Those are our public loves and our private lives
Tim Byrne
Monday was National Coming Out Day, a day for gays and lesbians to celebrate the public declaration of their sexuality. Using conservative estimates of the incidence of homosexuality, one would expect there to be about 600 homosexual students and about 30 homosexual priests at Notre Dame. So where were all of you Monday?
Coming out isn't telling the world about whom one sleeps with or what one intends to do with one's sex organs. It's about homosexuals claiming the same sort of public openness for their relationships that straight people enjoy. It's about not hiding one's affective life behind lies or dorm-room doors. It's about being proud and unapologetic for finding one's emotional fulfillment in a relationship with a person of the same sex.
Coming out is important because it helps everyone see the good that can come from a homosexual orientation. Bishop Gumbleton writes, "I hope that within our church every gay person, every lesbian person, every bisexual person, or transgendered person will come out, because that is how our church is going to truly change. I would say this especially to priests and bishops in our church." The change he hopes for here is that the church might come to appreciate the objective good of the capacity to love others deeply, the capacity that lies at the core of all sexuality — homosexuality included.
The catechism reduces sexuality to a disposition to use one's genitals in one way or the other. This reductive premise is the ground of the church's claim that homosexuality is an objective disorder. One can accept that this physiological disposition is disordered and still find value in homosexuality as a psychological and affective disposition. One only needs to look beyond the genitals to the whole person. Think about it. How could a capacity to love another human being very deeply, and to derive a deep and abiding satisfaction from that love be disordered? That's what homosexuality is though. It's the fact of finding one's deepest emotional needs met by members of the same sex (and for most homosexuals only by members of the same sex).
Catholics need to learn to see the good in homosexual relationships, and put an end to an unjust preoccupation with the details of our sexual lives. When one sees young men and women holding hands on the quad, one tends to see the good of those relationships rather than dwelling on the likelihood that fornication is occurring. Homosexuals deserve the same presumption of innocence, the same principle of charity, the same sphere of privacy where the intimate life of others is concerned.
This community wants to deny our relationships their public face while at the same time denying us our privacy. It pressures us to keep our relationships invisible, yet dwells almost pruriently on what we do with our sex organs. How would you like it if we heckled you on the quad while walking too close to your girlfriend, and then went on and on about the grave evil of fornication, etc.?
In the pastoral letter "Always Our Children," the American Catholic bishops wrote concerning homosexual children, "This child, who has always been God's gift to you, may now be the cause of another gift: your family becoming more honest, respectful, and supportive." This is a moral challenge: to get past prejudices to learn to be honest and open about the needs of the heart, respectful of the privacy of others and supportive of everyone in their search for affection and emotional fulfillment.
Tim Byrne
Graduate Student
Department of Philosophy
October 11, 1999
All Viewpoint Stories for Thursday, October 14, 1999
