> Abuse was ruled out in 35 cases. Seventy-four children were allegedly abused by other children and teenagers less than 18 years old. In 9 cases, an offender could not be identified. In the remaining 269 cases, two offenders were identified as being gay or lesbian. In 82% of cases (222/269), the alleged offender was a heterosexual partner of a close relative of the child. Using the data from our study, the 95% confidence limits, of the risk children would identify recognizably homosexual adults as the potential abuser, are from 0% to 3.1%. These limits are within current estimates of the prevalence of homosexuality in the general community.
> Using logit regression, it was found that homosexual abusers were 6.79 times more likely to be imprisoned than heterosexual abusers after adjusting for the combined effects of crime seriousness, prior record, and acceptance/denial of full responsibility for their actions.
edit: Your Reddit link demonstrates gay children are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators. LifeIssues.net is... pretty clearly biased.
Unfortunately your study is notably missing a category where abusing children is legal: child marriage. It's still legal to marry children in many states.
[edited for clarity: I'm agreeing with the poster I'm responding to in that most child sexual abuse occurs at the hands of hetereosexual abusers, to the point where it's normalized through legal child marriage, which is almost entirely heterosexual, and aren't usually considered in studies on child sexual abuse.]
I'd fully support a ban on child marriages, but I'm not able to find anything indicating same-sex child marriages are unusually prevalent. Where in the study are you seeing they ruled out underage marriages from the cohort?
Sorry, I'm saying I agree with you: hetereosexual abuse of children is way more common than homosexual abuse, to the point where marrying children is legal and is almost entirely heterosexual. I'm saying unfortunately this kind of child sexual predation is rarely counted as part of the studies because of how normalized it is.
I'd be curious to know what these gay priests are thinking exactly.
Preaching the will of organization that condemns them while actively pursuing the condemned interests on public profiles? It seems to me its got to be some sort of mental gymnastics to be choosing that career and sticking with it. Do these people believe that they are intrinsically bad? Do they just not believe what they're preaching? Do they think their niche is the one exception to their faiths belief system?
Sometimes you want or feel compelled to one thing, but also really, really want another thing that's in (ideological) conflict with the first thing. Also, spending years as priest and then giving it up sounds harsh, they probably have no marketable skills.
> Also, spending years as priest and then giving it up sounds harsh, they probably have no marketable skills.
I've known quite a few priests. Most are intelligent and well educated. Its pretty common for them to do a lot of work that probably would translate to secular roles. For example, there's a lot of overlap in managing a parish or diocese and managing a business or division of a corporation.
I went to Catholic school. The indoctrination is non-stop. Seminary I would gander is doubly worse. I don't know how true it is but I've long heard that many gay priests discover that fact in Seminary after they've taken a vow of celibacy. I can imagine that's a very tough place to be mentally, especially after making such a commitment.
I went to a catholic school and the indoctrination wasn't that bad. The school would accept non-catholic pupils as well and never really pushed it on them.
My school had non-Catholic pupils as well. After leaving I realized that a lot of what Catholic religious education is centered around is "acts of contrition". You're almost always guilty of something. They use these feelings of shame, guilt, and remorse to teach a lot of Catholic values alongside very strong language around things they don't like. For instance, when I was in school there was a story out of Atlanta, I think, where two gay men had their door kicked in while they were having sex, they were charged with some absurd sodomy law that was still on the books. My religious studies teachers point was that God punished all forms of sodomy, not just anal sex, and that any time you have pre-marital or sex without the intention of reproducing that you have sinned in a major way. I was 12, maybe 13 at the time. This is a small, isolated example but it's part of a pattern I recognized later in life. The stuff really does a number on you.
It is worth noting I attended Catholic school in the South, closer to the border, so the church reflected more Mexican practices in Catholicism than say one in New York. I've learned from some folks that where you're taught makes a drastic difference.
I was raised in a Catholic home, attended Catholic school 13 years, and lifelong Mass-goer. I don't doubt that your anecdata is valid, but it's not universal.
The only place I was subjected to guilt, shame, and remorse in a negative context was in my home by (Catholic lay) relatives (and mass media). They were in a "cultural Christian" demographic, raised in utterly secular households, and though they practiced the faith vigorously, didn't really believe or follow it at home, except by coincidence.
By contrast, at school I experienced respect and encouragement from women in authority, and church was full of good news, and loving, joyful men and families. Surely my experience is also not in isolation.
Appreciate your input and outwardly not stomping on my experience. For what it's worth, the last paragraph of what I wrote agrees with you, not all experiences will be like mine and I've learned that as I've gotten older. I'm glad your experience was good, mine wasn't all bad, but I've had a lot of unpacking to do as an adult.
Thank you for describing my experience as "good" but of course church+school only comprised a sliver of my childhood, and I wound up as a homeless bum with C-PTSD and lost my faith due to a resounding dissonance between the lovely church+school experience versus the living Hell I experienced at the hands of my adoptive parents.
When the Catholic abuse scandal broke, I was confused because my priests (and religious sisters) were nothing like that, but abuse by lay volunteers is real too, and it wasn't until 2019 when I put 2 and 2 together in that regard.
I'm pretty sure there's a ton of variation in the Catholic school experience. Certainly, a few are regarded as among the best schools in the US, while many others struggle to even match the local public schools, as far as educational quality. I know of at least one school that's diocese-affiliated but only loosely so, basically for marketing reasons, and does juuuuust enough to tick the boxes for that—they definitely don't do that kind of hard-sell Catholic indoctrination—and I doubt they're unique.
As a new england catholic, the only reason any catholic related organization isn't as hell and brimstone and guilt filled is simply a desperate attempt to seem more "progressive" and retain a following. Plenty of Catholics are openly hostile towards the current pope because he has the audacity to not aggressively attack the gay community, even though he doesn't condone it.
The organization itself is still rooted in angry, spanish inquisition style purity tests, and they openly push those views anywhere that isn't too progressive. For example, the same catholic church has pushed misinformation and propaganda all over africa to discourage condom use.
> many gay priests discover that fact in Seminary after they've taken a vow of celebacy [sic].
Seminarians do not take vows of celibacy. Seminary is by design a time of testing a vocation. Additionally, I would like to see the data backing your “most gay priests” assertion.
Unless they edited their comment, it reads "many gay priests" (not "most") which is vague and can mean any number, small or large. Though a source would be helpful still.
I could be wrong about vows of celibacy, but I was pretty sure they have at least commitments to celibacy. Here's a story that backs up what I've said: https://archive.ph/ehobt
You are right. You are only eligible to be in a seminary if you're not married (ok exceptions exist, but then you cannot be a priest) and so long as you are not married you are not supposed to have sex.
It's only in the Latin rite can you not be a priest when married; we had a Byzantine Catholic priest at our (Latin rite) church who was married, and the Byzantine Catholics are in full communion with Rome. Priests, however, may not marry so they need to have been married before taking their vows.
Christopher Hitchens famously (and rather politically incorrectly) said:
> Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.
I don't understand the psychology either, but people compartmentalize and rationalize. One line of thinking might be that everyone is a fallen sinner, even priests, and so long as they repent and guide their flock in the right direction, they will be forgiven.
> Do these people believe that they are intrinsically bad?
I'm sure some of them do. People can think they are terrible people while continuing to pretend they aren't in public.
In my experience it's quite easy. You quickly get resigned to the fact you're broken and will never be able to change. Once you accept that as truth, it's easier to just ignore it.
"Original sin is the Christian doctrine that holds that humans, through the fact of birth, inherit a tainted nature in need of regeneration and a proclivity to sinful conduct." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin
AFAIK original sin does teach that all men are fallen and require salvation. This doesn’t mean that human nature is all bad and it’s indeed not the same as total depravity. However it’s also not true that men are born holy.
I didn't say "born holy" but if you kindly turn to Genesis you can see how the first man and woman were CREATED in Original Holiness (and Solitude, Justice, Unity).
Original sin is a deprivation of these positive qualities. Mary, for example, preserved in holiness, not simply cleansed of it. Holiness is our natural state, and so baptism returns us to that preternatural holiness that Adam enjoyed when he walked with God in the Garden.
The total in TULIP's "total depravity" is not a measure of sinfulness. It is not meant to imply that we are naturally as evil as possible in every context. The "total" is speaking in terms of the extent of depravity. That is to say, sin touches and influences every aspect of our existence. So that even in good works with the best of intentions humanly possible, there still exists an element of self exalting corruption.
I mean “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” though. Obviously the entire message of the New Testament is that all are also offered salvation through Jesus, but it’s pretty clear that everyone needs saving in the first place.
There's a saint in the Catholic church named Andrew Wouters. He was a priest in the 16th century who was a major womanizer with lots of illegitimate children. He ended up getting hanged by Calvinist rebels because he refused to convert. His last words were "A fornicator I always was, a heretic I never was." Again, the pope canonized this guy.
Anyway, the point is, most American-influenced "logical" people take an implicitly Protestant perspective, that religion is all about consistently following consistent doctrines. The Catholic perspective on this kind of thing is more flexible and quite strange by comparison but tolerating hypocrisy around sexual behavior is definitely not new.
For sure. In this specific case, I'd add that because of Catholic belief on martyrdom (directly to heaven, no purgatory, no baptism required even), the standards are a lot lower to canonize a martyr. For instance they can (but don't always) skip directly to "blessed" status, skipping over the declaration that they were "heroic in virtue." Which makes sense--historically speaking the first saints that were involved in worship were martyrs. And many of those "converted" right before they were killed, not having led lives that were Christian at all. There is a sense one gets that martyrs are the ur-Saints and that other saints were only canonized "by popular demand."
> Protestant perspective, that religion is all about consistently following consistent doctrines
Isn't that a contradiction? I thought Protestants were all about grace over works (wasn't it Martin Luther who called James The Epistle of Straw because of it's emphasis on works?). Consistently following consistent doctrines would be works.
American Protestantism remains heavily influenced by Calvin and early Puritan groups who had very strict ideas of how one should act. One is only _saved_ by grace, but one should _live_ according to the will of God.
Martin Luther's perspective was more of a "Works in thanks of Grace". One is saved by Grace alone, and in thanks for that grace one's works should reflect the will of God as provided in the Bible. EDIT: It's more about works being a demonstration of the faith one has been given rather than works being involved in the receipt of faith and grace.
Sounds like a better system is to be saved by Grace and rely on that Grace to continue to save you as you do whatever you want. Is doing whatever you want a sign of ingratitude? Sure, but fortunately grace can save me from my sin of ingratitude. It's the best of both worlds. I can do whatever I want in this world and get to go to heaven in the next world. Thanks grace!
There are sects that hold that position, mostly associated with Calvinism. In those sects, if you're not showing gratitude by good works, then you're probably not one of the elect.
If you're convinced that you're not one of the elect, and you've given up, then you've failed to have faith, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Getting faith doesn't guarantee you're one of the elect, but not having it guarantees that you're not.
