You may recall that last month, I angrily attacked Cardinal Raymond Burke for unbelievably offensive comments he made about homosexuality. I used strong, colorful language, because I was extremely angry that someone could be so full of hate.
The piece took off, getting 186 recommends. But one thing that I did not expect was that it took off not just here. It was picked up by John Zuhlsdorf, a Catholic priest in Wisconsin. He decried it as an example of "how the Left thinks" on his "Fr. Z's Blog". (I've never understood why priests are called fathers; it's not like they have any children. Little boys can't get pregnant.) I did not pick up on this until now, so I will respond.
He begins by proving my point and describing the sexuality of people like me as a disorder:
At Daily Kos you can find a good example of how the Left thinks. This is also an insight into how the catholic Left think, too. For confirmation just watch the combox of the Fishwrap. You see similar attitudes and tone.
Daily Kos attacked Card. Burke in an especially vicious way. HERE Why? He stated, clearly, what we know about homosexuality. Same sex-attraction is an inclination that is not a well-ordered inclination, according to human ecology, the natural law. It is, as the Church has explained in rather clinical language, disordered. The Kos writer, probably not up to date on any sort of technical language or the finer points of any language, leaped to conclusion that Card. Burke (or any of us) think that homosexuals are therefore deranged.
While that's more benign than Burke's pure hate speech, it proves my point. Zuhlsdorf seems rather confronted by what I said. But how do you think we are going to respond to comments like that? You think we're not going to criticize you? When your church endlessly condemns same-sex attraction, is it really any wonder why we don't view your views as love or compassion? Is it really any wonder we don't hit back?
In the following blockquotes, speech outside square brackets is my original comment. Speech inside them is Zuhlsdorf's response. I am responding to his response.
So… here is a sample of how the Left “thinks”, which includes also – in many cases – the catholic Left. Thus, Kos, with my usual emphases and comments:
Hey, Cardinal F*ckwit, listen here: [With an intro like that, imagine what sort of brilliant reasoning and prose might follow!]
This was not intended to be a logical argument. I have long given up on trying to use logic and reason to persuade people like Burke and Zuhlsdorf that they are wrong. Their minds are completely closed off to it. God, the Bible and "natural law" (whatever the hell that means) constitute neither logic nor reason.
I've written before about the futility of trying to have rational debates with such people. The only thing that they understand is a forceful and unequivocal condemnation. They need to be confronted with how wrong they are. We can never change their minds. We can only make them too embarrassed to express what's on them.
The only “intrinsic disorder” here is your hatred and bigotry that belongs in the Dark Ages. [I suspect that, for the writer, "Dark Ages" is only a vague trope, a cliché.]
The point was to show how outdated and obsolete Burke's views are. Now, while I don't believe that Burke is literally as bad as the Dark Ages, there does exist such a thing as metaphors.
The only thing that LGBT people suffer from is the efforts of people like you to condemn their lives at every turn, [Who did that?]
The Catholic Church does that all the time.
I've compiled quite a long list of such incidents. Burke's is one such example. What do you think I was responding to in the first place?
and to fight with every ounce of your strength [I suppose the writer thinks that the world revolves around homosexuals. We don't really spend much time thinking about them.]
Raymond Burke himself has said that the Catholic Church "can never talk enough about" same-sex marriage. Pope Francis has said that the Church is obsessed with homosexuality. A lot of credence is given to this theory considering that you oppose marriage equality, civil unions, anti-discrimination laws including the Employment Non-Discrimination Act which has nothing to do with wedding vendors, and, most shamefully in my opinion,
Minnesota's bishops fighting the passage of LGBT inclusive anti-bullying laws in April last year despite the fact that nine students in the state have killed themselves after being bullied, many of whom were gay or perceived to be.
their dignity, equality and civil rights. [No. This is a canard. Do not be taken in by the claim that this is a civil rights issue, as if it was on par with racial civil rights.]
