Yet another Cissexist bisexual or “political lesbian” Radfem gets it wrong

Over on Facebook, my friend Zoe Brain pointed out an interesting but sad article this morning.

Someone named Bev Jo, as a “guest” columnist on the anti-trans Gender Trender blog, writes an essay entitled  Fighting the "Lie" of Trans, which summarizes everything that’s wrong with the cissexist POV on trans people adopted by many radfems based on the patriarchist birth-genital-essentialist position of the Roman Catholic Church, imported into radfem philosophy by the false spinnings of the twice-born Athenas, Catholic college-based professors, Mary Daly and her empire-building protégé, Jan Raymond.

On Facebook, while riding on the commuter train this morning, I summarized a response as follows:

The only time I ever lied about myself was when I was trying to assimilate in accordance with societal expectations. All the writer is doing is showing a particularly malicious, clueless, institutionalized pseudo-patriarchist cissexist POV no different from the cissexist birth genital essentialiam brought into Radfem philosophy by Catholic college professors, twice-born Athena fembots Daly and Raymond, who corrupted Radfem philosophy from the inside.

But sitting at the computer in my office after work, I decided to read and analyze Bev Jo's article a little more deeply.  I have just started reading Mary Daly's book Gyn/Ecology in an effort to better understand why Radfem philosophy took a cissexist turn, beyond the surmise that I've made based on my exposure to the writings of Daly's protégé Raymond.

Right in the beginning, Bev Jo tells us she is a Lesbian, and then proves she can’t be one!

She parenthetically claims

“Who women choose to love is a choice, not something as trivial as ‘sexual orientation.’”

That is a statement that can only be made by

(a) a woman with a bisexual sexual orientation who has a natural orientation that allows for such a choice, and who chooses to suppress her heterosexual side, or

(b) a woman whose natural sexual orientation is actually heterosexual, but who is so wrapped up in radfem philosophy that she rejects her natural orientation, suppresses it, and “chooses” to assimilate – for such as make that “choice,” the choice itself can be a cause for psychological imbalances.

So I don’t know what Bev Jo’s sexual orientation is, but she proves by her own words that she herself has no place in lesbian space, except perhaps to the extent that bisexual women are welcome.

So, having appropriated the identity of a Lesbian, she proceeds to assume the patriarchal authority to exclude others who have more right to Lesbian space than she herself does. This pseudo-patriarchy is not new, it has been a hallmark of Radfem cissexist thought since even before Mary Daly wrote her metaethics book Gyn/Ecology.

If anyone has made “death threats,” they are responsible for their own behavior. There is no excuse for oppressed trans women to make futile death threats against their oppressors. I am aware of an unfortunate use of violent imagery in a Facebook conversation by two trans advocates who should know better, but I am not aware of any actual death threats.

Bev then asks a rhetorical question about women’s reactions to “men claiming to be women.” I can only ask a counter-question – where are the men who are claiming to be women? I am a woman, I am a lesbian, and I was erroneously assigned male at birth, but I am not and never was a man, even though I spent years trying to live a lie and assimilate with societal expectations based on that erroneous assignment.

Bev Jo does not have a right to call me a man. I have more of a right to deny her right to call herself a lesbian, because he own words indicate that she cannot possibly be a real lesbian.

Bev Jo in her essay shows her amazingly incredible ignorance about transsexual women. She certainly has never met me, and it seems clear to me that she has never actually met a real trans woman. If the story she tells about her “stalker” is not made up, the person she describes does not fit within the parameters of being a trans woman.

She also does not seem to understand what it is like to be a girl, growing up in a situation where everyone expects you to be a boy. Unfortunately, those of us who have had that experience resent it when someone else takes our narratives and distorts them. I have already had the dubious “honor” of being quoted more than once on the “mansplainin’ transplainin’” site. One of those quotes was an explanation of how I felt when I was four years old in the 1950’s, from the perspective of being a four-year old. The people who run that site thought that my simple child’s-eye view of the differences between boys and girls, and my realization that I was being told I was with the wrong group, was quite amusing. I am sure they enjoy their cruel little laugh at my expense.

When Bev Jo describes how some women look (referring to them as “female impersonators”) she does not realize that there are many trans women who don’t need artifice. It would seem that she gets her ideas about what trans women are like by poring over the writings of the notorious Opus Dei psychiatrist Dr. Paul McHugh, an eating disorders specialist who advised the Vatican abut trans issues. Her description is almost exactly what McHugh wrote:

McHugh wrote in a 2004 article entitled “Surgical Sex” in First Things:

“The post-surgical subjects struck me as caricatures of women. They wore high heels, copious makeup, and flamboyant clothing;”

Bev Jo writes similarly:

“they look like drag queens with their heavy, ugly makeup, plucked unnatural eyebrows, garish costumes, etc.”

Bev Jo’s apparent reliance on yet another patriarchist source like McHugh is more evidence of the nefarious influence the Roman Catholic Church has exerted on radfem philosophy.

Bev Jo rejects those of us who have surgery, and she rejects those of us who do not or cannot have surgery as well.

Bev Jo has apparently not been exposed to the mass of scientific evidence that shows that trans women are not, and never were, men, regardless of whether we have GRS.

Bev Jo has shown herself by her words to be an agent of the patriarchy.

She even writes. “It’s a basic weapon of patriarchy to divide women.” And then she proceeds to do just that – making sure that there continues to be a barrier between cissexual women and transsexual women.

I know who I am. I know that the scientific research backs me up. I have developed self-confidence. I am a woman, I am a lesbian, and no pseudo-patriarchist cissexist radfem is going to steal my identity, just because they themselves don;t know what a woman is.

You’ll note I am not using the term “transphobia.” The better terms to use are “cissexist” and “cissexism.” The relationship, particularly that of the institutionalized variety cause by a lack of understanding of trans lives, is eerily similar to institutionalized racism – and just as white people have to work very hard to see institutionalized racism, cissexual people have to look very hard to see the institutiopnalized cissexism that permeates the society.

If not by virtue of being cissexist, how is it that the Roman Catholic Church and the Radfem philosophers are so totally aligned on the issue of trans women?

One thing Bev Jo gets right – the alliance between some Radfems and their fellow separatist TS separatists, is still a variety of cissexism. Just as radfem philosophy as it relates to trans women is pseudo-patriarchist, the position of TS separatists is a pseudo-cissexist imitation of the radfem position, which makes it pseudo-pseudo-patriarchist. The willingness of the TS separatists to oppress other trans women as a means to gain entry for themselves into radfem circles, is pretty disgusting.

Bev Jo wants to organize het women to join with radfems. Um, that strategy is probably a non-starter – particularly with what Bev Jo already wrote in the beginning of her article about straight and bisexual women.

One would think that women – all women, straight, bi, asexual and lesbian, cissexual and transsexual, ought to be able to get along.

Why should Bev Jo be strategizing at marginalizing the most marginalized women, just because we are different and not cissexual?

Bev Jo should know that the National organization for Women already supports trans women – maybe she should get a clue from them.

As to being in opposition to NAMBLA, I am surprised that is an issue. Even the gay men I know are condemnatory of NAMBLA, why should women hesitate to condemn child abuse?

Well, when we get to Bev Jo’s conclusion – even RuPaul would acknowledge that female impersonators are not women. But RuPaul identifies as a gay man, even though he does costume very well. RuPaul is not a trans woman. I doubt that RuPaul would want to be called a trans woman or a transsexual, or a transgender person.

On the other hand, if one were to watch the RuPaul Drag Race show, some of the people who work as “drag performers” actually *are* trans women – and while they are involved in drag culture they are often working toward transition.

It may be hard to tell the difference by looking at them, and Bev Jo has already shown that she can't tell the difference, but all anyone has to do is ask.

So, when Bev Jo asks for lesbians to put females and lesbians first, she should be inclusive of trans women who are lesbians.  The fact that she isn't?  That is very, very sad.

But when you start with false premises, as Bev Jo does, it is really difficult to come to a correct conclusion.

The Zeal of Melinda's Misguided Moral Message

This column was inspired by a blog column at Pam’s House Blend from February 11, 2010, by waymon hudson, entitled “More Problems at Notre Dame: Ex-Gay Speaker Invited to Talk About ‘Authenticity’”

The column is at:
http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/15193/more-problems-at-notre-dame-exgay-speaker-invited-to-talk-about-authenticity


This led me to read Melinda Selmys’s three-part column from early 2007 issues of the National Catholic Register, that introduced the world to her conversion to Roman Catholicism, abandonment of her previous “lesbian” life (“lesbian” is in quotes here for a reason I will get to later in this essay), and her acceptance and ability to regurgitate the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings on homosexuality with what at times seems to be a kinder and gentler spin, but one that can’t sufficiently whiten the sepulture.

There is nothing like the zeal of the convert, and Ms. Selmys is perhaps as good an example of this sort of zeal as one could expect from even a St. Paul or a St. Augustine, though in her case she isn’t creating any sort of new theology, she’s trying to paint a thin veneer over the intrinsic evil and failure of right reason that is the underpinning of the Roman Catholic Church’s moral theology as it applies to homosexuality.

Let’s start with some sacred scripture to get us in the mood for writing. In Matthew 7:26-27, Jesus is quoted as saying:

26 But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."

More instructively, this chapter begins with Jesus saying:

1 "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

I commend the entire chapter to the reader for reading and meditation – there is much in the teachings of Jesus that reflect badly on the way the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy has warped them over the nearly two millennia of the Church’s existence (depending on how one is counting – it could be from ca. 33 CE, or 325 CE, or 1054 CE, but for our purpose today, we’ll take the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity as all the others, connected to the trunk that grew from the first Pentecost).

In Melinda’s three part column from early 2007 she explains:

I knew nothing about natural law, had no concept of sexual complementarity, and had only the vaguest possible notions about the import of the sacrament of matrimony.

The most charitable thing I can say is that after reading the columns, is that while her thinking may have changed and she has been educated about Roman Catholic official teachings, she still knows nothing about those three things, and has been filled with all sorts of nonsense built up like a house of cards at the beach on the eve of an approaching hurricane and tsunami.

So Melinda placed herself in the position of an Abraham, trying to make a deal with God. If she was truly lesbian, she would not have been able to deliver on her promise. Having had one or more lesbian experiences and relationships could have made her as lesbian as Ann Heche, the well known hasbean who once had a relationship with Ellen DeGeneres. But some women, as Melinda later acknowledges, are more likely to have been bisexual.

She writes about:

women who experience same-sex attractions are more likely to identify themselves as bisexual

and when she describes how easy it was for herself to “change,” it indicates that, despite her claims to have actually been lesbian, she is more likely to have been bisexual, even though she does not come out and say exactly that, since it would ruin her message.

She tried to be straight, but found it easier to be lesbian. This doesn’t sound like the experience of the true lesbian who spends years attempting to live in accordance with societal dictates, getting married to a man and having children, before realizing that her true orientation is and always has been lesbian, and that she was only trying to assimilate before that.

In Melinda’s case, she found it easier to be lesbian.

Perhaps she felt it was going with some sort of flow (since she’s a convert, she didn’t have the pressure of Catholic parents trying to straighten her out), and she didn’t feel much in the way of societal disapprobation – at least until she started approaching the Catholic Church.


Let’s look at what she says:

I was emotionally reserved

a positive terror of being emotionally vulnerable.

I enjoyed male company — I actually vastly preferred it to female company, because men are much more likely to accept emotional reservation in their friends.

Men like to be friends with women who are intelligent, independent and emotionally undemanding, but they expect more emotional involvement from a woman whom they’re dating.

So, Melinda is indicating that she couldn’t be her "emotionally reserved" self and be with a man. This ultimately did not turn out to be true, but that’s how she seems to have felt at the time.

Men were my intellectual competition. They had the natural emotional strength that I desired and wanted to imitate. The idea of being vulnerable around them seemed not only impossible, but even demeaning. This meant, of course, that my relationships with men were entirely doomed to failure.

And women?

women weren’t a threat. I wanted romantic relationships, of course, but I didn’t want them to compromise my independence or my control. I always perceived my relationships with men as a power struggle.

With another woman I could always easily perceive myself as stronger, more intelligent and less dependent, and so there was no need for a struggle. I could have my romance, and still keep my distance.

So, for Melinda, it was just a matter of (a) not having found the right man, one who could understand her need for some “me” time, or (b) not being willing to lie to herself about her own nature and change so that she could be less independent and more subservient to a man. Let's look at more of her experience

In my own case, I was blessed with a very rapid healing process.

Once I had given up my homosexual practices, and embraced Mary as an ideal of femininity (more on this next week), I very quickly ceased to find other women attractive.

This last seems to militate more in favor of Melinda falling into possibility (a) – which is a good thing for Melinda, since it means she was most likely bisexual to begin with, and thus in her present heterosexual relationship, she doesn’t have to live a lie in order to act straight.

This leads Melinda to a happy heterosexual lifestyle:

Within a few short years, I have been blessed with a husband whom I love tremendously, and with two wonderful children on whom to practice those maternal virtues that I once eschewed.

I will have more to write about that quote later.

As one can see, her lesbian experiences aside, if she is truly happy in a heterosexual role, then she is much more likely to have been bisexually oriented by nature in the first place.

Some of her statements about gay men are rather ludicrous. Examples:

In the case of men, these wounds are often the result of distorted paternal relationships.

Secondly, it suggests that many homosexual men will tend to reject Catholicism, or indeed any major monotheism, because they will subconsciously equate God the Father with their own father, and therefore they perceive him as an unappealing, judgmental figure who expects more of them than they are capable of giving, and who rejects them without understanding — or as a distant, unapproachable person who has little to no interest in them or their affairs.