So an attitude like yours might work anyway, if you happen to be one of the elect, but the odds aren't in your favor.
American Puritanism had a strong streak that grace was a cause of good works. It was predestined whether or not you are among the elect, but those among the elect would lead upright lives. Of course the argument of whether or not good works was sufficient evidence of grace gave us Rhode Island...
Remember that a significant amount of american Christianity involves pre-determinism, ie that you're either good or bad, and cannot change that, and the good people go to heaven and the bad people to hell. It has nothing to do with actions but is an inane trait you are born with.
If you believe the God is all-knowing, then it follows that He's not constrained by the linearity of time. This gets you out of the paradoxes that arise around predestination and free will. But I don't think the average Christian thinks about it that way, unless they are in the subset that reads Science Fiction. I've known a few like that.
> The Catholic perspective on this kind of thing is more flexible and quite strange by comparison but tolerating hypocrisy around sexual behavior is definitely not new.
The Catholic perspective is not tolerating hypocrisy, it is a knowledge that we are all sinful and broken. I know what the right thing to do is, and if you ask me I will tell you what the right thing to do is, but often I won't do it. I'm not a hypocrite -- I know I'm wrong, I'm weak and a coward.
The sacrament of confession is based on the idea that Catholics (and all but one human) will sin regularly, despite acknowledging that these sins are bad. It's not so much hypocrisy as it is realizing that you are imperfect people working to meet perfect ideals. So the situation you describe is not fundamentally dishonest.
As far as I know, you can be an abstinent homosexual in the Roman Catholic belief. You just can't act on it. I would guess they do think their God is right and act accordingly.
I think that’s right. The analogy for straight men would be that they may want to love and sleep with many women but that it’s still wrong unless within a marriage.
This applies to the entire political class as well, one hand they ll talk non-stop about conservative (or liberal) values and as it turns out eventually, the very same people forced abortions/employed illegals/molested women and so on. I think ultimately there is big difference between what people practice and what they preach and it applies to literally everyone.
A really large proportion of the political class—and, I think, more of them, the higher up you go—are basically practicing kayfabe (the façade of reality that "Pro Wrestlers" and many fans engage in). They rip into each other on TV then go golfing together like nothing happened, same as a wrestling "face" and "heel" in the locker room might be cordial to one another when the cameras aren't following them. None of it's real, just an act, for lots of them, including the policies they push.
Thanks for linking this. I needed a good chuckle this morning.
On a more serious note. I'm gay and if you want to know why Pride parades, Pride month, and being out is so important, it's this sort of rhetoric. Calls for "biblical morality" and "homosexual crimes" to be punished are coded calls for our destruction. This sort of thinking is always absolutist and apocalyptic. There is nothing I can do to "tone it down" that will make them happy. They simply want us dead. Being out is the only real defense we have because we then go from a demonized other to just your friend, coworker, or family member.
For anyone curious about what oramit's talking about: Gay people have tried extremely hard in the past to "fit in", especially during the AIDS crisis. Gay catholics at the time were forced to face the fact that, if they acquired AIDS (at that time known clinically as "Gay-related immune deficiency") they will have to face the horrific and slow deaths without the support of their religious leaders due to homophobia. These were churchgoing, churchfearing, model catholics who did everything they could to fit into their parish and the church turned their back on them to the point where they could not even hold bible studies amongst themselves on church grounds.
Basically, the way AIDS victims were dehumanized, mistreated, overall publicly humiliated, shattered any real belief that if you just tried to fit in enough society will treat you as one of their own. Ultimately, the LGBTQ community were the only people supporting the LGBTQ community, and this required radical self-acceptance movements in the face of horrific death and apathy.
You're trying to excuse the way the Catholic church turned their backs on mass death and suffering within their communities by blaming the sufferers. This is the precise horrible truth that gay people were faced with during the AIDS crisis, when them and their peers were dying horrific death en masse and they were at the same time being ousted from their bible studies and refused to be given final rites on their deathbeds.
The church will watch gay people die on the street and spit on their graves like everyone else, and all the speech of forgiveness and compassion was actually a lie. Gay people aren't equal humans in their eyes. Like I said before: the only people supporting queer people were the queer people. The only thing they could do is love themselves, for the world was glad their deaths were painful, slow, and public.
These instances of rejection of final rights - were perhaps some of these cases due to the fear of transmission prior to common understanding of the means of transmission? Same for the Bible studies?
Again with the term "queer", this masks the important distinction mentioned above, because its use presents certain actions as morally-neutral. Many of us view(ed) the AIDS crisis as being used as a justification for sinful actions. I'm sure you're familiar with the Stop the Church event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_the_Church). It is rather obvious, based on who organized this event and others like it that they were opposed to actual teachings of the Church, such as its condemnation of sodomy, contraception (even as a prophylactic against contracting diseases) and even abortion.
I'm Catholic. I'm sure there are some Catholics that believe the stuff you're saying, just like there are some Baptists who are Westboro Baptists. Just to keep the categories clear.
Gonna drive a schism in America if they do that (well, another one—we already host at least one anti-pope that I know of—but others haven't been as big as I expect this one to be). American conservative Catholic media have been propagandizing against liberalizing the church for decades, especially around sexual morality issues.
I gotta say, I kinda agree with them on the Latin mass thing. I'm not Catholic (or religious at all, in fact) but the magic and gravitas and historical continuity of the service sounding like something out of Indiana Jones or The Exorcist or what (one imagines) a tenth-century mass would have sounded like, would be one of the bigger draws for me, if I were looking to convert.
[EDIT] OTOH I know at least one formerly-atheist gay guy who decided to pick up religion years and years ago, and definitely, for-sure would have become Catholic (see above about the pomp and circumstance being a big draw)—if not for their stance on homosexuality. IIRC he went Episcopalian instead. Maybe there's a vast untapped reserve of converts there?
If you grew up in a heavily Catholic area in America, then chances are that you know at least one if not a few people who were resigned to becoming clergy because it was the easiest way for them buy into a system that either repressed their natural sexual urges or gave them an out from society for not having any in the first place.
I rarely hear priests condemn homosexuality. Some do, but most don't. Maybe because the subject is really not relevant to the core tenants of Catholicism. There is so much more to the faith than these political wedge issues. Does a dietitian have mental gymnastics from having a beer or a slice of cake every now and then?
No, it's just the case that everyone sins and some people's sins are worse than others. Most religions acknowledge this. Even if you murder someone that doesn't mean you're beyond forgiveness, it's about trying to be a better person.
Catholic Church is not condemning homosexuals. Why it should? According to Bible they were created by God, so they are good by definition. CC is condemning homosexual sex, in the same way as it condemns pre-marriage sex or killing other people. All those acts are done by people created by God, but given a free will to do the things that are wrong from the Church perspective. And that can be forgiven thanks do a deal that Jesus made with God.
As far as priests are concerned it does not matter much if they are gay or not as they should not maintain sexual relationships anyway.
> I think most rational people would see through that ...
Where is the inconsistency? A heterosexual man is called to chastity as well. If he acts against this by cheating on his spouse I don't think the CC would be 'condemning an intrinsic quality' he was made with.
The teachings of Jesus should piss everyone off in some way or another.
The Bible says that Jesus did many things that, even if he actually existed, he certainly never did, so I think it's fair to say that Jesus the character from the Bible never defecated if it's not said anywhere that he did.
It's because it's so specific in its targetting of a vulnerable minority group.
If someone cheats on their spouse the problem is a betrayal of trust between two people. It's part of a complex web of obligations, urges, and everything else that happens in a relationship.
It's not nearly as simple as someone expressing their sexuality.
It's inconsistent in that it discriminates against a group of people with an undue burden that they can never have a loving, passionate, sexual relationship with adults they feel attraction towards. This is a bit like saying both the wealthy and the poor have equal access to homelessness, and therefore making homelessness a crime punishable with death applies fairly to all classes.
I think you are correct in emphasizing that the burden of the Church's teaching on chastity does not fall equally on all groups of people.
But it should be stressed that this is no way a consequence a specific teaching that targets people with same-sex attraction.
The root cause of the trouble is the fact that the Catholic Church has consistently taught something that is always counter-cultural, difficult, and even quite radical. Namely that the only proper place for sexual intimacy is within a life long bond between one man and one woman for the purpose of raising children.
>But it should be stressed that this is no way a consequence a specific teaching that targets people with same-sex attraction.
The Catholic Church teaches that gay sex is an act of 'grave depravity' and that same-sex attraction is 'intrinsically disordered'. How is that not a specific teaching that targets 'people with same-sex attraction'?
Of course the Church has a well-known teaching with regard to this activity. Just like the Church has a specific teaching about artificial contraception. So the Church obviously says specific things about specific things.
The point is that the identical moral reasoning process is being applied consistently to all people, namely, sexual activity is to be avoided outside of a marriage open to children. Gay people are not being targeted by some sort of religious moral carve-out.
The Catholic Church does not treat extramarital sex between a man and a woman who are infertile as morally equivalent to sex between two men. Nor does it treat the use of contraception as morally equivalent to gay sex, despite condemning both.
The Church specifically teaches that gay sex is wrong in a way that straight sex isn't, entirely independently of whether it occurs within or outside marriage.
In the case of the article we're commenting on, we have an example of the Church (or a closely associated organisation) specifically treating gay priests differently to straight priests, despite the fact that neither are permitted to have sex with anyone.
It's abundantly clear which group is being targeted here. It's not "people who are having sex with no possibility of having children", or "people who are having sex outside of marriage". It's gay people. And they're being targeted because the Catholic Church teaches very explicitly and specifically that gay sex is wrong.
It's reductive to say that the Catholic Church merely condemns gay sex. They also do not allow gay people to get married - which is the difference between their stance on pre-marital sex. There is no way within the framework of Catholicism that one can live as a gay couple, completely equal in rights to heterosexuals. It is Catholic Church doctrine to discriminate between heterosexual and homosexual couples - and if that discrimination doesn't read as condemnation to you, the church also literally condemns people to hell who disagree.
Only in the past ten years, under Francis' papacy, has rhetoric from the Catholic Church towards homosexuals began to soften. While that's certainly a great thing, that doesn't mean that the views shared by aged bishops, priests and general members of the church have changed as a result of that. We still see signs of that condemnation across the world regularly. They may be changing, but the damage is still present and still happening - it will take a long time for that to disappear, if ever.
>Why it should?
I'd say we should ask every priest, bishop and pope who has criticized homosexuality why they felt they should. I really don't understand why you would ask that rhetorical question when there are centuries of proof of them doing exactly that.
When there was a gay marriage bill in our state on the ballot, our bishop directed all catholic churches in the state to play a video he recorded talking about how maybe loving gay people is okay because we are supposed to love everyone but they are still heretics and we cannot give them basic rights. We aren't even a particularly conservative demographic.
