Catholics and marriage

On the ballot in eight states were amendments defining marriage as
between a man and woman, a direct repudiation of the right of
homosexual couples to marry. In seven of those states, the amendment
passed. One of those was Colorado, where a leader of the
anti-gay-marriage movement, Pastor Ted Haggard, had, the week before,
been forced out of his position as head of New Life Church in
Colorado Springs because of an alleged relationship with a male
prostitute. In his resignation letter, Haggard confessed, "I am a
deceiver and a liar. There is a part of my life that is so repulsive
and dark that I've been warring against it all my adult life."
In Massachusetts, ahead of last week's constitutional convention, the
Commonwealth's four Catholic bishops took a rare political
initiative, calling on Catholics to pressure legislators to support
an anti-gay-marriage amendment here. The convention recessed without
taking action, but the bishops had demonstrated the absolute priority
of rolling back the right of gays to marry. When public crises are
defined by an immoral American war, universal cuts in social
services, violence among young people, resurgent nuclear arsenals,
rising global inequity, unprecedented jeopardy of the earth itself,
why are the bishops obsessed with this particular question?
Same-sex erotic love is not the issue. Humans, including Catholic
bishops, have long accommodated it. But that accommodation assumes
denial and shame. What brings demonstrators into streets across
cultures, and what shows up in the United States as "values"
politics, mobilizing bishops, is the movement to bring homosexuality
out of the dark.
When gay people openly assert their identities as such, whether
through parades or through the demand for full and equal social
recognition, reactionaries cannot stand it. Why?
Two answers, one personal and one political. The open affirmation of
gay identity can pose a mortal threat to people whose own sexual
identity is insecure. The Haggard story is a cautionary tale. As it
happens, I was present last year to hear Pastor Ted preach a sermon
at his mega-church, and it included a digressive attack on
homosexuals that was as venomous and it was gratuitous. He equated
gay sex with bestiality.
Even at the time, I wondered about the dark energy of his hatred.
That it is revealed now as self-hatred comes as no surprise. One
needn't draw a direct line from Haggard's behavior to the private
morality of Catholic bishops to sense that the church's own deepening
insecurity on all matters of sexuality, especially those surfaced by
the still unresolved crisis of priestly sexual abuse of children,
informs its exceptional opposition to gay rights.
And so in Jerusalem. The insecurities of male establishments, whose
dominance over women is threatened, readily explode in contempt for
any expression of gay pride. Patriarchy is at issue.
There is a deflection here, and that points to the political use of
gay bashing. At the end of the Cold War, when the Pentagon defined
itself as the world's largest closet by decreeing "don't ask, don't
tell," the issue of gays in the military was being used to deflect
attention from the military's real problem: how to maintain Cold War
levels of spending, and a Cold War nuclear arsenal, without a Cold
War enemy?
The real "don't ask, don't tell" was "Don't ask us about our budgets
and nukes, and we won't tell you about the future wars they will
enable." All of the Sturm und Drang about gays in the military
deflected American attention from the real issue of the moment, and
it worked. The American Cold War ethos is still with us.
The human race is undergoing a massive cultural mutation. The meaning
of sexuality is being transformed as biology revolutionizes
reproduction. Women are demanding equality across the globe. Men are
being forced to reimagine their familial and social roles. Gays and
lesbians are at the center of these changes. Their refusal to be
silent and invisible is one of the era's great resources, a
magnificent sign of hope.