I believe people’s private lives are generally nobody else’s business, but there are exceptions. “The personal is the political,” they say, and that is true when policies affect lives or when hypocritically grandstanding to take away people’s rights under the veneer of “moral values.”

This brings us to the Republican Party. Pretty much, if you work at the upper echelons of this administration, you are complicit in its gay-bashing, and the American people deserve to know that for all the rhetoric, you, an LGBT person, are employed there. Same goes for Congress: if you advocate measures that deny gays and lesbians equal rights, or if you fail to raise your voice against such measures that others bring, your are participating in an injustice. If you yourself are in the closet, then the American people deserve to know where all your blustering is coming from. (On the other hand, if you’re out and advocate anti-gay measures, well, that’s just sad but at least voters would know what they’re getting and where you’re coming from.)

So, all that said, here’s an article on the administration’s “closet heterosexuals” and how the mainstream media is complicit in not discussing their personal lives and rumors around them when it is the administration itself insisting that personal lives are the purview of government.

Parishioners across the state were urged yesterday to sign the anit-gay marriage petition that would place a state constitutional amendment on the ballot in 2008.

It’s sad, really. There are many pressing social problems the Church could be dealing with: poverty, education, health care. There are even enough internal issues to keep the Church occupied: how to prevent the pedophile tragedy from happening again. Instead, the church chooses to scapegoat gay and lesbian people for forming stable families before the eyes of civil authorities. (And it chooses to scapegoat gay priests rather than dealing with the real causes of the pedophile scandals.)

”As I say, it’s not against anybody, it’s for children and it’s for the stability of marriage, which is really the foundation of our great nation,’ said Raymond L. Flynn, a former mayor of Boston and Vatican ambassador whose name appears on the petition as one of its chief sponsors.

What a lie! I’ve yet to hear of a heterosexual marriage dissolving because gay neighbors down the street could get a marriage certificate. I’ve yet to hear of children being better off because their parents are second-class citizens before the law. The Church, any church, is free to accept or reject the marriages it chooses, but it should not impose its dogma on a pluralistic society.

It’s the great irony of American history, isn’t it? Part of the American ethos is our foundation as a refuge from religious persecution, and yet we have always had a very theocratic streak. The Puritans, after all, weren’t seeking to establish universal freedom of conscience but rather a place where they could build their own vision of the Biblical “City on a Hill,” undisturbed by others.

Quietly, Conn. law allowing same-sex unions takes effect – The Boston Globe

Michael Sean Winters writes in Slate about the Vatican’s upcoming ban on gay priests:

The problem with such a ban is twofold. First, banning gay seminarians will only drive the issue underground, precisely the situation before the sexual revolution permitted people—even priests—to be more honest about their sexuality. The most notorious clerical child molesters were all ordained before the sexual revolution and before the changes wrought in the church by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Secrecy and silence encourage immaturity and duplicity, necessary precursors for inappropriate sexual behavior. Second, as my exchange with my friend indicates, many of those priests the right wing considers “their own” are also gay, and only a willful ignorance would fail to see it.

Such a willful ignorance must exist. When I was in the seminary in the mid-1980s, a local bishop came to visit. The bishop dressed for mass in the rectory next door. We seminarians were a bit late in arriving and were met by the bishop’s secretary who said, “Come on boys, get into your dresses. Grandma is coming.” Grandma was the bishop. The secretary had a feminine nickname, which, I am told, his intimates still use. To complete the screenplay quality of the experience, one of the priests who was in attendance that day left the priesthood shortly thereafter to become a flight steward or, as he called it, “a waitress in the sky.” This kind of campiness was common both in the seminary and in my experiences with those already ordained. As for the secretary, he is now a bishop much in favor with conservatives…

Reform of the church must always draw upon our tradition, and if Pope Benedict wants to truly address the source of the sexual abuse scandal, he will reinstate the ancient tradition of the church that prevented bishops from being transferred (the technical term is “translated”) or promoted from one bishopric to another, more important, diocese. In a stroke, he would remove the careerism that fueled the sweep-it-under-the-rug-at-all-costs syndrome that fostered the crisis. If a man wants to be the bishop of Bridgeport, let him be the bishop of Bridgeport for the rest of his life. But do not tempt him to fail to face problems in the hopes of becoming the archbishop of New York. This would be a useful first step.

From The New York Times: New Vatican Rule Said to Bar Gays as New Priests

Nice! This way they can force homosexual priests into the closet (or further into the closet– I wonder how many men become priests to avoid dealing with homosexuality) and they distract the public from the sexual predators in their ranks, who will continue to run free. Nothing like a little scapegoating…

Here are some radical suggestions: How about the church officially teaching children what kind of contact is inappropriate so they are more likely to report it immediately if and when it occurs? And how about embracing gay priests openly and publicly, so as to promote the better mental health that comes from being open about one’s identity?