"Civil rights", as they were fought for in the '60s, include things like the right to marry regardless of your race, the right to vote regardless of your race, your right to not be discriminated against in business because of your race, your right to not be fired because of your race, and your right to not be violently attacked because of your race. LGBT people are fighting for all of those things now, just on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity. They are seeking the same things. The same things, as in the same civil rights. Now, while our side has achieved the right to not be violently attacked on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity (the Matthew Shepard and James Bryd Jr. Act), and the right to vote (which wasn't really an issue, but I included it to cover all bases) regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity, people like you have stood in the way of everything else. So don't be surprised or saddened when, in 50 years, we look back on you like we look back on George Wallace. In Kansas, Gov. Brownback and AG Schmidt are acting like Wallace did when the latter physically stood in front of desegregated schools to prevent black students entering them. As Wallace defied a court order to keep racial segregation, so too is Brownback defying a court to keep marriage discrimination.
The only thing that makes them “profoundly unhappy” are your constant messages of hostility, animosity and condemnation for nothing else than who they are [?] and who they love. [It seems to me that only a profoundly unhappy person could write this stuff.]
You have proven my entire point. Many LGBT people live profoundly unhappy lives because of the discrimination they face that you have had such a big role in enforcing. When I wrote that, I was profoundly angry, not at my sexuality, but at Burke's attitudes towards it.
Something that actually scandalizes children is the rape and sexual abuse of them, which has been perpetrated, defended and covered up by your church for decades. [A drastic overplaying of that card.]
Notice how there's no rebuttal here, just an accusation of exaggeration. He can't deny it. Apart from accusing me of exaggerating, the only other path I could reasonably see them taking when confronted with this disturbing fact is to start arguing that raping children is good. (God, I hope Bill Donohue catches wind of this.)
Homosexuality is not a mental disorder. [Card. Burke didn't say that it was. This is a straw man.]
I didn't accuse him of doing so. The purpose of saying that was to introduce the next point with a persuasive tone. But he did call it "profoundly disordered and harmful". So you're not exactly embarrassing me here.
The beliefs that the Catholic Church holds about it is. [Try to follow that. "The beliefs" are a "disorder"? Does that even make sense?]
Do you actually have any rebuttal to that, or are you only capable of launching the vague criticism that it doesn't make sense without actually explaining how?
The cure for this disorder is [This is where it gets really nasty.] to challenge them, shun them, shame them, ridicule them, mock them, condemn them, and make anyone who is considering holding them too embarrassed to do so. [You'll have to try harder than this, I'm afraid. This is simply rude slop which only paints the writer as the one with the problem.]
You know, as "really nasty" as it may have been, I have never advocated for you to not be allowed to marry, or buy a cake for your wedding, or have tried to give students the right to bully Catholic students. Your side has done all of those things. So your beliefs deserve exactly the kind of treatment that I previously outlined. And to prove that no, I am not the bad guy in this, you may want to check out Michael Warning, the Catholic blogger who
called me a "sodomite" and a "demented soul" and called for my death, rhetoric that I would never touch with a ten-foot pole.
And I’m tired of having the meaning of tolerance dictated to me by the right. Tolerance means that I don’t ban you from saying what you just said. [This person isn't full of herself. Nope. Not a bit.]
How about actually addressing my point that tolerance does not equal respect?
That’s it. I do not owe your sick beliefs one iota of respect. In my mind, they should be shoved to the absolute fringe of society, away from where any half-decent person can give them any consideration at all. They should have no place in mainstream society, in the same category as racism, misogyny and religious prejudice, [Of which the writer is deeply guilty.] and they deserve nothing but profound disrespect.
Well, first of all, my post attacked homophobia and pedophila, neither of which are specific to the Catholic Church. So I haven't singled out your religion here. I happened to pay a little bit of attention to it because of the religion (Catholicism) of the person I was responding to (Raymond Burke). But even if I had, it's not prejudice to come to the conclusion that a hatred of people for who they are and who they love is abhorrent. It's postjudice. It's making a logical judgement based on the observation that that belief is abhorrent. You probably do the same thing when criticizing what you believe are false religions. And it's certainly not racist to criticize religion. I'm guessing that you don't view Islam as a race.
