We're on the road again this morning (in a few moments), so my blogging time is extremely limited. I do want to take notice of the following comment posted yesterday at National Catholic Reporter by a Catholic blogger who's been on my radar screen for some time now, who currently uses the name Purgatrix Ineptiae as she comments at NCR:
Are you sure about your adult homosexual friends' relationships? Have you ever asked to use their bathroom and found a lot of porn with teenagers who don't look anywhere near eighteen in it? Don't they seem to spend a lot of time hanging around high school tennis courts and university locker rooms? Aren't they kind of morbidly preoccupied with talking about their own childhoods? Don't they tell a lot of creepy jokes about young guys? Don't they seem to really like kid TV and kid books a little too much? Don't they stare at handsome teenagers a little too avidly?
I've known quite a few homosexual men too, over the years. And sooner or later, almost every one of them has done something completely unacceptable with a kid. The pattern is unmistakable.
(Obviously, lesbian relationships are different. Women almost never prey on children, and lesbian women are nearly incapable of the really dangerous brutal sexual practices.)
These statements are a gloss on a previous comment she makes in the same thread, accusing those who are gay (and male) of behavior that is "exploitative, inhumane, anti-social and unhygienic." This comment places responsibility for the abuse crisis on gay priests.
Why notice these comments? In a nutshell, because they're seriously damaging--they're downright toxic--to an entire segment of the human community. They pretend that the behavior of some members of a particular group of human beings is a description of the behavior of all members of that group, and an indictment of all members of the group as brutal, dangerous, exploitative, inhumane, anti-social, and unhygienic.
All gay men rape children. All gay men are diseased monsters who transmit diseases to others. All gay men are brutal.
It is hardly new in human history for some people to behave this way--to seek to transmit toxic stereotypes about a targeted minority group with the goal of making members of that minority group susceptible to harm. For centuries, some Christians who hated Jews spread rumors that Jews killed Christian babies and mixed their blood with the dough from which Passover bread was baked.
For centuries, Jews were depicted by some Christians as brutal, diseased, exploitative, inhumane, anti-social, and unhygienic, an infectious presence residing inside pure and clean Christian culture that needed to be eradicated before it caused sickness throughout the entire culture. This toxic rhetoric resulted in constant acts of violence against the Jewish people within Christian nations over the course of many centuries. It resulted in pogroms, in the ghettoization of Jews, in violation of the human rights of Jewish people, and, ultimately, in the mass murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust.
National Catholic Reporter would not, I think, dream of permitting someone to publish statements about Jews as carriers of disease, rapists, or murderers of Christian babies. Why, then, does this flagship American Catholic publication continue to permit Purgatrix Ineptiae to publish one statement after another that all gay men are pedophiles, carriers of disease, and brutal rapists?
As I've noted previously, the person posting these statements has now been banned from the Commonweal site after she went far beyond the pale using the identity of Felapton, an identity she also had when she used to log into my own blog to make comments. She then began to comment with the username Amy Ho-Ohn at the America blog site, and as far as I know, made herself persona non grata there, too.
She has employed a variety of usernames at several Catholic blog sites for some years now, and I have paid attention to what she writes because she once held forth on my own blog, and, as I have said previously, I take rather personally her statements that I am a diseased child rapist who is a threat to civilization. I've also followed her comments under the variety of names she employs because, as I've also said repeatedly in commentary here at Bilgrimage, it's very clear to me that she intends to promote an agenda that is extremely harmful to gay men. She is all about inflicting pain, and claiming that her right to do so is God-ordained.
The statements she is making now at NCR are par for the course. They're part of a script from which she's been working for some time, which is all about equating male homosexuality with rape of children and with disease. It's a script I've pointed out repeatedly, to little or no effect, when it comes to the Catholic blog sites that permit her to pursue her hateful agenda via their comboxes.
This is a script that is still permitted at one "liberal" Catholic blog site after another. Don't believe me? Go to the recent thread commenting on Richard Garnett's essay at Commonweal telling Catholics that they need to worry about the threat to religious freedom that is marriage equality, and read the comments of one Margaret. Same script: gays are diseased, mentally ill rapists who are after your children and who are responsible for the abuse crisis in the priesthood.
To Catholic parents: I would strongly advise you to block Catholic blog sites when your young folks go online. If your children are adolescents who might be beginning to discover that they're gay or lesbian, they absolutely don't need to encounter the dangerous toxins spread freely at Catholic blog sites by people like Purgatrix Ineptiae or Margaret.
They need to develop a strong sense of self-worth and self-respect without being informed by people who claim to speak in God's name that their very nature is sick, and that it leads to brutal exploitation and rape of others, including children. Parents of young people who are developing, period: you'd be well-advised to keep your children at a safe distance from the kind of hate rhetoric--and that is what it is, every bit as much as the rumor that Jews slaughter Christian babies in order to consume their blood--that is freely spread by Catholic blog sites against those who are gay. Hate rhetoric that is freely spread by even "liberal" Catholic blog sites . . . .
While these same sites freely censor those who point out that the leader of the U.S. Catholic bishops is in the pocket of the super-rich and the political party that primarily belongs to the super-rich . . . .
Bottom line: Catholic blog sites are dangerous to the psychological and spiritual well-being of children, particularly when young folks are struggling with questions of gender identity and sexual orientation. And even at its best, the Catholic church is a dangerous place for young folks who happen to be gay. Until it makes some major shifts in how it does business towards those who are gay, young gay folks would be well-advised to keep their distance from an institution that is a vehicle of toxins for gay human beings.
