IGF CultureWatch

I'm not staying up nights waiting for the Pope to apologize for his role in covering up - and I'd say offering tacit acceptance of - child rape by Catholic priests. As alcoholics and their loved ones know all too well, you can't offer a sincere apology for something you don't or can't admit is a problem in the first place.

Any apology from the Pope would be putting the cart before the horse. This isn't a tragedy just of human frailty or even of bureaucratic self-preservation and corruption. The original sin here is doctrinal.

The problem isn't celibacy - or only celibacy - it's the Church's cramped and careless view of nature, and specifically sexual nature. The Church trumpets the notion that God has ordained sex only for procreation, and that God's nature is itself being violated by every sexual act with any other intention; and even a correct intention isn't enough if the act isn't within a properly consecrated heterosexual marriage. This is nature writ very small.

In contrast, the demand that priests be lifelong celibates is a decree to those who are merely human to defy nature itself. What was originally crafted as a supreme sacrifice to God has turned into (if it has not always been) the institutional torture of human beings that plays out in these all too predictable everyday tragedies. Yes, some priests don't molest children. Perhaps the Vatican is correct that the vast majority of priests are entirely innocent of the charge.

But if anyone believes any majority of priests is actually celibate, they certainly aren't very vocal about it. A reasoned definition of nature must include human nature. Even without being philosophers, most Catholics have a more coherent view of human nature than their Church does, as they mock the Vatican's mad directive about birth control.

Priests and homosexuals are the only small groups that the Vatican still feels it can impose its disordered view of nature upon. The priests can speak for themselves, as can the remaining homosexuals who continue on as Catholics.

But the Vatican insists on burdening the rest of the world with its error about human nature in its stepped up campaign against gay marriage -- and gay rights more generally -- worldwide. What it cannot enforce upon its own clergy it wishes civil government to order for homosexual citizens - and digs deep into its pockets for the funds. This miserable crusade is the best the Vatican can do to distract from its barely existent threads of credibility on sexual matters.

None of the Church's problems will or can be solved until it is able to acknowledge that it is wrong about sex. Catholics know that, and so do most other religions, even those that agree with the Catholic misunderstanding of the side-issue of homosexuality. Until the Vatican offers up its own confession of error, it will suffer the practical penance of attrition, both among its sexually conflicted priests and its incredulous adherents who will be wise to accept the Pope's between-the-lines advice to take greater care of their children when in the custody of Catholic clergy.

Mark the date March 21, 2010, on your calendar. That's the day the great Obama health-care reform finally passed Congress. It's also the day that any realistic hope of passing significant gay-rights measures at the federal level died until at least 2013.

President Obama showed what a determined Democratic president and large congressional majority could do in the face of unified political opposition, powerful interests standing in the way, and the mobilization of the most energized and angry portion of the American public. When a president cares about something - really cares about it - he uses the bully pulpit in tandem with the political muscle and control of legislative procedure that a congressional majority gives him and he gets it done. That's what presidential leadership looks like.

But the fact is, the Democrats have now spent whatever political capital they had remaining for the passage of unpopular liberal-identified causes. They have called in all their chits. They have pulled out all the stops. Use whatever hackneyed phrase you like, but it all comes to this: They are done.

All of the liberal constituencies that make up the Democratic Party - environmentalists, gun-control enthusiasts, abortion-rights advocates, financial-reform supporters, and yes, gay-rights activists - will now be told that the urgent necessity is to focus on the fall election and that, for now at least, their pet causes must be subordinated to that larger goal. So sorry.

It's not as if gay-rights measures were headed anywhere fast before yesterday. Nobody is talking about repealing any part of the Defense of Marriage Act these days. Remember the president running on that?

Repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" has been put off for at least a year and the White House is in no mood to have it brought up before then. Fat chance getting it done after November.

Even the most innocuous and politically popular measure that even pre-election Obama skeptics like me thought would happen, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, has been delayed time after time. It's not clear it can pass the House with "gender identity" included, which gay groups are once again insisting upon. It's even more doubtful that supporters can round up 60 votes in the Senate for it, with or without protection for transgendered people.

