Homosexuality – Mama Needs Coffee

Culture of Death, current events, Evangelization, Homosexuality, Parenting

A transitioning culture

November 26, 2018

It started out as a little nugget of an idea, born from a series of quiet alarms going off in my head. Little things at first: a questionable book about penguins here, a little boy in a tutu, lipstick, and sparkly high heels at the library there, innocent encounters with my own kids where I’d gently redirect their wishes to marry their father, their same sex sibling, the family cat, batman, etc. to the reality of love and the gift of marriage and the truth which God has written into our hearts in creating us to – and for – love.

I remember vividly one such incident, explaining to my then two-year-old son that he can’t marry daddy or his big brother when he grows up because boys marry girls – if marriage is indeed the vocation they are called to – and glancing furtively over my shoulder to see if anyone at the neighborhood pool had overheard my bigoted explanation. Also, incest is not culturally appropriate. Yet.

Insanity, thy name is trying to parent in 2018.

That I, a seasoned mother of 5 and no stranger to the weirdness that is the little kid stage, would give pause to wonder – and worry – whether another parent might overhear me in a conversation with my toddler about what marriage is, is ludicrous. Should I pause with the same social trepidation when explaining to him that Batman isn’t real? That he can’t become a dog when he grows up? That he can’t marry his own sister, either?

We have become positively unhinged in our efforts to embrace anything – and everything – in the name of diversity. “Diversity month!” our local library cheerily announced on rainbow colored display boards, featuring pictures of, among other personalities, Mother Teresa, a kid in a wheelchair, a black female scientist, and a drag queen. Because the unifying factor in each of these unrepeatable images of God is…what, exactly? Since when is having a differently abled body or a call to serve Christ in the distressing disguise of the poor or being a woman of color advancing in the sciences on par with a man dressing in women’s clothing?

We are being slowly and steadily numbed to the oddness and the illness that is gender confusion. In the name of tolerance and marching under the banner of progress, we are being fed a diet of media and public policy proclaiming the end of the gender binary.

Progress! Select male, female, or other. Write in your own answer, depending upon what suits you. Encourage your children to think outside the biological box if they’d rather play with dolls and wear dresses, or prefer kicking a soccer ball to ballet lessons. Your penis is incidental, son. Your breasts are an aftermarket upgrade that we can easily have removed or modified to suit your taste, darling.

A human being is, after all, a blank slate, a tableau rosa upon which we may in this brave new world inscribe an identity of our own design. In this ultimate expression of materialism, the body itself becomes mere matter to be manipulated at will, a physical apparatus to express the inner self.

And it’s so close to true. It’s almost reality. Satan is never far from the truth. Indeed, his trademark is to manipulate and twist and tweak until it looks pretty darn close to the real thing.

A body is, after all, the incarnate expression of the person. Jesus Christ took upon Himself a human body in order to mediate the salvific love of the Father to fallen humankind. Christ’s body is an outward sign, a physical image of a spiritual reality. God became man and dwelt among us as a Son, a brother, a man. But His body was not insignificant to His incarnation; indeed was essential to the Incarnation.

Materialism would have us be masters of our own reality, manipulating the flesh at will like one more technology to be mastered. Bodies are reduced, in this vision, to incidental flesh-prisons that propel us through our earthly existence.

If my body has no meaning, no intelligent design, contains no intrinsic value endowed by its Designer, then why should I not manipulate it as I see fit?

There are real people who really do suffer from gender dysphoria. And some people are born with genetic deformities that render their secondary sex features unintelligible. Disease and dysfunction plague us on our earthly journey, reminding us that this side of eternity will always fall short. That this world is not, ultimately, our home.

But because a thing such as blindness exists does not justify us in gouging out our own eyes.

We are a culture infatuated with progress. We celebrate the destruction and reconfiguration of every cultural edifice, every possible human institution, figuring that if it has always been done one way, a new way is surely better. But the human person is not an iPhone. We shouldn’t approach our bodies as material to be upgraded and adapted to suit the latest trends. We have a Creator, and His design is intelligent, not incidental. When we forget that we were created by a loving God, that we were made for love and by love, then we begin to lose our bearings in reality.

And that is where our culture sits, in the West, in the year of Our Lord 2018.

We have forgotten who we are, and Whose.

If we are random creations of a chaotic universe, what does it matter if we want to mold and sculpt and reject and revise any part of our material selves? If life is meaningless and random, and humanity a stroke of dumb biologic luck, what harm in a little tinkering?

But we know better than this, as Christians. We know that we are not the random offspring of an impersonal universe, balls of genetic material that happened to lurch out of a primordial sludge at the right moment.

We are the willed, known, and loved children of a loving Father. Created to be sons and daughters who, in our sexual diversity as male and female, uniquely communicate some aspect of God’s nature to the world.

God is glorified in my femininity as woman who seeks justice and does not flinch from confrontation. These historically “masculine” characteristics do not suggest that I am a man trapped in a woman’s body, but that history has been incomplete in portraying the full human diversity exemplified by members of both sexes, as anyone with a fleeting understanding of how history came to be will concede.

Was Joan of Arc actually a trans man who donned armor and led armies into battle? I’m sure there are revisionist “gender theory” experts out there who would say so. In an ironic attempt to foster diversity, our culture ends up reinforcing the most stereotypical aspects of both sexes. Sensitive boys who prefer quiet activities and shun athletics might be gay, or might actually be in the wrong body altogether!

Or they might just be…sensitive boys. Men who have a broader spectrum of emotional awareness than the average male. Still fully male, and still uniquely and intelligently designed.

Rather than slavishly conforming to the narrow 2018 view of what constitutes our maleness and femaleness, we ought to push back and boldly proclaim the truth. That we are wonderfully made, and utterly unique. That each of us are personally willed, known, and loved by God. And that we live in a fallen, broken world that has been redeemed by Him and continues to be redeemed as we conform more and more to His nature, not to this present world.

If my 3-year-old unearths a stack of five (5!) copies of “I am Jazz” at the local library, you can bet those puppies are going straight to the bottom of the circular file. Because yes, I am intolerant of children being indoctrinated by a culture that would have them at odds with their very selves, questioning the goodness and the intention of their own bodies. I am bigoted against sin, which eats away at the human heart and separates us from the One who made our hearts. And I am positively rigid that children not be abused by their own parents, even at the expense of their very pressing wants and needs. My child believes that he can fly, use matches, and ride in the front seat of the car. I resist him on all fronts and continue to mentor him in reality; I don’t surrender to his capricious demands because he persists in them.

It’s not a matter of tolerance to allow poison in our children’s diets, no matter if the clamoring mob decides that arsenic is the new kale. We are called to fight for our children and to fight against the rulers and principalities of this world, those who seek to enslave and to destroy, to disfigure in any possible way the living image of God.

All that is necessary for this evil to continue to flourish is for good men and women to do nothing, to continue to turn away in discomfort, to keep the cable subscription or the streaming service with all the questionable content, to push the book back on the shelf and say nothing, to shrug our metaphorical shoulders, rationalizing “you can’t fight progress.”

