blacksnextdoor

Timothy Dolan, the latest New York archbishop has been installed and immediately as the whole city cheers – he makes it clear, it’s business as usual but he’ll try to conduct church business perhaps in a different tone.

Maybe I’ve been to too many executive leadership conferences but archbishop Dolan has the personal style of a CEO, doesn’t he?

Troubling.  

At least he had the good sense to let the Prayer of the Faithful include an Igbo speaking Nigerian woman who climbed up to the altar in a gele and must’ve taken aback a good number of those Catholics of European descent who just don’t understand what their priests have been up to for the last 100 or so years. Would’ve liked to have seen the look on that creep Giuliani’s face at that moment. Sure he was surprised someone let her in.

At any rate, I sobbed into my hands when tenor Ronan Tynan sang Ave Maria. I was born and raised a Catholic –  though I no longer am. And this hymn still brings me to tears.  Some things never change.

Or do they?

Can Dolan and eerie groups like the National Organization for Marriage be successful in stopping gay couples in New York from marrying? And if so, what is it that they’re trying to stop from happening exactly?

I don’t see how two gay people who are in love, who want to settle down together and possibly even raise children are a threat to society. I thought our societal aversion to gay culture was that it was not rooted in family. Well, more and more it’s trying be. Isn’t this what everyone wants?

If the Catholic church is truly concerned about making sure that marriage is being kept sacred, I can think of communities teeming with heterosexuals having children out of wedlock as if there’s no such thing, who are completely in need of some help.

Wouldn’t it make greater sense for the church to positively promote marriage worldwide rather than trying to stop it?

If the belief that homosexuality is a sin is what the archbishop is so steadfastly trying to enforce,  perhaps he should begin with his own priesthood.

There are many Catholics current and former who are increasingly incapable of suspending disbelief that this vast culture of celibate men and women that comprise the church are really truly that and not a sexually frustrated religious body.

I applaud Governor Paterson. He’s right. This is the civil rights issue of our time. To say that, does not – as some African-Americans fear – mean that the black Civil Rights struggle is being minimized or somehow gentrified.

If gay people were aliens who suddenly landed in spaceships from outer space, this paranoia would make sense.  But all of us work and live peacefully, if not enjoyably alongside gay people every damned day and have done so since forever.

According to statistics, there are lots of us who harbor some fundamental resentment anyway and are ‘against’ our gay neighbors, family members and colleagues having the same rights we do.

Excuse the space ship talk, but I find that strange and a bit scary.