Michael Voris responds to Melinda Selmys.
In asking, "What's up with all things gay?" Voris points out how all things gay is all over media: major news, entertainment, education, and so on. And if anyone opposes approval* of homosexual behavior and same sex marriage, they are labeled bigots and homophobes. Commenters have asked me - why do you always write about gay stuff? - as if to intimidate and silence me in what I have to say or report on - ignoring the fact that all things gay is indeed - all over media - and in the courts. There is a dishonesty amongst many who seek to change Church teaching and/or foment hostility against it.
I have to say, Michael pretty much gets it right as he refutes Selmys' complaints against him. (He covers it in the introduction. The rest seems to be pretty much call-in stuff and that kind of radio drives me nuts, so I didn't finish the program.) He even noted the rewrites and clarifications Melinda is getting to be known for whenever her original statements are challenged. Listen/watch Voris's radio show here.
*I have written about this frequently over the years. I stand by it:
Approval. Not just tolerance. Not simply acceptance. But full-blown approval. The agenda is all about approval - and it is exactly that which the Christian can never give. There may come a time when the approval is forcibly demanded - thus it is important for the Christian to understand, such approval is not theirs to give. - Read that post here.
H/T Jeanette
The Michael Voris FBI documentary on Homosexuality here. It is very well done.
Duck and cover.
Hey Terry,
ReplyDeleteI'm interested to see that you actually like the Voris stuff. I'm still utterly mystified as to why, but I feel that if anyone can explain it to me, it's probably you. w/r/t the "All Things Gay" presentation, I just couldn't take it seriously. He and his producer speculate about my psychology without ever coming to close to the mark, and he states that he talked at someone for four hours without listening and believes that this constitutes "friendship" and "acceptance." He keeps asking rhetorical questions with really obvious answers as if they are unanswerable objections. Weird. But I am sincere when I ask you what it is that you get out of it.
Pax et caritas,
Melinda
Melinda,
ReplyDeleteI'm a little mystified. Someone doesn't come over to see an old associate and ask questions and stay and listen to the answers without feeling accepted. That he says he can't DO it, is another issue. Even St. Augustine said that - "Give me chastity, but not yet."
I doubt if Voris threw his friend out of the house because he didn't instantly convert, and I would bet that he and his entire staff are praying for his friend - yes, I say friend -- someone who cares enough about your salvation to tell you the truth and pray for you.
The response you received is not surprising in view of the tone of your over-the-top attack on Voris, which is all I can call it. Perhaps you wrote it in the heat of the moment. But perhaps a truce is in order. I think we are all on the same side. Do we have to engage in all this internecine warfare?
Mary Ann,
DeleteYeah...like I said, I didn't want to publish my criticisms. I felt really pressured by Voris' full-term cheerleader repeatedly calling me on under several different aliases. It took me a while to realize that it was only one person, and by that time I'd already posted my list.
I do think that friendship has to go beyond "caring enough about your salvation to tell you the truth and pray for you." That's actually my biggest beef with a lot of Catholic responses to the LGBTQ community... love is reduced to charitably explaining people's sins and praying for their souls. I've never seen anyone convert because of that kind of love, which kind of makes me suspicious of it. Also, the thing that I hear all the time from gay people who are trying to be chaste is that they're starving for a more practicable, sustained, present love -- for the kind of friendship that says "Okay, so you're not ready for chastity yet. Let's go grab a pint and talk about something else." Or, the kind of friendship that says "I understand that you can't live that way all by yourself. How can I help?"
I'm curious to know who this "full-term cheerleader" masquerading under different aliases is. I've spoken with one of his (and my) close friends, and neither of us knows who on earth you are talking about.
DeleteMelinda - I think Michael and his producer were simply trying to figure out where you are coming from - they just don't understand you and your POV. Granted - their assessment was kind of lame - but hey, their straight.
ReplyDeleteI get nothing new out of what Michael says in his radio piece - I just listened to his rebuttal of your accusations against him. I thought he answered well - I don't think he was any more agitated than you were in your First Things piece. Just my observation, BTW. I stopped listening to the program after a few call-in responses - that stuff doesn't interest me.