Walking the wrong way into oncoming traffic isn’t progress. And sitting back and allowing the culture to continue plunging, unchecked, into debauchery and delusion is no progress either.

The time for going along to get along is long passed. If your kids are in public school, you can guarantee they’re getting schooled in the finer points of transgenderism on a regular basis.

The books that so disturb me when I encounter them in the library? They’re being actively circulated into school libraries and curriculums by forces with a vested interest in communicating with your children early and often, encouraging them to question reality and undermining their philosophical foundations. It is worth asking the question, why are some adults so invested in encouraging children to question their identities?

And why are adults who know better not rising up, en masse, to resist the insanity?

Because we have been steadily numbed to the onslaught of culture “progress” made in the past decade. Because what was unthinkable and illogical for all of human history has suddenly become possible and is therefore passably normal in 2018.

Human nature has not changed. God’s design for the human person has not altered. What was good in the beginning – male and female, He created them – is still good, even now.

And if reality appears to be moving away from that fixed point of reference, it bears asking, are we moving in the right direction? Not all movement is progress, after all.

(Thoughtful discussion and civil comments welcome on social media, though I won’t be there to read them)

abuse, current events, Homosexuality, Living Humanae Vitae, Pope Francis, prayer, Rome, scandal, Sex, sin

Disillusionment with the Church

November 12, 2018

Remember believing in Santa? Shhhh, my kids still do. Maybe that’s a bad analogy. Maybe you never believed in Santa. What about this: maybe you believed your mom or your dad to be invincible. Kind of superhuman or untouchable. And then you weathered your first big blow up between parents and an adult child. Or a shocking cancer diagnosis or the revelation of some kind of massive failing. I’m reaching for that feeling of deflation and just raw sorrow, of sort of coming unmoored and feeling unrooted. That has been the past 5 months for me, as a Catholic laywoman.

The Church whom I trusted implicitly, all my life, has broken my heart. Every morning there is a new story about some scandal, a message in my inbox about a parish whose pastor went on “administrative leave,” was arrested following – or at least incriminated by – some new allegation come to light.

The weight of it has ceased being a conscious burden; now it just feels like a sort of lingering heaviness, not unlike the way a clinical depression blurs the edges of reality and tamps down the colors and delights of daily living. I don’t mean exactly that I feel depressed about the Church, but that my perception of the Church has been shattered.

Even writing “the Church,” I’m not longer entirely sure what I mean. Do I mean the Roman curia? The Pope? The local bishop, who is technically my reference point for the authority of the hierarchy? Do I mean the parish down the hill where we worship? Our wonderful priests there who hear hundreds of confessions a week?

In many ways living here in Denver with such a vibrant Catholic community we have been isolated from much of the pain and scandal on an immediate level. In another sense, this makes things very strange when I feel “safe” in my own parish but feel utterly ill at ease in “the Church” at large. The Universal Church.

Our time in Rome this Fall, however beautiful, was also painful. Walking on a tour through the Vatican gardens, for example – what should have been a thrilling opportunity – was marked with sadness. “Here is the monastery where Pope Benedict retired to. There is the place where he used to like to pray, when he was more mobile.” My heart clenched painfully as I wondered, not for the first time, why God has allowed this season in the Church to come to be.

Why are we here? What does God, in His Providence, plan to accomplish with this wreckage and chaos?

And what can I possibly do, a mom with five kids, a little bit of internet real estate, no theology degree and no real position of influence within the Church?

Pray, obviously, which I have been. But I want to be transparent with you guys about how much I’m struggling with this. Every other week or so I try to make it to confession (see above: amazing parish) and one of my predictable recurring sins right now is one against charity towards the Holy Father, towards the bishops.

My choleric and justice-oriented mind does not comprehend that while I have been hustling and doing my level best to hold up my end of the bargain with God (and failing over and over and over again, naturally, bc sinner) there have been predatory priests preying on children. Homosexual bishops grooming and raping seminarians. Company men more concerned with promotions than with the people whose souls they signed up to shepherd. (And yes, I know there are good priests. And mediocre priests. And priests who are struggling manfully with heavy habitual sins. These aren’t the guys I’m thinking about.)

Priests hearing the confessions of ordinary Catholics who come to the sacrament of absolution struggling to live chastely, who are wrestling with any kind of addiction, who are trying to get their temper, their lust, their appetite for whatever in check; who are failing, crying out to the Lord for mercy, asking for absolution, who are coming back again and again and swimming upstream in this miserable culture of death, priests who meet up with an illicit lover later that same night, who shuffle an abusive priest to another assignment, who turn a blind eye to the failings of their brother bishops and keep on keeping on…

It boggles the mind.

And so while the surprise has abated and the rage has cooled, the lethargic sorrow remains. I thought I knew what the Church was. I never believed the clergy to be above reproach or without sin, but it didn’t occur to me that there would be priests leading double lives. Why not? I don’t know, I guess I’m an idiot? An idealist?

I don’t have a good wrap up. And it’s not like I’m over here wallowing in sorrow and questioning the existence of God or anything. But I am wrestling with what it means to be Catholic right now. Not because I would ever walk away, but because I am so angry that none of these guys did.

I know so many good priests. Good bishops too. As a parent, this is probably the most frustrating part of the whole crisis: are my children safe in the Church? Can we trust the men who we do know and love, going forward? I trust our bishop, and our parish priests. I love and respect and believe the religious community who we share so much of our lives with. Is a personal relationship going to be the necessary litmus going forward? Trust but verify?

I hate this place for our family. And I hate it for our Church, even more. There is no such thing as a personal sin. All sin is corporate. And everything that is done in the darkness will be, eventually, revealed in the light.

(p.s. This was written last Friday. How much more appropriate it seems today.)

Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, Homosexuality, Sex, sin, Suffering

When deferred maintenance hits the fan

August 1, 2018

Yesterday our sewer main backed up. I happened upon the grisly scene when I entered the basement. I stood transfixed, an overflowing basket of laundry on my hip and a stench in my nose. At first I didn’t realize what I was looking at. I got angry, my mind racing to assign blame to the horror I was beholding.

“JOHN PAUL!” I bellowed up the stairs, certain that the mess was a case of litter-box cleaning gone hideously awry.

Are my kids ever going to be old enough to be responsible for their own chores? Why would he dump the litter box on the ground down here? Why is it wet? Oh…

Once I realized that it was raw sewage we were dealing with, my anger melted away. First into disbelief and then to shame for having yelled at my poor 6-year-old, and finally to horror as I realized that I was the grown-up who was going to have to deal with this.

“Sorry buddy,” I called up the stairs to the wrongly accused, “there’s something wrong with the pipes. Tell everyone to go into the backyard until I figure this out.”

The rest of the day passed in a blur of phone calls and sewer technicians tromping in and out of the basement and the sound of many toilets being flushed over and over again. Nearly 8 hours and $500 dollars later I was crouched down scrubbing away at the horrific aftermath (using the cat’s litter scoop, appropriately enough) and willing myself not to vomit and add to my misery.

