To my readers, she'll be familiar as I've published related posts here and here but clearly, after finding what follows, there's much more to this young lady than just her musical talents.
Much, much more:
I feel that Phil Robertson’s tone in commenting on these things unintentionally flies in the face of those tenets we have been fighting to communicate in love—against the respect of personhood the Church clings to so dearly—against the deep commitment we ought to have to protecting, upholding, and affirming each person’s equal dignity. Here’s why: Phil’s comments, and the tone in which they were uttered, effectively reduce people with same sex attraction to their sexual impulses. Any of us who has
a homosexual friend, neighbor, or relative, probably knows that these comments are offensive not as much because of their eventual point (that homosexual sex is objectively immoral) but more because of the way that point is arrived at. Phil’s comments could be boiled down to this: “Dude sex is immoral and gross, because homosexual men like man butts more than they like lady parts, and that’s just weird and disgusting, kind of like sex with animals.” I take major issue with the ease of thought that leads anyone to the conclusion that the desires of homosexual men are that simplistic and fickle—that they are merely urges which could be changed by thinking about vaginas more clearly or more often, as if all homosexual males woke up one day and just forgot about how awesome lady bits are. It’s demeaning to homosexual people, not to mention lady bits, and the ladies to whom they are attached, to suggest that vaginas are the key to “keeping men straight.” And though bestiality is listed in Corinthians as a sexual deviation, along with homosexual sex, it is not Christian teaching that the two are the same. They are different things. Anyone of sound mind should be able to detect the line of thought beneath Robertson’s comments and reject it, even if they don’t reject his overarching viewpoint on homosexual sex. It’s not sound.
The tone and reasoning in these comments, and the comments of many others, is an affront to not only people with same sex attraction, who are not by default sex-crazed maniacs or bestial animal-lovers any more than heterosexual people are, but to heterosexual people as well—again, we must resist the temptation to peg people as one thing or another based on whom they are sexually attracted to. When we do this, we effectively look at them as merely animals with sexual organs, and define them ultimately as such, and begin to treat them accordingly. This is not merely a simplistic way of thinking about homosexual people, but about people in general—and it can very quickly and realistically lead to things like bullying, homophobia, and violence. How we reach conclusions about these things is crucially important.
Of course, I could sit here and blather on about the media and their seemingly willful disregard of any of the more historic Christian views on the subject of homosexuality and sexual morals—but I don’t want to beat that dead horse. I’m not responsible for their behavior, I’m responsible for mine. For my part, I want to uphold the dignity of each human life—and as a part of that commitment, I strive to resist the tendency to reduce people to their sexual drives, homosexual or heterosexual or otherwise. Phil Robertson’s perspective on the morals of homosexual marriage may overlap with mine, but I do not arrive at my conclusions about that, or my beliefs about human sexuality, in the same way that he seems to.
Phil Robertson seems like a good man. I don’t think he is hateful. I do think he is in the same boat as a lot of us who were raised in an evangelical Christian subculture, in that we don’t really have a solid anthropological view on sexuality, and we don’t know how to explain why we think marriage should be between a man and a woman except to say “the Bible says.” I don’t think he’s a villain—I do think he, like many of us, is a product of a subculture with a sad lack of compassionate and sound thought on the subject.
I’d love to see a world where we could manage to dialog about our views on sexuality and sexual morals in a way that doesn’t dehumanize or reduce any human being, but that views them each as individuals created with Love and stamped with the dignity of God’s image, and treat them accordingly—even on the internet.
Please go read what forms the basis, the foundation, for her thoughts. It's a necessary thing.
If I've learned anything about Catholicism, it's that it stretches me, it pushes me beyond the limits my upbringing has established. Ms. Assad has given voice to that about this whole Phils Robertson thing that was causing me some unease. On the one hand, I was applauding him. He was saying what many of us are thinking. Yet there was a wincing in the soul, a qualm I could not articulate, a misgiving lying underneath I semed to be squelching.
Ms. Assad has pulled back the veil on it all and for that, I thank her.
This. This is Catholicism. This is why I'm glad to be home and why I'll never again stray, with God's help.
Carry on.
H/T for the find to Frank Weathers.