Archbishop Timothy Dolan and the Zombie Apocalypse
Posted on Sunday, June 19, 2011 at 09:50 AM
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First Archbishop Timothy Dolan sent GOP Majority Leader Dean Skelos a widely reported warning salvo - calling in to an Albany radio show to claim that the marriage equality bill currently under consideration by the Senate could infringe on religious freedom.
Then, to underline his alarm, Dolan sent Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn to visit Skelos' in his office on Friday morning.
Dolan, who spent the week expressing himself like a terrified protagonist in a cold-war espionage film, added:
'Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America – not in China or North Korea. In those countries, government presumes daily to 'redefine' rights, relationships, values, and natural law. There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of 'family' and 'marriage' means.'
Wait, who does that remind you of, Archbishop?
In fact, as Dolan knows, the Marriage Equality bill exempts all religious institutions from solemnizing same-sex weddings and offering their private facilities for celebrations. This means no gay couples will be storming into churches, temples and mosques to force spiritual leaders to marry them.
So Archbishop, if you have a strong objection, isn't it always better to ensure that it's based in fact?
It's not difficult to appreciate Dolan's concerns about an arrangement that challenges his faith - and, more to the point, his political influence - but he does himself no favors by overplaying his hand.
On Friday Dolan warned that the proposed marriage equality legislation posed an 'ominous threat' to society.
Really, Archbishop? Have you been to Connecticut lately? Here's what will actually happen: gay couples will finally avail of the same legal rights and entitlements that heterosexual couples take for granted.
Here's what will not happen, Archbishop: the zombie apocalypse.
It's a measure of Dolan's inability to win his own argument or even offer a convincing counterpoint that he's had to frame the debate in scare quotes and absurdly overheated language.
The truth is the New York State Catholic Conference, the lobbying arm of the Catholic Church here, has no intention of supporting a marriage equality bill no matter what the religious exemptions are.
'Our beliefs should not be viewed as discrimination against homosexual people,' Dolan, in a moment of sheer surrealism, added. But this is obvious nonsense: if you try to limit someone's behavior without actually protecting them or anybody else from anything, it's an attack.
'The Church affirms the basic human rights of gay men and women, and the state has rightly changed many laws to offer these men and women hospital visitation rights, bereavement leave, death benefits, insurance benefits, and the like.'
So, there you have it. In the Archbishops view gay people constitute about three fifths of a human being, and they ought to be satisfied.
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hollabackgurl | Jul 07, 2011, 11:43 PM EDT
You can not agitate for the exclusion and removal of rights from a disfavored minority and contend they are not being attacked. It's idiotic to pretend otherwise. Dolan is of a piece with Jerry Falwell, Fred Phelps, Pat Robertson and every other Christianist who works tirelessly to expose gay people to insult, slander and second class status. The Catholic Church encourages its followers to pray that foreign countries will continue to criminalize homosexuality and will resist efforts by the Obama administration to get them to change. they want to marginalize and strip the rights from anyone unlike themselves, that's Dolan's core mission.
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eiriamach | Jun 22, 2011, 07:12 PM EDT
Gearoid4, I quoted a Vatican II document on opposing discrimination--"every type" of discrimination. The quotation is relevant because Dolan is lobbying to maintain a discriminatory status quo in NYS law. Perhaps he has not read or understood the pope's encyclical? I do not conflate or confuse his political activities with overt anti-gay sentiment. He does not need to say, "Hate the gays" in order to generate hatred of gays. Hannah Arendt pointed out that the best Nazis were not those who obeyed every order, but those who anticipated the will of the Fuhrer and did it without being ordered. When Catholics witness their own bishops working to keep discriminatory practices in place, many conclude that homosexuals are sinful and that it is therefore alright, if not obligatory, to hate them and to silence and ostracize those who argue for LGBT equality. I cannot believe that AB Dolan lacks the perspicuity to anticipate this result of his campaign. I have witnessed such hatred voiced by Catholics on a Saturday night, and then seen the same Catholics receiving communion the next morning at Mass. I do not expect such people ever to change their view of marriage, but I do expect Catholic clergy and prelates to realize that specific and generalized bigotry is the direct result of their anti-gay political activities. "Gaudium et Spes" supports that argument rather precisely.