After the November election, all of this legislation now on life support - to the extent it has any life left at all - will have the feeding tubes pulled out and the respirator turned off. The urgent necessity then, we will be told, is re-electing the president.

Then, in 2013, if he is re-elected, and if he has sufficiently large majorities in Congress, we get to start the cycle again.

UPDATE: A reader emphasizes a reasonable point: it's not as if the Democrats were making gay-rights measures a priority before health-reform passed, so what difference has passage made? The difference, I think, is that without this signature accomplishment the president and Congress would feel somewhat greater pressure to do something for various constituencies. Now they can say: "We've accomplished the liberal dream of the past century. Leave us alone until after the next election."

The original House-passed health care bill contained a provision extending to domestic partners the same tax exclusion on the value of employer-provided health benefits that spouses of employees receive. That was a major step forward-the taxes paid by domestic partners but not spouses for "family coverage" are huge.

The Senate dropped the tax-equalizing provision entirely in its version of the health care bill, although at the same time it loosened the language restricting government funding of abortion. Score: One for the pro-choice/abortion lobby, zero for gays.

The new reconciliation bill negotiated by Obama with House and Senate Democratic leaders (intended to be passed after the House's passage of the Senate bill) keeps the Senate's less-restrictive abortion-funding language but doesn't put back in the House's provision equalizing the tax treatment of health benefits for domestic partners. Score: Two for the pro-choice/abortion lobby, zero for gays.

The choice/abortion lobby knows how to play hardball. The LGBT Democratic party fundraisers know how to applaud and swoon.

More. The health care bill says that employers must allow adult children of workers to stay on their parent's plan up to age 26. The reconciliation measure clarifies that this is on a tax-free basis, so employer's don't have to input the value of the benefit as income to be taxed- as they will still have to do for domestic partners. So the Democrats expanded the universe of untaxed benefits for some family members and left us out, again.

If the Human Rights Campaign's claim that it pushed for untaxed DP benefits is true, I can only say that doing so while cheering the president and providing unconditional support to the party is a deeply flawed strategy.

Furthermore. I'm reminded that it's not just same-sex domestic partners that remain excluded; it's same-sex spouses as well! LCR has more, here.

General Petraeus' statement this week on DADT:

"I believe the time has come to consider a change to Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I think it should be done in a thoughtful and deliberative manner that should include the conduct of the review that Secretary Gates has directed that would consider the views in the force on the change of policy. It would include an assessment of the likely effects on recruiting, retention, moral and cohesion and would include an identification of what policies might be needed in the event of a change and recommend those polices as well."

Anti-gay social conservatives will be contacting Moveon.org to see if it has any of those General Betray Us posters left over.

There were many questions and much speculation (particularly in the Comments to my post) about the underlying facts related to the Catholic School in Boulder that expelled the children of a lesbian couple.

That couple has issued a statement anonymously (to protect their children's privacy). It lays out the facts clearly, concisely and with a cool passion I can only admire. If there's any better commentary on this situation, I can't imagine what it would sound like. If this case has caught your attention at all, their words are a must-read.

I titled my post "Suffer the Children," but I am happy to take it back. These children have got a couple of the best parents in the world, and while their church is doing everything it can to undermine these women's amazing parental skills, any suffering the church may be causing to the kids is more than compensated for by God's gift of their moms.

(H/T to Towleroad)

Writing in the Washington Post, Michael Gerson observes:

Just 20 years ago, opposition to abortion and opposition to homosexual rights seemed to overlap entirely. They appeared to be expressions of the same traditionalist moral framework, destined to succeed or fail together as twin pillars of the culture war.

But in the years since, the fortunes of these two social stands have dramatically diverged. A May 2009 Gallup poll found that more Americans, for the first time, describe themselves as "pro-life" than "pro-choice." A February CNN-Time poll found that half of Americans, for the first time, believe that homosexuality is "not a moral issue." This divergence says something about successful social movements in America.