Dave and I laughed about the entire situation over drinks later that night, shaking our heads in regret that we had neglected to take immediate action on the results of the pipe inspection we’d had performed last August before we’d closed on the house. A main-line cleanout must have fallen to the bottom of our laundry list of things needing immediate attention once we moved in. So while we were tearing up dirty carpet and peeling back stained wood paneling, our pipes, the very guts of our home, were continuing to deteriorate. Every month that went by where we paid attention to some cosmetic detail rather than addressing a crucial functional problem, we were skating by on borrowed time.

In our defense, the report really did slip our minds. Or at least, it slipped my mind. I was so focused on making our house beautiful that I was not super concerned with anything of a more practical nature. When I did think of the less glamorous stuff that needed to happen – installing a radon system in the basement, having the asbestos popcorn removed from the ceilings, etc – I would brush it aside, telling myself we’d take care of it “someday.”

Meanwhile, it was really important that we install hardwood floors in our dining room. We scrimped and saved and stretched uncomfortably far to make it happen, and I told myself it was essential because the kids would spill food there! It had to be a hard surface! We didn’t want to waste money installing an inferior product that we’d just be updating one day anyway…

So we did it, and our house looked better and better. At least on the surface.

The thing with deferred maintenance is that it usually ends up costing you more, in the long run. Sure, you don’t have to take that initial painful hit by dealing with the problem when it first presents, but as the rot progresses, it often does more damage than even the initial discovery would have yielded. The $100 we “saved” by postponing a main line cleaning ballooned into a $500 emergency situation, draining our resources and making a disgusting mess that affected the entire family.

The Church finds herself in a similar situation today. Deferred maintenance which allowed evil to take hold. Rot spreading silently through the ranks, corrupting and defiling when it should have been swiftly and relentlessly exposed to the light. Horrific crimes plowed under and buried while the facade remained polished, presenting an attractive – and unrealistic – image to the outside.

Shame on Dave and I, as parents, for not taking action sooner and making sure our house was well maintained, safe, and reliable. Thankfully, our failure to act will yield nothing more harmful than some traumatic memories of mommy yelling unrepeatable words and dry heaving while carrying trash bags to and from the basement.

The damage the Church is suffering now, and will continue to suffer in the months and years to come, will be far worse.

I am horrified, as a Catholic, by the stories that are coming to light because of the now-Archbishop McCarrick situation. (Click here for a balanced assessment of the issue if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

I am horrified as a mother.

I am horrified as a mother of sons.

I am horrified as a friend to good and holy priests, and as a Catholic under the jurisdiction of a good and holy bishop.

People will leave over this. People will walk away from Christ, who has the words of eternal life, because of the failure of some of His shepherds. People walked in Judas’ time, and they will walk in Theodore’s time, and woe to those who cause these little ones to suffer. It would be better for them to be cast into the sea with a heavy millstone around their necks than to cause that suffering.

We should never defer the maintenance. Bring it out into the light, all of it. Let us once and for all drag everything out into the light and put our houses in order. That goes for the clergy as well as the laity. The pornography. The child pornography. The homosexual behavior. The pedophila. The copies of 50 Shades of Grey and the innocent online affairs that “don’t hurt anyone,” really.

There is no such thing as a private sin. There is no injury done to the Body of Christ that does not affect all of its members.

Lord, have mercy. Help us get our house in order. No matter what the cost.

About Me, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Homosexuality

Love me enough not to leave me there

June 26, 2017

My college years were wild. They could have been worse, but they could also have been a whole lot tamer, which is always thrown into stark relief when I swap stories with my FUS pedigreed husband and fellow alums. You see, I did 4 years at CU Boulder before I transferred to Steubenville, so I had a sort of best (and worst) of both worlds college experience. Drinking, drug use, promiscuity, partying that bled into academic pursuits and, kind of, um, annihilated them? Check. And then. Festivals of Praise? Homeless ministry? Serving with the CFRs in the Bronx and praying at the abortion clinic in Pittsburgh? Also check.

It was a wild 5 years of undergrad, spanning a diverse and confusing range of experiences and friendships. And while I used to wish I could go back and erase certain chapters (especially from my junior and senior years at Boulder) I have become acutely aware that these encounters shaped me, too, for better and for worse, and that there are specific parts of my story that are relevant to other people I encounter precisely because they are relatable. I have no hope of ever ending up a St. Therese or a St. Dominic Savio. Best I can hope for is St. Augustine or St. Francis Xavier. (ha!) A little world weary, and a little too familiar with precisely what it is “the world” is struggling with.

I had some friends who were also Catholic or some other Christian denomination during my darker years, and many of them were lovely people who I had fun with. But they didn’t call me on. They saw no tension between the faith I professed on paper and the life I was living in reality. I was fun, and besides, we were living similar variations of the same story. We justified each other’s crap, to put it very mildly, and we demanded little from our relationships with one another beyond exhilarating company and tag teamed bar tabs.

There were a few other friendships, too. Not close ones, more acquaintances, technically. But these handful of beacons stood out in a time of seemingly impenetrable darkness and remain in my memory, even now, 15 years removed from the experience, shining monuments of hope and encounter in a dark and confused period of my young adulthood. The FOCUS missionary who called me every month to invite me to Bible study. Who still smiled and made conversation when we crossed paths on campus, even as I rejected invitation after invitation. Who stopped to chat in the street on the morning of her engagement, effusive with joy, dropping the yet unheard phrase “Theology of the Body” like an explosion into my curious brain. The kindly RA who lived down the hall and who would always wave to me at Mass the weekends that I made it there. The welcoming and non judgmental regular patrons of the Catholic student center who moved aside and let me awkwardly crash their (sober. astonishing to me at the time) movie nights, making room on the ratty couches for a cynical party girl who’d sworn off the bar scene for a month and found herself with a wiiiide open social calendar.

These were the people who invited me to consider that there was perhaps another way to live. These were the people who gently, mercifully called me to something more. They didn’t shout me down for the way I’d been living. They just opened the door and invited me in.

I think this method of genuine encounter is what is so desperately missing in the world. The Jesus eating with tax collectors and chatting with prostitutes mode of being. We lose sight of the necessity to encounter the other where they truly are and to then invite them into something more. To love them enough not to leave them there. It’s so easy to focus excessively on the feel good “I accept you how you are” and to drop the “and I love you enough to tell you the truth” ball. It’s equally tempting to forgo the acceptance/meeting phase and jump straight to Defcon “this is why you’re dead wrong.”

Neither way is Biblical. Jesus encounters and calls to conversion. He never separates the two. We live in a culture obsessed with being “tolerant” and “openminded.” But my tolerant friends were content to leave me paralyzed, on my mat, not costing them anything except maybe another round of Jaegerbombs. And in reality, maybe they didn’t – or couldn’t – realize how sick I was. How sick we all were. I was a stock character in their own dramas, as they were in mine. We were all of us hurting, medicating away some pain, covering up some insecurity or wound with a mode of being that allowed for numbness and oblivion.

