Bashful

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Dec 21, 2004

The Pope deplores "attacks on marriage and the family," and the RSM goes postal:

The Rainbow Sash Movement is calling Pope John Paul II to stop his international Gay Bashing. Dogma is driving this effort not Holy Scripture. Personal piety is driving the Church in the direction that is opposed to the reality of the Psychological sciences. Like Galileo's Papal detractors this Pope thinks it is ok to publicly condemn knowledge for Dogma. Gays/lesbians/bisexuals/transgender are the brunt of these senseless mean-spirited attacks

There's lots more. Three points:

• "Bashing" originally meant physical assault and injury. Now it means any act, statement, or gesture (regardless of motive) that causes offense.
• Picture a man surrounded by a minefield of his own planting. Charity bids us uproot our mines -- the occasions of offense that set us off when someone puts a foot wrong. But those who use the "gay-bashing" language exploit every opportunity to expand their perimeter. If an opponent backs off even in his rhetoric, they immediately bury a new mine in front of his toes, so the line of battle steadily advances in their favor.
• Wildly dramatic hyper-sensitivity to unwelcome discipline is commonly associated with 13-year-old girls ("Nazis!" screams the angry eighth-grader whose parents ground her on school nights). Adult men who use "bashing" to mean not broken teeth and bruises but calm repetition of inherited teachings corroborate the stereotypes they denounce in the very act of denouncing them.

Footnote: The RSM finds occasion to gloat over the Vatican Flynn-Flam discussed earlier: "If Cardinal Arinze recognizes this [complexity], what is the problem with the Pope?" To justify his own timidity to his American critics, Archbishop Flynn twisted Arinze's words of caution into a personal endorsement. The RSM has immediately pounced on the equivocation and claimed to find a "gay-gap" between Arinze and John Paul II. Entirely predictable.