All Pope Francis said was: Don’t execute gay people. FaithfulCatholics™ went nuts. (Pope Francis Derangement Syndrome Vol. XXXIII.)

ake Site News pro­motes Fr. Ger­ald Mur­ray’s lat­est fit against the pope on Warmed Over With Ray­mond Arroyo. Mur­ray and Fake Site are huge pro­mot­ers of what they call “anti-sodomy laws.” They don’t say they want gays to be exe­cut­ed. They don’t say they don’t want gays to be exe­cut­ed. They don’t bring it up at all, as though it was­n’t the con­text of the pope’s remarks in his inter­view with the Asso­ci­at­ed Press. But it was the con­text. Here’s the ques­tion (bear with me, it’s in Span­ish):

Hay un tema que es com­pli­ca­do, la crim­i­nal­ización de la homo­sex­u­al­i­dad. Es un tema que cada vez se ve dis­cu­ti­do, pero hay muchas pare­jas que tienen leyes crim­i­nales con­tra los homo­sex­u­ales y algunos has­ta con­tem­plan la pena de muerte. Inclu­so donde estas leyes no se apli­can, las nor­mas con­tribuyen a una cli­ma de vio­len­cia, dis­crim­i­nación con­tra la comu­nidad gay y trans. ¿Cuál es la posi­ción de la Igle­sia? ¿Qué debe hac­er la Igle­sia? Puesto que hay obis­pos que apoy­an estas leyes.

Pena de muerte—that’s the death penal­ty.

Here’s the trans­la­tion [cour­tesy Cyn­thia Schrage]:

There’s a com­pli­cat­ed sub­ject: the crim­i­nal­iza­tion of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. It is a sub­ject that is increas­ing­ly dis­cussed, but there are many places that have laws against homo­sex­u­als, and some even con­tem­plate the death penal­ty. Even where these laws do not apply, the stric­tures con­tribute to a cli­mate of vio­lence and dis­crim­i­na­tion against the gay and trans com­mu­ni­ty. What is the posi­tion of the Church? What should the Church do—since there are bish­ops who sup­port these laws?

Nicole Win­field, who asked the ques­tion, was inter­est­ed entire­ly in the prob­lem of gay peo­ple being exe­cut­ed and gay peo­ple being vic­tims of vio­lence. That is the prob­lem Pope Fran­cis was address­ing. In fact, in his reply, he says twice that 10–12 coun­tries have laws per­mit­ting the exe­cu­tion of gay peo­ple.

But Fake Site News does not men­tion this. Ray­mond Arroyo does not men­tion this. Fr. Ger­ald Mur­ray, the habit­u­al­ly apoplec­tic guest on Warmed Over, does not men­tion this. I con­fess I don’t know how you can neglect that con­text when dis­cussing the pope’s insis­tence that homo­sex­u­al­i­ty is “not a crime.” But they don’t men­tion it. At best this is slop­py.

PRO-ANTI-“SODOMY.”

Fr. Mur­ray does spend a great deal of time argu­ing that anti-“sodomy” laws ben­e­fit soci­ety. Such laws, he says, “warn peo­ple not to com­mit sin.” They “pro­tect soci­ety where if that sin were tol­er­at­ed it might become more wide­spread.”

Which is non­sense. There’s no evi­dence that tol­er­ance of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty caus­es homo­sex­u­al­i­ty to become more com­mon. No one decides to be gay because peo­ple are tol­er­at­ing gays. Tol­er­ance does not cause peo­ple to “catch the gay.” Such fears are igno­rance act­ing upon big­otry. If it super­fi­cial­ly seems that there are more gay peo­ple roam­ing the streets than there used to be, that’s noth­ing more than a func­tion of tol­er­ance bring­ing peo­ple out of the clos­et. Fr. Mur­ray seems to pre­fer a world where anti-“sodomy” laws kept peo­ple clos­et­ed. There were just as many gay peo­ple then as there are now, it’s just that Fr. Mur­ray did­n’t have to know about them.

