Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. The gay-obsessed New York Times is letting a gay columnist whack away at the Catholic church as having a “gay obsession.” No one obsesses about the gays as much as the gays, but you are only allowed to be “obsessed” if it’s relentlessly, propagandistically positive.
Openly gay columnist Frank Bruni calls it “persecution” for Catholic schools to dismiss employees who flagrantly, publicly dissent from church teaching by getting married to a person of the same sex (currently dramatized by Hollywood in “Love Is Strange”). Bizarrely in contradiction of the facts, Bruni says this political activity is not political and that the activists are not “calling any special attention to themselves.”
What’s happening amounts to persecution. And it’s occurring not because the workers in these situations called any special attention to themselves or made any political fuss. No, they just loved in a fashion displeasing to many church officials, whose concerns with purity are spasmodic and capricious.
The art in the Sunday Review section is at least appropriate, with a big rainbow target on a Catholic church. That’s exactly right. They’d like to blow a big rainbow-colored hole in Christian tradition.
Speaking of doctrinal “purity,” perhaps we ought to turn this around on The New York Times. How welcoming would the Times be for an employee to blatantly contradict its own doctrines, for example, if a reporter or columnist marched against abortion? If a Times employee blatantly demonstrated against “Occupy Wall Street,” instead of getting arrested as part of it? (Or did Natasha Lennard's OWS antics lead her to quit because she was "calling too much attention to herself"?)
Or, most atrociously of all by their lights at the Times, an employee stood on the steps of the Supreme Court to defend traditional marriage?
Bruni is also claiming that the Catholic Church is only focusing on “one issue” and one “group of people” in their politics, the gays. He can just casually dismiss the broader (and more urgent) Catholic concern with the Obamacare contraception/abortion mandates, because only his pet issue matters:
The blunt truth of the matter is that during a period when the legalization of gay marriage has spread rapidly in this country, from just six states in 2011 to more than three times that number today, Catholic officials here have elected to focus on this one issue and on a given group of people: gays and lesbians.
Their moralizing is selective, bigoted and very sad. It’s also self-defeating, because it’s souring many American Catholics, a majority of whom approve of same-sex marriage, and because the workers who’ve been exiled were often exemplars of charity, mercy and other virtues as central to Catholicism as any guidelines for sex. But their hearts didn’t matter. It was all about their loins. Will the church ever get away from that?
Asking when the Catholic Church will finally “get away” from the Bible is like asking when will the New York Times “ever” stop fussing about defense spending or domestic surveillance? When will they “ever” stop fussing about the wonderfulness of abortion?
The New York Times fails to see itself as orthodoxy-enforcing mechanism. They like to pretend they’re a tool of dissent, speaking truth to power – but they would most likely squelch any actual dissident from taking a paycheck from their company.
Naturally, Bruni turns to leftist theologian Lisa Sowle Cahill to thrash the Catholics once again over the child sex-abuse scandal:
“It’s about sex and gender issues,” she said, adding that it might be connected to the disgrace that church leaders brought upon themselves with their disastrous handling of child sexual abuse by priests. Perhaps, she said, they’re determined to find some sexual terrain on which they can strike a position of stern rectitude.
“They’re trying to regain the moral high ground, no matter how sure it is to backfire,” she said. Having turned a blind eye to nonconsensual sex that ravaged young lives, they’re holding the line against consensual sex that wounds no one.
Bruni only underlines that the tragedy of child sex abuse in the Catholic Church may be a problem that’s been tremendously squelched, but the gays will always use it as a rhetorical whip to flail away for their own agenda. If Pope Francis were to make the Vatican the enforcer of New York Times orthodoxy, you just know bygones would be bygones.
