JHD: Dignity and the Rat Master | 1986

 Orsetti detail which would be used for dead/queer/proud cover. Firetrap Press, 2002.

31YOU GOT KICKED OUT OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH? AND YOU WANT TO GET BACK IN? 

HELLO? THEY SHOULD WANT YOU.

The Vatican’s letter “On the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons” will not stop people from being gay or Catholic. But it will make life more tense when you try to he both gay and Catholic at the same time. Cardinal Ratzinger, writing for the Company of Men, asserts that gay groups (though he never calls us by name) such as Dignity, have no right to meet and hold services on church property. 

In an ironically gay use of words, the Rat wants us to obey his dignitas, which in Latin meant “office, rank and authority,” and was often used by the Emperor to refer to himself. The Society of Homos still have visions of extending the Holy Roman Empire to America. And they become very upset when ordinary Americans question their authority.

As the Rat states: “The use of church buildings by these (gay groups)... and permission to use church property may seem only just and charitable, but in reality it is contradictory to the purpose for which these institutions were founded: it is misleading and often scandalous.”

Should any “homosexual persons” come together on church property they must first abjure and renounce themselves: “No authentic pastoral program will include organizations in which homosexual persons associate with each other without clearly stating that homosexual activity is immoral.”

Lesbian and gay people are not welcome on church property. Harsh lines are drawn: it would seem that the only gay priest would be an ex priest, the only lesbian nun would be an ex nun and the only gay Catholic would be an exCatholic.

What do you do? Do you fight or quit? Stay on or drop out of the church? Do you attend services wearing a red letter “G” on your forehead and cause a scandal? Or, as one rebel suggested, do you chain yourself to your pew and force them to throw you out? It seems like the Holy Father is saying: “This is my church, love it or leave it!”

Fortunately, life is not a series of pseudo dramatic often neurotic either/or choices. As theologian Rosalle Muschal Remnhardt says, “you can be both/and and more/than.” When you are gay or lesbian there is no reason you have to cut yourself off from your church, family, or country. It is your choice how you place yourself. Inside or outside, or both in and out and more. Stay where it is comfortable for you. Adopt a style that is comfortable for you. Be confrontational, or moderational, as you feel free to be. Go along, or make trouble, do what you feel most expresses your love for your church and country.

Once you overcome the negativity of this Vatican letter and get yourself back in place a lot of issues will start to clarify. I can suggest a few and I’m sure you can think of others: 

1. If you want to get their attention fast start a movement to tax their Company. This is still America, where the idea of individual freedom prevails. Each person is free to act on her own authority according to the promptings of her own conscience. The founders of this country ran away from Kings, Queens (of either gender) and Emperors, to make this land the home of freedom. We are not now going to allow some Company of Foreign Men extend their vision of the Holy Roman Empire to our shores. We don’t accept the teaching of foreign potentates here, be they Ayatollahs, Bhagwans, or Popes. If the Company of Men in Rome want to assert their corporate rights of private property, let them begin to pay corporate taxes in America–and property taxes. Let the pseudo masters in Rome know: there will be no magisterium without taxation.

2.  The Society of Homos can't look you in the eye and won't have you in their "house". Ask yourself why.  Nowhere in the Rat's letter is the word gay or lesbian mentioned. They treat us as though we do not exist. They do not know our mores, our morals, our ways and means of existence. Their lack of respect and willed ignorance of us reveals much about themselves. They don’t understand that people who fight homosexuality are always fighting their own homosexuality. Since most of us have done the work it takes to come out, this is something we know that the Pope's gang doesn't. It's a Company loss, but they make us pay.

3. The Company of Men has "a long tradition" says the Rat. He's right. It's called lying and the Society of Homos have a special name for it: jesuitical "Crafty, intriguing, or equivocating person.” Though they say we "deceive" they are the real masters of deceitful Sophistry (here their magisterium fits). They've been "sodomites" for centuries: They ripped the "sin" of Sodom (inhospitality) out of its biblical roots, made up something new and have been killing people for this truly original sin ever since. The Rat takes the art to a new extreme: he blames us for the AIDS plague. Their letter on "pastoral care" (one more touch of sophistry) is a plague of words. It falls back on the Church of Rome. 

What are these liars hiding? They are on the run, terrified of the "gay" plague. They tell the world, that plague is AIDS. The thing that scares them, the dis-ease which freaks out these old homos, is a very young idea: two gays or two lesbians, together, publicly. Honest gays and lesbians threaten the entire Homo Order! Now we understand what the Rat means about "the lives and well-being of a large number of people."  He's out to save his Company of Men. 

