of the two young Republicans sponsoring the "Don't Say Gay" bill now before the Tennessee legislature, I think of something Timothy Beauchamp said at AmericaBlog Gay yesterday.  Beauchamp is reporting on a statement that the Republican minority leader in the Maryland Senate, Nancy Jacobs, made recently as the Maryland legislature gears up for a big debate about same-sex marriage.  Jacobs says she hopes her gay and lesbian fellow citizens won't take "personally" what her fellow Republicans say about them in the legislative debate.

We don't have to work hard to imagine the kind of things gay and lesbian human beings will be asked not to take "personally" as the homophobic Republican mud flies around in the Maryland legislature.  After listening to the anti-gay side recently, one Maryland senator, Democrat James Brochin, who had previously been opposed to same-sex marriage, changed his mind.  Brochin said that he found the "hate and venom" of those testifying against gay people and gay lives "appalling."  He concluded,

For me, the transition to supporting marriage has not been an easy one, but the uncertainty, fear, and second-class status that gays and lesbians have to put up with is far worse and clearly must come to an end. ... What I witnessed from the opponents of the bill was appalling. Witness after witness demonized homosexuals, vilified the gay community, and described gays and lesbians as pedophiles.

Those doing the demonizing in these Maryland hearings include Maggie Gallagher of National Organization for Marriage, who played a key role in arguing against the gay-marriage legislation and in changing Brochin's mind.  As I say, we don't have to stretch our imaginations to figure out what Republicans who have been pumped full of Maggie's Catholic-inspired and Catholic-funded hate and venom will be saying as they try to block same-sex marriage in Maryland--will be saying about gay and lesbian human beings, gay and lesbian lives, gay and lesbian loving relationships.

And so I agree absolutely with Timothy Beauchamp's rejoinder to Nancy Jacobs:

Now why would the gays elected to serve in the House and Senate take it personally to have their colleagues claiming they shouldn't be able to share in the same rights? How typical and sickening for a Republican to smugly argue they want to continue to discriminate but hope "the gays" don't take it personally. Another thing I'd like my Republican "friends" to know. If they don't want me to have equal rights, they can "love me" all they want but I won't be "loving them" back. I just don't believe in that form of "love" that is strangely synonymous with what would otherwise be known as hate. In fact, that is a very funny definition of love for them to deny us our basic human rights. Actions speak louder than words, Ms. Jacobs. 

I must be built different than other human beings, and maybe this is one of the effects of my disordered condition, but:  I do rather take it personally--very personally--when some people, including many of my Catholic brothers and sisters, characterize my life of committed, monogamous love with a longtime partner as bestial, as no different than a man's rape of a dog.  Or when they imply that I might molest children.  Or when they speak of me as diseased and a threat to the health of society.  Or when they state that my relationship and my life are narcissistic and non-generative.  Or when they say that my human rights are "alleged rights" trumped by their real right to discriminate. Or when they say that providing my committed, monogamous relationship with the same legal protections, tax advantages, and networks of support provided to heterosexual marriages will somehow magically dissolve everyone else's "traditional" marriage.

And I'll go a step further and say I also take it personally when people I know and love tell me--as some friends do--that they are fiscal conservatives but social liberals, and that they vote Republican only for the former reason and deplore the attacks on me and my kind by the "fiscal conservatives" these friends help elect.  You can't have it both ways.  You can't put these rabidly anti-gay folks into office and then disclaim responsibility for what you've done when they go on the attack.

And you can't claim to love me and cherish my friendship and then turn these haters loose on me and my kind.  Love is not what this demonization of gay human beings and gay lives to score political points is all about.  Never has been, never will be.  It's about prejudice and discrimination, pure and simple.  And the need of some people to build their sense of self and of their righteousness on the exclusion and destruction of other human beings to whom they feel superior.

Fresh Sperm: Bishop Eddie Long and John Paul II's Theology of the Body

One of the supposedly earth-shaking insights of the Catholic theology of the body developed by the late pope John Paul II is its insistence that male-female complementarity is the central thread on which Judaeo-Christian beliefs hold together.  The theology of the body insists that everything in scripture and tradition should be read through the optic of the crude biological facticity of gender, of maleness and femaleness.

And because it employs a literalistic framework for reading scripture and tradition, the theology of the body tortures the central symbols of religious traditions to make them fit its mindless literalism. And so we end up with arguments that priests must be male because the church is female, and priests are married to the bride of Christ through ordination.

And here's where these arguments are headed; here's where the mindless literalism, with its fixation on biological gender as the most significant fact about Judaeo-Christian faith ends up, when taken to its logical, absurd extremes.

This is Bishop Eddie Long of Atlanta preaching about the "fresh sperm" that he and other (male) preachers inject into the church's "womb" through their preaching:

"The word of God is potent. The word of God is His sperm," Long thunders. "The job of the preacher is to bring fresh sperm and when he speaks it, the womb -- the church -- is to take it in and say, 'Sho' you're right.'"

And this is absolutely no different at all from what John Paul II teaches in his theology of the body, and what those (like Maggie Gallagher and Robert P. George) now trying to impose the theology of the body on our entire culture through the political process, are arguing.

It all comes down to fresh sperm.  And male preachers and priests supplying it.  And the supple, receptive--but above all, passive--womb of women to receive it.  And the womb of the female church, with its its passive, receptive stance to the mighty men supplying it with fresh sperm.