The second kind of friends were the full package variety. They encountered and called on. They lifted up my mat. They opened their doors and offered a seat at their tables and looked me in the eye and said, in so many words, “neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more.”

This is what real acceptance looks like. Not empty platitudes and affected camaraderie, but authentic, intimate encounter and acceptance. Something that cost us each something. It cost me my pride and my lifestyle. And it cost them their comfortable existence and their hospitality.

And we each gained immeasurably more than we could have hoped for.

But not finding any way to bring him in because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him down through the tiles with his stretcher, into the middle of the crowd, in front of Jesus. Luke 5:19

I read this powerful testimony from a small group of friends who attended San Francisco’s gay pride event over the weekend and practiced an authentic and humble ministry of encounter there, meeting, welcoming, not judging … and being willing to lift the mat. Worth the click.

Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Homosexuality, JPII, mental health, Parenting, relativism, Theology of the Body

The beauty of gender: our differences aren’t scary, they’re beautiful (and essential)

April 7, 2017

Male and female created he them; and blessed them… – Genesis 5:2

This morning I was strolling a leisurely stroll on the treadmill and enjoying 45 minutes of toddler downtime (thanks, Brandy in kids club) when my eyes drifted to the newsfeed on the bottom of my tv screen where a “breaking news” alert was scrolling.

What constitutes breaking news in 2017? That’s a loaded question. But for this local ABC affiliate station, the answer was “Australia considering banning fairy tales from schools.” I rolled my eyes into my frontal lobe because probably it was offensive to real witches and living fairy godmothers, all that questionable detail Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, etc. go into about their lives and various motivations and ways of being.

But, no.

Apparently, it’s because fairy tales “encourage outdated gender norms” and that children “as young as four” are reportedly manifesting “gender biasing behaviors” in their play and make believe.

(Note: there are real, medical, biological examples of transgendered individuals born with chromosomal abnormalities and ambiguous genitalia. These are real medical conditions from which real people suffer and about which hard decisions and choices have to be made by doctors, parents, and the individuals themselves. What we’re talking about here today, however, is the growing cultural infatuation with what I’ll call “transgenderism by choice,” or the belief that gender is utterly divorced from biological sexual characteristics by desire, not by any design flaw, and that you could possibly have been born with ovaries and a uterus but a brain that “feels” male, and so you choose to discard – whether surgically or behaviorally – the “non-conforming” female part of your identity.

This is a point of real confusion and pain for a lot of people, and the present cultural climate of strangling political correctness makes civil discussion about any kind of gender dysphoria all but impossible. But we must persist for the sake of real human souls. We cannot shrink away from discussing what is fast becoming the defining issue of our age. End disclaimer).

First of all, kids as young as four display “gender biasing behaviors” because children as young as age four do, in fact, have genders.

Fetuses, it turns out, also have genders. Pull up a Youtube video of balloons popping out of giant cardboard boxes and you’ll see this is not a recent discovery. And gender – in parlance common up until just a few short years ago – was basically interchangeable with “sex” – and nobody was going to bat an eye or shred an admission form over it.

Children, like the rest of us, are male or female, and as such, they typically exhibit a few characteristic (but not exclusive) behaviors common to their gender. Boys, for example, as anyone who has ever birthed, raised, or even tangentially known one, are loud and they are intensely physical. Not all boys and not all the time, but overall, there is a certain exuberance that belongs to the male sex that is right and beautiful.

These boys will become men who lend their strong voices to the pursuit of truth and goodness. They will speak up for what is right, and they will take action to defy evil when they see it. Because that is what men are designed to do. Men are action-takers and pursuers of truth by nature. They image God in their strength, both physical and moral. And that is beautiful. (And does not, incidentally, exclude women from being action takers and pursuers of truth.)

So, about those differences. Let’s get into some generalizations here, because there are common features and universal truths that do, in fact, hold water. Not everything that we have collectively amassed over the course of human history needs to be jettisoned just because Mark Zuckerberg has a new global initiative of the month.

Ladies first. Girls are tender. Not all girls and certainly not all the time, but as a general rule, the female sex is superior at feeling and expressing feelings. Emotionally connected and deeply expressive, women possess a relational capacity that is unmatched in men. My daughter can yell down the entire minivan full of warring brothers and silence us all with a shriek of power, but she wears her heart on the outside, feeling the world deeply, and encountering things with her entire being.

This does not make her weak. (And this is not to say that my husband is not tender. That my boys do not feel sorrow for having hurt or disappointed someone, or shed tears of pain.)

Far from it, her depth of feeling and her capacity for emotion render her a force to be reckoned with beyond anything I have yet experienced in my 3 sons. We live in an era which has been captivated by the lie that the heart is somehow disconnected from and inferior to the mind. And that is a lie. The heart is essential. It is where we encounter God in His Holy Spirit, where we give and receive love. The heart is the source of human life, and it is from our hearts that our relationships with one another and with God take their roots. In a culture awash in isolation and alienation, between spouses and families and even within our very selves, it is evident that the price of disregarding and dismissing the heart is deadly high.

And then there are boys. Boys who will grow up to be strong men, and who desperately need to be affirmed in their abilities. They long for the affirmation – especially and essentially from their fathers – that they have what it takes.

A boy who is not mentored into manhood in this way will struggle in his adult life with feelings of unworthiness and shame. A man has to know that he can do it, that he has what it takes, and that there are people – his mom and dad first and foremost – who are cheering him on because they believe he can.

A boy who is denied these opportunities to prove himself is at risk of becoming a man who struggles with his identity and with his understanding of self worth.

For some boys this might look like hunting and fishing trips. Camping and using pocket knives and jumping off of boulders and killing it on the soccer field and generally having the experience of doing the hard thing and coming through the other side with the knowledge that he has what it takes, that he is enough, that he is capable of leading, of providing, of greatness.

This has less to do with being out in the great outdoors, being naturally athletic, or being any particular good shot with a bow and arrow, but it has everything to do with testing himself against some opponent, whether it be the elements, an animal, or even his peers, and discovering for himself that yes, he measures up. He does not fall short.

This does not mean that girls aren’t outdoorsy! I can’t emphasize enough, the stupid stuff we fret over with “gender norming” our kids is so much less about colors and kinds of toys and neutral language and so much more about what is intrinsic to the nature of men and women.

Girls aren’t going to pick up dolls just because they’re silly and pink and soft and isn’t that just adorable how she’s trying to breastfeed her teddy bear? No. I have watched my 3 year old decapitate her brother’s snowman with a lightsaber and then pretend to nurse her stuffed kitty cat, within the span of fifteen minutes. She weeps and rocks her stuffed animals to sleep at night if they’ve had a bad dream. And then she stands on the edge of her bed literally roaring in defiance if anyone should dare trespass and remove one of her beloved “babies” from their positions.

She is not weak because she is drawn to mothering behaviors with her toys, for if she is called to motherhood, it will be the source of her greatest strength and ability. (It’s not for nothing we use the expression of “mama bear” to communicate deep, protective and don’t-you-dare-mess-with-it anger.)

