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*insert something about gay marriage here*


Not The Philosopher

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veritasluxmea

Wow, Steve Gershom? I was following his blog years ago, back when he only wrote under a pseudonym. I'm really grateful to him actually, his witness really influential in showing me how one can be faithful to the Church even with personal struggles and problems. It really was the start of God showing me that He actually uses our problems to encounter Him and love us and have a relationship with us, not just love us in spite of them and ignore them or something. I stopped following him after a while because he didn't update his blog to often, glad to hear he's doing well. 

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Not The Philosopher

Wow, Steve Gershom? I was following his blog years ago, back when he only wrote under a pseudonym. I'm really grateful to him actually, his witness really influential in showing me how one can be faithful to the Church even with personal struggles and problems. It really was the start of God showing me that He actually uses our problems to encounter Him and love us and have a relationship with us, not just love us in spite of them and ignore them or something. I stopped following him after a while because he didn't update his blog to often, glad to hear he's doing well. 

Yeah, I read his stuff for a while too until he went on indefinite hiatus.

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franciscanheart

Thanks for posting this. Here are a few pieces that really resonated with me:

 

"For a few reasons. It’s a really complicated topic, and I’m not sure how to distill what is offensive about it. One, is that it’s offensive to be told what you ought to be allowed to call yourself. And in fact, I rarely feel strongly about whether I should use the word gay or not, but the one time I do feel strongly about it is when somebody starts upbraiding me for it. Because it feels incredibly intrusive.

This is a topic that gets very political very fast. It’s the sort of thing where people feel, and I think rightly, that they have been constrained to keep silent for most of their lives – and a lot of people have, whether it’s constrained by actual explicit homophobia among the people that they love and/or are related to, or whether it’s just sort of a general culture understanding that you don’t talk about this sort of thing. So you have a set of people who have felt this way for most of their lives, and then you have people saying ‘oh, well it’s sort of cool now if you talk about that, but just be sure you talk about it in this or that way.’ This is frustrating and comes across as very patronizing because these are people who don’t have any insight into the experience of what it is to be gay telling you what it is or is not ok to talk about, and what it is and is not ok to call yourself."

 

 

"When I told my roommate I was gay, the first thing that he said to me was, ‘do you mean same-sex attracted?’ And that was actually the precisely wrong thing to say, and I don’t hold it against him. (Laughs) But the heart of it is that I was telling him this incredibly personal thing, and he was instructing me in the right way to feel about it, immediately, from the get-go."

 

 

"Now I think that one reason Christians tend to dislike the word ‘gay’ is because if somebody says that they are gay, then they are usually implying that it is an unchangeable aspect of their personality. Whereas the sort of default position among a lot of Christians is that homosexuality is changeable. The unspoken implication is that if you identify yourself as ‘gay,’ then you’re probably not trying hard enough to be straight. And I believe that this why it is so offensive to be told that they shouldn’t use the word gay.  

It might be true that some people can change to some extent, but it’s extremely offensive to assume that the only reason somebody hasn’t changed is because they haven’t tried. And even though very few people would have the chutzpah to make that explicit, I do believe that that’s the belief that’s behind it."

 

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