Rowan Williams Tells ‘Persecuted’ Western Christians to Grow Up

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Since blog traffic tends to be lower on the weekends than during the week, most of the serious blog content—full posts written by our bloggers—will be posted during the week. I will use the weekends to post brief, thought-provoking excerpts that I think will be of interest to readers of the blog. For the most part, these will be posted with only brief commentary.

The first excerpt comes from a recent story in The Guardian about some comments by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams at the Edinburgh International Book Festival:

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“Gay”: Clarity or Obfuscation? (Part 2)

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In my last post, I pointed out the way that some Christians have exploited the ambiguous meaning of the word “gay” to make misleading promises (like “You don’t have to be gay”) to others.

Today, I want to look at how the word is sometimes used to mislead others—including other Christians—about the speaker’s own life and experiences.

Consider, for example, the sad case of Dr. George Rekers. He helped co-found the Family Research Council, and was for many years a member of the board and scientific advisor for the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). He was a leading opponent of gay rights and advocate of reparative therapy for several decades.

In 2010, he hired a man who worked as a male prostitute to accompany him on a trip to Europe. Allegedly, his travel assistant provided him with daily sexual massage services during the trip.

When these accusations became public, Dr. Rekers denied that he was gay.

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So how should you respond when someone tells you a story like mine?

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This is the fifth in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality. Click to see the first, second, third, and fourth installments.

Some of the best responses to my coming out have come from those who listened receptively. They take in what I have to say and seek to understand as best they can. In some ways, my coming out has changed very little in my relationships with others. I am the same man that I have always been. Most of my relationships have neither taken a radical redirection nor experienced a great rupture. So things have more or less remained the same.

Yet, everything has changed. It’s like a man who has always loved music and then learns musical theory. He loves the music, as he had loved it before, but his love is, in some ways, entirely different. He loves not only that music is beautiful, but he loves the particularities of that beauty that he had not seen before: its profound order, the development of a musical score, the genius of a composition.

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Disorder Revisited

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Aaron Taylor recently wrote a critique of the use (or abuse) of the category of “disorder” in relation to homosexual acts here at Spiritual Friendship. To my mind, the most important of his observations was the following:

First, the claim that homosexual acts are disordered obviously entails the judgment that the inclination to those acts is disordered. However, this is usually heard as the Church calling the sexuality of gays and lesbians disordered in toto. Given that the Church teaches that sexuality “affects all aspects of the human person,” it is almost impossible for the layman to distinguish this from the claim that the entire personalities of gay people are disordered.

It seems to me that the core problem that this term has when it comes to the relation between the Catholic Church and the gay community is the oft-repeated inaccuracy that the Church teaches that gay people are disordered. When someone says this, I think it touches a good deal more directly on the “homosexual inclinations are objectively disordered” than on the “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered” (though, as Aaron notes, the two are linked.)

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This is “gay”

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This is the fourth in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality. Click to see the first, second, and third installments.

The term “gay” can be both descriptive and constructive. It can be used as a term to describe particular emotions, sentiments, orientations, and actions. Or it can be used as a means by which one identifies oneself and one’s relation to the world. The word “Catholic” is always both constructive and descriptive. It describes one’s religious affiliation, but it is also a means of identification and construction; it becomes a center upon which one builds one’s life. It is not used merely to describe one’s beliefs. Rather, it dictates a way of life and has a command and affect on how we view ourselves. An identification with “Catholic” implies radical change and carries constructive force.

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On “Higher” Vocations and the “Marital Paradigm”

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Back when Joshua Gonnerman and I were students at Thomas Aquinas College, from 2005-2009, we were in an environment where the combination of geographical remoteness, Dominican community, and school-wide common study meant that any and every sort of intellectual conversation could take place. One would walk into the Commons and (I am perhaps underexaggerating here) and hear conversations abounding about anything, from Roman history according to Tacitus and Suetonius, to the political philosophy of the American Founding Fathers, to the question of how it is that angels may be said to move according to Aquinas.