As for his FBI report - he pretty much says the same stuff I've said on my blog for the past several years. Nothing new to me. I pretty much addressed that in my point by point to your point by point the other day.
I think people sometimes feel uneasy about the manner in which you present your story and views on LGBTQ culture. I had heard this was a minor concern last year at the Courage conference. Albeit hearsay, from what I was told, that was the reason Fr. Check interviewed you before speaking. Granted, you got his imprimatur if you will, but many people were confused before the conference as to where you stood as far as Church teaching, especially that which says: "Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder."
[Mike Voris and his producer were simply wondering if you believed homosexual acts were 'evil'. Evil being another word for sinful of course.]
I'm sorry to say I have the experience when reading your work, that whenever your statements are challenged it seems you go to great lengths to convince readers what you really meant. I admire your literary and intellectual skills and writing abilities, but I would expect your articles to be better prepared, formulated and straight forward enough to be complete and clarified upon publishing. Even your comments to Tom O'Toole seem to be clarifications of what you really meant in former comments - as Tom pointed out, you said what Voris was saying in his FBI piece was true - but evidently you did not like how he said things. I don't want to make an issue of whatever you said he said - I'm just pointing out what strikes me as strange inconsistencies in presentation.
I'll admit I don't 'get' you and that some of what you say seems to to me to come very close to what one encounters on blogs and in the literature of dissident gay Catholics.
I think others react similarly.
My apologies, I have hope and trust you are acting in good faith, and if there are errors in your work, I hope some one more qualified than myself may help you either correct it, or make it more understandable to ordinary Catholics.
As a parent, I know you know that Catholic parents would like to see their children grow up faithful Catholics, preserved from the grave scandals which threaten the family in our culture. Normal families are especially concerned about the loss of innocence in the world their children live in, and strive to protect them and train them in virtue. For them there is no grieving process over a lost civilization - far from it. LGBTQ persons have great difficulty in understanding and accepting that reality.
God bless you.
Beautifully put.
DeleteSorry - spell check/grammer check was off - their sb they're at the end of the first paragraph - as in 'they're straight'. I'm sure spelling is off elsewhere. My apologies - I write and hit print too soon.
ReplyDeleteTerry,
ReplyDeleteI know that a lot of what I say is confusing to Catholics...it's a really hard game because, as Joseph Ratzinger pointed out (in God and the World, I believe), our contemporary culture is a lot like Babel at the point where the languages are confused. That's a lot of the reason why clarifications are so often necessary -- it's really easy to write a Catholic article in Catholic language that will be immediately understood by a Catholic audience, but to write an article that will be comprehensible and potentially convincing to both a Catholic audience and a gay audience is...well, frankly it would be easier if there wasn't a pretext that we were all speaking the same English :) I generally assume that my audience will have a higher sensitivity to context than is, perhaps, warranted. Most people seem to be able to work with that, but people who are scared that I might be heterodox get antsy. If I figure out a way to fix that problem, I'll fix it, but until then I prefer to err in favour of being accessible to LGBTQ people and confusing to Catholics over being reassuringly familiar to Catholics and alienating to LGBTQ readers. The Catholics aren't the ones who need to be convinced :)
I do get that people want a more innocent culture for their kids. I homeschool, and I'm very familiar with how demanding that is. It would be nice if there were Catholic schools that were really Catholic. I guess the problem, from my point of view as someone outside of America looking in, is that you guys have been using the same "tell the truth and warn people about the dangers of contraception/divorce/abortion/homosexuality" and "vote for Republican politicians who will turn everything around" strategy since the '60s and it's just not working. It's two steps backward for every one step forward, and it's almost like you're meted out these little victories to keep you going. That's why I talked about 'acceptance,' using the term as it would be understood within a framework of the psychology of grief. Acceptance puts people in the right frame of mind to figure out how best to proceed. It's a form of giving up, but it's like Peter giving up in Gethsemene -- it's giving it up to Christ to let Him act, not giving up in the sense of throwing in the towel. I can see that for people caught in the heat of battle, and still hoping for a victory, that probably sounds like cowardly appeasement...