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Gearoid4 | Jun 22, 2011, 02:19 PM EDT
Eiriamach, clearly you do not understand the motivations driving the Archbishop to say what he does. He is not motivated by an ideological hatred of anyone in the gay community. He is undertaking his grave responsibility as the head pastor of his archdiocese to give a reasoned discourse on the importance of marriage as it is understood in Christian terms. There is no overt or covert anti-gay sentiment in any of his words. Do not conflate his speech with the hatred conveyed by extreme religious fundamentalists or those on the fanatical right who want to hurt or exterminate members of the gay community. You make reference to certain Vatican 11 documents in a specious way to try to get them to fit your arguments. Nowhere in any of the documents does the Church want to radically re-define marriage to make it what it was never intended to be. The relevant Vatican 11 teachings on marriage rather backs up the life-giving reality of a marital union between a single man and a single woman.
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eiriamach | Jun 22, 2011, 06:52 AM EDT
Geroid4, you ignore my argument: the bishops' activities do immense and widespread harm. They stigmatize an entire group of human beings on the basis of private behavior, they nurture hatred and discrimination in heterosexuals, they perpetuate unjust social and economic inequalities, and they create an atmosphere in which many young people have found life itself not worth living and have resorted to suicide. These consequences render the bishops' campaign clearly evil-- indeed, sinful and scandalous. It violates not only the spirit but the letter of the gospel and works not toward greater acceptance of the Church's teaching, but toward repudiation of the Church's voice in politics, as one can easily see from others' comments. Vatican II exhorted us to transcend social-group differences, to remove barriers to full development of our humanity. From Gaudiam et Spes, The Community of Mankind, "28. Respect and love ought to be extended also to those who think or act differently than we do in social, political and even religious matters. In fact, the more deeply we come to understand their ways of thinking through such courtesy and love, the more easily will we be able to enter into dialogue with them.... [W]ith respect to the fundamental rights of the person, every type of discrimination, whether social or cultural, whether based on sex, race, color, social condition, language or religion, is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God's intent."
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Gearoid4 | Jun 21, 2011, 05:24 PM EDT
Eiriamach, you quote statistics concerning the apparent decline of marriages since the 70's in the Catholic Church. A lot of reasons are responsible for the figures that you quote. The co-habitation option is seen by many couples as an alternative to marriage, although many do not give up the hope of a Church wedding. The registry office is favored by a lot of couples due to matters such as divorces in previous relationship which are problematic for the Church. Whatever the stats, marriage between one man and one woman provides the optimum conditions for the raising of children in terms of their future prospects as reliable studies show. It is not an entitlement that simply can be reconfigured to anyone's particular situation. laws which are of serious moral import cannot be decided on the back of a democratic vote. The natural law given by God is written in our hearts and we know instinctively if it is right or wrong. Eiriamach, the Vatican 11 Council never mandated a loosening of the definition of sacred institutions like marriage to suit 'same-sex' marriage. It was rock solid on the marital bond as being between a single man and a single woman and open to life.
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eiriamach | Jun 21, 2011, 11:24 AM EDT
Why are the bishops trying so hard to exclude this relatively small population from marriage equality under state law when the marriage rate for Catholics has fallen by nearly 60% --yes, SIXTY percent-- since 1972? See news articles on Our Sunday Visitor, the National Catholic Register, Commonweal, and elsewhere about this statistic. According to the Commonweal article, “'The number of marriages celebrated in the Church has fallen from 415,487 in 1972 to 168,400 in 2010 — a decrease of nearly 60 percent — while the U.S. Catholic population has increased by almost 17 million,' Gray writes. 'To put this another way, this is a shift from 8.6 marriages per 1,000 U.S. Catholics in 1972 to 2.6 marriages per 1,000 Catholics in 2010.'” It's not that people are no longer getting married, but that they do not often choose to marry in the Catholic Church. With the bishops taking such a snarky, scroogy, proprietary approach to marriage, that should be no surprise to anyone.
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eiriamach | Jun 21, 2011, 08:37 AM EDT
This opposition to full equality is the most telling symptom of pathology at work in the six-decades-long resistance of traditional Catholics to the reform Council of Vatican II. In 2011, Jamiemac is still repulsed by "pro-gay/lesbian images in print, on TV, in movies, in our educational institutions.... the 'gay agenda,'" and Gearoid4 argues "tradition" against *equality*!! Many unjust traditions changed after Vatican II, in part because reform-minded Catholics awakened to the justice of full civil rights for ethnic minorities, legal equality for women, transparency in government, rights of labor, etc. that mark the second half of the 20th century as an era of progress toward a more just society. The "princes of the church," however, blame such "liberation" movements for their own scandals. They cling to their privilege of dictating an anti-democratic and immoral "moral law" to the masses. They ride roughshod over our great American tradition of separating church from state. As they seek to control Catholic politicians, the result will be excluding Catholics from political office. They should consider the possibility that the Holy Spirit is not under exclusive contract to them. Sometimes the Spirit moves us to make progress by working for secular causes, such as full marriage equality. The Catholic bishops need to get their house in order and prepare for thorough-going church reforms that embrace the core message of the Gospel: God's inclusive love for the children, the poor, the marginalized, the rejected....