If any of them are smart rats, they'd better start practicing 'pastoral care' at Homo Heights, first,  and leave morality to those who can handle it. I've been a witness to such strength: every breath taken by a person with AIDS is a moral act. Without serious homo (mental) health-care at the Vatican–and lessons about how to treat guests–the Company of Men has no healthy future. It will die of its own terminal theology. (Rome has fallen before.)

For the recovering Catholics out there, Ratzinger's letter is just one more piece of junk mail. Send it back: addressee unknown. Or trash it.

© 2010 John Michael Vore and Firetrap Press. Originally appeared in Damski's JHD column, November 27, 1986 and republished in Damski's dead/queer/proud as Schizo-file#31 (Firetrap Press 2002).

The Field Of God

I am hesitant to enter the field of God. Reluctant to talk about God. She does not need my talk. Etymologically speaking the primary Indo-European and Teutonic roots of the word “God” are “invoked,” “the invoked one,” “the called on Being.” She does not need me to call on Her, if She is all-knowing and all-powerful.

The Greek root for the word “God” from the same family is kauchaomai, which means “I boast.” To presume to call on God is to boast.

That’s what I find so unappealing about all God talk from street corner to coffee shop. It causes us to boast and imagine that because we are having a conversation with the All-Knowing that somehow we are all knowing too.

In all God talk from the bible on, there is a viral overload of distasteful sexism. God is assumed to be a He/Him. Only in the last century have we broken the old iron code and realized that God is both a He and She, Him and Her. Those who cannot handle the pronoun shift, I cannot handle.

For me:
God is
God is love
God’s love will take care of us queers,,for God is the original loving He/She. And He/She is more concerned with love and forgiveness than sin and condemnation, more concerned with saving you and your neighborhood of domestic partners than in keeping anyone away from the Field of God and the stairway to heaven.

The Church and its bully pulpits, with their overly gooey and false interpretations of the Bible are even more virulently anti-gay today, hurling more vile doctrines at us. This is because we are the last to become the first, and because we offer the most serious threat to the monarchical rule of the Church.

When Paul picked out the sin of homosexuality to condemn, he chose it because it was the “safe sin” in his day. If he had picked circumcision or dietary law he would have spoken against sins his audience of Jew, Gentile Christians and Romans. Then as now, because of our long-standing denial mechanism, few if any believed or would say they were homosexual. Paul picked the safe sin to condemn, the one many felt was not serious and and the one they didn’t take personally.

In the daytime, Jesus threw out the Book of the Laws of the Jews. Love God as God loves you. Love your neighbor as you want your neighbor to love you. At night Jesus kept company and ate with some very queer types: whores, tax collectors, street people and us queers too. He loved us queers, and forgave our sins.

The Bible is so overpoweringly sexist: it continually disrespects women and gay men. We are no-accounts both on earth and in heaven. No voice - no rights nor say. The Men of Sodom ask Lot to send out the ambassadors of God “so we can know them” (causing most biblical scholars to twist the verb “know,” like an eight, to mean “have intercourse with” (ha,ha)). Instead, Job offers as compensation his two daughters “who have not yet known a man” (another sick joke). He can do this because the women are property, his property!

Strange, only God does not think you have sinned when you commit a queer act. Your mother does. Your lover does because you have betrayed him/her. Your brother and neighbor, but only She, who like us is everywhere, does not think you have sinned.

The only way to lord it over someone is to love the sin as well as forgive the sinner. Preachers and pastoral letters proclaim that you love your son for being gay, but not for doing gay (sex), sawing your son in half. The essence of being gay is gay sexuality.

Gays and lesbians have progressed like evolution, while the Church inches its way historically. They still refuses to see us for who we are.
HOMOSEXUAL IS NOT GAY.
DOMESTIC PARTNERS DO NOT LIVE IN SIN.
UNLESS THE CHURCH IS WILLING TO
REACH OUT AND OFFER US TOTAL SALVATION,
THE CHURCH IS DOOMED.

A wise theologian once said “To think you can teach and preach this stuff, makes you an ass. But to stay out of the Field of God and the eternally joyous and gay rewards of eternal life, makes you an ox.” We are still a threat to the Church after all these centuries because we challenge–to its face–monarchical and patriarchal ownership. God does not look kindly on people who want to keep us out of Her Church and Field. For by Her love and leave we are either all saved, included, or the Church is doomed.

HER LOVE GUARANTEES
WE ALL HAVE EQUAL ACCESS TO
THE FIELD OF GOD.


[Publisher’s Note: Along with “Homokind,” this makes up the last essays Damski wrote and edited in late October 1997. It was reprinted as Schizo-File No. 57, under the title “Final Scene: Academic odd ball lands in Chicago for mid-life Crisis, ends up writing columns for 20 years - and his last one has to be about the fucking Catholic Church and I’m not even Catholic. (I am out of here.).” in dead/queer/proud (Firetrap Press, 2002)--jmv.]