ESPN's Grantland website jumped on the bash Manny Pacquiao bandwagon on Thursday by giving a platform to a homosexual activist, who predictably trashed the Catholic Church as she took the Filipino boxing sensation to task for defending traditional marriage.
Writer Laurel Fantauzzo ripped the "the Church's cruel, untrue dictates about me," and promised if he didn't "evolve" like President Obama, "I'll simply have to sigh wearily and turn away from you, the way I've turned away from all of the idiotic bigots I've come across in my life, carrying a cross or a heavy book or a Constitution."
In her post, "An Open Letter to Manny Pacquiao From a Gay Filipina American," Fantauzzo wasted little time before targeting the traditional Christian teaching against homosexual acts. Even as she dropped many references to the strong Catholic culture in the Philippines, she all but admitted that the Church was her enemy because of what it taught:
...I know, though, that you [Pacquiao] also don't want me to be married. I know you think this is a perfectly reasonable, justified stand to take against me. You're like a lot of Filipinos: Catholic. Powerfully, post-colonially Catholic.....
I've stood in front of the Black Nazarene in Quiapo Church that you pray to after each fight...I've felt the power and the grace of it. I get it....When you grow up Filipina — or Italiapina, as I did — your parents give you Catholicism as a kind of heavy gift. A centuries-old guide for every life transition a human can go through. Birth, death, the burden of any wrongdoing, and, yes, marriage. But as I grew older and realized the dreaded word applied to me — lesbian — I realized the Church was what I'd have to feint and duck; the Church's cruel, untrue dictates about me were what I'd have to dance with and defeat....
...When I faced Proposition 22, Proposition 8, DOMA, Amendment 1, and too many dictates from the Church, and relatives, and leaders like you, who called me disordered, dangerous, diseased, doomed, how did I survive?...
I don't have a wife yet...but I hope one day I will....why would you deny this of me? In those quiet moments I imagine for you, when you ask yourself how you survived, I believe that your wife, more than anyone, is the one who helps to lessen the loneliness of your greatness. Ask yourself: Could you have survived all of this without her?
I'm glad I didn't die...and that I survived to this day, when more people in my life decry you than support you for wanting to prevent my marriage in the name of some cold, removed Church and God. Every day I am amazed by the wealth of my survival. I'm as amazed as you must be, or have forgotten to be, about yours.
So I'm going to extend an invitation to you...Manny, that I don't think a lot of gays would extend to you these days. I want to invite you to spend some time with me and my friends....I know there's a better heart in you...that would beat with more than the repetitive ill will you bear toward us in the biblical abstract. If you spent some time with us — if you saw the specific sweetness that makes up our human pursuit of love and marriage — maybe you'd think, you'd feel, you'd change. The way my parents have changed toward me. The way my President has changed toward me. The way I've changed toward myself....
But maybe you never will. Maybe you'll simply reopen your Bible, find those selective passages, and recite them to me again. Maybe I'll simply have to sigh wearily and turn away from you, the way I've turned away from all of the idiotic bigots I've come across in my life, carrying a cross or a heavy book or a Constitution.
Grantland's article followed quickly on the heels of a Wednesday post on Yahoo's ThePostgame.com online sports magazine, which badmouthed Pacquiao as a "homophobic boxing superstar" and a "bigoted boxer."
Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice gave a $10,000 grant to the writer in 2009-2010, and disclosed that she "has contributed to AfterEllen and Go Magazine, among other publications. She also founded the popular We Are Not the Enemy photo blog in response to California’s Proposition 8." In September 2011, she wrote an article for the online magazine The FilAm ("a magazine for Filipino Americans in New York"), where she promoted the so-called RH ("reproductive health") bill in the Philippines, which would legalize abortifacients and contraceptives, and is staunchly opposed by the Catholic bishops in the country.
Back in July 2011, Catherine Maggio of the MRC's Culture and Media Institute documented how ESPN was siding with left-wing homosexual activists on its main website.
