And a quick gloss to what I posted earlier today about celebrating (?) American Catholics' support for gay rights:
The big problem in the Catholic church as it's now configured, against which Catholics committed to justice for gay and lesbian persons also need to push back very hard, is male-entitled heterosexism. Leaders of the Catholic church have been working overtime in recent years to re-brand the Catholic church as a bastion of power and privilege for heterosexual males.
And they've succeeded, to a great extent. While millions of Catholics in the developed world have distanced themselves from the homophobia and heterosexism, often leaving the church to escape these toxins, Christians from communions that have ordained women and gays who oppose these developments have flocked to Rome in recent years. The development of the Father Corapi Starter Kit model for the priesthood--the emergence to center stage of Euteneuer and Corapi as leaders of "crunchy" manly-man Catholicism--depends entirely on the re-branding of the Catholic church as a male-entitled heterosexist club. The homophobia of the leaders of the Catholic church goes hand in hand with ugly misogyny that subjects American nuns to an investigation of their fidelity while the numerous bishops who have protected pedophile priests are never called on the carpet.
The abuse crisis depends on clericalism. It emanates from clericalism. And at the heart of the clerical system is a belief in clerical entitlement--in clerical power and privilege--that is bolstered by male heterosexist entitlement.
Even though at the dark heart of that same system there is (to use lesbian-feminist poet Adrienne Rich's marvelous formulation) an unholy trinity of lies, secrets, and silence about the real sexual orientation and real sexual lives of many clerics.
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