To Hell with your Cruelty

[elfs]

Christopher Roberts, a Roman Catholic deacon, recently penned an explanation of why it's okay to take gay people at face value as unalterably gay while still condemning them to a life of celibacy, deceit, or general unhappiness. He writes:

Most any result of the Fall — having Down’s Syndrome or Aspergers, having a short temper or being greedy — can be like this. Substitute any disability, sin, proclivity or “thorn in the flesh” in the above paragraph, and you can imagine cases where somebody matured, embraced the necessary asceticism, and turned their weakness or woundedness to spiritual profit.

This is the point where I felt a deep stab of nausea, because I immediately recognized this thought process. Greg Egan, famously neuro-atypical himself, wrote of this passionately when he wrote the novel Distress.

What's the first thing you can do for people you don't agree with? Offer to heal them. Convince them they're sick and then hold out the hope of relief. The power of medical science is about to go hyperbolic, but what is the endpoint of 'health?' Whoever successfully claims the right to define the distinction between health and disease claims the right to define everything.

They get to define what a "baseline" human being is. They get to define what Adam and Eve were like, and decide which deviations from that baseline are worthy of intervention and which ones are not. They impose on those who are "too far" beyond the baseline a special burden: either conform or live with disapproval, excommunication, and banishment.

Roberts may be a priest, but the horror of demanding everyone who's gay or lesbian or in any way not gender-conforming to a life without the unique affection and physical sweetness of sexual skin-on-skin love. The brain is a part of the body and inevitably the physical manifestation, infrastructure, and organizational basis of the mind and the soul, and to assert that a simple variation in the body exiles someone from living a full and joyful life is cruel. Father Roberts is actually trying to refute God by disapproving of some people who God created and in whom the light of God is visible.

Father Roberts' is approving not of a lifestyle, but of a deathstyle. The slow, agonizing death of one's soul when one surrenders to the unending pressure of their society and "maturely embraces the necessary asceticism."

To Hell with that variety of Catholicism.

Comments

[omahas]

On the other hand, by allowing each individual to define what "healthy" is, you get people with serious mental health problems, like anorexics or drug addicts who provide an example of what "healthy" is because they defined it for themselves.

There must be a balance in there somewhere. The problem is that balance is hard to find.

[danceswithlife]

I completely agree and ceased to be a Roman Catholic in 1983. As an FYI, a Catholic deacon is not a priest. He may be a transitional deacon, who is studying for the priesthood, but neither transitional or permanent deacons are priests. Neither type is referred to as "Father." "Deacon" would correct.

But anyone who believes this crap is an ignorant, hurtful, twit who should stop opening his mouth until he accepts some modern theology and scripture studies.