Thursday, March 8, 2007

CALLING DR. MENGELE

Jesuit Father Gianfranco Ghirlanda says the Church needs to use the psychological sciences to help weed out homosexual candidates from the priesthood. What a moron! I’m sorry, what I meant to say is that Father Ghirlanda could possibly be mistaken. (CNS story here.)

When this guy Ghirlanda gets to the “individual judgment” and the sin of employment discrimination comes up, he’ll be pleading incompetence and stupidity.

The stupidity defense works well with Yahweh (we’re told). The problem is God doesn’t like to hear this defense from the Jesuits. They’re supposed to be smart. It’s like the Puerto Rican and the Jew.

Once I overheard two members of my softball team arguing. One was an older, crusty, Puerto Rican ex-junkie from Spanish Harlem, the other a fussbudget young Jewish kid from the suburbs. At one point Izzy got exasperated and said, “Scott, you’re the first dumb Jew I ever met.”

So Father Ghirlanda wants to use science-based health care professionals to assist the Church in discriminating against homosexuals in employment. No can do.

The underlying assumption is that vows are more likely to be broken by homosexuals than by heterosexuals. Can anyone spell lol?

Then Father Ghirlanda mentions transitory versus deep-seated homosexual tendencies. I’ve been gay all my life, I’ve been gay longer than the average person on earth has been alive, and I have never heard this distinction. It sounds like something dreamed up in a steamy seminary dormroom to justify “just one more time.”

I aver that all competent psychology professionals in the industrialized world agree:

1) Sexual orientation is involuntary and unmanipulable.

2) Sexual orientation is a predictor only of sex partner choice.

3) To impute any moral, or psychological, or functional deficiency to anyone based on their perceived sexual orientation is scientifically unjustifiable.

4) To discriminate against homosexuals in employment is a violation of human rights.

5) For a practitioner to assist in a process that identifies homosexuals so that they can be discriminated against is a gross violation of medical ethics.

So, Father Ghirlanda’s idea is a non-starter. Any psychologist who would assist such a program is either a crackpot or someone with dark personal motives. Either way, the outcome will be a botch.

The Church is going to get the same crappy candidates for the priesthood that they’ve always been getting until they allow females and married people to be priests.

For a young man to vow to never have sex for the rest of his life makes as much sense as the same young man vowing never to drink orange juice. Like, why?

The vow of celibacy itself selects for weirdos, as discussed in “Celibacy Math.”

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