A Matter of Honesty, Part V--You Keep Using That Word. . . .


Let's do a thought experiment, shall we?  Imagine I call you up on the phone and say, "hey, it would be great to see you.  Why don't you come by and visit?"  "Great!" you say, so you drive to where I live.  You knock on the door, and I answer the door while talking on the phone.  Without getting off the phone, I usher you into the house.  Eventually, I get off the phone, and proceed to have a long monologue about how your life is going astray, and how you are making terrible decisions and "lifestyle choices."  I then tell me that you can stay, but you can only have a meal with me if you promise to give up said "lifestyle choices."

Would you say that I have been "welcoming" to you on your visit?  Probably not, right?  And if I claimed I was being welcoming insofar as I invited you to come to my house, it would be fair to object that welcoming has much more to do with the treatment once I arrived than the official posture of the visit in the first place, right?  And if I were to claim I thought I was plenty welcoming from my point of view, it would be fair to point out that it makes sense to judge welcoming from the point of view of the person being welcomed, as opposed to the person doing the welcoming.  Right?

Let's change the scenario.  Again, I call you up and invite you to my house.  Except this time, when you arrive, you make a series of burdensome demands on me--that I buy you some special food and cook you special gluten-free meal, that I immediately euthanize my cat that is triggering your allergies, etc.  I refuse to do that, and you storm off in a huff.

Here's the thing--you can still say that I was not welcoming to you.  Again, the measure of welcoming is determined from the point of view of the person receiving the welcome.  I can absolutely say that your standard for what constitutes a welcome is more burdensome than I am willing to meet.  And I think many folks would agree that it is unreasonable to expect me to euthanize my cat for the convenience of a house guest.  But, heavy or light, fair or unfair, if I am not willing to do the thing that the guest expects, then I am not being welcoming to that guest.  I have an aunt who is notorious for showing up at people's homes and making a bunch of demands of them.  She is allowed to make those demands, and I am allowed to tell her I will not meet them.  But I am not allowed to re-define welcome to be whatever I think is reasonable.

These thought experiments essentially sum up the posture of the Catholic Church toward LGBT people.  The newest mandatory talking point is that the Catholic Church "welcomes" LGBT people.  One good example of this meme is a lengthy letter to the editor from an Irish priest in response to a dust-up over a gay couple (thanks to Maureen Clarke for drawing my attention to the story).  In the letter, there is a one-sentence paragraph that literally says "[e]veryone is welcome in the Catholic Church," bracketed by ten paragraphs before that sentence and two paragraphs after about how gay marriage is terrible, and anyone who supports it is terrible.  It is as if the phrase "gay people are welcome" is a kind of talisman that shields the Catholic Church from criticism for anything else it might do or say about the topic.  Otherwise, it is a kind of CYA, a built in, pre-packaged defense to anyone who might complain.  "What do you mean you don't like the way I talk about you and your life--I mean, I'm welcoming you, aren't I?"

Notwithstanding this posture of welcome, overwhelming numbers of LGBT people view the Catholic Church as hostile to them.  This hostility is in large measure because most LGBT people have set the bar for welcome (for religious institutions and otherwise) at (1) acknowledging that being LGBT is a integral part of who they are; and (2) accepting their loves and relationships in a way that is indistinguishable from non-LGBT people.  By this standard, the Catholic Church is not welcoming, because it bobs-and-weaves on #1 and rejects #2 outright.

Now, I think the measure of welcome that LGBT people are requiring is the equivalent to the first scenario I laid out--a request grounded in basic notions of politeness, dignity, and fairness.  But, let's say you think the request to affirm same-sex sexual relationships is more like scenario #2--the equivalent to asking someone to euthanize their cat.  That's your right, but it still means that you are not being welcoming to LGBT people.  The Church could say, "most LGBT people insist that we affirm their sexual relationships, and we won't do that; thus, if you require that we affirm your relationship, you are not welcome in our church."  I think that is wrong, but at least it is honest.

This business of loudly proclaiming that the Church is welcoming to gay people and then blaming LGBT people for not feeling welcome is Orwellian nonsense.  It does violence to basic language, and it is an act of emotional manipulation--it allows the people who want to exclude LGBT people to not have to face the consequences of that position by flipping the responsibility on the recipients of the exclusion.  That is cowardly and it is cruel.

[Edit:  Here's a good example of the same dynamic in the Church of England, using the same "Orwellian nonsense" using the related word, "inclusion."]

If the Church wants to be welcoming to LGBT people, it needs to change its theology and practice with regard to same-sex relationships.  If it is not willing to change its theology and practice, then it needs to stop claiming it is welcoming.  You can't have it both ways.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

I was introduced to The Body's Grace by Frank from Letters to the Catholic Right in this post , where he quotes Williams saying: It puts the question which is also raised for some kinds of moralist by the existence of the clitoris in women; something whose function is joy. If the creator were quite so instrumentalist in ‘his’ attitude to sexuality, these hints of prodigality and redundancy in the way the whole thing works might cause us to worry about whether he was, after all, in full rational control of it. But if God made us for joy…? I want to talk about the first part of that quote here, regarding the clitoris.  I am not aware of any theology that has been done on the clitoris, but there should be.  As Williams alludes to, the existence and nature of the clitoris is a theological "problem," especially if you want to hold on to traditional Christian sexual morality.  It is especially problematic if you want to hold that sexuality needs to be understood through the...
Read more

On a Pelagian Politics, and Why It Would Be Good

I have two very hot takes.  The first is that Joe Biden is the best United States President in my lifetime, and probably the best since Franklin Roosevelt, and his many critics on both the right and the left are wrong.  The second is that the Irish monk Pelagius and his (mostly Celtic) disciples were basically right, and more specifically Pelagius's great opponent Augustine (and by extension the rest of the Western Church ever since) was wrong.  But the hottest take, the Hegelian synthesis of this Hotness, is that these two takes are ultimately the same take.  I believe that Biden is a great President because I am a Pelagian with a Pelagian world view, whereas American politics is fundamentally Calvinist, which is just Augustinianism taken to its logical conclusion. Let me try to justify this ball of hot takes. 1. Most of what we know of Pelagius comes from his opponents, especially Augustine and Jerome, who attempted (more or less successfully) to have him cast out ...
Read more

A Reflection on the Past, and Also on Art

Exactly twenty-two years ago, in February of 2002, I was living in River Forest, Illinois, finishing up my undergraduate degree.  I was living in an enormous old priory, hoping that I would be able to join the Dominicans when I was done with school in the summer (which, in fact, happened).  The priory was built in the 50s, when the Dominicans would have classes of a fifty or sixty students a year.  Those days were long gone, and so I was the only person living on the hall, on the far other side of the building from the actual Dominicans.  Other than meals, I was basically living entirely by myself. In my evenings, after getting done with my homework, I had a ritual on weekdays.  I would turn on the radio to the Chicago rock radio station Q101 and listen to the syndicated show Loveline .  Loveline  was a call-in show, focused on giving sex and relationship advice to teenagers and twenty-somethings.  The hosts of the show were comedian Adam Corolla ...
Read more