Earlier this month, the New York Times published an article on Jesuit Father James Martin titled, “Jesuit Priest Stands Up for Gay Catholics, Then Faces Backlash.” In the piece, author David Gonzalez, a former board member of Martin’s America Magazine, tells the tale of a golden-hearted priest who is facing down overwhelming “backlash” from hateful homophobes in order to fight for the “marginalized” LGBT community.
“Jesus went to where the people were and spoke to them in their language,” Martin told the Times. “And he was always going to the margins.”
Throughout the interview, Martin stresses this point about reaching out to the “marginalized” LGBT community, which apparently isn’t the same as ministering to them, since that would require applying the Church’s teaching on sexuality and marriage rather than denouncing those teachings as “needlessly hurtful.”
But the claim that the LGBT community is marginalized is laughable. The LGBT movement is perhaps the most widely celebrated social cause of our modern culture. Hollywood, academia, corporate America, and the mainstream media have overwhelmingly embraced the LGBT platform.
When LGBT Catholics reject the embrace of Holy Mother Church, the world rewards them richly for it.
Want an example of a group that is genuinely marginalized? Stay-at-home moms.
My mother-in-law is a faithful Catholic who has 11 beautiful children. Long ago she stopped counting the number of strange looks and nasty comments she received from people who were apparently repulsed by her decision to put herself last and give her “yes” to God’s plan for her family.
She and her husband have been able to feed, clothe, and educate 11 kids on a single income, and yet she has been called “irresponsible,” I suppose for increasing the “surplus population” (cf. Ebenezer Scrooge).
Condescending imbeciles have assumed that she is unaware of how babies are born, or rather how they are not born. Nobody stops to think she may have had intelligent, moral reasons for not jumping on the birth control bandwagon like so many other women in her generation.
Complete strangers have said unimaginable things about the most intimate parts of her body.
But you won’t hear much about the marginalization, objectification, or suffering of moms because
1. We’re too tired to whine about how little sleep we got in the past month, how many times we had to change our shirt in the past hour, how many loads of laundry we’ve done today, or how many people have told us (implicitly or explicitly) that we’re throwing our lives away or letting Womankind down, and
2. I like to think we’re generally pretty confident and satisfied with the decision we’ve made.
3. Unlike the LGBT community, and Fr. Martin himself, we are marginalized. That means we don’t have easy access to Hollywood celebrities, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and network television. We can’t simply call up our friends in high places and ask them to hear us out about our cause, because we have no friends in high places. That’s what being marginalized means.
As a mother, I can honestly say that I don’t need the Barack Obamas, Justin Trudeaus, Katy Perrys and Macklemores of the world giving speeches and writing songs affirming my life choices.
I’m satisfied without the power and celebrity that comes with conforming to the whims of the powerful. Mothers are marginalized, but we don’t mind that we are. When it comes to raising our kids, we’re not in it for the perks. We do it because we believe the task to be good, true, and beautiful.
No amount of misleading rhetoric and “dialogue” will change God’s perfect and permanent design for human sexuality. The Church calls on the faithful to take up our crosses and unite ourselves to Christ in our suffering.
Martin is trying to convince an entire group of people that they have no cross to bear other than the imaginary cross that has been unjustly thrust upon them by hateful bigots. “There is no one more marginalized in the Church than L.G.B.T. Catholics,” Martin tells the Times. “So, I’m right where I should be.”
In 2015, Cardinal Timothy Dolan issued a statement describing the emergence of a “new minority” in the Church and in the world. While he praised the Church’s efforts to welcome various minorities (the single, those with same-sex attraction, the divorced, the widowed, those with disabilities, the elderly, racial and ethnic minorities, etc.), he suggested that the Church could do a better job supporting and encouraging men and women seeking to faithfully follow the Catholic teachings on marriage and chastity.
Today, this “new minority” continues to receive little to no support from Hollywood, the media, and—thanks to clerics like James Martin—even Church leaders. These men and women are being punished for pursuing virtue in a world that embraces vice, and the Fr. Martins of the world are kicking dirt in their wounds.
Fr. Martin may still be free, for now, to continue sowing confusion about same-sex desires and the Church’s teaching on marriage, but no more should he be allowed to do so in the name of defending the marginalized.