This hysteria over neutral-colored Legos and removing all swords and tutus from toy boxes is missing the forest for the trees. A little boy is standing 12 inches from my elbow right now playing in a pink toy kitchen, stirring soup and preparing steaks to feed the cat. This doesn’t mean his gender is “confused.” It does mean he likes being involved in food prep and his chief enjoyment in the 4’oclock hour is chopping vegetables.

We are foolish when we typecast certain “behaviors” into rigid gender norms and then insist that our children refrain at all cost from manifesting them, should they match up in a way we are currently collectively frowning upon.

What good is there to be gained by discouraging a boy from expressing strength and courage on the playground, whether he is shouting down a bully or rallying his friends to the winning kickball run? And what good is served in correcting a girl who longs to be told that she is beautiful – who in fact has a profound and fundamentally good desire to be affirmed in her beauty on a soul-deep level – that she ought not be concerned with something so trivial or vain?

Conversely, if a boy enjoys cooking and art and a girl is an absolute terror on the lacrosse field, these, too, are good and beautiful manifestations of their particular individual giftedness. This does not indicate a confused or wrongly-assigned gender, but normal and healthy diversity in this thing that we call being human.

Being a mother is intractably a female role; being a hairdresser is not.

While the world frets on about the sexism of fairy tales, about girls dreaming of true love and affirmed beauty, and boys about vanquishing dragons and journeying into uncharted territories, I’ll be sitting here reading Cinderella and the Chronicles of Narnia to all of them, male and female alike. And they will perhaps get different things from the same story. They will perhaps encounter it with their male or female minds and focus on particular aspects which attract or repel them, and that will be fine. That will be good.

Our differences are our strengths, and denying the intricate design of the complementarity between the sexes is to deface the image of the Creator Himself.

(For further reading on the complimentary of the sexes and the essential goodness of gender, I highly recommend reading Dr. Mary Healy’s short, accessible book on JPII’s Theology of the Body, “Men and Women are from Eden.” I also like Dr. Edward Sri’s “Men, Women, and the Mystery of Love” and John and Stasi Eldredge’s books, “Captivating” and “Wild at Heart.” (I’m on a bit of John Eldredge kick myself at the moment, having just finished “Walking with God” and “Waking the Dead” and now about halfway into “Fathered by God.” The last title in particular is great for facilitating a deeper understanding of masculinity.)

Catholic Spirituality, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Homosexuality, JPII, relativism

Conform or be destroyed {but be not afraid}

December 2, 2016

No matter your political stripe, ethnicity, religion, or sexual proclivities, this one should concern you.

It’s the story of a family. Of a couple who have built an empire together, and whose concepts and innovation have almost single-handedly spurred the revitalization of a local economy and an entire community.

And their kids are pretty cute, too.

I’m talking, of course, about HGTV’s darling it-couple of the moment, Chip and Joanna Gaines, and of their wildly popular show “Fixer Upper” and the Magnolia empire behind it.

Their show, if you are unfamiliar with it, centers around showing prospective home buyers “the worst homes in the best neighborhoods” around Waco, Texas, before deciding on one crumbling property which they renovate and redesign on camera with a dramatic “reveal” at the episode’s end. The show is entertaining because while everything about reality tv is carefully scripted, the real star of their concept is their goofy, sweet, mutually respectful and supremely attractive marriage.

They like each other. They like each other a lot, it would appear, from the viewer’s perspective. And they like their children, and they like the life they’ve built together. There is friendly banter, there is teasing, there are eye rolls and sighs of exasperation, but there is no harsh cynicism. No passive aggression. No threats of divorce of ultimatums about behavior “or else.”

It’s just so refreshing.

The thing is, I think it’s as refreshing as it is because it’s real. I think they really do like each other as much as they play on TV. And it’s a beautiful witness to the joy of marriage.

Which is probably the precise reason they were targeted by a bigoted Buzzfeed writer with an anti-Christian axe to grind and a platform from which, she decided, was hers to lob grenades at unsuspecting victims from. Victims whose only crime, as far as I can decipher, is to hold a differing belief system from hers. And to hold it privately.

So basically tolerance in action.

The story gets a little weirder, though. Because the writer in question didn’t have a personal complaint about the Gainses themselves, but about the church they attend, and specifically about something their pastor preached in a sermon.

It’s pretty crazy what he said, though.

He said that God created men and women. And he quoted this radical text from antiquity called “the Book of Genesis.”

I know. Lock that guy up.

Here’s the thing. We live in a time of supposed plurality of beliefs, but some beliefs are more “free” than others. We give lip service to the concept of diversity, but the only diversity that is truly acceptable is narrowly defined and usually trending on Twitter.

Because the Gaines family attends a church that holds a biblical perspective on marriage (in line with the majority of Evangelical Christianity and the entire Roman Catholic Church, so not exactly a fringe-y minority), they are automatically cast as bigots. Excoriated for not vetting the guests on their show for their sexual behavior. Dragged into a career and life-altering witch hunt because a woman with a microphone can’t stand the idea that not everybody shares her belief system.

The Gaines family are probably hurting right now, but I very much doubt they are surprised. To be a Christian is to be a sign of contradiction in a confused and sometimes darkening world. And none of us are going to get out of it with our reputations or our egos intact. Which is a good thing. It really is!

What the Gaines family could use, however, from their fellow Christians is support. Vocal, enthusiastic support. Write a friendly message on one of their social media accounts (Unrelated: Chip retweeted Papa Francesco earlier this week.)Say a prayer for them. Drop HGTV an email saying how much you enjoy their show, or if you’ve never seen it, tune in for an episode this weekend and enjoy.

Hatred, bullying tactics and public lynchings are as old as the human race. In the era of the internet, the megaphone is bigger and the stakes are higher, perhaps, in terms of public notoriety and the heat being turned up, but in a week or two the news cycle with move on to a new victim, and they’ll be left to pick up the pieces and decide if it’s worth it to them as a family to continue to tell their story publicly.

I hope they do. But I completely understand if they don’t.

The stakes have ever been high to proclaim belief in anything, but particularly to proclaim belief in the One who made all things. Because the moment you stake your claim for Christ, you become an enemy to the world that “will hate you because it first hated Me.” We who dwell in reality, living in the world as it actually is, dwell in a place marred and scarred by actual sin. Sin, which in our time is a bigoted concept in itself (look for that storyline to play out in the not-so-distant future, coming soon to a headline near you) has actual consequences. Like pain. Division. Violence. Loss of friendships and reputation. Suffering.

But sin does not have the final word in this story. Not in the Gaineses story, and not necessarily in the angry Buzzfeed writer’s story, either. Wouldn’t it be a cool footnote in the annals of internet scandal one day to read that all this craziness ended in forgiveness and maybe even a change of heart?

Wilder things have happened.

In the meantime, do not be cowed into silence or surrender by the angry rhetoric or the public fallout being heaped upon this family. They are suffering, but they are suffering for Christ. And He can make something beautiful out of that. To be Christian is to suffer. Not because of a lack of love, but because of an abundance of it. Look to the cross.

And do not be afraid of what the world can do to you or take from you. The world took everything from Christ first, after all. And that ended rather well.

And seriously, pour yourself a peppermint mocha and get your shiplap on this weekend. A good family doing good work could use your support.

“When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.” – JPII, State visit to Netherlands, 1985.

Catholic Spirituality, Evangelization, Homosexuality, relativism, Theology of the Body

Lost friendships, hard truths, and homosexuality

September 9, 2016

This is a sensitive topic, and it’s a post I’ve been mulling over in my head for a long time. My closest male friend in college was gay, and I loved him. We spent many a lazy afternoon together drinking margaritas on the patio of our favorite Mexican watering hole, singing Tim McGraw karaoke and enjoying the endless sunny days Boulder, Colorado had to offer. The last time we spoke, it was to meet for drinks when I introduced my now husband to his then boyfriend. We shook hands, we laughed, we played pool, and we never spoke again.

That was almost 8 years ago now, and I think about him from time to time and go over the slow drift that pulled us apart after college. I wonder if there was some way we could have kept going forward, he living an openly gay life which I never once condemned him for, and me a practicing Catholic, married with a vanful of kids. I don’t know that we could have done anything differently, either of us, to keep things on track, but it hurts my heart to think about what we left behind because of seemingly irreconcilable differences.

I know that part of what caused the drift was his knowledge that my position on homosexuality was immovable. That much as I loved him unconditionally, I would never affirm him in his lifestyle choice. We both smoked at the time and while it was enjoyable, we both knew we should quit – tried to quit together, several times – because we knew the pleasure came at too high a cost. I am not drawing a moral equivalent between homosexuality and smoking, only pointing out that the tension between human desires and cravings and what is actually good for the human person is as old as humanity itself.

The final time we saw one another, I think we both recognized it as such. As much as we practiced kindness and respect for one another, what he wanted from me was compete acceptance of his homosexual relationship, and that I could not give. It simply wasn’t enough that I greet his boyfriend with friendliness, that I shake his had warmly and laugh with him over vodka sodas. He wanted more. And I don’t blame him. The differences that drove our friendship apart are heartbreaking, but they remain irreconcilable.

All of my love and kindness weren’t enough, so long as they fell short of total acceptance of their relationship.

Why, some of you may be asking, couldn’t I just get over myself for the sake of our friendship and tell them that I was happy for them? Why rock the boat so hard someone had to fall overboard?

I guess the answer is twofold. First, we never actually had the “I don’t approve of your lifestyle but I love you unconditionally” talk. We didn’t have to. He just knew. Without my explaining a single thing, he understood that I was Catholic, and that the same morality that precluded premarital sex and marked me out so singly at 1 am down on Pearl Street was the one that informed my view of homosexuality. He also knew I loved him like a brother. He felt the irreconcilability of our opposing positions, and it hurt him. It hurt me, too. But while my other roommates never forced me to choose between accepting their IUDs and sleep-over boyfriends and them, he did.

And thus we come to the real difficulty with the age we inhabit: Anything short of total acceptance is insufficient, and agreeing to disagree no longer seems agreeable enough to remain on one another’s Christmas card list. Or, in a more modern twist, to remain Facebook friends. Because that’s how it played out in real life. With the single click of a button, I was banished.

He wanted not only friendship, but tacit approval. He wanted me to change my moral position to suit his, to jettison my code of ethics and to adopt his own. Because it is uncomfortable to know that someone you love doesn’t approve of what you’re doing.

Just ask the family with 6 kids who gets ridiculed and chastised by extended family for going overboard in the procreation department. Ask the chaste, 32 year old female staffer on Capitol Hill living the single life in a sex-drenched social scene. Ask the young guy discerning the priesthood – and a life of celibacy – at a public university, regularly raked over the coals by his progressive sociology professor for colluding with an archaic patriarchy.

It is difficult to maintain your core values in the face of criticism, rejection, and hostility. It is even more difficult when real, live friendships are on the line. But what does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his soul?

This scenario will only become more common as homosexuality becomes more widely accepted, and gay marriage becomes the law of the land the world over. Christians cannot run from the issue. We have to face it, head on, with clarity, charity, and utter humility. The time for polite private disagreement and crossing one’s fingers it doesn’t happen “in our family” has passed. It will happen. Because homosexuality is being advanced in public schools and universities and embraced by popular culture as a new, essential value. And those of us who refuse to recognize – to wholeheartedly embrace – this new value, will be made to suffer the consequences.

And that’s okay.

It is okay to suffer for your beliefs. Actually, if we aren’t suffering for them, I wonder if there might be something not quite right, as the Lord Himself flatly states in John 15:18.

So I want to wrap up with a charge and a challenge. The first is to know your beliefs, to read deeply and pray intensely into the issue, and to search the Scriptures and the documents of the Magisterium to know what you believe, and to be ready and willing to explain it and defend it. If you are struggling with the Church’s position on homosexuality – or anything else for that matter – then it is your responsibility to inform and then reconcile your conscience to the Truth. There have been numerous issues over the 33 years I have lived as a Catholic that have stopped me almost in my tracks. And my response can only ever be to question, to challenge, to study, and finally, to accept with humble obedience even when I do not understand.

The Church’s teachings are the teachings of Christ. If one of them is a sticking point for me, then it’s me who has to move. Not Him.

The second challenge I have is this. Do you have a friend, a neighbor, or a relative who is gay? Do you keep the relationship at arm’s length, hoping the difficulty won’t rear it’s inconvenient head? Are you being authentic in your love for this person, or are you intentionally keeping it surface level to keep the peace?

Don’t do that.

If there’s one thing I wish I could do over with my lost friendship, it’s that we talked more openly and more intentionally about that elephant in the dorm room. I don’t know that it would have changed the outcome, necessarily, but I think I’d wonder less about “what if?” and I know that part of what held me back was cowardice. Was wanting to keep things agreeable, friendly, light.

But look where that got us.

I hope he knows how much I loved him, and how much I love him still. And that no amount of disagreement between us had to end things. If he called tomorrow, we could pick right back up. I know a great margarita place just down the street, and we could talk for hours.

(Comments on this post are closed. Respectful dialogue is welcome on Facebook.)

Abortion, Bioethics, Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Contraception, Culture of Death, euthanasia, Evangelization, Homosexuality, politics, Pro Life, reality check, relativism, sin, Suffering

The power of language and the witness of words

August 9, 2016

It is a curious time to be a Catholic Christian. (Is it ever not, though? I think maybe we all fall prey to a little good old fashioned chronological snobbery, whether or not we care to admit it.)

On the one hand, I live in America and for the most part, shuttered adoption agencies and defunct bakeries and cancelled after-school Bible clubs aside, the persecution that Christians face here is still on the lightish side. And many would shrug off the aforementioned incidences not as persecution at all, but as the rightful assertion of a collective morality over defiant and wrong-headed individual dissenters.