Some theorize that gay men historically found themselves pursuing the priesthood because this was a way to not have a romantic life with women without raising eyebrows. There’s also an element of repressed homosexuality that’s sort of difficult to communicate but it’s likely that these gay priests spend a lot of time with thoughts of self hatred, self-doubt, confusion. maybe god can save me from these thoughts?, it’s terribly complex and as much as I generally don’t tolerate Catholicism and what comes with it I truly feel for these priests
The same thing happened within the American Psychiatric Association with regards to the classification of homosexuality in the DSM as a form of deviancy and therefore as a pathology. All the while, many members were themselves gay and formed some small union of activist types who sought to slowly upend the codifications from within. It’s a glacial and bureaucratic process, but they succeeded. At the same time, many of them practiced psychiatry, and I don’t doubt found meaning in their practice to help people for other issues. The DSM isn’t all bad even if it’s flawed.
Now, imagine doing it for a dogmatic scripture held dearly by many millions. Sure, the Catholic Church is on the wrong side of history when it comes to gay rights, among other things, but if some people find peace and meaning in its voluminous scriptures, then there is still a leadership role for those priests. That might explain the cognitive dissonance.
Identity is the word of the decade, and is a helpful one here. For many, one simply is Catholic and one is called to the priesthood.
That you have a few “sins” to struggle doesn’t change your identity or your relationship to it, and besides — everyone has some “sins” they struggle with. As a priest, of all people, you would know that.
As a whole, secular society sees sexual preference as an inflexible identity around which other things like religious affiliation or occupation might pivot. But the converse works just as well for an individual’s view of the world and is of course what many well-established traditions espouse.
Catholicism, in particular, leaves room for living people being imperfect and inescapably bearing “sins” throughout their lives. It’s a core part of the theology. It’s what you do with it that becomes your profession of faith, and committing to the priesthood makes sense as a emphatic way of doing something about yours. (Which suggests that the preisthood can easily collect especially troubled “sinners” seeking to overcome their troubles… who maybe don’t always do a great job of it)
I am an atheist who grew up Catholic and I find I am incompatible with a lot of the secular world, when it comes to important values to live by. For example, what is marriage, what is love, what is the meaning/value of sex, to what extent is one prepared to sacrifice themselves for others, what is family, what is money, what role should charity play in society, what is a good life well lived, the relationship between the self and society, ...honestly so many aspects of the philosophy of life to consider.
I am not 100% in agreement with the official Church doctrine in all aspects, but then again no Catholic is. But I find myself much more at home with other people from a similiar background irrespective of whether they are still believers or not.
I suspect these gay Catholic find themselves in a similiar situation. They probably do not share much in common with the secular world.
Lots of people will immediately call this hypocrisy but they just have not put that much thought into it. There is more to life than sexual preferences.
>Preaching the will of organization that condemns them while actively pursuing the condemned interests on public profiles?
Dougal: But Ted, preaching against one thing in public, while secretly doing it in private, that's hypocrisy!
Ted: No Dougal, I don't think so. Hypocrisy is just not something the Catholic church does, if we do something there's usually a good reason for it. Hypocrisy is something more for the common people, and you should strenuously preach against it!
Dougal: Oh OK, thanks for clearing that up Ted.
*My imaginary Father Ted episode, if it was still running.
It is very easy if you read the gospels: its name is hypocrisy, nothing more.
Hard words but true. No mental gymnastics needed, just a bad conscience.
Now mind you: there are priests who have homosexual desires but try to live their celibacy, albeit not always successfully. These are not hypocritical, they are just human. But they do not tend to visit grindr.
They believe that one of the fundamental aspects of the human condition is believing that certain things are right but struggling to live up to it.
They believe that everyone experiences this kind of struggle, but in different ways depending on the person, and that failing at it is inevitable. They believe there is a way for things to be OK even though you fail.
They also believe in an ethical framework where you determine what is right or wrong based not on your own assessment of the pluses and minuses but by following guidance that comes (through scripture, church tradition, etc.) from a higher power whose wisdom is greater than your own.
And they also believe there's some kind of grand plan behind everything, and that the way they fit into this grand plan is to be a priest. They have at some point come to the conclusion that they are supposed to be one, that it is their vocation.
Or at least, within their faith, these beliefs are what is commonly accepted as the right way to look at it. An individual person may or may not actually think or feel exactly like this. Sort of like how one person may become a doctor because they like helping people and someone else may become a doctor because they don't want to disappoint their family.
They also believe the sin is the act not the desire.
So from their perspective, being hetero-celibate and being homo-celibate is an equal sacrifice.
A major cited driver of a lot of the abuse was that exact line of thinking. Good intentioned people who knew they had bad desires would enter the Priesthood as a framework to not act on those desires, but then they see other Priests being sexually active and just give in.
It also built a network of secrecy - very fine line between covering up your bosses' non-abusive (but in your mind still morally wrong) affair and asking him to cover up your abusive (but in your mind, only equally as morally wrong) activities.
In general, it's one of the arguments for normalizing non-abusive fetishes in the general populace. The more secrecy there is generally, the more truly bad stuff gets covered up.
While Catholics may be Christians, it is disingenuous to assert this is the teaching of the Church or that a majority or plurality of faithful Catholics have this position.
There is a very clear delineation between temptation and sin in the Catholic world.
No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.
We've banned this account for religious flamewar and for using HN primarily for ideological/religious battle, which is definitely not what this site is for.
Users flagged it. We can only guess why users flag things. In this case I think they probably just thought your comment was flamebait—any time a comment is (a) too short to contain much information and (b) the topic is controversial, you're going to get that interpretation. I've turned off the flags now.
While I have you, would you mind reviewing the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? Among other things, they ask you not to post questions like this in the threads, but rather to ask us at hn@ycombinator.com. There are a bunch of reasons for that; one is that we're only likely to see your question if you email it to us; and another is that posts like this take discussions off topic.
Imagine spending millions of dollars to prove 32 people are gay. No civil or criminal law has been broken, this isn't about predators and victims. This is essentially a group of people complaining to management because an employee has broken an internal morality code.
> because an employee has broken an internal morality code
When the organization as a whole only exists to enforce that morality code, it makes more sense that they would also heavily police internally as well.
> Imagine spending millions of dollars to prove 32 people are gay.
Do remember that this particular morality code is an unfashionable one. There are other taboos that also cause a waste of resources by people seeking corrective action where no law is broken and no one is victimized. And those are cheered on because those codes are fashionable.
Sure, this is dumb through and through. But this scenario just has properties that lend themselves to headlines meant to stir people up.
>Imagine spending millions of dollars to prove 32 people are gay. No civil or criminal law has been broken, this isn't about predators and victims.
Sounds exactly like the kind of thing one national political parties would have done to another prior to the fairly recent widespread acceptance of gay marriage.
These people are pillars of their community. To have them teaching other people and leading is just disgusting from their perspective.
Look, I support gay rights, I'm the furthest thing from catholic. But I understand how many communities find homosexuality unnatural and wrong. You should respect that and NOT join that community. Just like how Catholics shouldn't enforce their ideas on the rest of the world, you shouldn't enforce yours either.
> "A group of conservative Colorado Catholics has spent millions of dollars to buy mobile app tracking data that identified priests who used gay dating and hookup apps and then shared it with bishops around the country."
> Look, I support gay rights
Not sure how you can support gay rights and also be ok with organisations spying on gay people (specifically because they're gay).
One can debate whether or not this practice should be illegal, but it's clearly wrong, even by the tenets of Catholicism itself. Why are they not also spying on straight priests using Tinder?
I mean, it’s not just any organization, it’s the anti-gay organization. At least to me, this fits more into the category of “The Vegan Society spying on its employees through restaurant checking and UberEats orders”, which I wouldn’t describe as “spying on vegans (specifically because they’re vegan)”.
Well no, that would be spying on non-vegans specifically because they’re non-vegan (in the equivalent scenario where they were tracking usage of an app that only offered non-vegan options).
Also, wouldn't that be an extremely weird and creepy thing for The Vegan Society to do? I’m surprised you’d offer this analogy as a defense of the behavior in question.
Quick correction: I’m not defending this behavior (if it happened to me I would quit the company on the spot).
“That would be spying on non-vegans…” Right, some of the signs are flipped, but the concept is still the same - an organization promoting a particular ethical standard is surveilling its members adherence to that standard.
“Weird and creepy…” Yes, certainly! But not against vegan rights, not discriminating against vegans, not “targeting vegans (specifically because they are vegan)”. I was responding to the claim that supporting gay rights is incompatible with tolerating this practice.
Spying on gay people or people in general is a separate issue to the parent comment.
My reply is more referring to the intent of the parent comment. As in how is spending "millions" justifiable to root out gay people in a catholic organization.
I’m not sure I see the distinction. Being gay isn’t a sin according to Catholicism, only having gay sex. So given that they are not acquiring sex tapes from this data, it’s difficult to see how this is anything other than harassing some gay people for being gay. (If they discover that a priest is straight, do they then jump to the conclusion that he’s having straight sex?)
Perhaps you can think of a justification for all this, but I haven’t seen a coherent one given so far in this thread.
> Being gay isn’t a sin according to Catholicism, only having gay sex.
Being a pedophile isn't against the law, only engaging on pedophiliac desires is illegal. Therefore I should be ok with pedophiles being leaders of our community and teachers. Right? Wrong.
Examining the technicalities of the rules is just pedantry. There is an obvious intent and overall meaning behind the rules.
>Perhaps you can think of a justification for all this, but I haven’t seen a coherent one given so far in this thread.
Thanks for being so polite. This is obviously against the rules here, you're saying it to trigger me.
Pedophilia has victims and pedophiles are a potential danger to children. There is no victim when two adult gay men have consensual sex – unless one of them is harassed out of his job by people spying on him.
The comparison with pedophilia is so obviously inappropriate (and liable to unnecessarily inflame emotions in the context of this thread) that it makes me question whether you're engaging with this topic in good faith.
If you do have a point to make, could I ask you to please find a way to make it without reference to pedophilia, which has nothing to do with gay priests using hookup apps to talk to other adult gay men.
> Pedophilia has victims. There is no victim when two adult gay men have consensual sex – unless one of them is harassed out of his job by people spying on him.
Not necessarily. Depending on the state, it's technically pedophilia/rape when a 18 year old female has sex with a 17 year old. Let's say the 18 year old is a virgin and kind of innocent while the 17 year old is a big burly guy and has already had sex with dozens of people. In this case, many states classify 17 year old male as the one getting raped.
The technicalities here literally mask the intent. Intent is what matters here and the circumstances here make the intent less clear in such a way that the technical law can't fully articulate true justice.
But you don't need me to explain this. You are fully aware of what I mean here. When a homosexual man becomes a teacher for an all boys school something is wrong. When a homosexual man joins an organization against homosexuality something is also wrong. It makes perfect sense for organizations to spend money to get rid of these people.
