gotta find a new place where the kids are hip

WASHINGTON (CNS) — A policy adviser to the U.S. bishops has resigned following a controversy over an opinion piece he wrote suggesting that same-sex attraction could be the work of the devil.

“I’d rather have a dead son than a gay son.” These words, recently spoken by a prominent member of Congress as an appeal to Brazil’s “family values,” made Eleonora Pereira angry.

Eleonora’s son, Jose Ricardo, was murdered a year ago—victim of a rising tide of homophobic and transphobic hate crimes in Brazil.

”My son, my best friend, was killed in a hate crime last year. Now I’m filling that emptiness with the fight against violence, homophobia and discrimination.” — Eleanora

via Fr. James Martin

During the conference, Deb Word, whose talk during the first panel received a standing ovation from the attendees, shared her experience of raising her son, who is gay, and of housing homeless gay and lesbian teenagers, who have been shunned by their own parents. Word is part of a grassroots movement called Fortunate Families, which provides a support network primarily for Catholic parents of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender children.

“We see kids who think they are un-loveable because of their orientation,” Word said. “We help kids who have been suicidal over parental rejection. We love them and we let them know that God loves them as well. These are God’s children, but somehow that message has been lost, and we need to find a way to shout that message louder than any other.”

Other speakers on the Word’s panel were: Kate Henley Averett, co-editor of “From the Pews in the Back,” who shared her struggle with being both Catholic and lesbian, and her ultimate decision to leave the church; Michael Sepidoza Campos, Ph.D., who is gay, described his decision to join, and eventually leave, the seminary and his current work as a high-school teacher; Hilary Howes, a transgender activist who expressed her experience as a convert to Catholicism and the uncertainty surrounding her place in the church as a transgender female; Eve Tushnet, a freelance writer, shared her experience as a Catholic convert, and the joys and challenges of her decision, as a lesbian woman, to lead a lay, celibate life.

Tushnet said that by sublimating feelings of eros, she has found her vocation through service and friendship. “It was through loving service and connection to women, among other things, that I was able to express my identity as a lesbian while being celibate,” Tushnet said. “I wish someone had told me how much I would have to fight for both parts of being gay and Catholic.”

Tushnet said many people suffer due to a general lack of respect for friendship outside marriage, but that she found comfort during her discernment by praying to Oscar Wilde and St. Joan of Arc, among others. She said gay teens need to see more examples of “joyful, fruitful, celibate lives of service” in the church.

Many panelists shared stories of navigating the tensions between their faith lives and their sexuality, and expressed the hope that, as practicing members of the church, they could help to shape the conversation around such issues. “Was I at home in the Catholic Church?” Sepidoza said. “Eh, yes and no. Was I at home in the gay community? Eh, yes and no. But among these tensions were many experiences that were lifegiving.”

Howes also saw the beauty in her own experience as a transgender Catholic. “I got more heat for coming out as Catholic, than coming out as transsexual,” she said. “But there is so much that is good in the Catholic Church, and it isn’t going away.”

This is beautiful.

A Catholic priest’s take on a child who was refused acceptance to a Catholic school.

Not quite what you’d expect. (Thanks to my mom for sending this).

The story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness.

1973 was only 38 years ago. That explains a lot. History shows that things can change, but getting rid of collective baggage takes a while.

History is a lot of hypothesizing about who slept with who.

For nearly eight months in 1862-3, Capt. David Derickson led the brigade that guarded Lincoln at the Soldiers’ Home in the District of Columbia, the Camp David of the day. Derickson, in the words of his regiment’s history, published three decades later, ”advanced so far in the president’s confidence and esteem that in Mrs. Lincoln’s absence he frequently spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him, and — it is said — making use of his Excellency’s night shirt!”

Tripp can lay out a case, but his discussion of its implications is so erratic that the reader is often left on his own. One wonders: What does it mean to be homosexual? Not all of the men Lincoln admired were. Ellsworth seems straight as a ruler: he was engaged to a woman he passionately loved when he died. Even Derickson married twice and fathered 10 children (one son was serving in his unit while he was sleeping with Lincoln). Tripp argues that a cultural innocence — the word ”homosexual” had not yet been coined — allowed acts of physical closeness between men that had no deeper meaning, as well as acts that did but could escape scrutiny. We know more than our ancestors, and our reward is that, in some ways, we may do less. In any case, on the evidence before us, Lincoln loved men, at least some of whom loved him back. Their words tell us more than their sleeping arrangements.

What does Lincoln’s erotic life tell us about Lincoln? For a gregarious, popular man, he had few intimates (Tripp’s very title is a misnomer). Like many secretive types — Benjamin Franklin comes to mind — he kept the world at bay with a screen of banter. Yet behind the laughs lay an almost bottomless sadness, and sympathy for those he saw as fellow sufferers. There were many Lincolns: the joker, the pol, the logician, the skeptical theologian. But the man of sorrows may be the most important. ”The president has a curious vein of sentiment running through his thought which is his most valuable mental attribute,” as his secretary of state, William Seward, said. Desiring what he could not consistently have did not make him grieve — what Virgil called the tears of things did that — but it may have deepened his grief.