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eiriamach | Jun 21, 2011, 07:49 AM EDT
No, eliminating bigotry is not as simple as substituting one form of recognition for another. Substituting civil unions for marriage will not placate the Catholic bishops. See the Chicago Tribune's May 26, 2011 article By Manya Brachear:
"Catholic Charities of Rockford announced Thursday that the agency will halt its state-funded foster care and adoption services Wednesday — the day civil unions take effect in Illinois.
"The decision is the first of what could become a domino effect of Catholic Charities leaving the foster care and adoption business to avoid liability if state law requires them to place children with parents in civil unions — either gay or straight."
As social scientists have shown, there is no difference in achievement or mental or emotional health between children raised by same-sex couples and those raised by heterosexual couples. There are no rational grounds for Catholic opposition to marriage equality, and civil unions will not make same-sex unions acceptable to them. The bishops' continuing opposition to marriage equality stigmatizes and exposes gays to discrimination and worse. For all of us, it distorts the society we live in, distorts it with irrational rejection of some human beings and delusions of moral superiority on the part of others.
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ellenfromcork | Jun 20, 2011, 07:27 PM EDT
There's a simple solution to all this overheated debate. Anyone who wishes to unite permanently w/ another human being, of legal age and sound mind, ( John and Mary, John and Dave, Mary and Rose) can, in a civil ceremony. This would be recognized by the state as a "union" and have all the legal rights of what is now called a "marriage". If they wish, can also have a religious ceremony to provide a "marriage" The civil union would be the law of the land and the "marriage" the religious icing on the cake. l
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CitizenWhy | Jun 20, 2011, 09:58 AM EDT
Gearoid4 .. You previously said that marriage is between one man and one woman, then you say that it is meant by nature to be between a man and a women (without numbers). I think your main point is marriage is for the purpose of procreation, which the Catholic church teaches. But in my Catholic school I was taught that marriage has a number of purposes, starting with companionable love,which certainly is illustrated in the Jewish/Christian Bible. In the strictly Catholic (not universal) view, companionable love is sacramental because it is a direct reflection of Christ's love for the church and for all of humanity, and a source of grace to strengthen this love. I was taught that this companionable love is meant to be extended into the next generation through procreation or, for childless people, through any number of ways of contributing to the spiritual and material benefit of children. This care for the next generation was called generative love. Many liberal Christians believe that homosexuals can share their companionable love in union with Christ, and that they must take seriously that their lives will in some way benefit the next generations. This is a conflict between a strict traditional view and a view moderated by reconsidering marriage as an institution in the light of love, human and spiritual. Reconsidering happens often in religion: for instance, Leviticus, often cited to prove that homosexuality is wrong, also states that adulterers must be pt to death. May reconsiderers hold thar the condemnation of homosexuality in Leviticus is limited to sex without love or concern for the welfare of the next generation.
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JackFknTwist | Jun 20, 2011, 09:37 AM EDT
@Gearoid4 ; So what if catholics and Muslims agree that "marriage" is between one man and one woman ? they're still discriminating on equality grounds. go back into your churches and have what hate-fests you want. But in Public law there must be equality.....nothing less.
And the last thing we need is to be lectured to by pompous old lechers of the Catholic Church who are so guilty of abhorrent misconduct and crime that they should be ashamed to show their faces.
let's have no more Catholic s**t on this site.
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irishpjk | Jun 20, 2011, 12:08 AM EDT
Now I send Irish Central to my junk mail so I no longer will see the grabage gthey spew.
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patrickomalley | Jun 19, 2011, 11:06 PM EDT
Catholic church: Stop raping children, stop covering it up, stop lying about it, and stop telling everyone else what to do.
Oh, and lose some weight, Dolan. You are a horrible example for children.
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eiriamach | Jun 19, 2011, 10:50 PM EDT
"During an interview with The New York Post, Rudy Giuliani said that he is against gay marriage. He feels marriage should be between a man, a woman, the other woman, and the other woman he met after that." --Comedian Jay Leno
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