"You Are Not What Gives You a Boner"

Rather provocative title I know, but if it gets you to read in its entirety what Marc Barnes, aka BadCatholic, has to say about the news hitting the wires of a Catholic priest coming out as gay, then it's worth the heat I might get for the decision to use it.

After all, this blog isn't called Brutally Honest for nothing.

Here's but a piece of some of the most enlightening writing describing Catholic teaching on this issue I believe I've ever read:

Bravely facing the applause of a world in love with labels, and just in time for the release of a second edition of his new book “Hidden Voices, Reflections of a Gay, Catholic Priest,” Fr. Gary M. Meier came out today and declared himself openly gay to the notoriously unsympathetic Huffington Post.

Bless the man, may the Lord keep him, let His face shine upon him and give him His peace. He’ll be attacked by idiotic Catholics, whose quotes will undoubtedly be used in his up-and-coming “This Has Been Difficult” op-ed. But the sins of hatred will hardly puncture his popularity. I am attacking — with trident and with fire  – his philosophy and his easy critique of Church teaching that will win the blank-eyed nods of every other person who doesn’t give a damn about reading what the Church actually teaches.  He says:

…that’s precisely the message our Church is sharing. LGBT youth are hearing that they are disordered, diseased, defective, damaged goods, wrong when they should be right.

If they are being give this message, it is not by the Church. The message the Church has been consistently giving to LGBTQ youth is the same message she gives to heterosexual youth — you are not your genitals. Stop introducing yourself with your penises.

We take offense at the Church when she says that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,” (CCC 2357) but only because we put her words through the mind-numbing blender of reductionist thought which defines people as being their sexuality, as being heterosexual, being homosexual, being a lesbian, being pansexual, etc. The LGBTQ movement is so concerned with developing and refining their plethora of scientific labels by which to reduce human beings to a word describing their genital behavior that they — and the culture they own — have forgotten a very simple fact. You are not what gives you a boner.

It is by the urging of the Catholic Church that I refuse, reject, and trample on the label heterosexual. Why? Because I will not be defined as being attracted to women. My sexuality is personal, that is, it exists not as an abstract label generally unifying me with other people attracted to the opposite sex, but as an expression of my personal belonging to the bodily world, my personal integration of my soul and my body, which becomes “personal and truly human when it is integrated into the relationship of one person to another” (CCC 2337), with a single, particular, personal, woman, not to a general sex.

But this is far too complex. We want a label to be subsumed into. And thus Meier, in claiming the label “gay,” says “I want the world to know the truth about who I am,” because personal identity has been wonderfully reduced, and we can say — without fear of contradiction — that who I am is gay, or who I am as straight.

This reduction is the primary reason Meier makes the tired, required leap from what the Church says — that homosexuality is disordered — to what he claims the Church says — “LGBT youth are hearing that they are disordered.”  Our culture defines individuals by their genital urges, and thus any rejection of a sexual behavior is immediately heard as a rejection of the individual. If who you are is a homosexual, then there is no distinction between being told “homosexuality is disordered” and “you are disordered.” While blurring this distinction and allowing ourselves to exist as walking erections certainly allows for easy, sure-fire, and oh-so-safe criticism of the Catholic Church, how small it renders the human person! What a piece of work becomes man, how lacking in depth, how easily negated, how boring and how bored!

You must read the whole thing.  Get over the giggles.  Get over the snickering.  Read the piece, the whole piece, then decide for yourself if you're learning something new about Catholicism.

Because if you already knew it, then you need to get about spreading the teaching.

And if you didn't, it's past time to get started.

It's about honesty, truth, integrity, freedom and in the end, the gospel.

It's not about boners.

Carry on.