On the other hand, it is gravely concerning how very much the pace of things has accelerated, for society to embrace, wholesale, things that a decade and a half ago would have registered clearly on our collective consciences as “wrong.” There are now plenty of Christians who wouldn’t bat an eye at a 12-week abortion, embryonic stem cell research performed “for a good cause” to fight the horrors of ALS, of helping an elderly parent or terminal cancer patient end his or her life with a prescription written by the hand of their own physician.

In Colorado this last piece is coming to the ballot this November, under the tidy euphemism “physician-assisted suicide,” but more popularly nicknamed “death with dignity.” So as you exit your favorite natural grocery store you might be intercepted by a cheerful, clipboard-wielding volunteer in a neon green t-shirt earnestly inquiring into your concern that sick and elderly people have “dignified end of life choices.” Which is a whole lot harder to answer “no thanks” to than, say, “should Coloradans vote to let people who want to die kill themselves with a prescription written by a doctor?”

Language carries the day. As it always has. And it becomes essential for those of us who believe in a God Who is the Author of life to reclaim these conversations on a linguistic level.

It seems a small thing, a popular word or commonly-accepted term here, a turn of phrase there. Look how much traction gay “marriage” has gotten in a few short years.

When the phrase first came into existence, Christians and other people who recognized the impossibility of two same-sex individuals, however sincere their love, contracting what we all commonly understood to be marriage, had no problem throwing quotes around the term, because it was an imprecise and incorrect application of a recognized reality. But repeated loudly and often enough, we’ve now all but lost that point.

There’s no longer any room in the national conversation to point out “actually, marriage is a covenant contracted between two consenting opposite-sex adults, for the purpose of creating and raising a family and contributing to the development and continuation of civilization.”

I guarantee if you bust out that last sentence at the neighborhood block party, you’d either get a drink tossed in your face or find yourself with a semi-circle of bewildered acquaintances backing away from you in a hurry.

Because we’ve conceded that point on a linguist level and on a legal level. And now we must hide behind our “personal beliefs” or “chosen religious faith” when making the point, which, in a secular society governed almost exclusively by the court of public opinion, is a weak position to operate from indeed.

By forcing religious belief and morality into a corner, meant now to be tucked handily into one’s pocket and not revealed in polite company, the secular Left have employed a chillingly effective strategy, with hardly any real persecution necessary. We zip our own lips instead, avoiding tough topics with friends and coworkers, afraid of causing a scene, afraid of professional fallout, not looking to start a fight.

Guess what? That isn’t going to work much longer.

Every inch that Christians give over as a forgone conclusion: that children don’t deserve to be protected by their parents, that religious belief is a private matter that must be exorcised from the public square, that the government dictates morality to the people, and not vice versa…every one of these small skirmishes that we offer up in embarrassed silence, not wanting to muddy the waters, brings us closer and closer to a civilization in which we have no voice.

Because we stopped using our words.

Because we stopped having conversations at the only level that truly matters: personal, one-on-one, and rooted in trust and authentic relationship.

How on earth can we expect our gay neighbor to ever understand our position, however rooted in love and respect, if she does not hear it from our lips, but relies instead on Rachel Maddow’s punditry to inform her how we – Me! Her friend next door! – really see “them.”

How can our children defend their position on abortion to a school bus full of teammates if they’ve never participated in compassionate and nuanced conversations around the dinner table about human dignity and real feminism and authentic healthcare?

How can we expect our leaders to legislate based on objective morality rather than creating morality based on subjective legislation if all of our voices fall silent, all at once, afraid to break the peace, afraid to ruffle feathers, afraid to look foolish.

It is time to look foolish.

It is past time.

It is time to answer truthfully to the question “do you plan to have more children?” Or “have you thought about scheduling a vasectomy” with His truth, not the truth of the day. It is time to explain to a curious coworker that no, you couldn’t vote for a woman who holds up abortion as a fundamental human right, no matter how compelling the circumstances might seem. To defend your position on the intrinsic evil of torture around the campfire at a guy’s fishing weekend. To explain to a friend with an aging parent that some things are worse than suffering, and that some choices are always wrong.

It is time to struggle with hard topics and harder choices out loud, in a way that is authentic and vulnerable and worthwhile, so that someone else who is searching for the truth might see a glimpse of it reflected in your life, however much you might be screwing it up and failing.

Because that is what it means to be a Christian. It means to wrestle with God, accommodating ourselves to His reality, humbly admitting that we don’t understand, that we aren’t doing it perfectly, and that we’ll get back up again and try – with His grace – to do better next time.

But it does not mean falling silent while evil is perpetrated all around us. It doesn’t mean (guilty here!) sliding into a comfortable, surface-level relationship devoid of authenticity with your neighbors so that nothing unpleasant ever comes up to muddy the waters.

We must use our voices while we still have them, because our words have power, power given to us by the One in whose image and likeness we are created.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Christians, it is time to speak up.

“The days of socially acceptable Christianity are over, the days of comfortable Catholicism are past…It is no longer easy to be a faithful Christian, a good Catholic, an authentic witness to the truths of the Gospel. A price is demanded and must be paid.”

– Professor Robert P. George, Princeton

Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, Homosexuality, motherhood, Parenting, Sex, Theology of the Body, Women's Health, Women's Rights

About those bathrooms…

April 28, 2016

I read a great piece this morning on the Target situation du jour from local writer and friend who explained with great compassion and insight why she and her family would still be patronizing the Bullseye, restroom politics notwithstanding. And she took care to explain her position in such a way that I found myself nodding along and agreeing and, well, see for yourself how well thought out and nuanced it is.

I wholeheartedly concur with her assessment that the real threat implicit here is, first and foremost, the opening up of the (relative) safety of the women’s room to a host of unnecessary risks to women, who are naturally more vulnerable and more prone to violence.

And that’s why I’m angry.

Not because I hate transgendered people.

Not because I’m a backwards bigot who has never seen a cross-dresser.

And not because I want my children to live in a bubble of Stepford proportions, clad head to toe in Vineyard Vines and playing with their intentionally-curated pink Barbie houses and blue Matchbox cars. I happen to think that popular distinctions between the sexes are mostly BS, and mostly stereotypical. Playing with tools and cars does not a penis endow, nor does care for the garden or interest in the goings-on of a kitchen qualify you for membership in club uterus. But that’s a whole other post entirely.

No, I’m angry that the conversation has so completely shut out (for the most part) women’s, and particularly mother’s, concerns, and it seems to be more of the same, tired “business as usual, pretty little ladies need not bother themselves” from the mainstream media and on social media.

It strikes me as terribly dismissive – and ironic – that the legitimate concerns for the safety and privacy of roughly half the population (and Target’s bread and butter demographic) are being shoved aside to further a political agenda, on Target’s part, aimed to build their social capital as the unofficial Best Corporate Advocates for What is Currently Cool and Trending.

I think women, along with people in the trans community, are both being used in this equation.

Trans and gender-fluid individuals don’t want attention drawn to their plight the way it has been the past week, I have no doubt. The hatred and vitriol I’ve seen spewed across the internet on both sides of the issue has been breathtaking. And as someone who has written publicly about dog moms, I’ve seen it all, people.)

