The United Nations General Assembly is hearing a French statement this week about “human rights violations based on sexual orientation and gender identity, including torture, arbitrary arrest, killings, political, social and economic discrimination and the criminalization of same-sex love.”

Lisa Neff’s cogent and thorough opinion ([1] “The Sins of the Pope”) on [2] 365Gay.com is helpful and clear in trying to get people to see moral issues in a clear light that does not allow hypocrisy to hide.

There are still 86 nations in the world which criminalize sexual behavior between persons of the same sex, and 7of them stipulate the death penalty. But as Neff reasons, the Roman Catholic Church is less concerned about the death penalty for intimate same-sex acts than it is about discrimination against people who discriminate!

“All the European Union members, as well as a number of non-EU countries and Latin American nations, have signed on to the statement to decriminalize homosexuality. The United States, however, has not signed on to the document.

To anyone’s surprise?

And the Vatican has taken a stand against the statement.

To anyone’s surprise?”

Since the Vatican has publicly stated over and over that [3] homosexuality is intrinsically “disordered” it believes that open season for discrimination against us should not be limited.

“In defense of the Vatican’s opposition, Archbishop Celestino Migliore said a statement to decriminalize homosexuality would lead to bias against those who discriminate against gays and lesbians. ‘If adopted, they would create new and implacable discriminations,’ [4] Migliore told Reuters. ‘For example, states which do not recognize same-sex unions as ‘matrimony’ will be pilloried and made an object of pressure.’”

Neff’s point is that the death penalty, which some segments of the Roman Catholic Church have publicly opposed, is apparently less serious a moral violation than two people of the same sex being in love.What’s wrong with this picture? It is all too easy to throw it all at the feet of Roman Catholic teaching (and of course at the feet of the United States of America, which has dragged its feet on virtually everything good and decent from human rights to the Kyoto protocols). There is a lot to throw down there, including the fact that the same Roman Catholic Church which, during the Inquisition five centuries ago, executed heretics and “faggots” by burning them at the stake, has never recanted from it’s medieval evil. The Vatican’s Office of the Inquisition never actually shut down. It is still in existence more than 500 years later, but it was renamed the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and, until recently, was headed by Cardinal Ratzinger, who is now Pope Benedict XVI. Benedict, whose papal name means “blessed” apparently sees little internal conflict between being blessed and attacking the right of human beings to live without fear of brutal violence and execution simply for being who they are.Ahh, but here is the rub. The intractable Roman Catholic view is that homosexual behavior is not intrinsic — it’s not about who we are but how we behave. Behavior can be modified, they insist. Human beings can desist from doing evil, and choose the good. Of course they haven’t asked us if any of this fits our life experience. And of course they haven’t explained what is so morally evil about two people, who happen to be of the same biological sex, loving one another. What if it is a choice? What makes it an evil choice in their view?

No, they have simply defined our way of being as a propensity for an evil behavior. And they make clear, over and over, decade after decade, that their moral view for Roman Catholics should prevail over all human beings also.

Sadly, Vatican reasoning is not based on any rational construction of theological teaching. It is based on the irrational and circular reasoning that human beings should not have the human right to just be different. Their irrational point of view is based of course on the idea that homosexuality is not a given in the human personality or human nature, but is a choice. They reject the empirically verifiable evidence that human beings are in deed quite different from one another, in thousands of physical, psychological, and emotional ways. For such [5] Luddites, any variation or difference from the norm which the Vatican has designed is clear evidence of sin, moral error, disorder, or evil.

Our movement has spent decades trying to explain, convince and defend the point of view that the homosexual orientation is not a matter of choice but is a given for a minority of the population – a minority which remains pretty consistent across the centuries and the cultures of the world. The Vatican point of view simply rejects this—and 40 years worth of psychological research and studies—because it is foundational for their entire system of prejudice. To admit that human beings do not choose, but discern, their sexual orientation would collapse even quasi-rational theological and legal arguments to defend prejudice.

In his first book, [6] Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama, summarizes the internal dissonance he began to feel as a child when he first became aware of prejudice and racism, and I think his description fits our experience of irrational homophobia equally well. He explains his reaction to seeing a Life magazine photograph of a black man who had tried to peel off his own skin:

I suspect I was one of the luckier ones, having been given a stretch of childhood free from self-doubt. . . . But that one photograph had told me something else: that there was a hidden enemy out there, one that could reach me without anyone’s knowledge, not even my own. When I got home that night . . . I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror with all my senses and limbs seemingly intact, looking as I had always looked, and wondering if something was wrong with me. The alternative seemed no less frightening— that the adults around me lived in the midst of madness. [New York, Three Rivers Press, 1995, 2004, pp. 51-52.]

With the election of Obama as President we might comfort ourselves that the racism which fueled terrible violations of human rights, including cruelty, violence and the death penalty for centuries against people who are of a different color, is on the wane. But don’t look for the defenders of systemic homophobia, such as 86 nations of the world and the Roman Catholic Church, to change any time soon.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles