Imagine this Conversation
Mother: You hurt him.
Father: I didn’t touch him.
Mother: True, you didn’t touch him. You hardly ever touched him—I mean, embraced him, ushered him along, encouraged him.
Father: I never hit him.
Mother: But you still injured him. You didn’t touch him when you should have, in the way you should have—
Father: So, I made him gay.—Is that where you’re going with this?
Mother: Something did.
Father: Something did what?
Mother: Made him gay.
Father: You think I did?
Mother: I don’t know what to think.
(pause)
Father: What do you want from me?
Mother: Just, just give him a chance. You seem more closed than open to him.
Father: You’ve babied him enough for two people.
Mother: He’s my son…And he’s your son too.
Father: He doesn’t talk to me.
Mother: Why is that?—Why doesn’t he talk to you?—I’ll tell you why. Because you didn’t speak to him. I don’t mean you didn’t tell him your opinions or give orders or correct him. I mean speak with him—about yourself, or your feelings, about life, or how you felt about him.
Father: So, what do you want me to say?
Mother: I want you to have a relationship with your son.
Father: (ruefully) My gay son.
Mother: Our gay son.
Father: I don’t approve.
Mother: Of him?
Father: Of him being gay.
Mother: It’s who he is.
Father: I didn’t raise him to be gay.
Mother: You hardly raised him at all.
Father: Listen, what I did—
Mother: Was fail to love him.
Father: You’re hard on me, woman.
Mother: Now you know how your son feels.
Father: How’s that?
Mother: Alienated.
Father: He feels gay, he said so.
Mother: He’s alienated. From you…and because of you.
Imagine this Conversation
Priest: The psychological dynamic does not excuse immoral behavior.
Psychologist: I think the dynamic needs to be understood.
Priest: Homosexual activity is inherently disordered.
Psychologist: Wrong?
Priest: Yes, wrong.
Psychologist: Then say so—plainly. You don’t help understanding if you mince words here.
Priest: Ok, ok. Wrong.
Psychologist: What about the homosexual inclination?
Priest: What about it?
Psychologist: Is it wrong?
Priest: Is it wrong?
Psychologist: Well, is it? Because it seems like your Church says it isn’t.
Priest: The Catechism says it’s disordered.
Psychologist: Does that mean wrong?
Priest: Well, I’m not a moral theologian—
Psychologist: I thought we agreed to speak plainly. Is it wrong—a homosexual inclination?
Priest: I guess it is.
Psychologist: You guess? That’s all you got—a guess?
Priest: Well, if you want to follow a line of reasoning that the Church lays out, then the inclination is wrong. It’s wrong because it is directed to a wrong behavior. What inclines toward what is wrong is itself wrong.
Psychologist: You think so?
Priest: I think that’s a logical outcome. What’s wrong is wrong. What inclines to something wrong is also thereby wrong.
Psychologist: Shall we call you Thomas Aquinas?
Priest: Ha ha. Far from it. I’m more of a sinner, and a good deal thinner…But now let me ask you something. What did you mean when you said ‘the dynamic needs to be better understood’?
Psychologist: It does.
Priest: You know the Catechism says that very thing.
Psychologist: I did read that.
Priest: Nice to know you pay attention to the Church.
Psychologist: More than you know. But I get in trouble if I do—on this very point.
Priest: Trouble?—with whom?
Psychologist: My profession.
Priest: What do you mean?
Psychologist: The psychological profession. It does not share your ‘Aquinas point’ about the homosexual inclination being wrong. It’s all about homosexual orientation being good and supportable.
Priest: And you agree with that?
Psychologist: Well I think it’s complicated.
Priest: Well, if the shoe isn’t on the other foot! ‘Don’t mince words’. ‘Speak plainly’. Somebody just said that to me.
Psychologist: All right. All right. Easy does it. I get it.
Priest: Then, give it—I mean, an answer. Agree or not?
Psychologist: Agree with what?
Priest: With what your profession says about the so-called goodness of a homosexual inclination?
Psychologist: Anyone listening?
Priest: Just you and me.
Psychologist: It’s not good.
Priest: Hater! Homophobe! Villain!
Psychologist: Funny. But in some quarters I could lose my license for saying that.
Priest: And that would be a bad thing?
Psychologist: Of course it would. Think about it. My perspective lines up with your ‘Aquinas perspective’. And you guys—Church—need all the help you can get.
Priest: Yes, we do.
Psychologist: Actually, I have thought for some time that what psychology—decent psychology—can say to the Church is ‘stick to your guns’. You do the morality. We’ll do the psychology. And the classical insight from psychology here is that many a son—who can be characterized as sensitive, without detriment to his maleness—experiences a father wound. This is a wound that results from the father withholding or otherwise failing to show sufficient love to him. The wound has the boy feeing radically insecure about himself—as a male person. What’s more, he’s drawn to males. But this attraction to males is not something he controls. It’s not naturally occurring. It has him, has the boy in its grasp. That’s why it’s a psychological matter. He needs to be free of its grip on him.
Priest: I’m having a little trouble following all that.
Psychologist: It’s really nothing new. It’s just been buried.
Priest: Buried where?
Psychologist: Buried since 1973 when the American Psychiatric Association dropped homosexuality from its book of disorders.
Priest: You mean, homosexuality was a psychological disorder?
Psychologist: Once upon a time.
Priest: And it’s not now?
Psychologist: I’ve already told you I consider it to be so.
Priest: But why the change? Some new evidence show up then in 1973?
Psychologist: The only thing that changed in 1973 was the political climate.
Priest: In the psychological profession?
Psychologist: Yes, indeed.
Priest: So, a diagnosis was reversed?—One day homosexuality was a disorder and the next day it wasn’t?
Psychologist: As they say in Church, ‘Amen’.
[Conversations to be continued.]