Michael McGough in today’s LA Times reminds us that virulently anti-gay Republican Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has a son, Paul, who’s a priest, and works for an organization that pretends it can “pray away the gay.”
The Catholic group, Courage, is one of various “gay cure” who peddle the lie that with a little bit of love, and manliness, you too can learn to have sex with women, or something.
Here’s the portion of the LA Times story that covers Paul Scalia:
The notion that there are no homosexual people, just homosexual acts, is an ancient one. Until recently it was the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church. Scalia’s son Paul, a Catholic priest who has served as chaplain to Courage – “a spiritual support group to help those with same-sex attractions live chaste lives” – continues to resist the idea of a gay identity. He has written: “We must always distinguish the person from the attractions. Most errors in this area come from the reduction of the person to the attractions: to say, ‘A person who has homosexual attractions must be homosexual.’ This reduces the human person to the sum total of his sexual inclinations.”
In a 2005 article in the magazine First Things, Paul Scalia warned against the labeling of high school students as “gay” and even took the Vatican to task for using the term “homosexual person,” which, the younger Scalia said, “suggests that homosexual inclinations somehow determine, which is to say confine, a person’s identity.” Of course, this is a straw man; psychologists and other who speak of a gay identity don’t argue that “gay” is an exhaustive description of an individual’s personality traits, only that there is more to being gay or lesbian than participation in sexual acts.
Someone sounds awfully worried about this notion of being defined by one’s “homosexual inclinations.”
I’ve found, over the years, that a lot of people who don’t think “homosexuals” exist, and who recoil at the notion that “a person who has homosexual attractions must be homosexual,” tend to actually be gay themselves. Or bisexual.
There’s a reason people on the anti-gay right think being gay is like alcoholism, or that it’s described as an “urge” rather than an orientation, because for many of them I wonder if it isn’t an urge that pulls at them like alcohol pulls at an alcoholic. It’s not something theoretical – it’s something they’re experience directly, and they loathe.
I’m not saying that Antonin Scalia’s son Paul is gay. I’m saying that generically, over the years, when I’ve heard people talk this way – people who seem fixated on “homosexual inclinations” and not being defined as “gay” simply because you desperately want to have sex with men – it’s always made me wonder if they’re not gay themselves, and if that’s not why they’re so focused on “evil” uncontrollable urges.
It also would explain why their hypothetical fathers so clearly have issues.
I have to dig a bit more into Scalia, the son’s, crazy article linked from the LA Times piece. In the other piece, Scalia rails against the notion of calling teenagers “gay” or “bi” or “trans”:
Of course, the phrases are tempting because of their convenience and efficiency. They are common, close at hand, and make quick work of a difficult issue. But they also identify an individual person with his homosexual inclinations. They presume that a person is his inclinations or attractions; he is a “gay” or is a “homosexual.” At some point adults have to admit that a fifteen-year-old who claims to be “a questioning transgendered bisexual” is really just confused.
Yeah, because what young guy hasn’t thought that maybe he was really a girl? Is Scalia out of his mind? Most straight kids don’t think they’re gay. And most non-trans kids don’t question if they’re trans. It’s something that crosses your mind because something is already there, something is going on, something that most other kids aren’t experiencing, certainly not to the degree you are.
Calling it “confused” is, well, confused. And yet again, makes me wonder more about the person making the allegation than about the kids themselves.
And for extra shi*s and giggles, here’s a video of a Catholic priest rapping about how the Catholic church still loves you, even though you’re going to hell. It’s reportedly produced by Courage, the anti-gay Catholic cure group that Scalia belongs to. Just to give you a sense of what, and who, we’re dealing with here:
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