It will be no surprise that the Catholic church is plunged deep into yet another scandal involving men with objectively disordered sexual desires.
One of the “explainers” of this scandal is priest Father James Martin. He has made it his mission to explain how a priest’s objectively disordered sexual desires do not influence his thinking or behavior in any way. He says the thoughts and actions of people with disordered desires are no different in general from other people.
His mission is an immediate failure because it begins with a contradictory premise. His theory is that a man’s thoughts do not matter to how the man acts. If that is so, then thoughts do not matter. Nobody believes that. How much a man’s propensity to disordered sex influences him depends, of course, on the man. That it does not influence his behavior in any way is false.
Improper Definitions
Martin quoted in a tweet “A witch-hunt mentality demonizes the vast majority of celibate gay men who are faithful to their vows, serve the church, and are as horrified as anyone at the abuses committed.”
Leave aside that it is indeed the Church’s job to engage in witch hunts, in the sense that witchcraft and Christianity are not compatible. And forget the (common) misuse of “celibate”, which merely means “bachelor.” (In French, bachelor is célibataire.) The word wanted was “chaste”, meaning a person not acting on objectively disordered sexual desires.
Now just what is a “chaste gay man”? A man with objectively disordered sexual desires. A man who is tempted to immoral (simulated) sex with another male. Sodomy is a sin that cries out to Heaven for vengeance, or so the Church has always taught. A chaste gay man is thus one who walks on the precipice of Hell.
But that’s too simple a definition. It is incomplete. Asking one word—gay—to hold the weight for all the myriad kinds of non-procreative desires men have is asking too much.
A Queer Theory
All know the acronym cum phrase “LGBT” is shorthand for an ever-expanding list of kinds of sexual desire. We began with LGBT and we are now at LGBTQWERTY, or whatever. I used to be derisive of lists like that, but I now believe this is the one thing sexual desire ideologues get right.
It really is true that sexual desire is broad, much broader than we used to understand. A man may desire sex, or more usually simulated sex, with himself, with another man, with a child, with a couch on the side of a road (a real case), with a goat, with another man’s wife, with a dead body, with those missing limbs because they are missing limbs, with only females of certain races, with men who pretend to be women, and on and on and on.
And on…until you click this to read the rest…
The Church instead needs to return to a proper understanding of the nature of man.
Update Sander below makes a good but wrong point. We know it is the nature of man to have two legs. Science would see a difference between whole men and those with legs blown off. This scientific observation does not change the nature of man to have two legs. And it still requires two legs to (say) run a race.