I'm still not sure what the appeal of the Voris approach is, or what it's supposed to accomplish. As an expression of grief, I could get it. If that's not the answer...I remain confused.
Sincerely,
Melinda
To borrow a quote from the movie Braveheart: "Uncompromising men are easy to admire"
ReplyDeleteI went to a talk of his about a year ago. When it comes to preaching the Gospel, his attitude is pretty much, "Life's too short to be nice". I imagine his style appeals a lot more to men than women.
Melinda,
ReplyDeleteI have not kept up with the conversation since your original piece in First Things, but I think you raised valid points there. It seems to me that your writing about "acceptance" - your meaning of it - has been misunderstood at times. But I think what you wrote was solid and good and important. I know, from reading your piece, that you are not calling for dissent from Church teaching on homosexuality.
I have a same sex attracted young friend. We met when I was a 30-something young mom and he was in high school. He was very active in the pro-life movement and the Catholic Herald did an article on him. I called to give him an "atta boy" and he started calling me regularly -- usually several times a week. I think I was like a second mom for awhile.
ReplyDeleteHe got somewhat obsessed with Franklin Kameny, the gay D.C. activist and was calling him. I got concerned because he had a troubled background (molested by a school councilor, absent dad, etc.) and I urged him to stay away from Kameny but could see it was like a moth to a flame.
To make a long story short he got into the gay lifestyle, was a board member of the D.C. gay pro-life group, and stopped calling me. It was about ten years later that I was working at a crisis pregnancy center when he called. We reconnected. He'd been to the bottom (drugs, alcohol, etc.) but wanted out and back into his faith. Today he is clean, drug-free, back in school, and making straight A's. I'm so proud of him. But there was a time HE stopped calling me and had moved away. Like the prodigal son's father, I could only wait and pray for him to come to his senses.
Melinda, my experience (which is limited to my friend and a few others) is that, unless you approve the lifestyle, most gays stereotype you as a vicious homophobe who wants to nail them to the sticking post. I have a whole file of hateful letters, emails, and posts from homosexuals who don't like what I write. Who rejects whom? Sometimes the only thing you CAN do is pray and wait.
I read an article years ago about a homosexual young man who hated his parents because they would not accept his lifestyle. When he contracted AIDS it was his parents who brought him home and cared for him. All his homosexual friends were stunned when they finally met the parents, because the portrait of them painted by their son was so different from the reality. Sin makes people blind. Men like Voris appear like devils with horns to them for speaking a truth they don't want to hear. (Brian Camenker of Mass Resistance is a good example. The Mass homo-active gang detest him and constantly slander him for daring to expose the unbelievable evils they are trying to impose in the schools, etc.!)
I admire the courage, dedication and perseverance of men like Voris and Camenker and applaud them for standing up to a movement that (along with unfaithful, contracepting, aborting, divorcing Christians) is destroying the culture.
I suspect, Melinda, that you and Mike Voris have more in common than you realize if you put down your shotguns and stop shooting at each other. What a waste of energy that could go into working together! I'm praying my rosary today for you both.
Thank you sincerely for you prayers. I think we do have a lot in common...we're both passionate about what we believe in, and we're both trying to protect people who we see getting hurt. I've contacted his people, and I hope that they get back to me. I agree that it would be better to make peace :)
DeleteThanks very much Melinda, I appreciate your patient response. I sort of agree with Mary Ann, that you and Voris have more in common than you realize.
ReplyDeleteKeep the faith.
Terry
Amen. God bless.
DeleteOh - and genuinely united to each of you in prayer.
ReplyDeleteI think that is exactly right. Melinda, you and Voris believe the same things in susbstance, but differ in approach. What you are saying resonates with me, because I know many people like those you write about. Voris's appoach will not touch them. Yours will. Only by the way we act, and only one at a time. But that's the way to go about it.
ReplyDelete