Of course, Melinda does not know my friends Michael and Robert, who have had a long term monogamous relationship, got married in Canada, and when they returned to their Catholic parish in the Bronx, they were thrown out of the choir and asked not to come back to the Church. They, and Michael’s late mother Rae, found a more accepting spiritual home with the Episcopal Church.

Melinda also does not know of my similar experience. I was a cantor at my parish, but when I started transition I was asked by the associate pastor not to come back to the Church because I was “creating a scandal in the Church.” I spent three years in a Catholic seminary, and it took me some time to analyze the theology and discover that Unitarian Universalism is a much better fit for me. OF course, being a transsexual lesbian, I don’t think I come onto Melinda’s radar screen. Do I?

Melinda’s view of lesbians is similarly distorted:

This explanation may seem a little unlikely, particularly since many self-identified lesbians are highly masculinized, apparently invincible and frighteningly outspoken. It can be difficult to associate the wounded, vulnerable woman I described above with the short-haired, irate feminists that scream “pro-choice” slogans at Christians who protest abortion. What we must keep in mind is that the anger that fuels this sort of feminism must, necessarily, be derived from fear — no one can hate an abstraction like “patriarchy” so much that it turns them into an abuse-hurling lunatic unless their hatred is fueled by a genuine and deep-seated terror of real men.

This is terribly offensive and untrue. While I know a few radical lesbian feminist separatists who might, on a bad hair day, slightly resemble this horrific thumbnail sketch (and I may think they’re misguided in some ways, but they’re not in fear of some sort of “real men”), I wonder what Melinda might think of the maniac Catholic anti-women’s reproductive rights protestors who carry fetuses in jars of formaldehyde to wave at women going to see their ob/gyn doctors for medical care (and not even necessarily abortions!). I guess the anger that fuels their hatred of women is built on a genuine and deep-seated terror of real women being independent rather than slaves to their lords and masters.

Melinda mentions in the first segment (and repeats elsewhere, as a sort of meme) of her tripartite essay that she was afraid of complementarity in a heterosexual relationship:

The complementarity inherent in such a relationship demands mutual self-giving, and that self-giving seemed to compromise my sense of self.

But then, early in the second segment, she somewhat contradictorily acknowledges:

Even within a homosexual relationship there has to be some sort of complementarity . . .

There either is, or there isn't. Of course, one of the teachings of the Catholic Church is that there isn’t any complementarity in homosexual relationships – meaning that even with her zeal, Melinda may be skirting the edges of apostasy or even, gasp, heresy.

But what is “complementarity” in the first place?

Melinda gives us:

Complementarity is central to sexual attraction — we are designed to seek out those who are different from ourselves.

This is a very simplistic statement, and does not really reflrect the kookiness of the Catholic hierarchy's teaching. So, based on Melinda's definition, one may wonder, why would the Church teach this is possible only in a heterosexual relationship? Is it based on the physicality of a need to follow the cereal box top instructions for heterosexual sex? (For those who don’t understand that – the instructions are “Insert Tab A into Slot B.”) But that physical aspect, so central to the Church teaching, seems to be glossed over by Melinda in an attempt to be ingratiating.

Still, her underlying false assumption is that homosexuality is a psychological disorder. This leads to assertions that non-heterosexual sexual orientation cannot be a part of God’s Plan for some people, but must be based on some sort of psychological “wound” or “fear.” The false premise leads Melinda to a belief in a cure.

Here are some more quotes from St. Melinda along these lines:

their primary claim — that homosexuality is not a choice — really does reflect the experience of persons with same-sex attractions.

Okay, what's wrong with that? We see that Melinda thinks it's just a matter of "belief" but maybe with some biological factors involved:

there are numerous psychological and possibly biological factors involved that cause a person to feel that they are really, fundamentally and immutably homosexual.

Pathology anyone?

homosexuality seems to be in the same sort of category as something like chronic depression or poor self-image

there are substantial differences in the psychological causes of same-sex attractions in men and in women

women who experience same-sex attractions are more likely to identify themselves as bisexual

In the case of men, these wounds are often the result of distorted paternal relationships.

Secondly, it suggests that many homosexual men will tend to reject Catholicism, or indeed any major monotheism, because they will subconsciously equate God the Father with their own father

Complementarity is central to sexual attraction — we are designed to seek out those who are different from ourselves.

the reasons underlying homosexual behavior are genuine emotional and psychological needs or fears.

People who experience these desires are people whose sexuality, and possibly the ability to identify with their own gender, has been wounded in some way.

Ah, there it is – I knoew it was only a matter of time - she found a way to include trans people in a phrase: “possibly the ability to identify with their own gender” – I think. It’s possible that she’s still talking about men who can’t form healthy friendships with other men.

But look at all those other quotes, quite pregnant with unstated assumptions about psychological disorders. The best truth test is to say the same thing about heterosexuality, and if it doesn’t seem true, in those cases not associated with reproduction, it’s also probably not true about homosexuality.

It is, therefore, not enough to convince them that homosexual activity is wrong.

Ah, Melinda doesn’t make the premise “homeosexual activity is wrong” – it’s just an unstated assumption.

There are plenty of people practicing homosexuality who believe in the immorality of their actions, but feel unable to stop because they don’t know of any other way to fulfill their fundamental, underlying needs.

And there certainly are many LGBT people who have been wounded by Church teachings into believing that being who they are is immoral. Melinda never explains the suicides that occur from the conflict between the evil teachings of the Church and the nature of the individual.

Here, she seems to get something right:

Many have gone through years of guilt and shame before finally deciding that any God who demands such an impossible sacrifice is cruel, and any church that rejects their sexual actions is unjust.

But then she goes off the deep end:

It is important, therefore, to seek to bring the healing power of God into their lives so that, rather than simply telling them to live chastely, we give them the emotional and psychological means by which to do so.

Exactly where is Melinda's theological grounding for this? Melinda, so clearly only slightly bisexual on the Kinsey scale, so easily able to assimilate as straight, thinks is must be easy for those whose actual nature is much farther up the Kinsey scale to “live chastely.”

St. Paul has a message for us here, one I have quoted before:

In 1 Corinthians 7:8-9, we read:

8 Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. 9 But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

So how can Melinda justify the fact that the Church does not endorse marriage for those who are naturally oriented toward the same sex and have high libidos?

I spent three years in a Roman Catholic seminary studying for the priesthood because I had been twisted into the belief that my gender identity issue was indicative of a calling of the Holy Spirit to the celibate life of the priestly life, where I could do a lot of good for a lot of souls while suppressing my nature and living with the pain. When I added the high libido to the mix, it turned out to be impossible.
I was told by a psychiatrist in 1970 that I couldn’t really be transsexual because I was sexually attracted to women. This was because, at that time, homosexuality was still in the DSM, and “we won’t cure you of one disorder to give you another one.” I did not realize I was supposed to lie and pretend to be straight as a woman to get the treatment I needed.

So I took the Church teachings at their face, and got married, fathered four children, and then there came a point after my younger brother died, that I could no longer suppress my nature. I tried, but I had to let myself out of the bottle, at least on a part time basis, while trying to keep my marriage and my family together.
After I lost my spouse, my family, my home, my friends and my job, and had been thrown out of the Church; then, and only then, I felt free enough to allow myself to be the real me, after all those years of suppression and pain, trying to give up my nature for the poor souls in purgatory. Life was hell, and I must have single-handedly emptied purgatory before I found peace in starting transition.

The struggle of my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters, and my transsexual sisters and brothers, cannot be denigrated by someone like Melinda, a bisexual-acting-heterosexual who is either living a lie with a lot less pain, or really was mostly oriented toward the opposite sex in the first place. I am guessing (actually, hoping and praying) that Melinda’s apparent bisexuality is the latter, one where there is little or no pain associated with the denial of nature. For those in or near Melinda’s apparently natural bisexuality, it is fairly easy to find a religious belief that is anti-gay and use it as a crutch to exit what a bisexual person would easily think of as an “alternative lifestyle.”

The experience of attempting to suppress one’s nature is so much more difficult, the farther one ascends on the Kinsey Scale. When you get to the people who are hardwired with a same-sex attraction, no amount of anti-gay religious faith will do anything other than usher in self-rejection and suicide. Those with a little bit of bisexuality, the “flip side” of a Melinda, might be able to cope with years of living a straight life while suppressing the most basic part of their nature.

Melinda doesn’t seem to understand that there is such a thing as a “cafeteria Catholic” who can accept some of the Church’s teachings, but finds it possible to reject the evil teachings.

Of course, as a zealous convert, Melinda is going to be inclined to accept the whole illogical and unreasoning faith as a matter of blind faith.

Interestingly, Melinda tries to infiltrate:

Persons with same-sex attractions, even the most strident, anti-Catholic, shamelessly sexualized demonstrators, are not the enemy. They are our own people, who have fallen into enemy hands, and it is our responsibility as Christians to do anything necessary to win them back.

So she gives Catholics tips as to how to approach converting gay people:

First, while it is important to be conscious of the psychological problems that may underlie a homosexual orientation, it is equally important not to openly psychoanalyze.

How patently patronizing.

Secondly, it is usually not a good idea to go into a deep discussion of the moral theology of sex unless they absolutely insist on doing so.

There is a very good reason for this – and that’s because the Roman Catholic Church’s moral theology of sex does not stand up to a non-bigoted reasoning person’s understanding of natural law.

but it is usually sufficient to say that, yes, as a Catholic, you support the Church’s teachings on homosexuality and believe that homosexual behaviors are morally wrong

How trite – it’s just fine for Melinda to believe that “homosexual behaviors are morally wrong” for her own self – but there is no right for her to believe that they are morally wrong for someone else. That is the sort of judgment that Jesus condemned – the judgment that people who are by their nature different must subscribe to the exact same moral code.

Look at Romans 1:26-27 with my eyes:

26 For this reason God gave them up to vile lusts; for both their females changed the natural use into that contrary to nature;
27 and in like manner the males also, leaving the natural use of the female, were inflamed in their lust towards one another; males with males working shame, and receiving in themselves the recompense of their error which was fit.

The key to this is “contrary to nature.” If one’s nature is heterosexual, and one is Christian, then homosexual activity can be seen as contrary to nature. But of one is by nature gay or lesbian, then acting against nature takes on a different connotation – and it is the attempt to live a lie that would be sinful.

I can go toe-to-toe with Melinda Selmys or Robby George, on both sacred scripture and natural law, and I won’t come out with a scar or a bruise. So please don’t assume that Christianity has anything to do with Roman Catholicism, which I’d prefer to think of as “The Augustinian Heresy” these days. But that would lead us into deeper theological discussion in which I would be tearing down the whole structure of traditional Christianity that starts with Original Sin and leads inexorably to the Resurrection. That, sadly, is the sideshow, not the kerygma, of the Good News. But more on that at another time.

Melinda tells us:

if you tell someone suffering from same-sex attractions that their sexuality is objectively disordered and their behaviors are immoral, but that you love them in spite of their sexuality, they are going to call you a hypocrite.

And, perhaps she should tell that to Pope Benedict. But of course, Melinda must believe that he’s infallible. (Well, that’s only when he speaks ex cathedra, but that’s a nuance we can almost ignore since so much of what he wrote as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is almost as binding on traditional non-cafeteria Catholics, even if it is ludicrous and contrary to sacred scripture.)

their genuine personality traits — aspects of themselves that actually are part of the way God made them — are psychologically bound up with their homosexuality.

Melinda does not realize that in many cases, their homosexuality itself is actually a genuine personality trait. She’s stuck in this whole Freudian reparative therapy trap.

What is necessary, therefore, is to show them that someone can love them, and love all of the things that they erroneously associate with homosexuality, without actually loving their sin.

One has to assume that it is a sin in the first place. It is not. The house of cards may proceed to fall.

Make the faith appealing. Show them a God who is patient, merciful and loving, a God who brings healing to a world broken by sin.

But one does not have to posit a world broken by sin to have a God who is patient, merciful and loving. All one has to do is reject the pomps and works of the Antipope in the Vatican.

At the time I didn’t even remotely understand the logic behind his request, but he had died for me on the cross, so he had the right to ask that I give up something as relatively minor as my sexuality for his sake.

Sexuality? Minor? Easy for a nearly-straight bisexual woman to say. Of course, the “Jesus died for me on the cross” is a part of traditional Augustinian heresy style Christianity that a good Pelagian would reject. Jesus taught a lot of good things – but the things that got added later by the followers who were trying to Mithra-ize him, were not very fair. Jesus was executed by the Romans as a political agitator for the incident in which he started a riot at the Temple. Perhaps it was a trumped up charge. One wonders who “the Son of the Father” really was – and that was what “Barabbas” means – Were Jesus and Barabbas the same person?

But let’s again turn away from theological speculation and toward Melinda’s essay.
When it comes to homosexuality, Melinda advises that:

It is best, therefore, to rely on the documents and statements put out by the Vatican.

And there is nothing better, to me, than to use materials from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – the most authoritative source for Roman Catholic teaching, excepting only an encyclical from the Pope.

I’ve cited the following before - in my very first post on this Blog in 2007, entitled, "Will They Be Numbered Among the Goats?:"

Let’s look first at the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. When he was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the current Pope (the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) dismissively cited the story of Sodom and Gommorrah as follows "Thus, in Genesis 19:1-11, the deterioration due to sin continues in the story of the men of Sodom. There can be no doubt of the moral judgement made there against homosexual relations."*
---
*LETTER TO THE BISHOPS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON THE PASTORAL CARE OF HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS – Homosexualitatis problema (Epistula de pastorali personarum homosexualium cura), October 1st, 1986, §6, paragraph 2
---
Apparently, the Pope has not read the story of Sodom as written in the Book of Genesis. It is a story that involves the suspicious and inhospitable inhabitants of the City of Sodom, who did not approve of strangers from outside the city who were visiting Abraham’s brother Lot.

