HuffPo worthy Paige Lavender --is that a real name?-- took time out from her busy schedule to chastise two Republican (gee, really?) lawmakers for "questionable" and "insensitive" tweets about the Boston Marathon explosions. Mustn't speak ill of (Muslim and immigrant) murderers. I am so glad that our Liberal masters care that (certain) AmeRicans restrain their politically incorrect language under stress.
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Another HuffPo article describes the brothers in detail...Chechen Muslims...the brothers showing both anti-American and aggressively Islamic attitudes about a variety of things...and the describes their actions as "an enigma."
3 comments:
Dear Ex,
Since finding your blog, and reading your post about leaving denominations you can't reconcile with, I have come to the conclusion that my time in the Catholic Church may be at an end. I realized that I had to convince myself of the teachings on homosexuality, and that there is scant regard among "good" Catholics for the Catechism's call to "compassion and respect." The arguments about natural complementarity, while certainly having truth, are beginning to sound shrill and hollow in their implicit cries of "procreation only."
I cannot accept that anything that can make you put somebody else's life before your own is sin. I cannot accept that seeing the beauty in members of my own gender, reveling in their maleness, being able to say "it is good," and wishing for another member of my own gender to do the same to me is wrong. I cannot accept that these acts are always born of selfishness, that two men can only take from each other, not give themselves to each other.
Certainly, these acts can be born of selfishness, as some say, but are they always? Just as the marital act, which is proclaimed as holy and unselfish, can be greedy and foul, does it not follow that the homosexual act, which is proclaimed as flawed and pointless, can be beautiful and fulfilling?
They say that pointing out homosexuality's absence from the Gospels is childish, but hasn't Scripture been corrupted before? Didn't Luther add "faith alone" to justify his heresy? If God would never allow His word to be distorted, then how did this occur?
I am now in a world that I know nothing of. I have left the harbor I have floated in all my life, and have put out into the open sea. To quote the apocryphal Diet of Worms, here I make my stand. I can do no other. If I am wrong, God be merciful and grant me the grace to repent, I only did what I thought was right.
Have mercy on us all, Lord.
-Sean
Dear Sean,
Much of what you write is painfully and sadly familiar. While there are gay Catholics who can maintain their belonging to the Church as well as their sexual sense of self (theologian --and fellow ex-Dominican) James Alison, for instance), people like me, and now you it seems, cannot make ourselves believe that they are compatible.
And even if there is truth in that, there is also loss. As you say, "I have left the harbor I have floated in all my life, and have put out into the open sea." I think I know what that's like.
I wish you well.
-Ex
Dear Ex,
Thank you for the support. This, as of yet, a private apostasy. Fortunately, Jack Donovan's musings on the pointlessness of coming out has convinced me that these details need not be divulged. It's my life, why burden people I care about with unnecessary pain?
While this is a sad period in my life, I feel oddly at peace. The pain and tension I felt was attached to my desire to be a good Catholic, and realizing I couldn't do that. I am trying to work out being Christian without a parish, but I will never stoop to the level of Protestant. Talk about pearls before swine! :)
Ironically, my last masses were a Ukrainian Divine Liturgy on Palm Sunday and Easter Vigil. After the Divine Liturgy, we were invited to kiss a cross the priest was using and be anointed. I guess it was a kiss goodbye, if you will. And after the Vigil, I told my uncle (the celebrant!) that seeing people entering the Church even after everything that has happened in the past year gave me hope for her survival.
God must have a sense of humor.
-Sean
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