>The comparison with pedophilia is so obviously inappropriate (and liable to unnecessarily inflame emotions in the context of this thread) that it makes me question whether you're engaging with this topic in good faith.
I throw this right back at you, your response is not in good faith. You're trying to start something here. I think you're very intelligent and attempting to deliberately turn this conversation into a witch hunt against me.
It is also not inappropriate from many peoples perspective including the people in the article. Homosexuality from the perspective of many conservative and religious groups is Just as deviant as pedophilia. From this reasoning, it makes sense why such a group would form to weed out homosexual priests. Unfortunately, the technical wording of the catholic rules on this matter doesn't govern their intents and feelings about it, and thus they act on their feelings rather then the rules themselves.
It's not about whether the existence of these groups is right or wrong. It's whether these anti-homosexual groups exiling a homosexual who joined their group is right or wrong.
I'm sorry to say, it's right. Those people shouldn't have joined in the first place. If you're not supporting and acting for the principles of this group you shouldn't join. Bottom line. The intent of the action is right, the intent of the people joining the group IS NOT.
I also flagged your post. Despite me giving you a good faith answer, I still consider your answer as someone who is obviously trying to start a witch hunt and get me banned. You are not acting in good faith; you have an agenda and your answer is manipulatively hiding that fact. This type of behavior is a hundred times more vile and insidious then someone who is just trolling (and I'm OBVIOUSLY not).
I recommend we end the conversation here before it gets out of hand. Good day.
Edit: This sentence here was ADDED to your response AFTER I made this reply:
"If you do have a point to make, could I ask you to please find a way to make it without reference to pedophilia, which has nothing to do with gay priests using hookup apps to talk to other adult gay men. "
Obviously you're trying to retroactively change what you wrote so others seeing it will misconstrue your intent. You could've just responded to me instead of trying to change what you wrote earlier. Complete garbage.
Paragraphs and paragraphs about pedophilia when you could just have chosen another analogy to make your point. Apologies for the late edit (which I made without having seen your comment), but I hope you can see what I'm getting at here. There has to be a better way to make your point than this.
Again, even if Catholics somehow see homosexuals as being deviant in a way comparable to pedophiles (and I hope that most don't!), homosexuals clearly don't present the same danger to others that pedophiles do. This is why the analogy fails for me, and I'd rather you found another one.
I have no interest in 'getting you banned', by the way.
Edit: On closer reading, I am surprised to find this sentence in a comment from someone who earlier claimed to be a supporter of gay rights:
>When a homosexual man becomes a teacher for an all boys school something is wrong
I think perhaps we are now seeing your true point of view.
> Paragraphs and paragraphs about pedophilia when you could just have chosen another analogy to make your point. Apologies for the late edit (which I made without having seen your comment), but I hope you can see what I'm getting at here. There has to be a better way to make your point than this.
Except if you read ANY of the paragraphs you'll see that it's relevant. Many Catholics view homosexuals in the same way they view pedophilia (with disgust) and don't want homosexuals in leadership positions. I'm sorry this analogy is apt and you know it from your other comments. Live with it.
>I have no interest in 'getting you banned', by the way.
Then don't accuse me of not commenting on good faith. Don't point fingers. Accusations and attacks on someones character as if they're in violation of the rules here can get people banned.
>I think perhaps we are now seeing your true point of view.
What view? That homosexuals are the same as regular human beings with ulterior motives and incentives? What? you think I should just assume that if someone is gay then he's a paragon of moral goodness? If a man who loves sushi goes to a place that exclusively sell sushi it is reasonable to assume he wants sushi. It is reasonable to question that act.
If that man went to a food court that happens to have sushi then it's reasonable to assume otherwise. But such is not the case when a gay man becomes the leader of a boy scout troop. He may have good intentions, but it is highly highly reasonable to assume he does not.
>Edit: On closer reading, I am surprised to find this sentence in a comment from someone who earlier claimed to be a supporter of gay rights:
I support gay rights in the same way I support human rights. I don't give you or gay people special treatment. If a gay person commits a crime he's a criminal. Your statement here is trying to put me in a box. It's like you're saying that If someone can even just assume that a gay person could have the proclivity of doing something unethical then how could that person be a supporter of gay rights? Impossible!
If you think it would be ok for a school to fire a teacher merely for being gay (as suggested by “it makes perfect sense for organizations to spend money to get rid of these people”), then you don’t support gay rights. In some instances US courts have even ruled against religious schools that have done this:
If you absolutely insist on making this a discussion about pedophilia (even extending your unpleasant insinuations to gay men who are boy scout leaders), then I’m calling it quits here. The subject of the article is gay priests talking to other adult gay men on dating apps. Even if a significant number of mainstream Catholics think that being gay is equivalent to being a pedophile (which I doubt), then that is still no reason for the rest of us to make such an association.
> If you think it would be ok for a school to fire a teacher merely for being gay (as suggested by “it makes perfect sense for organizations to spend money to get rid of these people”), then you don’t support gay rights. In some instances US courts have even ruled against religious schools that have done this:
I suggested no such thing, it's just more manipulation from you. This is what I suggested: I suggested that it's extremely strange for a gay man to be teaching at an all boys school and it's highly reasonable to suspect that his intentions are unethical.
If I could read the mind of such a teacher and I can see his intentions are good, by god I will fight for that teachers right to work there. Barring that I can only make the best logical judgment given the information that I have and that judgement is either the teacher leaves or I put my kid in another school/classroom.
>If you absolutely insist on making this a discussion about pedophilia (even extending your unpleasant insinuations to gay men who are boy scout leaders),
I never insisted on such a thing. I am simply clearing my name on the accusations you continue to pile on to me one after another. You accuse me of using pedophilia as some sort of deliberate inflammatory weapon, all I did was point out that I AM NOT. There is no insistence that we continue the conversation along those lines.
I want a discussion but apparently I can't have one because your attitude is combative and accusatory. It's characteristic of activists of gay people and many many activists nowadays. They use accusatory tactics of boxing people into horrible labels like "racist", "misogynistic". It's largely an effective tactic, but it's so effective that many times it's used as a mechanism to gain power and dominate others.
Activists like you don't want to engage in meaningful discussion, you just want to dominate. To achieve these goals what you do is misconstrue your opponents intention, you throw away all nuance and deliberately try to simplify your opponent and his actions so that he or she will fit into the box you want him in. When you successfully do this then you execute your main weapon of calling him "racist", "sexist" or any other horrible term that carries a history too horrible to justify using such words with such frivolity.
So what I'm doing is I have to continuously CLARIFY what I am saying. I have to reemphasize the nuance behind what I am saying so that I protect myself from being nailed onto that label. You literally attempted to do this to me earlier.
>Even if a significant number of mainstream Catholics think that being gay is equivalent to being a pedophile (which I doubt), then that is still no reason for the rest of us to make such an association.
I never said the "rest of us" have to make that association. I am simply saying why it makes sense for Catholics to want to root out their leaders who engage in homosexual behavior. Personally, I don't care if a gay man is elected mayor but it makes sense to me why a catholic doesn't want a priest to be gay. I am also saying it's justified for such priests and leaders within the catholic community to be fired.
> I suggested that it's extremely strange for a gay man to be teaching at an all boys school and it's highly reasonable to suspect that his intentions are unethical.
Your suspicions are unreasonable. As I mentioned before, heterosexual male teachers are not automatically viewed with moral suspicion in all-girls schools (second example: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/the-perils...), so it is unreasonable to automatically suspect that homosexual male teachers in all-boys schools are unethical. You are applying a double standard to homosexual males that society does not apply to heterosexual males.
Those teachers may be married and/or have daughters. A single male SHOULD be questioned.
> You are applying a double standard to homosexual males that society does not apply to heterosexual males.
Again simplistic logic. A double standard does not preclude it from being true. You have to see motive. Your link isn't evidence for anything. Can you read the minds of those teachers? Do you know if anything happened behind closed doors?
By virtue of once being a young single heterosexual male with no children I know how these men think. A high school teacher at an all female school is not only fighting external forces of how he's perceived but the internal forces of his instincts. If an attractive female HS student makes a move, the temptation is real.
Typically for males, though, the consequences of such violations are a hundred times more severe then if a female did it so you tend to see female teachers violate this rule more regularly.
> Those teachers may be married and/or have daughters.
Homosexual male teachers may also be married and/or have sons. Your entire line of reasoning is invalidated by your refusal to consider homosexual males in the same light as heterosexual males.
> But such is not the case when a gay man becomes the leader of a boy scout troop. He may have good intentions, but it is highly highly reasonable to assume he does not.
This portion of your comment is unreasonable. Girl Scout troops welcome male leaders, including heterosexual male leaders, without any insinuation of pedophilia or child sexual abuse.[1] There is no evidence that child sexual abuse is more of an issue for homosexual males than it is for heterosexual males,[2] and therefore no legitimate reason for you to suggest that homosexual male leaders of boy scout troops are more problematic than heterosexual male leaders of girl scout troops.
Male leaders tend to have daughter(s) or family in the troop thus the incentives are aligned. A single male is rarely the troop leader.
There is a reason to suspect a single heterosexual male joining a girl scout troop for the same reason you'd suspect a single male joining an all female yoga class.
There's a degree of common sense here that's being deliberately ignored. If a pedophile who's never acted out on his desires becomes a scout leader it is completely logical and wise to question his intentions as it is to question the intentions of a male girl scout leader or a gay boy scout leader.
You have to look at circumstance and evidence and nuance. You can't just build simplistic logic of "this exists and therefore the following must be completely true". No. Life is much more complex such that if your own child was part of a troop and ANY person who matches the profile of the characters described above MUST be questioned for the safety of your child.
> Male leaders tend to have daughter(s) or family in the troop thus the incentives are aligned. A single male is rarely thie troop leader.
Gay male leaders can also have son(s) or family in boy scout troups. The Boy Scouts of America stopped prohibiting gay individuals from becoming members in 2013 and stopped prohibiting gay scout leaders from holding memberships in 2015.* The majority of homosexual males are not pedophiles, just as the majority of heterosexual males are not pedophiles, so your reasoning is faulty. There is no legitimate reason to view homosexual males with any more suspicion than heterosexual males in scouting.
> When a homosexual man becomes a teacher for an all boys school something is wrong.
No, that is incorrect. There is nothing wrong with all-girls schools having heterosexual male teachers (example: https://girlsschools.org/advocacy/blog/2017/01/10/all-girls-...), so there is nothing wrong with all-boys schools having homosexual male teachers. You posting this sentence undermines your claim that your comparison of homosexuality to pedophilia (two things with wildly different acceptance rates among Catholics and among people in general) was in good faith.
>But I understand how many communities find homosexuality unnatural and wrong. You should respect that and NOT join that community. Just like how Catholics shouldn't enforce their ideas on the rest of the world, you shouldn't enforce yours either.