Now, some overall notes about my post. I stand by everything in it. The reason that I called Burke a "f*ckwit" was because there comes a point where you can't hold back anymore. Eventually, you cannot approach something rationally. Sometimes, swearing is the only way to make it absolutely clear that you will not stand for it. It's the only way to accurate convey the full extent of your emotions. I'm reminded of when Jon Stewart hurled insult after insult against the Republicans for shutting down the government, topping it off with "self-righteous Orwellian zebra queefs", and then screamed "fuck you" at Todd Starnes for mocking the poor people affected by it. No rational argument was present in those insults, nor was one required. It was just sheer condemnation. Sometimes, the only way to make someone realize how terribly wrong they are is to embarrass them and humiliate them.
I can quote Tim Minchin's "The Pope Song" at length here: "If you don't like the swearing that this motherf*cker forced from me, and reckon it shows moral or intellectual paucity, then f*ck you, motherf*cker. This is language one employs when one is f*cking cross about" hatred, bigotry and homophobia. That's the only thing that will make the Catholic Church understand that no, I don't view their homophobia as love or compassion, and that as much as they think that love and compassion requires them to spread the truth, we don't view it like so, and never will. All it serves to do is to make people profoundly unhappy. And if trying to calmly explain that we don't appreciate it doesn't work, then making them feel confronted is sometimes the only deterrent.
Secondly: One of the rallying calls of the Right against us on the Left is that we are hypocritical, because we talk about tolerance for gay people but never show any ourselves. As I've already explained, tolerance does not require respect. I will readily admit to showing profound disrespect for Burke's comments. But that doesn't mean I am intolerant of them. I do not seek to make them illegal. Another alleged hypocrisy is that we say we oppose hate, but then direct it against people we disagree with. I think we on the Left would do ourselves good to elaborate on exactly what we mean by this. We oppose hating people for who we are. Hating someone for who they are is very different to hating someone for hating someone for who they are. I hate homophobia. I hate racism. I hate misogyny. I hate genuine religious intolerance, like the barbarity ISIS shows to Christians and Yazidis. This kind of hate is very different to hating a person because of their race, religion, gender or sexuality. So no, we on the Left do not act inconsistently with our attitudes towards hate.
Thirdly, Zuhlsdorf's thinking exemplifies what I call the doctrine of one-way liberty, which is the one common thread among all religious conservatives. (I investigate it in detail here and here.) This is the thinking that religious conservatives have the right to say anything they want, as well as the right not to face any criticism for it. They interpret their religious freedom to mean that they have the right to prevent others from living as they want. If any of what they dish out is served back at them, however, they cry "persecution". Their belief that they have the right to suppress other's speech and others' lives comes from the moral absolutist belief that they are right because they are following God, and so they have the right, indeed the responsibility, to suppress everyone else. This line of thinking pisses me off to no end. It holds that Burke has the absolute right to say what he said, and that people like me have absolutely no right to respond and defend ourselves. When Phil Robertson maligned an entire group of people, and got criticized, who did the religious right feel sorry for? Him. To prove my consistency on this, I will make clear that I do not view myself as persecuted or my own free speech as under attack because of Zuhlsdorf's criticism. But I didn't start this. Burke did. I would much rather not have to deal with his kind of crap. But if I have to, I will. According to Zuhlsdorf, if Burke maligns an entire group of people, and gets rightfully slammed for it, then he's the victim. (Incidentally, this opens up a can of worms. One of the arguments against hate speech laws is that without them, hate can be expressed, and thus, it can be challenged and shown to be wrong. Well, that argument, which is so often put forward by right-wingers like Zuhlsdorf, only works if we are actually able to challenge that. It's kind of completely inconsistent and inherently contradictory to oppose hate speech laws because not having them allows people to challenge hate speech, and then say that people shouldn't challenge hate speech.)
Okay, that does it. Should you see this post, Mr. Zuhlsdorf, I would like to see your response.