They wanted to communicate their lack of hospitality for Lot’s visitors, by gang-raping them and then throwing them out of town. It was the ancient equivalent of tarring, feathering and riding out of town on a rail.

The idea of the gang rape of the visitors, was a very macho sort of thing – to show the visitors that the men of Sodom were "real men" and the visitors were "less than women."

This sort of misogynistic attitude, this mistrust of people who are different, or who are strangers in our midst, is not a characteristic of gay people, who are often slurred when they are called "sodomites."

What the Pope and the Christianists refuse to understand, is that the punishment of Sodom was meted out to those who do not accept strangers, and who hate people be-cause they are different. The real "sodomites" are the people who have a rabid hatred of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people, because we are different, because we are strangers, because we are eunuchs.

But Melinda points out a document from THE PONTIFICAL COUNCIL FOR THE FAMILY entitled THE TRUTH AND MEANING OF HUMAN SEXUALITY.

This can be found at:

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/family/documents/rc_pc_family_doc_08121995_human-sexuality_en.html

And the truth is, much of the document is perfectly fine, as far as it goes, as a guide toward educating adolescent Catholics, at least the straight ones. But let’s focus on some of the strange parts:

Creating the human race in his own image... God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being".

Somehow, this seems to be somewhat in contradiction to St. Paul raising celibacy to the highest level, not to mention Aquinas on the topic of perpetual virginity being the highest calling.

Still, this doesn’t yet state that it has to be a one-man, one-woman kind of love.

Even:

Femininity and masculinity are complementary gifts

still does not automatically imply that a couple has to be one with only a Tab A and one only with a Slot B. After all, in Genesis 1:27 we learn that each of us is created in the image and likeness of God as male and female. But we gradually get to:

14. When love is lived out in marriage, it includes and surpasses friendship. Love between a man and woman is achieved when they give themselves totally, each in turn according to their own masculinity and femininity, founding on the marriage covenant that communion of persons where God has willed that human life be conceived, grow and develop. To this married love, and to this love alone, belongs sexual giving, "realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and a woman commit themselves totally to one another until death".

Still, with the exception of the allegation of exclusivity “to this love alone” if one excludes same-sex couples from the married state. IF one accepts that same sex couples can share their masculinity and femininity to the extent that each has some of each in their nature, then this exclusivity becomes clear that it is only within the married state that this sort of sexual encounter is blessed. But for a Church that denies the sacrament to those who are not heterosexually oriented, at least without requiring them to deny their God-given natures, the allegation of exclusivity is either inapplicable or false.

God does not require the impossible – so if someone is truly gay or lesbian, it is clear with the use of right reason that sexual activity in a committed monogamous relationship outside of marriage, where the parties are not otherwise under disability and where marriage is not available because of societal prejudice cannot be sinful.

But the document goes further:

it makes them capable of the greatest possible gift, the gift by which they become cooperators with God for giving life to a new human person.

If this was descriptive of heterosexual relationships only and not as an exclusive statement for everyone else as well, then this can make sense in a Catholic context.

Of course in that version, the calling for many heterosexual people, those who cannot contain themselves in chaste and celibate means in accordance with St. Paul’s teaching, is to a committed marriage relationship in which the possibility of children is admitted.

But what of those heterosexual people who know they do not have the temperament and would never make fit parents? Must they be relegated to celibacy? Or must they get married and create children they can’t properly raise and don’t really love? It is all well and good to see the creation and rearing of children as a very good thing – but to make it exclusive is wrong.

16. As we will later observe, virginal and married love are the two forms in which the person's call to love is fulfilled. In order for both to develop, they require the commitment to live chastity, in conformity with each person's own state of life.

Where the Church denies married love without requiring people to live a lie as to their nature, and requires those people to live a “virginal” chaste life, The Church is condemning many to failure – “it is better to marry than to burn with passion.” But for those who are truly gay or lesbian marriage is forbidden and virginity is an impossible goal, there can be no sin in acting on their natural impulses. God does not require the impossible.

18. "Chastity includes an apprenticeship in self-mastery which is a training in human freedom. The alternative is clear: either man governs his passions and finds peace, or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy".

For those who are called to celibacy, this is god advice. For those who are made different by God but are not called to chastity, this is an impossible requirement. Celibacy must be freely chosen, not imposed by circumstance.

Parents are well aware that living conjugal chastity themselves is the most valid premise for educating their children in chaste love and in holiness of life.

Eventually, we’ll figure out what “conjugal chastity” means. But the document only provides mystical-sounding double-talk.

If it means what I think it might mean, then modern married Roman Catholics are called to have sex only when the woman has ovulated and it is possible to fertilize an egg – which we know is possible to figure out by taking the temperature of vaginal mucus, as recommended by the rhythm method. Married Catholics, to be chaste, then may reasonably be required to refrain from sex except during such a fertile period, and that in this way they are allowing the Spirit to act. To have sex at other times when it is possible to know the woman is not fertile, must be sinful, since it does not give the Spirit the opportunity to act to assist the procreative function. I wonder how many married Catholics would be willing to admit honestly that they could live perfectly chaste lives without sin with these limitations. All one has to do is count the number of children – if a couple in their 40’s does not have eight or nine children, and cannot establish a physical impairment, one with the inclination to judge them the way they judge us, could reasonably infer that there was some sort of sin going on within the marriage.

The Church’s theological thinking about the nature of heterosexual sex is the result of the Manichean influence of the Augustinian heresy (the Western branches of Christianity) on much of traditional Christianity. Instead of a genuine expression of mutual love, sex becomes dirty and sinful even within a marriage, except when there is a genuine possibility of a child being conceived.

The Church wisely does not require the physical impossibility of requiring a one sex act to one child correspondence. Perhaps this could happen with a hypothetical Opus Dei type married Catholic couple, who, if they have sex and don’t conceive, might get to spend the rest of the month self-flagellating and wearing the hair shirt in penance until the next ovulation bump.

30. Christian marriage is a sacrament whereby sexuality is integrated into a path to holiness, through a bond reinforced by the indissoluble unity of the sacrament: "The gift of the sacrament is at the same time a vocation and commandment for the Christian spouses, that they may remain faithful to each other forever, beyond every trial and difficulty, in generous obedience to the holy will of the Lord: ?What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder' ".

As usual, the Church misunderstands Christ’s teaching – divorce should not merely be the choice of a husband who under the old Jewish law (still in Islamic Shariah) only needed to say “I divorce you” three times to be free of a wife who had no similar option. Again, we’re off topic, but only making a point that Melinda’s special document is rather faulty. Divorce should not be the province of a man’s decision alone.

So let’s see what the Document Melinda Recommends says about sex other than heterosexual sex:

103. Masturbation particularly constitutes a very serious disorder that is illicit in itself and cannot be morally justified, although "the immaturity of adolescence (which can sometimes persist after that age), psychological imbalance or habit can influence behaviour, diminishing the deliberate character of the act and bringing about a situation whereby subjectively there may not always be serious fault". Therefore, adolescents should be helped to overcome manifestations of this disorder, which often express the inner conflicts of their age and, in many cases, a selfish vision of sexuality.

104. A particular problem that can appear during the process of sexual maturation is homosexuality, which is also spreading more and more in urbanized societies. This phenomenon must be presented with balanced judgement, in the light of the documents of the Church. Young people need to be helped to distinguish between the concepts of what is normal and abnormal, between subjective guilt and objective disorder, avoiding what would arouse hostility. On the other hand, the structural and complementary orientation of sexuality must be well clarified in relation to marriage, procreation and Christian chastity. "Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained". A distinction must be made between a tendency that can be innate and acts of homosexuality that "are intrinsically disordered" and contrary to Natural Law.

Especially when the practice of homosexual acts has not become a habit, many cases can benefit from appropriate therapy. In any case, persons in this situation must be accepted with respect, dignity and delicacy, and all forms of unjust discrimination must be avoided. If parents notice the appearance of this tendency or of related behaviour in their children, during childhood or adolescence, they should seek help from expert qualified persons in order to obtain all possible assistance.

For most homosexual persons, this condition constitutes a trial. "They must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfil God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition". "Homosexual persons are called to chastity".

Let’s address masturbation first. It is not a sin, in moderation. Really. The scriptural basis for the erroneous teaching is the sin of Onan, who spilled his seed on the ground. But let’s look at the story. In Jewish tradition, there was no heaven. The promise to Abraham was that he would have many descendants, and religious Jews believed that a man truly lived on through his children. Thus if a married brother died without children, a Jewish man was obligated to take in the brother’s widow and have sex with her to give the dead brother a surrogate child, so that he could live on into posterity. But Onan was a younger brother, and we know from the story of Esau and Jacob that the elder brother got the inheritance – this meant that if Onan’s older brother had no children, Onan would inherit from their father. But if Onan got his widowed sister-in-law pregnant, then the baby would inherit through the brother’s line and Onan would get nothing. So Onan decided to take in his sister in law, and have sex with her, but did whatever he could to make sure there would be no child. Onan’s sin was in denying his brother eternal life, and in selfishly coveting the inheritance. It was not merely the “spilling his seed on the ground.” There is no scriptural authority whatsoever for masturbation to be viewed as sinful. But there is a lot of Manichean guilt that can be tapped into if it is seen as a sin.

Similarly, the worst that can be said about male homosexual activity is that at best a single act might be forbidden, and that would be the true misogynistic “Sin of Sodom” in which heterosexual men anally rape (I.e., use them as they would use a woman) male enemies and strangers to show that they were the real he-men and the enemy or stranger was less than a woman. A loving homosexual relationship was not forbidden – it is clear from 1 Samuel 18 that David and Jonathan were married to each other.

There is nothing in sacred scripture that condemns female homosexual activity. The only scripture that gets used on lesbians is the misquote of Romans 1, and that only refers to women acting against their natures. A lesbian would sin by marrying a man, not by having a loving and committed relationship with a woman. While the relationship is not explicit, it is clear to me that Naomi and Ruth are the epitome of a loving female relationship. At our wedding, Trudy and I used the same vow as Ruth made to Naomi, though we did leave out the “may God punish me severely” part as unnecessary, at the suggestion of the celebrant.

There is a lot more I could write about the fallacy of Church teaching in the area of non-heterosexual sexuality, but I think this illustration from Melinda’s cited source is sufficient to make the point.

So let’s get back to the last part of Melinda’s essay.

Once you’ve familiarized yourself with Church teaching, you’re going to need to be able to present the teachings in a charitable and compassionate manner. It is tremendously important that you use the right language.

That is, you have to lie about the Church teachings, which are truly not charitable or compassionate, but are rather patronizing and schizophrenic.

I avoid the use of “gay” or “lesbian” unless I am discussing a person’s choice to identify themselves as such . . . I do this because “gay,” “lesbian,” “queer” and so forth are the terminology used by the homosexual community, to denote a permanent and fundamental state.

So, Melinda is projecting her easily-accomplished slightly bisexual choice on those whose God-given sexual orientation is firmly hardwired as gay or lesbian.

I tend to prefer “person(s) with same-sex attractions,” because that is the language used by Courage — a Catholic group for people struggling to live a chaste life in spite of temptations to homosexuality.

That’s fine. It’s a clearly neutral term and I will find It as acceptable as using “person(s) with opposite-sex attractions,” to describe a heterosexual or sometimes a bisexual person in a heterosexual context.

It is advisable to avoid using terms like “unnatural” or “objectively disordered.” They are perfectly accurate, and if they are understood properly they are not at all offensive. The problem is that they sound offensive even though they aren’t, and they’re easily misunderstood.

Accurate? No, they’re lies. They’re based on false premises inconsistent with a true rational understanding of Natural Law. Natural Law does not require that all human beings have the same nature. It is a sin to limit God to that percentage of nature that conforms with societal expectations and to call the rest of the diversity unnarural.

It is much simpler to paraphrase — rather than saying that homosexual acts are unnatural, say that they contradict the purpose for which God ordained sex.

Melinda, and the Catholic Church, fail to look at the larger perspective. Rather than correctly seeing heterosexual acts within a man/woman marriage for the intention of procreation as only a part of the natural world, She (and they) erroneously see it as the only game in town, other than the highly unnatural states of celibate life and of permanent virginal chastity, to which only a very few are called.

Then Melinda comes up with a good thing!

reason, and not feeling, must ultimately be the compass of morality

But, sadly, Melinda throws reason out the window. However, the following is not so bad:

we believe that God has ordained all things in order to serve the good of his creatures. Therefore, regardless of what we might feel at any given moment, when we use things in accord with God’s design, they will ultimately serve our good.

The problem is that Melinda only sees a part of God’s design, perhaps the part that applies to her, and perhaps one that doesn’t. I am not in her head, but if she is wracked by self-doubt about her bisexual choice of an exclusively heterosexual life after experimenting with the other side of her sexuality, she may have made the wrong choice. But since her heterosexuality came so easily, I can only conclude that she was very near the heterosexual end of the Kinsey Scale in any event. It is much less likely that she was experiencing a straight equivalent of the “living in denial of our true nature” kind of existence – I can believe Donnie McLurkin’s story might support such a hypothetical underlying nature, but that does not ring true of Melinda’s story. She’s not straight, she is bisexual, but has chosen since her conversion to only express her heterosexual side, so to speak.

Bisexual people by their nature, and with a desire to do so, can do that, while truly gay or lesbian people can’t, or they may try, sometimes very hard, but it causes too much psychological stress to live the lie and they come to terms with their nature, commit suicide, or live with unnecessary guilt.

Someone who is involved in a homosexual relationship is, by virtue of the fact that they are pursuing a lifestyle that God cannot sanction, frustrating God’s plan for their vocation.

Melinda cannot see what God’s intention for that other person is. It is the height of condemned judging for her to do so. God’s plan for that person is between that person and God – and it is not for Melinda or the Roman Catholic Church to judge that person’s true calling.