Catholics do enforce their ideas on the rest of the world, as many Christians in positions of power do. Especially in the US. Especially recently, with the surge of extremist anti-LGBT and anti abortion laws, all predicated philosophically on Christian doctrine. People who find homosexuality unnatural and wrong should not be respected, or simply let be, any more than virulent racists or anti-Semites. Tolerance for the intolerant only leads in the extermination of the tolerant.
>"Tolerance for the intolerant only leads in the extermination of the tolerant."
This is awfully hyperbolic, I cannot take it seriously because it comes across as an indictment of tolerance and an endorsement of intolerance as a moral imperative. Granted, I'm sure the implication is that it would be a 'righteous' kind of intolerance, but it is rooted in absolutism nonetheless.
> I cannot take it seriously because it comes across as an indictment of tolerance and an endorsement of intolerance as a moral imperative.
It's a very simple concept, described by Karl Popper in a single straightforward paragraph, commonly referred to as the Paradox of Tolerance. It's one of those lessons that came out of the aftermath of the Holocaust, which for some reason people go through great pains to refuse to comprehend.
That's fine - should you ever find yourself as part of a demographic that some other group wants eradicated, feel free to defend to the death their right to organize and recruit and argue for that, and tolerate their hatred as much as you like. In fact, just out of principle, make sure they have access to as many platforms as they want and can gather as much political power as possible. Maybe even try to engage them in debate, despite the unequal power dynamic between truth and lies (particularly in the modern ecosystem of engagement-driven social media and manufactured reality) - sunlight is the best disinfectant after all.
I'm still not convinced, and I've definitely heard and examined the Karl Popper paradox you mentioned. There's some strong insinuations in your response, but the main point of contention I have is this notion that by merely letting an idea/stance exist there is culpability and support for 'eradication'.
>"That's fine - should you ever find yourself as part of a demographic that some other group wants eradicated."
How do you know I'm not?
>"In fact, just out of principle, make sure they have access to as many platforms as they want"
Just having a platform, or being on lots of platforms, does not guarantee an ideology will succeed or spread substantially.
>"Maybe even try to engage them in debate, despite the unequal power dynamic between truth and lies"
Refuting lies is difficult, but it is still worth doing. I think its better than giving up and using force.
From my perspective I do not have an associate between homosexuality and pederasty. One of the things that bothers me is the targeted investigation on gay men. If someone is investigating sexual activity of priests why are they limiting themselves to homosexual activity? Why is breaking vows of celibacy with women less serious than with men?
Fornication with women is a celibacy vow, but otherwise encouraged for the laity to reproduce and be fruitful and multiply.
Homosexuality is, as mentioned, viewed as an evil tendency or sin, rather than something to be encouraged, and thus is more serious on its own.
Yes, this is what Catholics would say (with optional gay men = pedos dog whistles - see your sibling comment). It’s an explicitly homophobic rationale that depends on the assumption that being gay is worse than being straight. So while it sheds some light on the internal logic of Catholic homophobia, it’s hardly likely to reassure anyone who is worried that gay men are being singled out for unfair treatment. Rather, it explains exactly why this is occurring.
Wow, what is this? You know about how many Catholics view pedophilia as equivalent to homosexuality and you had the gall to accuse me of being inflammatory in my other comment. You do have an agenda.
I was referring to this comment from a Catholic, which explicitly connects gay men with pedophilia: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35084663 Of course not all Catholics think this way, which is why I added the word 'optional'. None of this was in reference to you.
There is no evidence that homosexuality is a reliable predictor of pedersaty within the Catholic clergy. HN users making this accusation without evidence are not immune to criticism, just as Catholics who make this accusation without evidence are not immune to criticism.
Your comments accusing other HN users of having "an agenda" are not consistent with this HN guideline:
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Well for starters, while obviously both are sinful, for a priest to break his vow of celibacy with a woman would require fewer conceptually-separate sinful actions than for a priest to break his vow of celibacy with a man. The former would at least require betraying an oath to God, fornication, and scandal, while the latter would require the addition of sodomy. Therefore, the latter is a graver moral evil.
(Additional note: while Dante Alighieri is not an approved moral theologian, many Catholics see his breakdown of Hell in the Inferno to be quite valuable; Dante places sodomites in the seventh circle with usurers and blasphemers, while those simply guilty of lust are placed in the second circle).
[
EDIT: For more info on this particular aspect of Dante's breakdown of Hell, I made a video on this topic, if you are interested:
But as far as the investigation, many of us (again, I am representing a certain demographic within the Church, not an aggregate of every card-carrying Catholic) see the problem of homosexual clergy as far more interrelated with other present scandals, such as the sexual abuse crisis, widespread poor catechizing of the youth, general moral flimsiness, and the desire to displace the Tridentine form of the Mass. It's sort of a guilt-by-association thing, sure, but most investigative work in general works on heuristics. Of course, there isn't a necessary link between so-called "homosexual" inclination and behavior on the one hand and pederasty on the other. But there are a few things to keep in mind:
1) This association is actually ancient - it isn't merely some prejudice from puritanical 1950s America. You find it in Plato and Aristotle, despite the overgeneralizations people make about Ancient Greece (much of which is based on very little evidence).
2) It doesn't follow that just because homosexuality is not a consistent predictor of pederasty in the broader population that this lack of pattern is maintained among homosexual clergy.
I would add that most people I speak to in the Church are consistently disfavorable toward priests that have children out of wedlock. But it doesn't really seem to be as major of an issue at present.
In the general population homosexuality is a poor predictor of pederasty. It is possible that this is not true of population of Catholic clergy, but it is presumptuous to make this association with a lack of other evidence. The conclusion I am drawing from this conversation is that the investigation has very little to do with preventing/stopping sexual abuse by members of the clergy, or with identifying priests that break their vow of celibacy in general. This is about disposing of theological rivals in positions of authority inside church.
Small anecdote. I have a gay friend who lives in Maynooth (where the seminary in the article exists, alongside a regular university). Right after moving there a few years back he noted, not without some amusement, that few of the hundreds of grinder profiles in the area contained pictures with faces. Virtually all the pictures were of torsos.
Interesting, why do you think that is? As a straight guy, facial appearance would be extraordinarily important for me - even for a hookup. Is it not as much of a priority, or are people still closeted / afraid of being catfished?
It reminds me of my high school English teacher who would give high scores to boys he was attracted to. The next year, when we had him again and it was obvious that nobody was interested in his advances, the scores mysteriously dropped 20 points for the same type of work.
A childhood friend who had attended a Mississippi boarding school transferred back to our school system in the second half of our junior years after having picked up a dope habit over there. He freaked out the first time he saw this particular teacher because the man had a habit of spending the weekend with the priests at the boarding school.
It is questionable that a story about priests using a gay dating app for adults reminds you of... a pedo English teacher you had who hung out with priests? There's a long history of people equating being LGBTQ+ with being groomers, pedophiles and sex offenders, and those stereotypes and false beliefs about one being related to the other are part of what leads to the homophobia that forces priests to be closeted. Perhaps the teacher was around the priests for sex offender reasons? It just seems odd to me to being up pedo stuff on stories about gay people facing discrimination.
Also, the prohibition on homosexual relationships drives gays and lesbians has been the Catholic church's not so secret tool to maintaining an adequate number of Mass performers. I know 7 gay men from high school classes before and after my own. One is Baptist. One is an atheist. The rest are either in or are former members of the Catholic clergy. Why? Because the area I grew up in was exceedingly Catholic and conservative, and the priesthood has been seen by people as a good way to repress those urges, regardless of the ultimate outcome.
The evangelical culture wars are simply coming to Catholicism, because there is a large segment of the US Catholic population who have chosen to mix religion and political identification, and the results in the US will be absolutely catastrophic. Not only are young gay Catholics no longer willing to live their entire lives in the closet, but the church refuses to give up its weird fixation on the chastity of priests. People are following their own common sense, and it's causing parishes to collapse from a lack of human and material resources.
On one hand, you've got bomb throwers who see apostasy and want to root it out wherever they see it, and on the other hand you've got a clergy who preaches one thing and does another out of necessity.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I don't really feel like it's trolling given the history of child abuse in the Catholic institution, but I could have definitely been more eloquent with my delivery so point taken.
Why would a gay person choose to become a catholic priest? That's like a short person who has no interest in basketball choosing to be a professional basket ball player.
As a devout Catholic, I don't have any issues with a gay person pursuing the priesthood. I do expect them to stop all activities related to dating, romance and sexuality once they choose to pursue that calling. Its troubling that this expectation is being flaunted on an apparently large scale
If you are Catholic and gay, you might feel like perhaps celibacy is the best option for you and in that case, why not consider religious life? I’ve had a number of gay Catholic friends who have started down that path and then decided against it (and some who ultimately continued down it). Not to mention that two male priests going on vacation wouldn’t raise any eyebrows while a priest and a woman going on vacation would.
Catholicism cannot and should not be reduced to a bunch of sexual thou-shalt-nots. Despite some Catholic organizations (like the one in the story) being vehemently anti-gay, the church’s actual teaching is far more nuanced.
Becoming a catholic priest because you want to be celibate is like becoming an astronaut because you like freeze dried food. Worse if you're gay because you putting yourself among a bunch of sex-starved men.
This is deeply concerning, I know that the apps are sending less data so I would love to see some investigation on wether or not this is still happening or possible.
But how long until these insane people just start trying to target other people. Getting this data, writing some scripts and start sending emails like "Did you know your employees are using XYZ" in an attempt to get people fired?
A priest has a job like most of us have jobs. Many of us joined companies after believing they were doing great things for the world. We were later disillusioned after learning more. After specializing ourselves and creating other limitations, we are unable to leave without creating serious hardship for ourselves.
The real issue here is employers buying up location data and probably other available intel to spy on and control us outside of work. Regardless of what you think about someone else's job, we should all help each other to avoid the oppression this enables.
Honestly, as a Catholic, I think that Bishops are stretched super thin these days, so any tools that can help them more effectively oversee and mentor their priests and seminarians is a win and it’s a healthy reminder that nothing you do on the internet is private.
That being said, they should be (and seem to be?) looking at data from all kinds of dating apps, not just gay ones. Any priest or seminarian has no business using those, gay or straight. Priests are public officials who care for a large flock and failing in their vows affects and scandalizes whole communities, thus its important that they take their vows to heart.
I will remind people that being LGBTQ puts one at high risk for ending up homeless. Connect the dots here: "If you are LGBTQ, we will actively interfere with your employment in ways we won't do for straight people." Can anyone see how that impacts one's ability to keep a roof over their head?