There were a few “hot topics” every year that tended to repeat themselves, and one of them was the question of vocational order. This arose from a careful distinction Aquinas made in the Summa, but one which, left unclarified by those giving it only a partial reading, tended to give students heartburn. There is an order among the different states of life in the Church, one defined by both the weight of the sacrifice one makes to be in that state, and also by the juridical order of the Church herself. Because one makes a complete sacrifice of oneself, a holocaust, in entering religious life, Aquinas says that (objectively speaking) religious life is the highest form of life. In this he follows St. Paul, who says in 1 Corinthians 7 that he would that all would remain celibate, but that God calls some to marriage. (Of course, the way he puts this is a legendary bone of contention for those attempting to “justify” marriage as a high vocation. I tend to think he vindicated this, though, by his famous “husbands, love your wives” injunction at the beginning of the same chapter.)

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My Early Education

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This is the third in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality. Click to see the first and second installments.

I consider it a strength of my early upbringing that the particularities of sexual identity were not a primary topic of discussion. Although words like “gay,” “straight,” and “bisexual” were known to me, I felt no urgent need to make these categories a significant part of how I viewed myself.

From the age of about five, I attended St. Joseph Catholic School in Bryan, Texas. It was a small parish school; I don’t recall my class size ever exceeding thirty-five students. I grew up in a loving family, with a mother, a father, a brother eighteen months younger than me, and a sister about three years younger than him.

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“Gay”: Clarity or Obfuscation? (Part 1)

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In contemporary culture, “gay” is the most common word for describing homosexual persons. This has become so much a part of the default language that Pope Francis used it as a neutral description of a person’s sexual attractions in response to a question at a recent press conference.

I think a lot of the language debates that go on around homosexuality make mountains out of molehills (I could link to examples, but why give traffic to posts I think are hurting the discussion?). I am more interested in talking about vocation, friendship, celibacy, and other questions which I think address more important needs.

Still, language can cause confusion, and stirs up a lot of debate. So I’m going to say something about it, even though I think the arguments have been blown out of proportion.

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Why am I saying this? Why now?

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This is the second in a series of posts looking at my Catholic Faith, and how it relates to my life and my sexuality. Read the first post here.

In 2012, The Observer ran a series on the experiences of gay and lesbian students at Notre Dame. Senior Sam Costanzo came to Notre Dame with the same hope that I suspect many other gay students had brought to Catholic universities: that it “would be a school where he could come to terms with his sexual orientation as it related to being a practicing Catholic.” Like many others before him, Sam was no longer a practicing Catholic at the time the article was published. This is a common story, and it’s a story that I understand. When you’re gay, coming to terms with being a Catholic is an extremely difficult journey, a story that is rarely told, and when it is told, it almost always ends with a broken relationship with the Church.

Often, when gay and lesbian men and women can’t find a place in the Church, they feel that their only option is to leave, and they walk out of the Church, often accompanied by their friends and family members. This could have been my story. Given the frequency of this story, it is perhaps something of a miracle that my life is developing in a rather different direction.

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How is Gay Celibacy Different from Straight Celibacy?

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[This is the third in a series of three posts on celibacy. The first was What Does Genesis 2:18 Really Teach? and the second was The Gift of Celibacy.]

While on the topic of singleness and celibacy, I think it would be helpful to talk about some of the practical ways that things are different for a lot of people who are celibate because they’re exclusively gay.  I’ll start with my standard disclaimer that as someone who is attracted to both sexes, I am not entirely speaking out of experience.  However, this is something I’ve discussed quite a bit with others, and I think my experience brings something to bear as well.  I’m not trying to say that the situation of exclusively gay people is entirely unique, but there are some practical differences people don’t always think about.

Many straight Christians are celibate by choice.  They may discern a specific call to celibacy as a form of dedication to God.  Those who find celibacy forced upon them by circumstances, regardless of sexual orientation, will have unique difficulties.  Ron Belgau offered some initial reflections on these issues in Seeds of Celibacy, and I offered some related thoughts in The Gift of Celibacy.  Even in these cases, however, there are some important differences between involuntary celibacy for straight people and involuntary celibacy for gay and lesbian people.

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