If they are called to a life of chastity, to bear their homosexuality as a cross, then they are turning away from that cross, and therefore also turning away from a deeper union with Christ and from the means of their salvation. If they are called to accept God’s healing, and to eventually enter the married state, then they are rejecting the gift of a spouse which God wants to offer them.

But seriously, how can Melinda say this? How does she really know what God wants for those other people? She can only know what God wants for her. What if they are truly called to a chaste but homosexual life in a committed relationship that should be legally sanctioned as a marriage? How dare the Church teach that it is evil and immoral for same-sex couples to enter into a legally-sanctioned civil marriage? And how dare Melinda buy into the aggressive immorality of the Church’s teachings in this regard.

When I converted to Catholicism, I thought that my sex life was over. I still believed that homosexuality was fundamental and immutable, and that I was a lesbian. I had no expectation that when I turned my sexuality over to God that he would be able to heal it.

God actually had nothing to do with Melinda's so-called “healing.” It was the choice Melinda made to believe in a God as portrayed by the Roman Catholic Church. She chose to adopt a religion that teaches an un-Christian bigotry against natural homosexual behavior, and as a slightly bisexual woman, she was easily able to choose to act straight – she did not have to deny her entire nature, only a part of it. Her projection of the ease of her conversion onto others, so she can act as a mouthpiece for the Roman Catholic abomination being inflicted on those who are different and believe differently, is an affront to God and an eclipse of Reason.

I began by believing that I was confined to a homosexual lifestyle by factors beyond my control, and ended by discovering that God had something more wonderful than I imagined possible in store for me.

Somehow this, at least the first part, does not ring true – but hey, it’s Melinda’s story and she can tell it how she sees fit. I can’t tell her what her story is, I can only use the clues she gives to interpret it.

As I have come to realize over a painfully long period of time, the Church that rejected the real me is a false Church. Its teachings are a perversion of the teachings of Christ. Only cafeteria Catholics who reject the most evil of the teachings while adhering to the harmless superstitions have any chance at not being numbered among the goats.

Within a few short years, I have been blessed with a husband whom I love tremendously, and with two wonderful children on whom to practice those maternal virtues that I once eschewed.

On the one hand, this is wonderful news, assuming Melinda is truly happy and is not self-deluded by her faith. On the other, if I were to uncharitably judge Melinda on her own merits and using her own beliefs, in the way she uncharitably judges those who do not share those beliefs, we could ask something like this:

Wait – Melinda, are you unchastely having sex at any time except your most fertile times? Are you doing other things with your husband than the officially sanctioned “procreative act?” I would imagine that unless the two of you are incredibly strong-willed, you should have four or five children by now, unless you’ve been married less than four or five years, in which case you’re probably right on track. In 20 years of marriage, my ex and I produced four children, and I am sure that if we paid more attention to the temperature of vaginal mucus, we could have produced twice that many in that time. The first two came rather quickly, but then they came five years apart. I am not sure how long Melinda has been married, but it does not seem to me that she is being a good enough Catholic wife and mother, unless it really has only been a short time, or there is a “cafeteria” somewhere, hidden beneath her zeal to go on the talk circuit to sell more of her books and push the false teachings of a seriously misguided Catholic hierarchy.

Melinda can be praised for finding her path, but she should not falsely claim that her path is for everyone. Melinda's speech at Notre Dame is likely to be as ojectionable as the cartoon recently run in that school's newspaper. But who would expect a Roman Catholic institution to be fair, anyway?

P.S. I found something today in which Melinda writes that she has been married nine years and has five children - that pretty much jives with her being a good Catholic in accordance with those strange "moral" teachings about sex, so those rhetorical questions do have a personal answer - based on the available evidence, evn if I really wanted to, I couldn't "judge" her practicing of Catholicism as being internally immoral from a Roman Catholic perspective, but perhaps from a Malthusian one.

Responding to the Manhattan Declaration

A REAL Christian and Humanitarian Response to the Manhattan Declaration
Introductory Statement

The Manhattan Declaration was released from under some rock in New Jersey some time on November 20, 2009. It is reported to be the work of Christianist apologist Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor of jurisprudence with ostensibly sterling academic credentials in law and theology.

As recently reported in the New York Times magazine, Robert P. George is the notorious board chair of the so-called “National Organization for Marriage” which opposes civil marriage rights for certain minorities, supporting instead special rights for the majority. He founded a group called the “American Principles Project” which opposes and attempts to undermine the principles under which the United States was founded, and which has sponsored a witch hunt of lies and innuendoes aimed at Kevin Jennings, an openly gay member of the Obama administration. He assisted in the drafting of a proposed Federal Marriage Amendment, to enshrine bigotry in the United States Constitution.

At Princeton, Robert P. George founded The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, which opposes American ideals and is designed to subvert American institutions. While it invokes the name of one of the founding fathers, it certainly does not reflect Madison’s vision of American principles. He has also been a founder of the Witherspoon Institute. Robert P. George is reputed to have links to, or membership in, the shadowy Roman Catholic Christianist cult Opus Dei. According to Frank Cocozzelli, neither James Madison nor his “influential teacher at Princeton” John Witherspoon, would be happy with the association of their names with the subversive anti-American theories of government espoused by Robert P. George. Witherspoon and Madison actually opposed the idea of religious factions imposing their will on the American people that is championed by “Robby” George.

Robby? According to the article in the Times magazine, “Seemingly everyone from [Karl] Rove to Cardinal Rigali calls him, simply, Robby.” So, for the remainder of this proclamation, we shall simply refer to him by that familiar name.

Robby may be fairly called a Father of Lies, since his obviously tissue-paper thin rationalizations in the justification of prejudice and bigotry masquerade as being based on principles of “natural law” can be refuted point by point.

The first thing to point out are Robby’s appeal to Christians in the preamble as being “heirs of a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God’s word, seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering.”
The thrust of the Manhattan Declaration is to cloak opposition to justice, imposition of tyranny, and oppression of women and minorities, in a sheep’s mantle of appearances. His opposition to human rights and dignity will be made apparent in short order, but the Manhattan Declaration begins with soothing thoughts of justice and compassion to lull the minds of the easily duped into complacency. So now we turn to responding to the document itself.


A RESPONSE TO “THE MANHATTAN DECLARATION

NOTE: The text of the Manhattan Declaration is "quoted," while the response is in Regular type

Preamble

Christians are heirs of a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God's word, seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering.

On the other hand, unlike real Christians, Christianists have misused the message, the teachings and tenets of Christianity for nearly 2,000 years to persecute and crusade against those whose beliefs are different, to oppress women, to enslave minorities, to twist the Good News of the Gospels and use it to persecute and oppress people of different natures. Augustine of Hippo was not the first, but was one of the most prominent of these early Christianist hypocrites, mixing his Manichean and Platonic philosophical leanings with Christianity to create a toxic brew from which the Roman Catholic Church has not overcome.

While fully acknowledging the imperfections and shortcomings of Christian
institutions and communities in all ages, we claim the heritage of those
Christians who defended innocent life by rescuing discarded babies from trash
heaps in Roman cities and publicly denouncing the Empire's sanctioning of
infanticide.

Christianists should be cognizant of the Judaeo-Christian traditions and biblical teachings that associate the soul with the breath of life, and that recognized that the soul is not infused in a human being until it is born and has taken at least one breath, which Christian tradition has been embodied in the Anglo-American Common Law from time immemorial. They should be aware of the meaning of the Sacrament of Baptism, which in its traditional form of immersion is a recapitulation of the time spent in the womb, and then birth and a new first breath. They should recognize and speak to the truth that the rules and laws they support that are against women’s reproductive choices, including opposition to abortion rights and denial of access to contraception, are intended for the purpose of oppressing women, and not for the purpose of protecting the lives of human beings. They should recognize and admit the truth, that abortion was expressly permitted by Christian teachings well past the thirteenth century.

We remember with reverence those believers who sacrificed their lives by
remaining in Roman cities to tend the sick and dying during the plagues, and who
died bravely in the coliseums rather than deny their Lord.

Real Christians will be aware that war and the death penalty are secular evils against which Christians should be willing to sacrifice their lives. The author and signers of the Manhattan Declaration elevate the value of human life in potentia over that of human lives in being.

After the barbarian tribes overran Europe, Christian monasteries preserved not
only the Bible but also the literature and art of Western culture.

It was Irish Celitic Christian monks who preserved much, but it was early Islamic Culture that preserved the works of Aristotle, which were later incorporated into Christian thinking through the work of Thomas Aquinas, and that later, when Western culture started to flourish, Islamic culture withered because of its leadership holding arcane religious tenets to supersede the teachings of science, and which started an oppression of women and minorities.

It was Christians who combated the evil of slavery: Papal edicts in the 16th and
17th centuries decried the practice of slavery and first excommunicated
anyone involved in the slave trade; evangelical Christians in England, led
by John Wesley and William Wilberforce, put an end to the slave trade in
that country. Christians under Wilberforce's leadership also formed hundreds
of societies for helping the poor, the imprisoned, and child laborers chained to machines.

It was Christianists who used the Bible to support the evil of Slavery – teaching that African slaves were the descendants of Ham, and condemned to be the servants of White slaveowners. There are Christianists today who would support evil practices such as racial segregation. We must be mindful of the preachings of many earnest white Protestant ministers in the 19th century who railed from the pulpit that the involuntary servitude of African Americans was biblically justified, referring to the slaves as “Children of Ham” and referring to the Genesis 9:20-27 story in which Ham’s descendants (Canaan and his children) are punished by God – to be the servants of the children of Shem and Japeth.

Yes, those white ministers of religion believed that Christianity endorses slavery - and their reliance on Genesis 9 shows that they were not limited to the teaching of St. Paul abjuring slaves to be obedient to their masters (Ephesians 6:5, Titus 2:9).

In Europe, Christians challenged the divine claims of kings and successfully
fought to establish the rule of law and balance of governmental powers, which
made modern democracy possible.

The divine right of kings was a Christian institution and a way to keep the papacy as a force above the kings; it was the work of enlightenment philosophers at the edge of Christianity, and of Deists, atheists and others, who successfully fought to create the American Experiment. America is not a Christian nation, but a nation which supports and encourages a diversity of religious belief and expression, centered on a higher morality in the common public square than that encouraged by religious intolerance.

And in America, Christian women stood at the vanguard of the suffrage movement. The great civil rights crusades of the 1950s and 60s were led by Christians
claiming the Scriptures and asserting the glory of the image of God in every
human being regardless of race, religion, age or class.

The truth is that the women’s movement was a movement of women of all sorts of religious backgrounds and traditions. It was and still is the Christianist objective to maintain and preserve the institutions of patriarchal dominance over women. In the 1830’s and 1840’s and even now, as evidenced by much of Robby’s writing once stripped of the smarmy rhetoric, many ministers of religion opposed basic human rights for women, particularly married women, because altering the laws relating to marriage by giving women control over their own inheritances, or wages, or allowing women to vote, would destroy the sacred institution of marriage. After all, just as slaves were told by St. Paul to be obedient to their masters (see Ephesians and Titus citations above), wives were told to be obedient to their husbands (Titus 2:5).

This same devotion to human dignity has led Christians in the last decade to
work to end the dehumanizing scourge of human trafficking and sexual slavery,
bring compassionate care to AIDS sufferers in Africa, and assist in a myriad of
other human rights causes - from providing clean water in developing nations to
providing homes for tens of thousands of children orphaned by war, disease and
gender discrimination.

Christianists such as the author of and signatories to the Manhattan Declaration have maintained a crusade against gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex people because they are different, and Christianists continue to oppress women. And how does Robby explain the Roman Catholic and Bush Administration policies that have crippled the fight against the spread of HIV in Africa? Not at all – caring for the victims may be compassionate, but halting the spread of disease would be a loftier goal. Abstinence education does not work.

Like those who have gone before us in the faith, Christians today are called
to proclaim the Gospel of costly grace, to protect the intrinsic dignity of the
human person and to stand for the common good. In being true to its own calling,
the call to discipleship, the church through service to others can make a
profound contribution to the public good.

Christianists like Robby George and his ilk, on the other hand, feel a call to oppress women, lesbian, gay and transgender people as a contribution to the blight of bigotry and prejudice that they surround with lip service to allegedly Christian principles. You will know them by their works.

Declaration

We, as Orthodox, Catholic, and Evangelical Christians, have gathered,
beginning in New York on September 28, 2009, to make the following declaration,
which we sign as individuals, not on behalf of our organizations, but speaking
to and from our communities. We act together in obedience to the one true God,
the triune God of holiness and love, who has laid total claim on our lives and
by that claim calls us with believers in all ages and all nations to seek and
defend the good of all who bear his image. We set forth this declaration in
light of the truth that is grounded in Holy Scripture, in natural human reason
(which is itself, in our view, the gift of a beneficent God), and in the very
nature of the human person. We call upon all people of goodwill, believers and
non-believers alike, to consider carefully and reflect critically on the issues
we here address as we, with St. Paul, commend this appeal to everyone’s
conscience in the sight of God.

While the whole scope of Christian moral concern, including a special concern for the poor and vulnerable, claims our attention, we are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.

The preceding paragraph are flowery, nice sounding language that says that Christianists want to continue to oppress women by denying them reproductive health services, to persecute people whose sexual orientation or gender identity is different from what society’s majority expects, and to use their bigoted religious beliefs as a shield a pass for unlawful discriminatory activity in the public square. Marriage has been “redefined” over the years as society has evolved. Now that we have become more civilized, it is certainly a moral good to welcome previously despised ,ostracized and misunderstood minorities into fuller participation in the society as equals.

Because the sanctity of human life

Which the Christianists reserve only for unborn babies and not for those on death row or the victims of war, and which Christianists use as a code to elevate the “sanctity” of human life in potentia over the sanctity of human lives in being.

