Maggie Gallagher, who loves homosexuals except in the "they deserve equal rights" sense, is very oppressed because her Jesus doesn't want people she doesn't know in a place she doesn't live in to do things she won't ever know about that wouldn't ever affect her.
This makes no sense, maybe, but still, it makes her weepy.
To drive her point home, she says if gays can get married in Washington DC, Jews will be killed in Massachusetts.
Which is probably true.
Wait, no, that's insane. What?
New legislation now being proposed in the Massachusetts state legislature to ban circumcision of any male children, including Jewish children, comes very close to saying, "Yes, it should be a crime." Circumcision of infant males has been a requirement of Jewish faith and identity since the time of Abraham.
Wow! Gallagher provides no links, so let's just look this up, checking the Google... oh, here we go.
Massachusetts lawmakers are being asked to outlaw infant male circumcision.
Holy shit! But then again, last sentence of the story:
No Massachusetts lawmakers have signed on to support the measure.
So it's being discussed why? Who knows! Clearly, score a point for Maggie Gallagher: the gays want to kill Massachusetts Jewish babies by denying them circumcisions, even, one supposes, the girl children, by having no lawmakers not propose a law. IT ALL MAKES SENSE.
But that's not all.
Meanwhile, just a year ago this week, two very powerful state legislators in Connecticut proposed a bill that would have had the government take over the finances of the Catholic Church. (It took a rally drawing thousands of folks to the state capitol to persuade them to withdraw the measure.)
Oh, OK. And clearly, Connecticut state legislators are immensely powerful.
How did we reach the point where powerful people seriously consider such outrageous intrusions on religious liberty? These "shots across the bow" are skirmishes in a larger war between a newly triumphant liberalism and older American values, including pluralism, conscience protection and respect for religious liberty.
Um. One of these examples of "outrageous intrusions on religious liberty" is clearly bullshit, and the other is to do with the murky issue of how Catholic churches handle money, a controversy arising from a local dispute. Maggie Gallagher is sure working hard to prove right wing religious people are about to get nailed to trees, wonder what that's about...
Oh yes, she is against equal rights for homosexuals.
If the right to religious liberty -- a right clearly and explicitly established in our U.S. Constitution -- were being supported and enforced equally with other First Amendment rights, traditional faith communities would not be as worried as they are about the coming attempts to misuse government power. Secular liberals are showing a powerful desire to use the power of government to repress faith communities that disagree with their views. They have been enabled by a Supreme Court (led, ironically, by Justice Antonin Scalia) that has thrown up its hands at the difficulties of enforcing religious liberty and ruled that government intrusions imposed on all people are acceptable, even if they substantially interfere with religious practice.
If you can't get Antonin Fucking Scalia to agree with you about how you're an oppressed Catholic in modern America, give it the fuck up, would be my advice.
The Catholic Church is an outsize provider of social services in D.C., with a well-deserved reputation as a valuable partner in providing a vast array of caring services to the most vulnerable citizens of the district.
When the D.C. politicians passed gay marriage without serious conscience protections, the Catholic Church became aware that it would seriously interfere with the church's ability to help the government care for poor people in D.C. Catholic organizations, especially those that accepted government money, would now be required by the government to recognize gay marriages, regardless of their faith commitments.
As a result of this senseless government pressure, Catholic Charities was forced to close its adoption and foster care services, needlessly reducing the number of caring and competent services available to poor and abandoned children. And the diocese just announced it would, henceforth, cease offering spousal benefits at all, in order to protect Catholic organizations from being forced by the government to recognize gay marriages.
The Catholic Church was "forced" into nothing. The diocese has decided that its mission to minister to the needy is less important than its commitment to political posturing.
But whines Gallagher:
What was the point of these kinds of government impositions on Christian institutions? The Catholic Church's position on gay sex and gay marriage are well-known, or should be. Surely it should come as no shock to a potential employee to discover that a Catholic organization is not the right place to pursue their career if they want gay marital benefits? What gay person in D.C. is practically better off as a result of this mean-spirited and successful attempt to drive the Catholic Church out of the public square in key ways? If this were left up to ordinary gay people, I'm betting it would all turn out very different. Live and let live is the American impulse across ideological and moral disagreements.
The point was that homosexuals would have equal rights, even the ones who are not Catholic. Or, as St. Augustine once notably observed, "duh."
And the gay person who is "better off" is the one who can say "I have publicly & officially celebrated my commitment to the love of my life." Which is no small potatoes -- I got to do that for the love of my life, and if I had been told I couldn't, I'd have been pretty pissed off.
But this is a hilarious paragraph anyhow; savor the idea that Catholic organizations could possibly function without their gay employees. For instance, I am given to understand that in certain Protestant "faith traditions" it is possible to discover a heterosexual capable of arranging a competent liturgical musical program, but I have never personally observed the like in all my decades as an (admittedly annoyed) Irish Catholic.
More than that: Gallagher glides over the fact that the DC diocese is going to get rid of spousal health benefits for straight employees, just so they won't have to potentially do the same for gay employees. That's fucked up.
Gallagher is not the oppressed party here. Neither is the Catholic Church -- which as an institution only exists, quite bluntly, because of the efforts and commitment of homosexual Catholics. Shit, most of us straight folks left a long time ago, leaving behind (1) the crazies like Gallagher and (2) the genuinely pious, about 2/3 of whom are gay, and all of whom do the actual work.
Frankly, after watching how the church nastily and chronically abused my mom, a woman who devoted her life to actually helping the needy, politics be damned, as well as my observations of the 20th century Irish hierarchy (I've read more friggin' Lenten Pastorals than you have), I'll confidently assert that Maggie Gallagher and the strain of Catholics she champions don't give a shit about human suffering: they are all about telling people what to do, and they don't like not being in charge anymore.
Fuck them, love who you want, and if you can find it in your heart to refuse to help a human being in need because gays are having sex, fuck you, and fuck that dogma you used to justify being a bigoted prick you rode in on, motherfucker.