Catholic Writer Unhappy That Ted Cruz Opposes Death for Gay Ugandans
A Catholic publication published an angry screed condemning Pride month, rainbows, and Ted Cruz’s opposition to a harsh Ugandan law that imposes life imprisonment or death on men found to have had sex with other men.
by Evan Urquhart
It’s been a while since Assigned checked in on the excesses of Catholic media, and whoo, boy, the church best known for a seemingly endless string of child sex abuse cases continues to be extremely unhinged and bloodthirsty when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community. Wrapped in a self-righteousness that completely ignores the horrors perpetrated against children in the religion, an essay by Sean Fitzpatrick we’re focusing on today exemplifies the grand posturings of Catholicism’s fradulent and abusive edifice.
Fitzpatrick’s is a fairly standard screed, bemoaning the acceptance of “sexual insanity” which, in this context, means open acceptance of people with LGBTQ+ identities, but not child sex abuse or repeated efforts to cover it up and enable it within Catholicism.
Much of the discusion is taken up with how Fitzpatrick loves rainbows but not, well, those rainbows. Here’s some of the flavor:
screenshot from Catholic World Report
According to Catholic dot com (a real website), Fitzpatrick is on the faculty of Gregory the Great Academy, a Catholic boys’ boarding school, in Elmhurst, Pennsylvania. Such a position seems like it might to lend itself to more serious concerns about sexual immorality than represented by rainbow lapel pins, such as the safety of young men who are completely isolated and banned from using electronics in a “semi-monastic” environment. Such concerns would be particularly relevant since the precursor to this school (St. Gregory’s, also in Elmhurst, which closed down in 2012), once functioned as a hunting ground for predatory priests who plied high school boys with alcohol to break down their resistance, then sexually abused them. The predatory priests were members of an organization, housed at the school, which promoted conservative values and a return to Latin mass within Catholicism. Instead, Fitzpatrick goes with the lapel pins.
However, Fitzpatrick does make room to criticize one conservative Christian leader: Senator Ted Cruz. Cruz recently surprised everyone by condemning a law in Uganda that criminalized homosexuality. The law would sentence gay men to life imprisonment and in some cases death, and Cruz called it “horrific & wrong” on his Twitter account. Fitzpatrick criticizes the law itself first, saying that imprisonment and death go “too far” but legal penalties for homosexuality are appropriate. He then criticizes Ted Cruz far more harshly, calling the evangelical Senator a “so-called conservative.”
screenshot from Catholic World Report
Catholics are famously proud of the way their philosophy has been weaved together into a single coherent whole. Here Fitzpatrick is demonstrating another type of Catholic consistency, a consistency in how he believes abuses of power ought to be dealt with. As a Catholic, he believes that sexual abuse of children by priests is wrong, yeah, sure, okay, but not the sort of wrong that a person should ever talk about, take seriously, publicly condemn, or attempt in any way to stop from happening. Likewise, the state sentencing gay men to death is wrong, but it’s even more wrong to say it’s wrong, as Cruz did. In Catholicism, the worst sin seems to be ideologically inconvenient honesty. No wonder they hate the LGBTQ+ community!