He goes on to note that:

...a generation of thoughtful gay rights advocates, exemplified by Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal, has made the argument for joining traditional institutions instead of smashing them. More radical activists have criticized this approach as assimilationist and bourgeois. But only bourgeois arguments triumph in America. And many have found this more conservative argument for gay rights-encouraging homosexual commitment through traditional institutions-less threatening than moral anarchism.

That speaks to the advancement of gay marriage and other "assimilationist" goals once virulently denounced by "progressive" gays as "rightwing." But going back to Gerson's initial point about abortion, many leading gay political groups still maintain a pro-abortion-on-demand litmus test for candidates they'll endorse, including the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund. This effectively eliminates many Republican gays-and gay-supportive but pro-life Republicans (and a few Democrats)-from ever being backed by these officially nonpartisan LGBT groups.

More. Another sign of the times. Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia, a Republican and long-time social conservative, unexpectedly issued a directive barring discrimination against gay state workers. As the Christian Science Monitor reports:

By making that move, the governor "is now projecting the image of reasonableness and inclusiveness," says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "This is not going over with the hardcore right-wing elements in the party, but it is a necessity for governing and it tells you where our society has gone. McDonnell has recognized a reality."

Small steps forward are still steps forward, and we'll only fully gain equality under the law when anti-gay stances are anathema among both liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans.

Bill O'Reilly is quite right. "Something doesn't sit right here." There's a big chasm between the reasons offered by Sacred Heart of Jesus School for expelling the children of lesbian parents and the consistent application of those reasons to anyone other than homosexuals.

The Catholic school did not remove these children because they were homosexual, but because their parents were. The eager but nonpersuasive priest O'Reilly interviewed gave this woolly but absolute reason for the decision: "a religious institution [must be] able to preserve its identity on fundamental issues."

I certainly couldn't argue with that, nor could O'Reilly. But what is that supposed to mean?

And that's where O'Reilly zeroed in. What about divorced parents? Or adulterous ones? Is the archdiocese as zealous in preserving its identity on those fundamental issues as well?

I can speak to this from personal experience. My parents needed to use contraception for medical reasons after the birth of my younger sister, and were prohibited for many years from attending mass (they would drop my sister and I off at church and pick us up afterward; eventually they found a more understanding priest). My sister is divorced and remarried. I am gay.

My family, then, provides a trifecta of Catholic sins. Yet the church is not engaged in any active campaign to prohibit contraception or divorce; just same-sex marriage. I am not aware of any diocese that is prohibiting the children of divorced and remarried parents, or those who use contraception from enrolling their children in Catholic schools, and the priest here does not even attempt to engage O'Reilly on that issue - he simply reverts, again and again, to the general principle, which he wields to defend the church's fundamental identity as anti-gay but not anti-contraception or divorce.

I wondered whether the church had eased up on contraception and remarriage. Perhaps those are no longer "fundamental" parts of the church's identity. I've seen ads and signs for Catholics Come Home, which is calling ex-Catholics to return to the church, and went to their website.

Both divorce and contraception have their own specific pages, and if the church has changed its position on either since I was a member, you couldn't tell from this site. Divorce is still prohibited; however, it looks like the church may be a bit more generous these days in handing out annulments ("it's not scary") to pave the way for remarriages.

Contraception is still banned, though, as well as any infertility treatments. The page specifically says "these issues are a big deal." So where is the enforcement effort to maintain the church's fundamental identity on contraception? The U.S. Catholic Bishops, themselves, estimate that about 96% of married American Catholic couples use birth control.

The numbers speak for themselves. No rational institution is ever going to try and enforce a rule it knows 96% of its members violate. It's far easier to take a hard line against a group that is smaller - say 3-5%.

This is how the Catholic church has lost its credibility. Its survival takes precedence over its coherence. What moral principle is at stake in bullying a tiny minority when the sins of the majority are accepted in the normal course of business? O'Reilly wants to hold the church to a higher standard, to some level of consistency. But over and over, the Catholic church proves its anti-sexual posturing goes only as far as homosexuality.

Only heterosexual Catholics can call the church on its hypocrisy. The question is why would they? O'Reilly suggests they might do it out of principle. I applaud him on this. That would be a principle worth standing up for.