I wish the world would stop being so homophobic. This is a church that covered up for priests who molested children and moved them elsewhere so they could get a fresh start -- and thereby hurt more children -- but it thinks it desperately needs to know who is gay.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8008535/
> Abuse was ruled out in 35 cases. Seventy-four children were allegedly abused by other children and teenagers less than 18 years old. In 9 cases, an offender could not be identified. In the remaining 269 cases, two offenders were identified as being gay or lesbian. In 82% of cases (222/269), the alleged offender was a heterosexual partner of a close relative of the child. Using the data from our study, the 95% confidence limits, of the risk children would identify recognizably homosexual adults as the potential abuser, are from 0% to 3.1%. These limits are within current estimates of the prevalence of homosexuality in the general community.
Convictions are a bit of a different story.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1995-35375-001
> Using logit regression, it was found that homosexual abusers were 6.79 times more likely to be imprisoned than heterosexual abusers after adjusting for the combined effects of crime seriousness, prior record, and acceptance/denial of full responsibility for their actions.
edit: Your Reddit link demonstrates gay children are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators. LifeIssues.net is... pretty clearly biased.
[edited for clarity: I'm agreeing with the poster I'm responding to in that most child sexual abuse occurs at the hands of hetereosexual abusers, to the point where it's normalized through legal child marriage, which is almost entirely heterosexual, and aren't usually considered in studies on child sexual abuse.]
Preaching the will of organization that condemns them while actively pursuing the condemned interests on public profiles? It seems to me its got to be some sort of mental gymnastics to be choosing that career and sticking with it. Do these people believe that they are intrinsically bad? Do they just not believe what they're preaching? Do they think their niche is the one exception to their faiths belief system?
I've known quite a few priests. Most are intelligent and well educated. Its pretty common for them to do a lot of work that probably would translate to secular roles. For example, there's a lot of overlap in managing a parish or diocese and managing a business or division of a corporation.
It is worth noting I attended Catholic school in the South, closer to the border, so the church reflected more Mexican practices in Catholicism than say one in New York. I've learned from some folks that where you're taught makes a drastic difference.
The only place I was subjected to guilt, shame, and remorse in a negative context was in my home by (Catholic lay) relatives (and mass media). They were in a "cultural Christian" demographic, raised in utterly secular households, and though they practiced the faith vigorously, didn't really believe or follow it at home, except by coincidence.
By contrast, at school I experienced respect and encouragement from women in authority, and church was full of good news, and loving, joyful men and families. Surely my experience is also not in isolation.
When the Catholic abuse scandal broke, I was confused because my priests (and religious sisters) were nothing like that, but abuse by lay volunteers is real too, and it wasn't until 2019 when I put 2 and 2 together in that regard.
So yes, A LOT of unpacking!
The organization itself is still rooted in angry, spanish inquisition style purity tests, and they openly push those views anywhere that isn't too progressive. For example, the same catholic church has pushed misinformation and propaganda all over africa to discourage condom use.
Seminarians do not take vows of celibacy. Seminary is by design a time of testing a vocation. Additionally, I would like to see the data backing your “most gay priests” assertion.
> Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.
I don't understand the psychology either, but people compartmentalize and rationalize. One line of thinking might be that everyone is a fallen sinner, even priests, and so long as they repent and guide their flock in the right direction, they will be forgiven.
I'm sure some of them do. People can think they are terrible people while continuing to pretend they aren't in public.
In my experience it's quite easy. You quickly get resigned to the fact you're broken and will never be able to change. Once you accept that as truth, it's easier to just ignore it.
"Original sin is the Christian doctrine that holds that humans, through the fact of birth, inherit a tainted nature in need of regeneration and a proclivity to sinful conduct." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin
Original sin is a deprivation of these positive qualities. Mary, for example, preserved in holiness, not simply cleansed of it. Holiness is our natural state, and so baptism returns us to that preternatural holiness that Adam enjoyed when he walked with God in the Garden.
Anyway, the point is, most American-influenced "logical" people take an implicitly Protestant perspective, that religion is all about consistently following consistent doctrines. The Catholic perspective on this kind of thing is more flexible and quite strange by comparison but tolerating hypocrisy around sexual behavior is definitely not new.
(Former Catholic but not a theologian or anything. See discussion here on how canonization is not a declaration of virtue: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02364b.htm)
Isn't that a contradiction? I thought Protestants were all about grace over works (wasn't it Martin Luther who called James The Epistle of Straw because of it's emphasis on works?). Consistently following consistent doctrines would be works.
If you're convinced that you're not one of the elect, and you've given up, then you've failed to have faith, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Getting faith doesn't guarantee you're one of the elect, but not having it guarantees that you're not.
So an attitude like yours might work anyway, if you happen to be one of the elect, but the odds aren't in your favor.
The Catholic perspective is not tolerating hypocrisy, it is a knowledge that we are all sinful and broken. I know what the right thing to do is, and if you ask me I will tell you what the right thing to do is, but often I won't do it. I'm not a hypocrite -- I know I'm wrong, I'm weak and a coward.
Its hard to argue the same for gay priests who only occasionally get laid as a result of their choices.
"Well I don't really care that much about actual religion but job is safe and pay is decent..."
On a more serious note. I'm gay and if you want to know why Pride parades, Pride month, and being out is so important, it's this sort of rhetoric. Calls for "biblical morality" and "homosexual crimes" to be punished are coded calls for our destruction. This sort of thinking is always absolutist and apocalyptic. There is nothing I can do to "tone it down" that will make them happy. They simply want us dead. Being out is the only real defense we have because we then go from a demonized other to just your friend, coworker, or family member.
We're here, we're queer - fuck off.
Basically, the way AIDS victims were dehumanized, mistreated, overall publicly humiliated, shattered any real belief that if you just tried to fit in enough society will treat you as one of their own. Ultimately, the LGBTQ community were the only people supporting the LGBTQ community, and this required radical self-acceptance movements in the face of horrific death and apathy.
The church will watch gay people die on the street and spit on their graves like everyone else, and all the speech of forgiveness and compassion was actually a lie. Gay people aren't equal humans in their eyes. Like I said before: the only people supporting queer people were the queer people. The only thing they could do is love themselves, for the world was glad their deaths were painful, slow, and public.
Again with the term "queer", this masks the important distinction mentioned above, because its use presents certain actions as morally-neutral. Many of us view(ed) the AIDS crisis as being used as a justification for sinful actions. I'm sure you're familiar with the Stop the Church event (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_the_Church). It is rather obvious, based on who organized this event and others like it that they were opposed to actual teachings of the Church, such as its condemnation of sodomy, contraception (even as a prophylactic against contracting diseases) and even abortion.
I gotta say, I kinda agree with them on the Latin mass thing. I'm not Catholic (or religious at all, in fact) but the magic and gravitas and historical continuity of the service sounding like something out of Indiana Jones or The Exorcist or what (one imagines) a tenth-century mass would have sounded like, would be one of the bigger draws for me, if I were looking to convert.
[EDIT] OTOH I know at least one formerly-atheist gay guy who decided to pick up religion years and years ago, and definitely, for-sure would have become Catholic (see above about the pomp and circumstance being a big draw)—if not for their stance on homosexuality. IIRC he went Episcopalian instead. Maybe there's a vast untapped reserve of converts there?
If you grew up in a heavily Catholic area in America, then chances are that you know at least one if not a few people who were resigned to becoming clergy because it was the easiest way for them buy into a system that either repressed their natural sexual urges or gave them an out from society for not having any in the first place.
Catholic Church is not condemning homosexuals. Why it should? According to Bible they were created by God, so they are good by definition. CC is condemning homosexual sex, in the same way as it condemns pre-marriage sex or killing other people. All those acts are done by people created by God, but given a free will to do the things that are wrong from the Church perspective. And that can be forgiven thanks do a deal that Jesus made with God.
As far as priests are concerned it does not matter much if they are gay or not as they should not maintain sexual relationships anyway.
I think most rational people would see through that, it's pretty flimsy.
Where is the inconsistency? A heterosexual man is called to chastity as well. If he acts against this by cheating on his spouse I don't think the CC would be 'condemning an intrinsic quality' he was made with.
The teachings of Jesus should piss everyone off in some way or another.
If someone cheats on their spouse the problem is a betrayal of trust between two people. It's part of a complex web of obligations, urges, and everything else that happens in a relationship.
It's not nearly as simple as someone expressing their sexuality.
But it should be stressed that this is no way a consequence a specific teaching that targets people with same-sex attraction.
The root cause of the trouble is the fact that the Catholic Church has consistently taught something that is always counter-cultural, difficult, and even quite radical. Namely that the only proper place for sexual intimacy is within a life long bond between one man and one woman for the purpose of raising children.
The Catholic Church teaches that gay sex is an act of 'grave depravity' and that same-sex attraction is 'intrinsically disordered'. How is that not a specific teaching that targets 'people with same-sex attraction'?
http://www.catholic-catechism.com/ccc_2357.htm
The point is that the identical moral reasoning process is being applied consistently to all people, namely, sexual activity is to be avoided outside of a marriage open to children. Gay people are not being targeted by some sort of religious moral carve-out.
The Church specifically teaches that gay sex is wrong in a way that straight sex isn't, entirely independently of whether it occurs within or outside marriage.
In the case of the article we're commenting on, we have an example of the Church (or a closely associated organisation) specifically treating gay priests differently to straight priests, despite the fact that neither are permitted to have sex with anyone.
It's abundantly clear which group is being targeted here. It's not "people who are having sex with no possibility of having children", or "people who are having sex outside of marriage". It's gay people. And they're being targeted because the Catholic Church teaches very explicitly and specifically that gay sex is wrong.
Only in the past ten years, under Francis' papacy, has rhetoric from the Catholic Church towards homosexuals began to soften. While that's certainly a great thing, that doesn't mean that the views shared by aged bishops, priests and general members of the church have changed as a result of that. We still see signs of that condemnation across the world regularly. They may be changing, but the damage is still present and still happening - it will take a long time for that to disappear, if ever.
>Why it should?
I'd say we should ask every priest, bishop and pope who has criticized homosexuality why they felt they should. I really don't understand why you would ask that rhetorical question when there are centuries of proof of them doing exactly that.
The difference is that these “monitor” groups don’t care about the priests on Tindr because their biases.
Now, imagine doing it for a dogmatic scripture held dearly by many millions. Sure, the Catholic Church is on the wrong side of history when it comes to gay rights, among other things, but if some people find peace and meaning in its voluminous scriptures, then there is still a leadership role for those priests. That might explain the cognitive dissonance.
That you have a few “sins” to struggle doesn’t change your identity or your relationship to it, and besides — everyone has some “sins” they struggle with. As a priest, of all people, you would know that.
As a whole, secular society sees sexual preference as an inflexible identity around which other things like religious affiliation or occupation might pivot. But the converse works just as well for an individual’s view of the world and is of course what many well-established traditions espouse.