, the dignity of marriage as a union of husband and wife,

Which Christianists assume means that marriage can’t include husbands and husbands, or wives and wives, because they believe only Christianists should be entitled to dignity and legal protection.

and the freedom of conscience and religion

which is all well and good, except the freedom of conscience means choosing professions that do not require a “conscience” decision, and the freedom of religion must not be limited only to the freedom of religion of Christianists and those who share their beliefs.

are foundational principles of justice and the common good, we are compelled
by our Christian faith to speak and act in their defense. In this declaration we
affirm: 1) the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every human being as a
creature fashioned in the very image of God, possessing inherent rights of equal
dignity and life;

by which, somehow, the author and signers of the Manhattan Declaration mean fetuses, to the exclusion of lives already in being.

2) marriage as a conjugal union of man and woman, ordained by God from the
creation, and historically understood by believers and non-believers alike, to
be the most basic institution in society and;

Which should not interfere with marriage as also encompassing a conjugal union of man and man, or woman and woman; after all, David and Jonathan were married, right there in 1 Samuel 18, right? As to marriage being “ordained by God from the creation” – that is a matter of one sort of religious belief, and there are other legitimate views, some of which involve a correct interpretation of sacred scripture, and others which do not rely on Judaeo/Christian/Islamic traditions,

3) religious liberty, which is grounded in the character of God, the example
of Christ, and the inherent freedom and dignity of human beings created in the
divine image.

Christianists believe that only they should have religious liberty – how about the religious liberty of Unitarians willing to marry gays? The author and signatories to the Manhattan Declaration make a hollow mockery of the very idea of religious freedom.

We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of
ecclesial differences to affirm our right - and, more importantly, to embrace
our obligation – to speak and act in defense of these truths.

No, Robby and his ilk are Christianists, joining together to oppress women and LGBT people.

We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on
earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or
acquiescence. It is our duty to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus
Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season. May God help us not to
fail in that duty.

If they were truly Christians, they wouldn’t be making and signing this ridiculous Declaration. Remember that. And those of us who truly believe in religious freedom, pledge that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate *us* into silence or acquiescence. It is the duty of those of us who are Christian to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in its fullness, both in season and out of season. It is the duty of those of us with other beliefs to maintain the freedom of our various and diverse religious beliefs in a diverse and multicultural society. May God help us not to fail in that duty.

Life
So God created man in his own image, in the image
of God he created him; male and female he created them. Genesis
1:27

EVERY human being is created “male and female.” Every human being has the blueprints in every cell of their bodies, to build a male or female body. Many will develop as primarily male, and others will develop as primarily female, but still others have characteristics of BOTH. GOD’s true name is HE/SHE and the original Adam was fully male and fully female until he was separated into two people.

Yet Robby and the people who follow his thinking are among the worst oppressors of the transgender community.

From a real Christian point of view, those who claim to be Christian might do well to read the warm and welcoming words of Isaiah. Chapter 56, in which we learn, in verses 3-8:

3Neither let the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to the LORD, speak, saying, The LORD hath utterly separated me from his people: neither let the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree.

4For thus saith the LORD unto the eunuchs that keep my sabbaths, and choose the things that please me, and take hold of my covenant;

5Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters: I will give them an everlasting name, that shall not be cut off.

6Also the sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the LORD, to serve him, and to love the name of the LORD, to be his servants, every one that keepeth the sabbath from polluting it, and taketh hold of my covenant;

7Even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer: their burnt offerings and their sacrifices shall be accepted upon mine altar; for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.

8The Lord GOD, which gathereth the outcasts of Israel saith, Yet will I gather others to him, beside those that are gathered unto him.

What most Christianists on the Robby George bandwagon don’t seem to realize, is that the biblical term "eunuchs" includes people who today would be called "transgender." And God loves transgender people, even if Christianists do not know how to love his neighbors who are strange and different.

Even the Lord Jesus knew that the term "eunuchs" includes a number of different kinds of people, when he is quoted in Matthew 19:12 as saying:

"12For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it."

Transgender people are "so born from their mother's womb." Misassigned a sex at birth, they spend their early lives being told they are something they know deep inside that they are not. Some transition early in life, while others continue their struggle into mid-life. Some will have surgical intervention, while others will not. Christians know that God loves transgender people and has a special place in heaven "in my (God's) house within my (God's) walls a place and a name . . . an everlasting name that shall not be cut off."

If Isaiah's and Jesus' own words are not enough, there is always Acts 8:

36And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?

37And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And the eunuch answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.

38And the eunuch commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized the eunuch.

39And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more: and he went on his way rejoicing.

This story begins with the eunuch reading the Book of Isaiah, and already up to Chapter 53. The message is clear - here is a eunuch who, while already a eunuch, has accepted the kingdom of heaven and is baptized, and respected as a human being - something one does not see in the positions taken by many signers of the Manhattan Declaration.

These people do not even understand the biological sex is not solely resident in the genital duct development but includes the entire development of the bodily anatomy, including the brain.
Robby George, his several groups and think tanks, and many other misnamed and evil organizations slimily slither their anti-American agenda into the minds of Americans by clothing them in a wrapping of Christianity They are trying to seduce the American people into their Dominionist camp - trying to make America, which is a nation built and made great on the diversity of origin, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and gender identity, into a third world nation cowering in the thrall of false prophets of twisted religion.

The only difference between Christianists and Islamists, is that where they control government, Islamists are already stoning to death people who are different. Christianists merely want to introduce some electroshock therapy and other "reparative" treatments, and perhaps pre-frontal lobotomies, to "treat" people who don't agree with his agenda.
So when these people cite to Genesis 1:27, they’re usually misinterpreting it as a support of the artificial division of human beings into two and only two sexes without a proper recognition of the diversity of reality. They are usually interpreting it as meaning there people are “either male or female” and not understanding that even scientifically, each human being has the blueprints in each of our cells that would support either developmental path, or various different anatomical situations that result in transgender and intersex realities. While the Manhattan Declaration does not directly address transgender and intersex people, it is only because we are not always on their radar screen.

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. John 10:10

And one might wonder who is entitled to life “to the full.” Robby does not include women, for some reason.

Although public sentiment has moved in a pro-life direction, we note with
sadness that pro-abortion ideology prevails today in our government.

First, public sentiment is irrelevant to the civil rights, religious beliefs, moral beliefs and privacy rights of individual women. Second, the Christianists still maintain an ascendancy in governmental ideology – as evidenced by gag rules and lack of funding. The principle is that majority rule should not be used to unfairly restrict individual liberty.

Let’s take a look at the history of Christian teachings on the subject of abortion – far from being “unchanging,” we see that they change with the times.

The Church’s early teachings on “ensoulment” and abortion are based on writings of Aristotle, Jerome, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas – all of whom believed that “ensoulment” occurred several weeks after conception. Pope Innocent III, to whom one might ascribe “infallibility” (though there is the story of one Pope trying and condemning a deceased predecessor – try sorting *that* out), made it Catholic Church doctrine around the 13th century that abortion was permitted until fetal animation (called “quickening” - Aquinas posited that girl souls were implanted at 90 days after conception, while boys got souls after only 40.

Of course, this medieval and Aristotelian-based philosophical thinking ignored the majestic message of Sacred Scripture, in which the infusion of the soul (and the soul’s taking leave of the body) is inextricably intertwined with breathing – the soul itself involves the “breath of God” or “the breath of life.”

It was not until the 19th century that the Catholic Church started to change its position on abortion – and, of course, we have Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae that is largely responsible for the Church losing its moral compass on the ideas and concepts of ensoulment and what constitutes a human being. It is clear that all life, including human life, is a continuum, but a human being does not exist until birth and breath. Humanae Vitae prohibited Catholics from the use of any sort of artificial birth control.

It’s clear what the current the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy teachings are on abortion and birth control – I submit that while these may be binding on those Roman Catholics who accept the apostasy of the Church hierarchy in its misguidance of the flock, it is in no way appropriate for the hierarchy use its twisted religious morality to interfere with the constitution and laws of the United States and the several states as they apply to those citizens and inhabitants of the United States and the states who do not subscribe to this particular religious belief that is counter to the message of sacred scripture.

The present administration is led and staffed by those who want to make
abortions legal at any stage of fetal development, and who want to provide
abortions at taxpayer expense.

And the decision to have an abortion is a personal moral decision for a woman, and a medical decision for her doctor. To do anything else is to oppress women. Period.

Majorities in both houses of Congress hold pro-abortion views. The Supreme
Court, whose infamous 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade stripped the unborn of legal
protection,

It may be sad that Congress can’t even seem to pass a health care bill that includes abortion funding; but Robby’s description of Roe v. Wade reflects a profound and willful ignorance of the nature of that decision – though Robby, as a professor of jurisprudence is most probably not ignorant at all, he is simply lying in the pursuit of his agenda.

The fact is that it is patently obvious to anyone with a modicum of reasonable intelligence and a lack of prejudice against women, that Roe v. Wade preserved the traditional English Common Law principle, which is based and deeply rooted in Christian Tradition, of “birth and breath,” while modifying it slightly to assert a state interest in potential life in the 3rd trimester, but not so much that it interferes with the health or life of the already-alive women in whom the fetus is a parasite.

continues to treat elective abortion as a fundamental constitutional right,
though it has upheld as constitutionally permissible some limited restrictions
on abortion. The President says that he wants to reduce the "need" for abortion
- a commendable goal. But he has also pledged to make abortion more easily and
widely available by eliminating laws prohibiting government funding, requiring
waiting periods for women seeking abortions, and parental notification for
abortions performed on minors. The elimination of these important and effective
pro-life laws

What Robby is saying in the preceding paragraph is that the creeps behind the Manhattan Declaration want more and stronger laws to oppress women and reduce them to baby-producing uteruses.

cannot reasonably be expected to do other than significantly increase the
number of elective abortions by which the lives of countless children are
snuffed out prior to birth. Our commitment to the sanctity of life

Robby’s commitment to the sanctity of life clearly does not extend beyond birth – to Robby, life is only sacred while it is surrounded by a uterus.

is not a matter of partisan loyalty, for we recognize that in the thirty-six
years since Roe v. Wade, elected officials and appointees of both major
political parties have been complicit in giving legal sanction to what Pope John
Paul II described as "the culture of death."

Robby is one of the leading progenitors of the “:culture of death,” with his support and justification of aggressive wars waged by the United States in faraway countries, and his lack of opposition to the barbaric death penalty. Why does Robby do this? So he can rationalize his support of the evils of right wing philosophies by elevating them into a sort of moral good by way of rationalizations, not right reason.

We call on all officials in our country, elected and appointed, to protect
and serve every member of our society, including the most marginalized,
voiceless, and vulnerable among us.

What a nice sentiment – “protect” women. Protect gays, protect lesbians, protect transgender and intersex people – the most marginalized Americans, truly. But sadly, that is not what Robby means in his context.

A culture of death inevitably cheapens life in all its stages and conditions by
promoting the belief that lives that are imperfect, immature or inconvenient are
discardable.

Abortion is not killing – war and the death penalty are killing and DO create a culture of death – so why is NOT ONE SINGLE WORD IN THIS DECLARATION aimed at warmongering or capital punishment? BECAUSE Christianists, like the authors and signers of the Declaration, in the deep recesses of their twisted little hearts, want to be able to stone to death those of us who are different. Because Christianists, like the author (perhaps) and some signers of the Manhattan Declaration, are loony-toons who see current events as leading to the “Last Days” and are trying to make the idea of the Battle of Armageddon a self-fulfilling prophecy.

As predicted by many prescient persons, the cheapening of life that began
with abortion has now metastasized. For example, human embryo-destructive
research and its public funding are promoted in the name of science and in the
cause of developing treatments and cures for diseases and injuries.

So it looks like these creeps are also against scientific advances. Life is cheapened by wars of mass destruction with huge tolls in innocent human life, such as have swept the world several times in the 20th Century and continue to mar the 21st. It is not cheapened by abortion – in fact, there is proof that the quality oflife increases where babies are wanted babies, not where babies are forced on unwilling women.

The President and many in Congress favor the expansion of embryo-research to
include the taxpayer funding of so-called "therapeutic cloning." This would
result in the industrial mass production of human embryos to be killed for the
purpose of producing genetically customized stem cell lines and tissues.

Embryos can’t be killed, they are not people, but merely human tissue that has a potential and a potential i n proper circumstances, for development into a human being - do not confuse the egg with the Chicken - one could invite Robby for a chicken dinner and serve him a pair of sunny side up eggs, asking him how he liked his pair of chickens. There is nothing morally wrong with these practices – and if the Christianists don’t believe in them, then they shouldn’t be using hospitals or getting medical treatment more advanced than a miracle faith healing anyway. Leave the advances in medicine to those of us who actually believe in medicine.

At the other end of life, an increasingly powerful movement to promote
assisted suicide and "voluntary" euthanasia threatens the lives of vulnerable
elderly and disabled persons.

End of life care should not mean needlessly prolonging a person’s pain. Christianists believe in prolonging suffering, do they? Perhaps Robby might like self-flagellating hair-short-wearing practices, but dying people should not be forced to suffer, unless that is their choice.

Eugenic notions such as the doctrine of lebensunwertes Leben ("life unworthy
of life") were first advanced in the 1920s by intellectuals in the elite salons
of America and Europe. Long buried in ignominy after the horrors of the mid-20th
century, they have returned from the grave. The only difference is that now the
doctrines of the eugenicists are dressed up in the language of "liberty,"
"autonomy," and "choice."

There is a huge difference between eugenics being foisted on people by a totalitarian or authoritarian government, and people choosing to end their own life with dignity at such time as their bodies are failing. Robby clearly thinks he can fool pwople into not understanding the difference. I am not fooled - is anyone else? (well, yes, ths signers of the Declaration, but even they know they are wrong.