And on the other hand, concerned mothers are being marginalized and dismissed as hateful bigots because they don’t want creepy pretenders claiming sudden and terribly convenient gender-fluidity-for-the-sake-of-restroom-access using the toilet alongside themselves and their little, and not-so-little, girls.

How, precisely, a Target team member is to be expected to accurately vet the validity of a baseball-clad bro in gym shorts’ claim to a female mind and soul has yet to be convincingly explained to me. Because they didn’t think it through. They didn’t arrive at the logical conclusion that bad people will exploit a bad policy in order to do bad things.

The whole thing smacks of relativism and dismissive “progress” at the expense of, who else, women. Who are and will always be the perennial losers in the sexual revolution.

This move by Target? It was never about better care for people who lay claim to transgenderism. It was about making a political statement and garnering valuable corporate activism capital in the eyes of an increasingly secular marketplace and, even more so, in the echo chamber of social media and the mainstream news cycle.

And the outrage from the other side of the aisle? It was never about marking out or marginalizing or demonizing the “others.” At least not from where I’m sitting, clutching my own proverbial pearls and wondering whether or not my little girl will be safe when she’s in the restroom one day, without me there standing guard outside the stall door.

But now it’s become both of these, because we’ve lost our damn collective minds. And it’s hardly possible to order a coffee without offending someone, bumping up against a competing worldview or accidentally uttering a trigger word.

Listen, even if we disagree 110% on matters of human sexuality, it is still possibly to have courtesy and mutual respect for one another.

And maybe, for Target and for every other retailer-cum-social engineer out there in the fray, a simpler and more authentically respectful solution to all parties involved would have been the addition of single-occupancy family/individual restroom and dressing room to their stores. (Because you know dressing rooms are coming next.)

But that wouldn’t have been nearly as splashy or, therefore, nearly as sexy.

Catholic Spirituality, Catholics Do What?, Culture of Death, Evangelization, Homosexuality, sin

Love, hate, and civil debate

January 11, 2016

I will be the first to confess that I have not always been careful with my words. I’m a firstborn, a choleric, and an INTJ. I might be perfectly right about something, but I also might be a perfect ass in letting you know it.

I am sincerely working on that. And I suspect it will be the work of a lifetime.

Still, I’ve found that each year as I get older and have more experience with motherhood, my grinchy little heart expands ever so slightly and I am granted a clearer vision of what it means to acknowledge and honor the dignity of my fellow human being.

Even if I disagree with them. Even if I disagree with them so fundamentally and so vehemently that I cannot conjure up a single other unifying quality which we both posses other than the unchanging reality that we’re both human beings with immortal souls.

That’s enough.

And if I ever had the chance to attend a beer summit with Barack Obama, I’m almost positive that’s the quality I’d have to fall back on when reminding myself of our mutual right to dignity. Unless he likes IPAs? In which case great! There’s a second common factor.

So even two people who could not be further apart in terms of what they practice and preach – Obama and I – even we could have a civil, generous conversation in keeping with one another’s mutual dignity.

Even though I oppose his views on abortion with all my heart. Even though I believe from the depths of my soul that his policies and practices where the unborn are concerned are vile and objectively evil.

He’s still a person.

Still able to grow and change and experience conversion and God’s infinite mercy. And while I can use the strongest language possible to condemn the gravely unjust policies of his administration and look longingly towards January 2017 as the end of a particularly dark period (please, God) in American history, I don’t hate the man.

I don’t wish suffering and hardship for his family. I wouldn’t dare to call his daughters sexually explicit or derogatory names. I don’t troll around the internet cursing his family name and wishing cancer, mental illness, or even death on his spouse and children.

Because it’s wrong.

And because it’s asinine to make the leap from disagreeing with policies, political actions and personal beliefs, to personal attacks.

There’s a flip side to this, too. And I think it’s one that’s hard to grasp for people who easily make the leap to personal attacks, but here it is, nonetheless: it is possible to sincerely think someone wrong in their behavior or belief without any trace of malice or hatred for the person himself.

When I hear someone say “I don’t believe in Catholicism” I don’t hear “I hate you.”

(When I hear someone say “I hate all Catholics, including you,” however, I suppose it’s safe to assume they mean exactly that.)

Now, this is an imperfect analogy, but I figured it would be less incendiary than using the examples of clinical depression, alcoholism, or anorexia, even though all are much closer in line with what homosexuality actually is: a deviation from healthy and normative human behavior which injures the person practicing it, body and soul.

When I write about wanting to protect my kids – and their peers – from children’s books designed to desensitize them to homosexuality and normalize the behavior through the antics of adorable, chubby sea birds, I’m not tapping out a secret code that actually reads I HATE LESBIANS in all caps.

I have no ill will in my heart for people who practice homosexuality, any more than I begrudge the actions of an alcoholic or an anorexic. God knows we’ve all got something we struggle with. (The obvious difference being that homosexuality is the trendy sin of the day, so my speaking against it is culturally anathema.)

What I do take offense to is efforts to normalize the behavior and pitch it to my children as a valid lifestyle choice. But even my grave offense taken does not grant me the right to shout down the other side, screaming about bigotry and hatred and wishing them death.

I desperately want to revive the practice of civil, charitable debate. Both online and in person. Perhaps even more importantly in person, difficult and vulnerable though that may be.

But we can’t go around assuming that everyone who disagrees with us is a HATE-FILLED BIGOT WHO HATES US AND SHOUD BURN IN INVISIBLE HELL, IF SUCH A THING AS HELL EXISTED.

Because where does that get us?

Going back to the religious example, you’d be hard pressed to show me an effective evangelization campaign, in this day and age, that consists in leaving comments like that on atheist websites and waiting for the Sunday attendance roll to fatten up.

Shouting down someone you disagree with is no way to win them over.

Vigorous and impassioned and authentic debate. Yes. A thousand times yes.

But personal attacks, ad hominems, and virtual lynchings?

Not effective. And so unnecessary.

Look, I know we moderns are identify so closely with our behaviors and occupations that this concept has been rendered almost utterly unintelligible, but the ancient maxim “love the sinner, hate the sin” still holds very much true for Christianity. And when I point out your sin, or when you point out mine, it’s not out of hatred, but out of love. And a sincere desire to move the other toward repentance and conversion.

I don’t hate gay people. I don’t hate drunks or addicts or prostitutes, either. I don’t hate wife beaters or child abusers or even moms who smoke crack. I don’t hate myself for yelling at my kid in the parking lot at the grocery store this morning, or for losing my temper in traffic over the weekend like an entitled jerk.

But when I do these bad things – these wrong choices that I make, not fundamental expressions of who I am – I make amends, I repent, and I try again. I don’t, however, attempt to force everyone around me to participate in my sin in some misguided effort to normalize or neutralize it. That’s no good for any of us.

So love the sinner, hate the sin. And don’t clog up the internet with shrill accusations about hatred and bigotry and malice.

We’re all sinners in need of mercy, and we’re all human beings in need of charity.

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