“The sto­ry of Sodom and Gomor­rah in the Bible,” Fr. Mur­ray con­tin­ued, “is a warn­ing to us.”

Fr. Mur­ray thinks that dous­ing the gays with burn­ing sul­fur is an appro­pri­ate “warn­ing,” although the sin of Sodom was not homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. Even Fr. Dwight Lon­ge­neck­er agrees that the sin of Sodom was sex­u­al vio­lence. It has no bear­ing on what Pope Fran­cis is talk­ing about. (And for that rea­son we real­ly ought to dis­pense with the offen­sive word “sodomy.”)

But Fr. Mur­ray, who insists upon the word as though he just learned it, has more com­plaints.

“What is the basis where you would decrim­i­nal­ize sodomy?” he asks. “Do peo­ple have a right to com­mit sodomy? Is this some­how now a human right?”

Unfor­tu­nate­ly the man is read­ing too much into things. There aren’t laws against adul­tery. There aren’t laws against pre­mar­i­tal sex. There aren’t laws against con­tra­cep­tion. There aren’t laws against mas­tur­ba­tion. But I don’t hear any­one claim­ing that this means any of them are “human rights.” Any­one could make a con­vinc­ing claim that all of these things are harm­ful to soci­ety, and yet no one sug­gests that they should be against the law. No one sug­gests giv­ing for­ni­ca­tors or mas­tur­ba­tors a lethal injec­tion or send­ing them to the fir­ing squad.

No, it’s only the gays Fr. Mur­ray wants to pun­ish.

FAKE CATHOLIC TEACHING.

Ray­mond Wolfe, writ­ing at Fake Site, claims: “Catholic teach­ing explic­it­ly con­demns legal pro­tec­tion for homo­sex­u­al­i­ty.” He cites a 1992 let­ter from the CDF enti­tled “Some Con­sid­er­a­tions Con­cern­ing the Response to Leg­isla­tive Pro­pos­als on the Non-Dis­crim­i­na­tion of Homo­sex­u­al Per­sons.”

It’s a wind­ed title, although the let­ter is only slight­ly longer. But the real prob­lem with Wolfe’s appeal to it is that it address­es a dif­fer­ent ques­tion alto­geth­er, name­ly, whether the law can pro­hib­it dis­crim­i­na­tion on the basis of sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion. The CDF does not address whether homo­sex­u­al­i­ty as such, or gay sex, should be ille­gal, only whether gay peo­ple can be denied pub­lic hous­ing intend­ed for fam­i­lies, and things of that kind. Mr. Wolfe’s claim that Pope Fran­cis is con­tra­dict­ing Catholic teach­ing fails on that basis alone.

And even the Nation­al Catholic Reg­is­ter admits that Pope Bene­dict XVI also urged the decrim­i­nal­iza­tion of homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. The Reg­is­ter cites this state­ment by the Vat­i­can at the UN Gen­er­al Assem­bly in 2008. Here’s the key pas­sage:

The Holy See appre­ci­ates the attempts made in the Dec­la­ra­tion on human rights, sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion and gen­der identity—presented at the UN Gen­er­al Assem­bly on 18 Decem­ber 2008—to con­demn all forms of vio­lence against homo­sex­u­al per­sons as well as urge States to take nec­es­sary mea­sures to put an end to all crim­i­nal penal­ties against them.

 

[…]

 

The Holy See con­tin­ues to advo­cate that every sign of unjust dis­crim­i­na­tion towards homo­sex­u­al per­sons should be avoid­ed and urges States to do away with crim­i­nal penal­ties against them.

Fr. Mur­ray and Fake Site News neglect to men­tion this.

•••

All it took for the lat­est episode of Pope Fran­cis Derange­ment Syn­drome is for the pope to say: You know, maybe we ought not to be killing gay peo­ple.