We will be united and untiring in our efforts to roll back the license to
kill that began with the abandonment of the unborn to abortion. We will work, as
we have always worked, to bring assistance, comfort, and care to pregnant women
in need and to those who have been victimized by abortion, even as we stand
resolutely against the corrupt and degrading notion that it can somehow be in
the best interests of women to submit to the deliberate killing of their unborn
children.

Unborn children cannot be killed. They are not children until they are born - merely potential children. They are not yet ensouled, not yet lives in being, but only lives in potentia We see nothing in the Manhattan Declaration about the Death Penalty or the Waging of Aggressive Wars such as those being immorally prosecuted by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan as a substitute for rounding up and bringing to justice the criminals behind the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Our message is, and ever shall be, that the just, humane, and truly
Christian answer to problem pregnancies is for all of us to love and care for
mother and child alike.

Christianists have never voted to fund adequate education and child care. For them, women are best left barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. They are more interested in the bottom line than in education, health or the welfare of children. Robert P. George was reported as advising Catholic bishops to “stop talking so much about the many policy issues they have taken up in the name of social justice.”

A truly prophetic Christian witness will insistently call on those who have
been entrusted with temporal power to fulfill the first responsibility of
government: to protect the weak and vulnerable against violent attack, and to do
so with no favoritism, partiality, or discrimination. The Bible enjoins us to
defend those who cannot defend themselves, to speak for those who cannot
themselves speak. And so we defend and speak for the unborn, the disabled, and
the dependent. What the Bible and the light of reason make clear, we must make
clear. We must be willing to defend, even at risk and cost to ourselves and our
institutions, the lives of our brothers and sisters at every stage of
development and in every condition.

This is dangerous – Robby is calling for violence for the purpose of institutionalizing their belief in the oppression of women! Beware these wolves who clothe themselves in the skins of sheep. They don’t care about the lives of women, only the potential lives of fetuses. Their concern is only for oppressing woman, and forcing the dying to suffer, ostensibly so they can give up their pain for the souls in purgatory, or something like that.

Our concern is not confined to our own nation. Around the globe, we are
witnessing cases of genocide and "ethnic cleansing," the failure to assist those
who are suffering as innocent victims of war, the neglect and abuse of children,
the exploitation of vulnerable laborers, the sexual trafficking of girls and
young women, the abandonment of the aged, racial oppression and discrimination, the persecution of believers of all faiths, and the failure to take steps
necessary to halt the spread of preventable diseases like AIDS. We see these
travesties as flowing from the same loss of the sense of the dignity of the
human person and the sanctity of human life that drives the abortion industry
and the movements for assisted suicide, euthanasia, and human cloning for
biomedical research. And so ours is, as it must be, a truly consistent ethic of
love and life for all humans in all circumstances.

The author of the Manhattan Declaration is a tool of the Republican Party. Where abortion is not available, more children are abused and neglected, by parents who had them by accident and do not want them, see them as a burden and do not properly care for them. When abortion has been available, there has been a drastic reduction in violent crime that follows the availability by about a couple of decades – long enough for abused and neglected children born to unwilling parents to have grown up to lash out against a society that oppresses women and keeps them down, a society that ceases to care for children once they are born (take the Catholic Church in Massachusetts, only willing to run an adoption agency as long as they could take public money to do it), a society that wages aggressive wars without raising the money to pay for them, causing terrible economic repercussions. A society that fans the flame of the spread of AIDS by “teaching abstinence only” and opposing the distribution of condoms. A society that does not care for legitimate medical research because Christianists want more people to suffer. A society where Christianist Republicans place their warped version of Christianity at the head of the line – all other faiths must take a back seat to theirs,

Marriage
The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man." For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. Genesis 2:23-24
This is a profound mystery - but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Ephesians 5:32-33

And how about1 Samuel 18:1-4:

1 After David had finished talking with Saul, Jonathan became one in spirit with David, and he loved him as himself. 2 From that day Saul kept David with him and did not let him return to his father's house. 3 And Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself. 4 Jonathan took off the robe he was wearing and gave it to David, along with his tunic, and even his sword, his bow and his belt.

And the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, in which Christians are called to celibacy, and that marriage is only for the morally weak:
8Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. 9But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion. 1 Cor. 7:8-9

In Scripture, the creation of man and woman,

Each human being is made in the image and likeness of God as male-and-female.
and their one-flesh union as husband and wife, is the crowning achievement of God’s creation.
Is Robby saying that it’s all about the sex? That sex (within marriage) is the crowning achievement of creation? Except for unicellular and asexually-reproducing creatures, even lowly creatures reproduce via sexual activity.

In the transmission of life and the nurturing of children, men and women
joined as spouses are given the great honor of being partners with God Himself.
Marriage then, is the first institution of human society - indeed it is the
institution on which all other human institutions have their foundation.

And what of the poor unmarried pregnant teenager whose boyfriend, who did not make her pregnant, marries her anyway so she would not be stoned to death, who journeyed to Bethlehem to give birth? According to the Roman Catholic Church, she was an “ever virgin” and never had any sex with her husband. To that Augustine-ridden Manichean-influenced Christianist theology, it is laughable for an adherent like Robby to ply these lofty words of mindless breeding as the highest and best human activity.

In the Christian tradition we refer to marriage as "holy matrimony" to
signal the fact that it is an institution ordained by God, and blessed by Christ
in his participation at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. In the Bible, God Himself
blesses and holds marriage in the highest esteem.

Christianists only tell part of the story, as usual .

First, appealing to sacred scripture is fine for Christians – but marriage as “the crowning achievement of God’s creation?” Not according to St. Paul, who teaches that marriage is only for those who cannot contain themselves, Early Christian Fathers also taught that celibacy was a higher calling. (For that matter, the early Church Fathers misused scripture, such as Matthew 19:12 to indicate celibacy is a higher order of existence, but decrying an actual castration, as was done in many cases among early Christians – so much so that by the time of the Council of Nicaea, there was a prohibition against the ordination of eunuchs to further discourage the practice.)

Vast human experience confirms that marriage is the original and most
important institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all
persons in a society. Where marriage is honored, and where there is a
flourishing marriage culture, everyone benefits - the spouses themselves, their
children, the communities and societies in which they live. Where the marriage
culture begins to erode, social pathologies of every sort quickly manifest
themselves.

So, marriage is good, and extending the right to those who are not heterosexual should also be good, right? But not according to the twisty turnings of the warped mind of Robert P. George.

Unfortunately, we have witnessed over the course of the past several decades
a serious erosion of the marriage culture in our own country. Perhaps the most
telling - and alarming - indicator is the out-of-wedlock birth rate. Less than
fifty years ago, it was under 5 percent. Today it is over 40 percent. Our
society - and particularly its poorest and most vulnerable sectors, where the
out-of-wedlock birth rate is much higher even than the national average - is
paying a huge price in delinquency, drug abuse, crime, incarceration,
hopelessness, and despair. Other indicators are widespread non-marital sexual
cohabitation and a devastatingly high rate of divorce.

Don’t blame gays for the failures of straights. The decline of marriage began with laws making divorce easier, laws that required men to pay for out-of-wedlock babies who were not voluntarily affiliated. Before the early 1950’s there were severe legal consequences for women who had sex outside of marriage and got pregnant – they had no “right” to child support. In the 1950’s, states started to try to make men obligated to support children born to women they had not married – this was the first blow against marriage.

The real answer is to make abortion easier to get so fewer unwanted babies are born. Make it so men can voluntarily affiliate, but do not force paternity on them outside of marriage. Create a culture in which all marriages are celebrated, and that despite Christian teaching encouraging marriage only for the weak-willed, promoting married life as a lifestyle for straight as well as gay people.

We confess with sadness that Christians and our institutions have too often
scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage and to model for the
world the true meaning of marriage. Insofar as we have too easily embraced the
culture of divorce and remained silent about social practices that undermine the
dignity of marriage we repent, and call upon all Christians to do the same.

To strengthen families, we must stop glamorizing promiscuity and infidelity
and restore among our people a sense of the profound beauty, mystery, and
holiness of faithful marital love.

Wonderful – and by letting gays marry, and lesbians, too, that means that there will be less promiscuity, right? That would be a moral good. But not for Robby and his ilk.

We must reform ill-advised policies that contribute to the weakening of the
institution of marriage, including the discredited idea of unilateral divorce.
We must work in the legal, cultural, and religious domains to instill in young
people a sound understanding of what marriage is, what it requires, and why it
is worth the commitment and sacrifices that faithful spouses make.

That paragraph is better than most! Perhaps one of the few that stands on its own as a good thing. But then Robby goes right into his evil thinking and we lose the thread of good stuff . . .

The impulse to redefine marriage in order to recognize same-sex and multiple
partner relationships is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the erosion of the
marriage culture. It reflects a loss of understanding of the meaning of marriage
as embodied in our civil and religious law and in the philosophical tradition
that contributed to shaping the law. Yet it is critical that the impulse be
resisted, for yielding to it would mean abandoning the possibility of restoring
a sound understanding of marriage and, with it, the hope of rebuilding a healthy
marriage culture.

This has nothing to do with straight people – marriage equality does not lessen the rights of straights to get married. Extending the right does not diminish the right for straights. As to multiple partner relationships, I am sure that the authors and signers of the Manhattan Declaration might bother to open their scriptures and find the number of multiparty marriages found all over the Bible.

It would lock into place the false and destructive belief that marriage is
all about romance and other adult satisfactions, and not, in any intrinsic way,
about procreation and the unique character and value of acts and relationships
whose meaning is shaped by their aptness for the generation, promotion and
protection of life.

So, marriages are supposed to be arranged by peoples’ parents? If love is not supposed to be a part of marriage (what the author of the Manhattan Declaration decries as “romance”), then on what foundation should it be built? Should it be a forced financial arrangement in which women are subsumed into the patriarchal primacy of the husband so much that they become legally incompetent – under the English Common Law, “the two become one, and that one is the husband.” IS this the goal of the Christianists? To return to a “traditional” form of marriage as it existed before 1848 in New York, under which married women did not even have the right to their own inheritances or wages?

In spousal communion and the rearing of children (who, as gifts of God, are
the fruit of their parents’ marital love), we discover the profound reasons for
and benefits of the marriage covenant.

And there aren’t gays and lesbians with children? And since there are, there is no reason for the law to discriminate against their children if their parents want the protection that marriage allows them.

We acknowledge that there are those who are disposed towards homosexual and
polyamorous conduct and relationships, just as there are those who are disposed
towards other forms of immoral conduct.

The LIES Robby comes up with - what can we expect from the Chairman of Maggie Gallagher's Anri-MArriage group's board of directors – first commingling things and calling homosexuality and polyamory “immoral conduct.” LIE, Robby, LIE. It is Patriarchal dominance that is immoral; marriage in which women are treated as property is immoral. Non-heterosexual people are not all polyamorous, and heterosexual people are not all monagamous. One can justify a moral form of polyamory if one wishes, too.

We have compassion for those so disposed; we respect them as human beings
possessing profound, inherent, and equal dignity; and we pay tribute to the men
and women who strive, often with little assistance, to resist the temptation to
yield to desires that they, no less than we, regard as wayward.

There is nothing less wayward than having a libido. St Paul recognized that those who cannot maintain a celibate lifestyle should get married! But one does not see Christianists like Robert P. George pushing all but the weakest straight people to be celibate – no, to Robby, it’s all about heterosexual sex for breeding, isn’t it?.

We stand with them, even when they falter. We, no less than they, are
sinners who have fallen short of God's intention for our lives.

I’m sorry, but this “culture of sin” is a Manichean problem that some Christianists still have to deal with – “Sin” is not what they think it is. And the idea that gay people and their natural sexual orientation are somehow sinful is rather distressing – the sin would be for them to act against their natural orientations. It is a Christian sin for straight people to experiment with gay sex, much as it is a sin for gay people to experiment with straight sex. God has a special calling for those who are not called to be heterosexual, or cissexual. There is a special place and a name in God’s House that is better than children.

We, no less than they, are in constant need of God’s patience, love and
forgiveness.

Robby George should speak for himself – it seems as if he wrote a speech on this topic for George W. Bush not so long ago, complete with the “we are all sinners” bologna. It’s just fine for Robby to wear a hair shirt and self-flagellate with his Opus Dei cronies, but it is not fine for him and his friends to be flagellating others – so please keep your sins to yourself, and let us keep our sins to ourselves.

We call on the entire Christian community to resist sexual immorality, and
at the same time refrain from disdainful condemnation of those who yield to it.
Our rejection of sin, though resolute, must never become the rejection of
sinners.

Robby characterizes us as sinners, by his definition of morality. Unfortunately, Robby and the Christianists don’t really get it – there’s nothing immoral or sinful about gay people in a loving committed relationship. Make it legal and bless it. Or allow the religious freedom to those who believe they should be able to! The morality of “making it legal” is incontrovertible – only those with an evil morality or who are under the sway of false prophets will oppose marriage equality.

For every sinner, regardless of the sin, is loved by God, who seeks not our
destruction but rather the conversion of our hearts. Jesus calls all who wander
from the path of virtue to "a more excellent way." As his disciples we will
reach out in love to assist all who hear the call and wish to answer it.

Maybe the Christianists should seek forgiveness for their own sins, rather than criticizing others – the whole mote and beam thing. They are so busy criticizing and demeaning those who are different, that they fail to understand any of the central message of Christian teaching. (Which isn’t, by the way, the whole death, resurrection and ascenscion thing, but is rather the idea that we should not put form over substance, that we should love our neighbors, even those who are strange and different.

We further acknowledge that there are sincere people who disagree with us,
and with the teaching of the Bible and Christian tradition, on questions of
sexual morality and the nature of marriage.

I know, Christianists like Robby George don’t understand what the Bible really teaches. Those who understand sacred scripture and natural law can see the folly of his parody of reason. I do not believe that he is at all sincere – he is bright enough to understand exactly what he is doing and has done – but he is a slave to his deeply held prejudices, and he uses his God-given intelligence to rationalize a way to make it seem that the prejudice is justifiable. The fact is I do not view Robby George as being sincere – he disagrees with me, but his motivation is not sincere, it’s pure evil. Even if the oppressor is sincere, he is still the oppressor. While I may forgive him his sin, he must still repent to be saved.

Some who enter into same-sex and polyamorous relationships no doubt regard
their unions as truly marital.

They are. They are just as valid, and moral and should be as legal as Robby George’s marriage, though Robby George conflates marriage equality based on sexual orientation and gender identity with other things in an attempt to lessen them by association – same sex relationships are no more likely to be polyamorous as opposite-sex relationships.

Ask the wealthy Egyptian who submits to the Will of Allah – and has the maximum four wives allowed under his religious belief. Robby might wish to address the morality of this. Of course, Islam is not a wonderful example of a moral religion, not when many imams support stonings and executions of gay people.

They fail to understand, however, that marriage is made possible by the
sexual complementarity of man and woman,

Marriage is made possible by the willingness of two people to enter into a valid and binding exclusive contract of mutual love and support. For heterosexuals, there is “sexual complementarity” between a man and a woman. For gay men, there is a “sexual complementarity” between a man and a man, and for lesbians, there is a “sexual complementarity” between a woman and a woman. Robby George might benefit from reading Plato’s Symposium. Then again, he might not get it, since Plato is somewhat deep.

and that the comprehensive, multi-level sharing of life that marriage is
includes bodily unity of the sort that unites husband and wife biologically as a
reproductive unit.

This is false, to the extent that it implies that the capacity for reproduction is a biological necessity for marriage – As I have pointed out, St. Paul teaches that Christian marriage is only for the weak of will. Reproduction is a side effect. The fact is that gay and lesbian people should be allowed to have the same sort of “comprehensive multi-level sharing” as their heterosexual brothers and sisters.

This is because the body is no mere extrinsic instrument of the human
person, but truly part of the personal reality of the human being.

Don’t gays and lesbians (or transgender people) get to have our own personal realities?

Human beings are not merely centers of consciousness or emotion, or minds,
or spirits, inhabiting non-personal bodies. The human person is a dynamic unity
of body, mind, and spirit. Marriage is what one man and one woman establish
when, forsaking all others and pledging lifelong commitment, they found a
sharing of life at every level of being - the biological, the emotional, the
dispositional, the rational, the spiritual - on a commitment that is sealed,
completed and actualized by loving sexual intercourse in which the spouses
become one flesh, not in some merely metaphorical sense, but by fulfilling
together the behavioral conditions of procreation.

Except for the procreation-by-accident part, gays and lesbians can achieve the same sort of commitment on all levels – and in many cases children are involved, whether they come from a previous heterosexual relationship, are adopted, or are the result of in vitro fertilization or surrogate motherhood.

That is why in the Christian tradition, and historically in Western law,
consummated marriages are not dissoluble or annullable on the ground of
infertility, even though the nature of the marital relationship is shaped and
structured by its intrinsic orientation to the great good of procreation.

Robby can write that in a world that is plagued by overpopulation and overbreeding, without blinking an eye. Perhaps the morality of a tiny desert tribe struggling for existence in the desert is inapplicable to billions of people on onne fragile planet. Yet the Roman Catholic Church will annul just about any marriage on the basis that the parties were not “ready” at the time, regardless of how many children they’ve had in the interim 20 or 30 years. And yet the Roman Catholic church will invalidate any marriage in which one of the parties turns out to be transsexual. Is Robby George suggesting, by the use of the term “consummated” in this context, that for heterosexuals it’s all about the sex?

Add to that the sheer exercise in pure rationalization Robby George uses to justify non-reproductive heterosexual relationships as involving “marriage” while not justifying non-heterosexual relationships. If natural reproduction is not a requirement of all marriages, then it necessarily follows that marriages that are not reproductively capable are both moral and allowed, regardless of the sexual orientation of the parties.

We understand that many of our fellow citizens, including some Christians,
believe that the historic definition of marriage as the union of one man and one
woman is a denial of equality or civil rights.

It *is* a denial of civil rights – but Robby George and the Christianists have an agenda to oppress women within marriage, which means that if there is no woman to oppress, or if both parties are women, marriage does not make sense to them. But it makes sense to anyone whose mind is not twisted with prejudice.

They wonder what to say in reply to the argument that asserts that no harm
would be done to them or to anyone if the law of the community were to confer
upon two men or two women who are living together in a sexual partnership the
status of being "married."

Putting it in quotes is insulting– if we put the shoe on the other foot, just how really “married” is Robby George to the woman he breeds with? If he must insult my relationship by putting it in quotes, why should his not be in quotes as well? To the extent that marriage is not available on an equal basis, it is an immoral institution for those who can partake of it because it is used as an instrument of oppression.

It would not, after all, affect their own marriages, would it?

And it does not.

On inspection, however, the argument that laws governing one kind of
marriage will not affect another cannot stand.

The argument stands pretty well, Robby. There should be only one kind of marriage – making artificial distinctions is what cannot stand – which is why only marriage works as supportive of equal rights.

Were it to prove anything, it would prove far too much: the assumption that
the legal status of one set of marriage relationships affects no other would not
only argue for same sex partnerships; it could be asserted with equal validity
for polyamorous partnerships, polygamous households, even adult brothers,
sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships.

Let’s examine this carefully – Robby George’s twisted misuse of reason leaves him using the same sort of argument that comes from the people who liken marriage to relationships between adults and minor children, or animals, trees or inanimate objects.
The point is, the bottom line is that marriage should be a contract on informed consent between or among competent adults who are not under coercion and have no disability to entering into a valid marriage, Islam allows a man up to four wives. Patriarchal Hebrews did the same. There are still splinter Mormon groups that practice polygamy. Many Americans practice a form of polygamy known as “serial monagamy” where they have more than one spouse, only just one at a time (while paramours may be involved, too, they just don’t have legal recognition) – these are ultimately dishonest relationships that cheapen the institution of marriage. There are differing religious views that should be respected provided children and the incompetent are not harmed, and no competent adult is coerced.

Should these, as a matter of equality or civil rights, be recognized as
lawful marriages, and would they have no effects on other relationships?
No.

Actually, YES!!! They would NOT have an adverse effect on other relationships. If the only reason for prohibiting marriage between close relatives is because of a fear of recessive genes being concentrated and the creation of birth defects, these are the same sort of “eugenic” concerns that Robby George abhors in other circumstances. But an “incestuous” marriage between consenting adults would not adversely affect a non-incestuous marriage – the incestuous couple would have to bear the burden of an increased potential for adverse birth defects, but many of these could be dealt with via pre-natal screenings.

The truth is that marriage is not something abstract or neutral that the law
may legitimately define and re-define to please those who are powerful and
influential.

The Christianists are the powerful and influential people who use the power of “majority rule” and use lying rhetoric to scare people into oppressing minorities – but people who really understand natural law, and the rights and freedoms of Americans, do not fear their power – Any real Christian knows that Robby George and the hard of heart Christianists who have signed onto his Manhattan Declaration, whose motivation is to harm LGBT people, will be numbered among the goats unless they repent what they do – and they would know it, too, if they were not ensnared in the web of falsehood that is a parody of natural law reasoning. The Christianists fear that as people become more civilized and less under their thrall, that they may soon no longer be able to hide behind the “majority rule” of oppression.

No one has a civil right to have a non-marital relationship treated as a
marriage.

That is exactly the reason why marriage equality is necessary. Calling our relationships anything other than marriage lessens them, cheapens them, makes them lesser than those of the heterosexuals among us. Christianists only want special rights for the majority while they belittle and demean those whom they wish to victimize.

Marriage is an objective reality - a covenantal union of husband and wife -
that it is the duty of the law to recognize and support for the sake of justice
and the common good. If it fails to do so, genuine social harms follow.

Marriage is certainly an objective reality – a covenantal union, but not limited to a special right for heterosexuals.

First, not recognizing marriage equality is discriminatory against an oppressed minority. The genuine social harms are being imposed on my people, by people like Robby George and his ilk.

First, the religious liberty of those for whom this is a matter of
conscience is jeopardized.

Second, the religious liberty of those who DO believe in marriage equality is jeopardized. Religious liberty is NOT just for Christianists, but for everyone.

Second, the rights of parents are abused as family life and sex education
programs in schools are used to teach children that an enlightened understanding
recognizes as "marriages" sexual partnerships that many parents believe are
intrinsically non-marital and immoral.

Third, children should be taught in school that many of them are heterosexual and some are bisexual, homosexual, or asexual, and that all of these orientations are natural and equally good for those who have them – then leave it up to the Churches to teach it is wrong for people to act against the nature God gave them. Of course, some Churches will teach immoral doctrines that make some people less worthy than others on the basis of their sexual orientation – provided they keep their bigotry in their Churches and keep it away from the public square, they can be tolerated. Perhaps Christianist parents should be seen as abusive of their children if they keep them from being educated about the reality of life. Perhaps these people should not be allowed to keep the children they abuse in this way.

Third, the common good of civil society is damaged when the law itself, in
its critical pedagogical function, becomes a tool for eroding a sound
understanding of marriage on which the flourishing of the marriage culture in
any society vitally depends.

Fourth, use that argument listed as “Third” in the Manhattan Declaration since a clear reading of it makes it work in favor of marriage equality! The common good of civil society is damaged when gay and lesbian relationships are treated as less than the special relationships for heterosexuals,

Sadly, we are today far from having a thriving marriage culture. But if we
are to begin the critically important process of reforming our laws and mores to
rebuild such a culture, the last thing we can afford to do is to re-define
marriage in such a way as to embody in our laws a false proclamation about what
marriage is.

And limiting marriage to heterosexuals is a false proclamation. Live with it. The cure for heterosexual marriage does not include denigrating the marriages of non-heterosexual people.

And so it is out of love (not "animus") and prudent concern for the common
good (not "prejudice"),

Robbie is still lying - he knows or should know that it is purely out of animus, and prejudice, that he makes his false rationalizations.

that we pledge to labor ceaselessly to preserve the legal definition of
marriage as the union of one man and one woman

Which means that the open bigotry of Robby George and his associates will continue, under a false mantle claiming to be “moral” but representing the corruption and evil of the Christianist whited sepulchres.

and to rebuild the marriage culture. How could we, as Christians, do
otherwise?

Robby George is clearly a Christianist, and not a Christian at all. So he can’t even honestly ask the question.

The Bible teaches us that marriage is a central part of God's creation
covenant.

And St. Paul, right there in the Bible, clearly and unequivocably teaches that marriage is only for the weak of will – Christianity does not have the answer for civil marriage – there is too much that is contradictory in Christianist teachings. While fecund heterosexual relationships certainly have their place, they may at best only claim to be primum inter partes (first among equals) because the human race would cease to exist if there was no reproduction at all.

Indeed, the union of husband and wife mirrors the bond between Christ and
his church.

Robby George places his Christianist views ahead of the United States Constitution and the principles upon which the United States was founded. Considering that Christianity has been torn by schisms and there are many Christian churches, the “bond” must be a polygamous one between Christ and his Churches – unless Robby is going to be jettisoning his non Roman Catholic findamentalist friends. Only by cynical rationalization, can Robby George come to the false conclusions that he does in his parody of natural law.

And so just as Christ was willing, out of love, to give Himself up for the
church in a complete sacrifice, we are willing, lovingly, to make whatever
sacrifices are required of us for the sake of the inestimable treasure that is
marriage.

The fact is that it is the opponents of the Manhattan Declaration who are supportive of the inestimable treasure that is marriage equality. Perhaps Robby George should consider pulling back from the brink – if there is no justice, there should be no peace. And if the Christianists will sacrifice in their lust to oppress women and minorities, then those of us who love freedom can do no less than to pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor to support equal rights, and to oppose special rights..

Religious Liberty
The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me, because the LORD has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners. Isaiah 61:1

Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. Matthew 22:21

If we understand the idea of rendering to Caesar, we should understand that what Robby wants if to have his understanding of God’s Will be substituted for the fairness and equality of the principles that provide the foundational structure of the American Republic.

The struggle for religious liberty across the centuries has been long and
arduous, but it is not a novel idea or recent development. The nature of
religious liberty is grounded in the character of God Himself, the God who is
most fully known in the life and work of Jesus Christ.

Wait a moment – shouldn’t Buddhists have religious liberty? How about Jews? Is religious freedom reserved only for those who turn Jesus into God?

Determined to follow Jesus faithfully in life and death, the early
Christians appealed to the manner in which the Incarnation had taken place: "Did
God send Christ, as some suppose, as a tyrant brandishing fear and terror? Not
so, but in gentleness and meekness..., for compulsion is no attribute of God"
(Epistle to Diognetus 7.3-4). Thus the right to religious freedom has its
foundation in the example of Christ Himself and in the very dignity of the human
person created in the image of God - a dignity, as our founders proclaimed,
inherent in every human, and knowable by all in the exercise of right
reason.

Robby uses the term “right reason” without understanding the concept in the least. All he does is “wrong rationalization” while calling it right, and reason – or maybe he means right-wing reasoning.

Christians confess that God alone is Lord of the conscience. Immunity from
religious coercion is the cornerstone of an unconstrained conscience. No one
should be compelled to embrace any religion against his will, nor should persons
of faith be forbidden to worship God according to the dictates of conscience or
to express freely and publicly their deeply held religious convictions. What is
true for individuals applies to religious communities as well.

But when your religious freedom is used to oppress me, you have to leave it in your church, and keep it out of the public square. Robby’s religious freedom must have limits, or else it is only Robby and those who are fellow believers in oppression and patriarchal dominance who will have freedom.