Catholicism, in particular, leaves room for living people being imperfect and inescapably bearing “sins” throughout their lives. It’s a core part of the theology. It’s what you do with it that becomes your profession of faith, and committing to the priesthood makes sense as a emphatic way of doing something about yours. (Which suggests that the preisthood can easily collect especially troubled “sinners” seeking to overcome their troubles… who maybe don’t always do a great job of it)
I suspect these gay Catholic find themselves in a similiar situation. They probably do not share much in common with the secular world.
Lots of people will immediately call this hypocrisy but they just have not put that much thought into it. There is more to life than sexual preferences.
Dougal: But Ted, preaching against one thing in public, while secretly doing it in private, that's hypocrisy!
Ted: No Dougal, I don't think so. Hypocrisy is just not something the Catholic church does, if we do something there's usually a good reason for it. Hypocrisy is something more for the common people, and you should strenuously preach against it!
Dougal: Oh OK, thanks for clearing that up Ted.
*My imaginary Father Ted episode, if it was still running.
Hard words but true. No mental gymnastics needed, just a bad conscience.
Now mind you: there are priests who have homosexual desires but try to live their celibacy, albeit not always successfully. These are not hypocritical, they are just human. But they do not tend to visit grindr.
They believe that everyone experiences this kind of struggle, but in different ways depending on the person, and that failing at it is inevitable. They believe there is a way for things to be OK even though you fail.
They also believe in an ethical framework where you determine what is right or wrong based not on your own assessment of the pluses and minuses but by following guidance that comes (through scripture, church tradition, etc.) from a higher power whose wisdom is greater than your own.
And they also believe there's some kind of grand plan behind everything, and that the way they fit into this grand plan is to be a priest. They have at some point come to the conclusion that they are supposed to be one, that it is their vocation.
Or at least, within their faith, these beliefs are what is commonly accepted as the right way to look at it. An individual person may or may not actually think or feel exactly like this. Sort of like how one person may become a doctor because they like helping people and someone else may become a doctor because they don't want to disappoint their family.
So from their perspective, being hetero-celibate and being homo-celibate is an equal sacrifice.
A major cited driver of a lot of the abuse was that exact line of thinking. Good intentioned people who knew they had bad desires would enter the Priesthood as a framework to not act on those desires, but then they see other Priests being sexually active and just give in.
It also built a network of secrecy - very fine line between covering up your bosses' non-abusive (but in your mind still morally wrong) affair and asking him to cover up your abusive (but in your mind, only equally as morally wrong) activities.
In general, it's one of the arguments for normalizing non-abusive fetishes in the general populace. The more secrecy there is generally, the more truly bad stuff gets covered up.
There is a very clear delineation between temptation and sin in the Catholic world.
"But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart."
Matthew 5:28
No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
While I have you, would you mind reviewing the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html? Among other things, they ask you not to post questions like this in the threads, but rather to ask us at hn@ycombinator.com. There are a bunch of reasons for that; one is that we're only likely to see your question if you email it to us; and another is that posts like this take discussions off topic.
When the organization as a whole only exists to enforce that morality code, it makes more sense that they would also heavily police internally as well.
Do remember that this particular morality code is an unfashionable one. There are other taboos that also cause a waste of resources by people seeking corrective action where no law is broken and no one is victimized. And those are cheered on because those codes are fashionable.
Sure, this is dumb through and through. But this scenario just has properties that lend themselves to headlines meant to stir people up.
Which ones?
Sounds exactly like the kind of thing one national political parties would have done to another prior to the fairly recent widespread acceptance of gay marriage.
These people are pillars of their community. To have them teaching other people and leading is just disgusting from their perspective.
Look, I support gay rights, I'm the furthest thing from catholic. But I understand how many communities find homosexuality unnatural and wrong. You should respect that and NOT join that community. Just like how Catholics shouldn't enforce their ideas on the rest of the world, you shouldn't enforce yours either.
> Look, I support gay rights
Not sure how you can support gay rights and also be ok with organisations spying on gay people (specifically because they're gay).
One can debate whether or not this practice should be illegal, but it's clearly wrong, even by the tenets of Catholicism itself. Why are they not also spying on straight priests using Tinder?
Also, wouldn't that be an extremely weird and creepy thing for The Vegan Society to do? I’m surprised you’d offer this analogy as a defense of the behavior in question.
“That would be spying on non-vegans…” Right, some of the signs are flipped, but the concept is still the same - an organization promoting a particular ethical standard is surveilling its members adherence to that standard.
“Weird and creepy…” Yes, certainly! But not against vegan rights, not discriminating against vegans, not “targeting vegans (specifically because they are vegan)”. I was responding to the claim that supporting gay rights is incompatible with tolerating this practice.
My reply is more referring to the intent of the parent comment. As in how is spending "millions" justifiable to root out gay people in a catholic organization.
Perhaps you can think of a justification for all this, but I haven’t seen a coherent one given so far in this thread.
Being a pedophile isn't against the law, only engaging on pedophiliac desires is illegal. Therefore I should be ok with pedophiles being leaders of our community and teachers. Right? Wrong.
Examining the technicalities of the rules is just pedantry. There is an obvious intent and overall meaning behind the rules.
>Perhaps you can think of a justification for all this, but I haven’t seen a coherent one given so far in this thread.
Thanks for being so polite. This is obviously against the rules here, you're saying it to trigger me.
The comparison with pedophilia is so obviously inappropriate (and liable to unnecessarily inflame emotions in the context of this thread) that it makes me question whether you're engaging with this topic in good faith.
If you do have a point to make, could I ask you to please find a way to make it without reference to pedophilia, which has nothing to do with gay priests using hookup apps to talk to other adult gay men.
Not necessarily. Depending on the state, it's technically pedophilia/rape when a 18 year old female has sex with a 17 year old. Let's say the 18 year old is a virgin and kind of innocent while the 17 year old is a big burly guy and has already had sex with dozens of people. In this case, many states classify 17 year old male as the one getting raped.
The technicalities here literally mask the intent. Intent is what matters here and the circumstances here make the intent less clear in such a way that the technical law can't fully articulate true justice.
But you don't need me to explain this. You are fully aware of what I mean here. When a homosexual man becomes a teacher for an all boys school something is wrong. When a homosexual man joins an organization against homosexuality something is also wrong. It makes perfect sense for organizations to spend money to get rid of these people.
>The comparison with pedophilia is so obviously inappropriate (and liable to unnecessarily inflame emotions in the context of this thread) that it makes me question whether you're engaging with this topic in good faith.
I throw this right back at you, your response is not in good faith. You're trying to start something here. I think you're very intelligent and attempting to deliberately turn this conversation into a witch hunt against me.
It is also not inappropriate from many peoples perspective including the people in the article. Homosexuality from the perspective of many conservative and religious groups is Just as deviant as pedophilia. From this reasoning, it makes sense why such a group would form to weed out homosexual priests. Unfortunately, the technical wording of the catholic rules on this matter doesn't govern their intents and feelings about it, and thus they act on their feelings rather then the rules themselves.
It's not about whether the existence of these groups is right or wrong. It's whether these anti-homosexual groups exiling a homosexual who joined their group is right or wrong.
I'm sorry to say, it's right. Those people shouldn't have joined in the first place. If you're not supporting and acting for the principles of this group you shouldn't join. Bottom line. The intent of the action is right, the intent of the people joining the group IS NOT.
I also flagged your post. Despite me giving you a good faith answer, I still consider your answer as someone who is obviously trying to start a witch hunt and get me banned. You are not acting in good faith; you have an agenda and your answer is manipulatively hiding that fact. This type of behavior is a hundred times more vile and insidious then someone who is just trolling (and I'm OBVIOUSLY not).
I recommend we end the conversation here before it gets out of hand. Good day.
Edit: This sentence here was ADDED to your response AFTER I made this reply:
Obviously you're trying to retroactively change what you wrote so others seeing it will misconstrue your intent. You could've just responded to me instead of trying to change what you wrote earlier. Complete garbage.Again, even if Catholics somehow see homosexuals as being deviant in a way comparable to pedophiles (and I hope that most don't!), homosexuals clearly don't present the same danger to others that pedophiles do. This is why the analogy fails for me, and I'd rather you found another one.
I have no interest in 'getting you banned', by the way.
Edit: On closer reading, I am surprised to find this sentence in a comment from someone who earlier claimed to be a supporter of gay rights:
>When a homosexual man becomes a teacher for an all boys school something is wrong
I think perhaps we are now seeing your true point of view.
Except if you read ANY of the paragraphs you'll see that it's relevant. Many Catholics view homosexuals in the same way they view pedophilia (with disgust) and don't want homosexuals in leadership positions. I'm sorry this analogy is apt and you know it from your other comments. Live with it.
>I have no interest in 'getting you banned', by the way.
Then don't accuse me of not commenting on good faith. Don't point fingers. Accusations and attacks on someones character as if they're in violation of the rules here can get people banned.
>I think perhaps we are now seeing your true point of view.
What view? That homosexuals are the same as regular human beings with ulterior motives and incentives? What? you think I should just assume that if someone is gay then he's a paragon of moral goodness? If a man who loves sushi goes to a place that exclusively sell sushi it is reasonable to assume he wants sushi. It is reasonable to question that act.
If that man went to a food court that happens to have sushi then it's reasonable to assume otherwise. But such is not the case when a gay man becomes the leader of a boy scout troop. He may have good intentions, but it is highly highly reasonable to assume he does not.
>Edit: On closer reading, I am surprised to find this sentence in a comment from someone who earlier claimed to be a supporter of gay rights:
I support gay rights in the same way I support human rights. I don't give you or gay people special treatment. If a gay person commits a crime he's a criminal. Your statement here is trying to put me in a box. It's like you're saying that If someone can even just assume that a gay person could have the proclivity of doing something unethical then how could that person be a supporter of gay rights? Impossible!
https://www.them.us/story/illegal-for-catholic-schools-to-fi...
If you absolutely insist on making this a discussion about pedophilia (even extending your unpleasant insinuations to gay men who are boy scout leaders), then I’m calling it quits here. The subject of the article is gay priests talking to other adult gay men on dating apps. Even if a significant number of mainstream Catholics think that being gay is equivalent to being a pedophile (which I doubt), then that is still no reason for the rest of us to make such an association.
I suggested no such thing, it's just more manipulation from you. This is what I suggested: I suggested that it's extremely strange for a gay man to be teaching at an all boys school and it's highly reasonable to suspect that his intentions are unethical.
If I could read the mind of such a teacher and I can see his intentions are good, by god I will fight for that teachers right to work there. Barring that I can only make the best logical judgment given the information that I have and that judgement is either the teacher leaves or I put my kid in another school/classroom.
>If you absolutely insist on making this a discussion about pedophilia (even extending your unpleasant insinuations to gay men who are boy scout leaders),
I never insisted on such a thing. I am simply clearing my name on the accusations you continue to pile on to me one after another. You accuse me of using pedophilia as some sort of deliberate inflammatory weapon, all I did was point out that I AM NOT. There is no insistence that we continue the conversation along those lines.
I want a discussion but apparently I can't have one because your attitude is combative and accusatory. It's characteristic of activists of gay people and many many activists nowadays. They use accusatory tactics of boxing people into horrible labels like "racist", "misogynistic". It's largely an effective tactic, but it's so effective that many times it's used as a mechanism to gain power and dominate others.
Activists like you don't want to engage in meaningful discussion, you just want to dominate. To achieve these goals what you do is misconstrue your opponents intention, you throw away all nuance and deliberately try to simplify your opponent and his actions so that he or she will fit into the box you want him in. When you successfully do this then you execute your main weapon of calling him "racist", "sexist" or any other horrible term that carries a history too horrible to justify using such words with such frivolity.
So what I'm doing is I have to continuously CLARIFY what I am saying. I have to reemphasize the nuance behind what I am saying so that I protect myself from being nailed onto that label. You literally attempted to do this to me earlier.
>Even if a significant number of mainstream Catholics think that being gay is equivalent to being a pedophile (which I doubt), then that is still no reason for the rest of us to make such an association.
I never said the "rest of us" have to make that association. I am simply saying why it makes sense for Catholics to want to root out their leaders who engage in homosexual behavior. Personally, I don't care if a gay man is elected mayor but it makes sense to me why a catholic doesn't want a priest to be gay. I am also saying it's justified for such priests and leaders within the catholic community to be fired.
Your suspicions are unreasonable. As I mentioned before, heterosexual male teachers are not automatically viewed with moral suspicion in all-girls schools (second example: https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/the-perils...), so it is unreasonable to automatically suspect that homosexual male teachers in all-boys schools are unethical. You are applying a double standard to homosexual males that society does not apply to heterosexual males.
There's nuance in this you're not seeing.
Those teachers may be married and/or have daughters. A single male SHOULD be questioned.
> You are applying a double standard to homosexual males that society does not apply to heterosexual males.
Again simplistic logic. A double standard does not preclude it from being true. You have to see motive. Your link isn't evidence for anything. Can you read the minds of those teachers? Do you know if anything happened behind closed doors?
By virtue of once being a young single heterosexual male with no children I know how these men think. A high school teacher at an all female school is not only fighting external forces of how he's perceived but the internal forces of his instincts. If an attractive female HS student makes a move, the temptation is real.
Typically for males, though, the consequences of such violations are a hundred times more severe then if a female did it so you tend to see female teachers violate this rule more regularly.
Homosexual male teachers may also be married and/or have sons. Your entire line of reasoning is invalidated by your refusal to consider homosexual males in the same light as heterosexual males.
This portion of your comment is unreasonable. Girl Scout troops welcome male leaders, including heterosexual male leaders, without any insinuation of pedophilia or child sexual abuse.[1] There is no evidence that child sexual abuse is more of an issue for homosexual males than it is for heterosexual males,[2] and therefore no legitimate reason for you to suggest that homosexual male leaders of boy scout troops are more problematic than heterosexual male leaders of girl scout troops.
[1] Example: https://www.girlscoutsni.org/en/our-council/news/2016/dads_w...
[2] Written by a professor who specializes in the area of clerical sexual abuse: https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2018/10/22/no-homosexu...
There is a reason to suspect a single heterosexual male joining a girl scout troop for the same reason you'd suspect a single male joining an all female yoga class.
There's a degree of common sense here that's being deliberately ignored. If a pedophile who's never acted out on his desires becomes a scout leader it is completely logical and wise to question his intentions as it is to question the intentions of a male girl scout leader or a gay boy scout leader.
You have to look at circumstance and evidence and nuance. You can't just build simplistic logic of "this exists and therefore the following must be completely true". No. Life is much more complex such that if your own child was part of a troop and ANY person who matches the profile of the characters described above MUST be questioned for the safety of your child.
Gay male leaders can also have son(s) or family in boy scout troups. The Boy Scouts of America stopped prohibiting gay individuals from becoming members in 2013 and stopped prohibiting gay scout leaders from holding memberships in 2015.* The majority of homosexual males are not pedophiles, just as the majority of heterosexual males are not pedophiles, so your reasoning is faulty. There is no legitimate reason to view homosexual males with any more suspicion than heterosexual males in scouting.
* https://www.aclu.org/news/lgbtq-rights/dont-clap-just-yet-bo...
No, that is incorrect. There is nothing wrong with all-girls schools having heterosexual male teachers (example: https://girlsschools.org/advocacy/blog/2017/01/10/all-girls-...), so there is nothing wrong with all-boys schools having homosexual male teachers. You posting this sentence undermines your claim that your comparison of homosexuality to pedophilia (two things with wildly different acceptance rates among Catholics and among people in general) was in good faith.
Catholics do enforce their ideas on the rest of the world, as many Christians in positions of power do. Especially in the US. Especially recently, with the surge of extremist anti-LGBT and anti abortion laws, all predicated philosophically on Christian doctrine. People who find homosexuality unnatural and wrong should not be respected, or simply let be, any more than virulent racists or anti-Semites. Tolerance for the intolerant only leads in the extermination of the tolerant.
This is awfully hyperbolic, I cannot take it seriously because it comes across as an indictment of tolerance and an endorsement of intolerance as a moral imperative. Granted, I'm sure the implication is that it would be a 'righteous' kind of intolerance, but it is rooted in absolutism nonetheless.
It's a very simple concept, described by Karl Popper in a single straightforward paragraph, commonly referred to as the Paradox of Tolerance. It's one of those lessons that came out of the aftermath of the Holocaust, which for some reason people go through great pains to refuse to comprehend.
That's fine - should you ever find yourself as part of a demographic that some other group wants eradicated, feel free to defend to the death their right to organize and recruit and argue for that, and tolerate their hatred as much as you like. In fact, just out of principle, make sure they have access to as many platforms as they want and can gather as much political power as possible. Maybe even try to engage them in debate, despite the unequal power dynamic between truth and lies (particularly in the modern ecosystem of engagement-driven social media and manufactured reality) - sunlight is the best disinfectant after all.
I'm sure it'll all work out OK.
>"That's fine - should you ever find yourself as part of a demographic that some other group wants eradicated." How do you know I'm not?
>"In fact, just out of principle, make sure they have access to as many platforms as they want" Just having a platform, or being on lots of platforms, does not guarantee an ideology will succeed or spread substantially.
>"Maybe even try to engage them in debate, despite the unequal power dynamic between truth and lies" Refuting lies is difficult, but it is still worth doing. I think its better than giving up and using force.
From my perspective I do not have an associate between homosexuality and pederasty. One of the things that bothers me is the targeted investigation on gay men. If someone is investigating sexual activity of priests why are they limiting themselves to homosexual activity? Why is breaking vows of celibacy with women less serious than with men?
Your comments accusing other HN users of having "an agenda" are not consistent with this HN guideline:
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(Additional note: while Dante Alighieri is not an approved moral theologian, many Catholics see his breakdown of Hell in the Inferno to be quite valuable; Dante places sodomites in the seventh circle with usurers and blasphemers, while those simply guilty of lust are placed in the second circle).
[
EDIT: For more info on this particular aspect of Dante's breakdown of Hell, I made a video on this topic, if you are interested:
https://odysee.com/@ConnorCreegan:a/violenceaswenolongerknow...
]
But as far as the investigation, many of us (again, I am representing a certain demographic within the Church, not an aggregate of every card-carrying Catholic) see the problem of homosexual clergy as far more interrelated with other present scandals, such as the sexual abuse crisis, widespread poor catechizing of the youth, general moral flimsiness, and the desire to displace the Tridentine form of the Mass. It's sort of a guilt-by-association thing, sure, but most investigative work in general works on heuristics. Of course, there isn't a necessary link between so-called "homosexual" inclination and behavior on the one hand and pederasty on the other. But there are a few things to keep in mind:
1) This association is actually ancient - it isn't merely some prejudice from puritanical 1950s America. You find it in Plato and Aristotle, despite the overgeneralizations people make about Ancient Greece (much of which is based on very little evidence).
2) It doesn't follow that just because homosexuality is not a consistent predictor of pederasty in the broader population that this lack of pattern is maintained among homosexual clergy.
I would add that most people I speak to in the Church are consistently disfavorable toward priests that have children out of wedlock. But it doesn't really seem to be as major of an issue at present.
[1] https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/martin-removes-priests...
A childhood friend who had attended a Mississippi boarding school transferred back to our school system in the second half of our junior years after having picked up a dope habit over there. He freaked out the first time he saw this particular teacher because the man had a habit of spending the weekend with the priests at the boarding school.
Also, the prohibition on homosexual relationships drives gays and lesbians has been the Catholic church's not so secret tool to maintaining an adequate number of Mass performers. I know 7 gay men from high school classes before and after my own. One is Baptist. One is an atheist. The rest are either in or are former members of the Catholic clergy. Why? Because the area I grew up in was exceedingly Catholic and conservative, and the priesthood has been seen by people as a good way to repress those urges, regardless of the ultimate outcome.
The evangelical culture wars are simply coming to Catholicism, because there is a large segment of the US Catholic population who have chosen to mix religion and political identification, and the results in the US will be absolutely catastrophic. Not only are young gay Catholics no longer willing to live their entire lives in the closet, but the church refuses to give up its weird fixation on the chastity of priests. People are following their own common sense, and it's causing parishes to collapse from a lack of human and material resources.
On one hand, you've got bomb throwers who see apostasy and want to root it out wherever they see it, and on the other hand you've got a clergy who preaches one thing and does another out of necessity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Catholicism cannot and should not be reduced to a bunch of sexual thou-shalt-nots. Despite some Catholic organizations (like the one in the story) being vehemently anti-gay, the church’s actual teaching is far more nuanced.
But how long until these insane people just start trying to target other people. Getting this data, writing some scripts and start sending emails like "Did you know your employees are using XYZ" in an attempt to get people fired?
The real issue here is employers buying up location data and probably other available intel to spy on and control us outside of work. Regardless of what you think about someone else's job, we should all help each other to avoid the oppression this enables.
That being said, they should be (and seem to be?) looking at data from all kinds of dating apps, not just gay ones. Any priest or seminarian has no business using those, gay or straight. Priests are public officials who care for a large flock and failing in their vows affects and scandalizes whole communities, thus its important that they take their vows to heart.
I will remind people that being LGBTQ puts one at high risk for ending up homeless. Connect the dots here: "If you are LGBTQ, we will actively interfere with your employment in ways we won't do for straight people." Can anyone see how that impacts one's ability to keep a roof over their head?
I wish the world would stop being so homophobic. This is a church that covered up for priests who molested children and moved them elsewhere so they could get a fresh start -- and thereby hurt more children -- but it thinks it desperately needs to know who is gay.
smh