How the love that dare not speak its name became the love that won't shut up

Austin Ruse, "A Manly Voice on Matters Gay and Christian" (Crisis magazine, May 23, 2014):

A gay guy gets up in the morning, does something, and nobody writes about it. Now that would be news.

Will we ever see that day when we as a culture do not stare slack-jawed and unblinking—so as not to miss a single thing—at all things gay?

There’s an old joke about how many lesbians it takes to screw in a light bulb. Five. One to screw it in and four to write about it. That’s pretty much where we are now and there’s no relief in sight. A society of 300,000,000 force-fed the nanosecond by nanosecond trials, tribulations, triumphs and television kisses of a comparatively scant few.

... A writer at something called “Letters to Christopher” explores a variant of this enforced obsession and that is the insistent obsession of “gay Christians”on, well, themselves, how we see them and deal with them and speak to them and minister to them and everything about them.

In “My Cross Isn’t Greater Than Yours, or, Enough with the Whining” this anonymous blogger says, “Show me a man who doesn’t suffer, and I’ll show you a dead man. One of the more irksome aspects in the current conversation of LGBT issues and Christianity is the remarkable amount of dreary and droopy writing I hear from folks like me who grew up in the Church and realized they had an attraction to men.”

He quotes one such blogger:

“It would be beneficial for Christians and Christian traditions as a whole to consider [the] question: are we imposing sexual abstinence as an unfunded mandate with dire consequences for LGBT people who do not succeed? Especially as more people are coming to awareness of their sexual orientations and gender identities at a younger age (emphasis mine), it is irresponsible and cruel for churches to repeat ‘You can’t have sex!’and refuse to offer any additional support.”He says there are only two options, forced abstinence and a life of suffering, or sex and excommunication from Church, and family. He says “numerous young LGBT Christians find themselves crushed by the pressure from priests, pastors, parents and faith communities.”

“Letters from Christopher” hates “that sort of portrayal of what my life must have been like back when I was a teenager in the eighties, or how that must be what the life is today for a 15 year old. How fatalistic. How could that ever inspire a teenager to fight the good fight of chastity if they were to ever read that?”

He says, “Sure, it’s hard. But we are made of the stuff of God. We are made in the image of a God who willingly went to the Cross. That’s the building block of our humanity. Boys and girls with same sex attraction aren’t witless victims of the vagaries of fate if they find themselves attracted to the same sex—they have a choice, and God has promised that He will always provide his children the grace to live out the most difficult of demands.”

One word describes this column from this anonymous blogger—manly—something quite distinct from the “oh woe is me” school of “gay Christians.” He calls them back to the “buck up” school. Get on with it. Stop whining, he says.

This isn't ultimately a same-sex problem, as prevalent as it might be in the LGBT community. It's a narcissism problem. Something of this problem is evident in the pre-shooting rampage video by Elliot Rodger, who confesses to having suffered for eight years since reaching puberty and reached his wit's end because he's twenty-two years of age and hasn't had sex yet or even kissed a girl.

One wants to scream: "Get a life!" But the problem is more that this or that individual, as culpable as they may be, because the whole culture is drenched in weak-willed self-indulgent narcissism (Christopher Lasch, The culture of Narcissism); and if one had nothing but the entertainment media as one's catechesis, one might well conclude that the meaning of life is to be found in an endless series of transient spasms of pleasure. What a pathetic, lonely, shallow little puddle of meaning. Sights can be set a good bit higher. Look to our Lord.

[Hat tip to JM]