It is ironic that those who today assert a right to kill the unborn

You can’t kill that which is not yet alive.

, aged and disabled

No – it’s the right of the dying to die in dignity.

and also a right to engage in immoral sexual practices,

Robby is clearly blind to Truth. What is immoral for him as a heterosexual male Roman Catholic involves acting against his nature, is different from that which is moral from me as a transsexual lesbian Unitarian (and recovering Roman Catholic), for whom it would be immoral to act against my nature. In the public square, morality must be tempered with mutual respect and the overarching principles of tolerance for the beliefs of others – limiting acting on individual morality where it harms children, or involves coercion or abuse of others. Regardless of Biblical teachings ,an unmarried rape victim should not be forced to marry her attacker. Persons caught in adultery should not be stoned to death in the public square (or anywhere else). People should be entitled to equality of opportunity in the public square, particularly when discrimination would otherwise occur on the basis of prejudice.

and even a right to have relationships integrated around these practices be
recognized and blessed by law - such persons claiming these "rights" are very
often in the vanguard of those who would trample upon the freedom of others to
express their religious and moral commitments to the sanctity of life and to the
dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife.

We see this, for example, in the effort to weaken or eliminate conscience
clauses, and therefore to compel pro-life institutions (including religiously
affiliated hospitals and clinics), and pro-life physicians, surgeons, nurses,
and other health care professionals, to refer for abortions and, in certain
cases, even to perform or participate in abortions.

If one’s religious beliefs and morality preclude proper performance of the job, the individual should see other employment that does not result in a moral conundrum. A physician opposed to abortion should not consider gynecology or gynecological surgery as a specialty. A pharmacist who can’t morally fill prescriptions for birth control pills should perhaps get a job in another profession. If one’s moral beliefs conflict with one’s job, the moral choice is to get another job.

We see it in the use of anti-discrimination statutes to force religious
institutions, businesses, and service providers of various sorts to comply with
activities they judge to be deeply immoral or go out of business. After the
judicial imposition of "same-sex marriage" in Massachusetts, for example,
Catholic Charities chose with great reluctance to end its century-long work of
helping to place orphaned children in good homes rather than comply with a legal
mandate that it place children in same-sex households in violation of Catholic
moral teaching.

Another Robby George lie – one thst has been used over and over by his “National Organization for (really against) Marriage.” The TRUTH is that Catholic Charities chose to end its adoption placements because it did not want to use its own money, and the use of state funds came with strings attached, such as a law prohibiting discrimination. The LDS religion continues to provide adoption services in Massachusetts, it does not sponsor gay adoptions, and does not accept state funds.

In New Jersey, after the establishment of a quasi-marital "civil unions"
scheme, a Methodist institution was stripped of its tax exempt status when it
declined, as a matter of religious conscience, to permit a facility it owned and
operated to be used for ceremonies blessing homosexual unions.

Yet another Robby George lie – this involved the abuse of a tax exemption for a secular place, not a church building, located on a beachfront where the tax exemption was conditioned on equal access. No one was forcing a non-inclusive Methodist minister to preside at the ceremony. And the tax exemption that was lost was only for the affected pavilion, though I personally believe that churches should not be exempt fromt axation, since a tax exemption should be seen as an encouragement and support of churches by government.

In Canada and some European nations, Christian clergy have been prosecuted
for preaching Biblical norms against the practice of homosexuality. New
hate-crime laws in America raise the specter of the same practice here.

Stirring up one’s flock to stone the nearest gay person is something that should be prosecuted – except in Robbyworld, where it is okay to preach violence, abuse and murder against minorities.

In recent decades a growing body of case law has paralleled the decline in
respect for religious values in the media, the academy and political leadership,
resulting in restrictions on the free exercise of religion.

As with any other freedom, there are reasonable limits - no freedom can be untrammeled else it devolve into mere license. When religion is used to oppress others, it cannot be freely exercised.

We view this as an ominous development, not only because of its threat to
the individual liberty guaranteed to every person, regardless of his or her
faith, but because the trend also threatens the common welfare and the culture
of freedom on which our system of republican government is founded.

Really? These developments exist to preserve the common welfare and culture of freedom – the limits on untrammeled exercise of a “freedom of religion” is clearly a question of examining the difference between true freedom, and license. Freedom of religion does not give Robby a right to stone me to death.

Restrictions on the freedom of conscience or the ability to hire people of
one's own faith or conscientious moral convictions for religious institutions,
for example, undermines the viability of the intermediate structures of society,
the essential buffer against the overweening authority of the state, resulting
in the soft despotism Tocqueville so prophetically warned of.1 Disintegration of
civil society is a prelude to tyranny.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned against the tyranny of the majority – clearly Robby hasn’t read much of Democracy in America, either.

As Christians, we take seriously the Biblical admonition to respect and obey
those in authority. We believe in law and in the rule of law. We recognize the
duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws
are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or
otherwise immoral.

Then it is incumbent on us to resist the laws against marriage equality – it is incumbent on us to resist laws that oppress women and deny them their rights – it is incumbent on us to resist laws that oppress LGBT people.

The biblical purpose of law is to preserve order and serve justice and the
common good; yet laws that are unjust - and especially laws that purport to
compel citizens to do what is unjust - undermine the common good, rather than
serve it.

Going back to the earliest days of the church, Christians have refused to
compromise their proclamation of the gospel. In Acts 4, Peter and John were
ordered to stop preaching. Their answer was, "Judge for yourselves whether it is
right in God's sight to obey you rather than God. For we cannot help speaking
about what we have seen and heard." Through the centuries, Christianity has
taught that civil disobedience is not only permitted, but sometimes required.
This may well be a principle – but one that is only morally used in the
defense of justice, fairness and equality.

There is no more eloquent defense of the rights and duties of religious
conscience than the one offered by Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from a
Birmingham Jail. Writing from an explicitly Christian perspective, and citing
Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, King taught that just laws
elevate and ennoble human beings because they are rooted in the moral law whose
ultimate source is God Himself. Unjust laws degrade human beings.

And the unjust laws that Robby supports, and the just laws that he opposes, degrade all human beings – no one is free until all of us are free. It is a horror that Robby dares quote Dr. King in support of his oppressive imposition of his "morality" on the world.

Inasmuch as they can claim no authority beyond sheer human will, they lack
any power to bind in conscience. King's willingness to go to jail, rather than
comply with legal injustice, was exemplary and inspiring.

Because we honor justice and the common good, we will not comply with any
edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions,

Robby does not have justice or the common good in mind when he preached bigotry. If a Catholic hospital accepts government money? Sorry. Operate it solely with private funds, and maybe the government might allow it to discriminate unjustly.

embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other
anti-life act;

Again – I can possibly consider support ing Robby’s right for Catholic institutions to refuse to participate in any of these things as long as public money is not involved – but not if they accept one taxpayer dime for any purpose.

nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual
partnerships,

Blessing, okay. Sure, if a church is a church for bigots, it should have the freedom to bless religious marriages, but should NOT have a right to perform a civil marriage.

treat them as marriages or the equivalent,

Whoops, this is where I have a problem with Robby. Civil marriage is different from religious marriage - it's perfectly all right for Robby or another bigot to not recognize my marriage as being real, as long as I have the right to believe that it's immoral for him to be breeding with a woman he thinks he is "married" to (especially a non-Catholic woman!) and contribute to overpopulation. If this is an employment issue, employees should be protected by the same laws. I can understand the possibility of exempting a church that hires only its own adherents. If the Catholic Church hires a Jewish housekeeper, she should be entitled to the same medical coverage she would get elsewhere, regardless of the Church’s position. If a Catholic hospital employs only Catholics, and treats only Catholics, an exemption should be allowable.
Hire a gay employee who has a civil marriage – they get the same benefit as other married people. Solution? Do not provide special benefits to anyone based on marital status, and the Church does not fall outside the law

or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and
immorality and marriage and the family.

There are limits to the “proclamation of ‘truth’” – incitement to violence should not be exempt.

We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar's. But under
no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God's.

Well, Robby should not force his version of God on the people – and shouldn’t force his intolerant and unloving version of God on me, or on my civil rights.

1Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

On Marriage, Transsexual people, and the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church

Robby George is a Roman Catholic, and has within his coterie of followers many bishops of the Roman Catholic Church. The following address that Church’s scriptural and logical errors.

The teachings of the Roman Catholic Church relating to homosexual and transsexual people (the latter available only in a sub secretum document issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2000, leaked to CNS in 2003) are not firmly rooted in sacred scripture, and the ''science'' used to depict these different people as ''disordered'' is junk science.
Before his papacy, Pope Benedict himself dismissively cited the story of Sodom and Gommorrah as follows ''Thus, in Genesis 19:1-11, the deterioration due to sin continues in the story of the men of Sodom. There can be no doubt of the moral judgement made there against homosexual relations.''*-*LETTER TO THE BISHOPS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON THE PASTORAL CARE OF HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS – Homosexualitatis problema (Epistula de pastorali personarum homosexualium cura), October 1st, 1986, §6, par. 2- The Pope sees a different story than that written in the Book of Genesis. The story I read involves the suspicious, inhospitable men of Sodom, whose disapproval of and lack of hospitality for strangers from outside the city translated into a desire to gang-rape them and throw them out of town, the ancient equivalent of tarring, feathering and riding out of town on a rail.This was a very macho thing – to show strangers that the men of Sodom were ''real men'' and the visitors were ''less than women.''This misogynistic mistrust of people who are different, strangers in our midst, is not a characteristic of gay people, but of those who condemn them as ''sodomites'' – who are themselves the real sodomites!

There is a difference between an Aristotelian-based understanding of biology parsed through a scriptural lens, and the actual biological reality of God's creation. Biological sex in reality is not as simple as looking at the gross shape of the 23rd chromosome pair. If one delves into the genetic blueprint, everyone is created ''male *and* female'' which one can also see stated in Gen.1:27. Developmentally, we usually end up with one or the other sex, and this works with over 99% of human beings. The other less-than-1% have biology that does not easily fit into one or the other of the sex designations. It is the height of human folly to arbitrarily limit God.

Transsexual and other intersex people were created to be different. It is not their choice to be created the way they were, and I suspect that we exist as examples of the diversity of creation.

The theories of John Money as to the malleability of sex identity were discredited by Milton Diamond, not by John McHugh, who misadvised the Vatican on transsexuality leading to my frustration with the sub secretum pronouncement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2000. We are indeed as God created us, but for those who are transsexual or intersex, that is ''other'' or ''both'' rather than ''either'' or ''or.''

Rabbi Mark Sameth of Pleasantville, New York, wrote something recently on a surprising disclosure of an aspect of the nature of God found by studying the Tetragrammaton, which dovetails nicely with Gen.1:27 - read YHWH backward and one gets HWHY, which reads (in English) as ''he/she'' - an epithet usually hurled at persons who are visibly different, but who are special to God (Is.56:5).

In Romans 1, often cited in condemnation of gay and lesbian people, Paul was being critical of pagan fertility (goddess cult) and Bacchanalic orgiastic practices, which led persons of a heterosexual nature to practice in their religious ecstasy behaviors that are against their natures as God created them. If one assumes a homosexual nature in those created by God with such a nature to be ''natural'' for that minority of God's creation, the passage could well be read as implying that we should not act against our nature as we are created.

An example: Jim, a gay Catholic striving to overcome his nature, marries Mary. He tries very hard to act against his nature, they even have children, but the marriage ends in divorce (and an annulment is granted) because his attempt to be ''straight'' has caused him to have psychiatric issues. Everyone has been hurt because Jim tried, but failed, to act against his nature. Indeed, had he gone into the marriage knowing his nature was homosexual (rather than buying into the idea that he could change his nature), one can argue that his getting married to Mary would be sinful.

Counseling gays into reparative therapy to make them try to act against their nature as they were created, is is not a good idea. Celibacy as an obligation for all who have a homosexual orientation is needlessly cruel and I would think it flies in the face of 1Cor.7:8-9. Paul indicates that celibacy is only for those Christians who can contain themselves sufficiently to live in continence. Those who cannot should marry rather than to fall into sinful behaviors. (Of course, that raises the issue of whether the Church should consider whether gays in monagamous relationships should be viewed as acting sinfully - I would think that God does not require us to do the impossible, and it is clear than not all are called to celibacy.)
This commentary of mine, of course, is a criticism of the current teaching of the magisterium.

Conclusion to this Response

The bottom line to the Religious Liberty argument professed by these Christianists, is that they are the only ones they think should have religious liberty. All others should have their religious liberty suppressed. How exceedingly obvious this is, and how sad.

For Robby George, whose appalling rejection of natural law is apparent from his writing, Reason is merely a tool of whatever prejudice strikes his fancy. True Right Reason is in favor of civil marriage equality, not opposed to it.

When he blames same-sex marriage for all the ills of heterosexual marriage, such as marital infidelity, divorce, and out-of-wedlock births, he makes no sense except through the lens of his prejudice.

Robby George wants to keep children ignorant, to keep women oppressed, and to discriminate against people just because they are different from him or have a different faith.

Robby George’s parody of Reason is proof of the corruption of his version of natural law, which is not based at all upon the reality of nature, but upon his prejudice. Perhaps he should return to Faith; even if that can still be twisted to suit his prejudice, as we know all too well.

Please join in condemning Robby George and those misanthropic misogynists who have promulgated and signed the Manhattan Declaration. They are hateful, abusive, intolerant Christianist bigots falsely claiming the mantle of Christianity to push their agenda of special rights and oppression. They have further hardened their hearts against all that is good and right and just, and showed the depth of the evil in their hearts.

And for those of us who believe in God, pray that God has mercy on their souls, lest they be numbered among the goats on the Day of Judgment.

In Peace and Love,

Joann Prinzivalli
Serva Servarum Deae