June has been designated as Pride Month around the parts of the world in which it has become a moral imperative to accede to the various agendas that the LGBTQ+ label represents.
The month is replete with official proclamations, corporate sponsorships and marketing campaigns, festivals and galas, and increased political pressure to uncritically normalise the various lifestyles and moral claims encompassed by LGBTQ+ ideology.
Of course, Catholics cannot in good conscience join any of these celebrations when doing so would imply endorsing this agenda or its normalisation. That does not mean, however, that we should either ignore or condemn these agendas wholesale.
On the contrary, this is a prime opportunity more carefully to consider our pastoral responsibility to people who fall under the various letters. Ours should not be a posture of rejection, but of welcome and reconciliation.
But, of course, that posture must be qualified by Catholic moral teaching on the nature of sexuality, gender, and marriage. And it must begin by breaking up the initials.
It is not possible to offer a coherent theological and pastoral response to the LGBTQ+ agenda, because the letters do not represent a single moral issue or even a coherent collection of moral issues. They do, however, represent the powerful political agenda of some who identify with one or more of the letters to treat everyone as a member of the oppressed collective or unit.
This is so that aggressive (and even violent) agendas can be protected under the shield of compassion for persons who struggle with sympathetic confusion about sexual attraction or gender incongruity.
In other words, the label LBGTQ+ and its variations protect a group of moral free-riders from criticism, regardless of how distant, and even inconsistent, their issues are from others that also fall under it.
So, for example, to express categorical condemnation of the systematic grooming and recruitment programme known as “drag queen story hour” is to express the same condemnation of a person who has genuine, but tentative questions about his or her sexual attraction. Heterosexual or same-sex-attracted men who get sexual arousal and gratification from wearing women’s clothing in public have a strong interest in falling under the same moral consideration of teenage boys and girls struggling with sexual identity that is often a normal part of adolescent development.
By keeping the LGBTQ+ initials together, to condemn the idea of fully-grown male drag queens spending time with young children in schools is also to condemn people who may feel sexually attracted to people of their own sex, but who are repulsed by the strategies of “trans” recruiters.
Same-sex attraction is not the same moral, political or public policy issue as gender dysphoria. Nor is gender dysphoria necessarily (or perhaps even usually) the same phenomenon known as transgender ideology. And transgender ideology has no relationship at all to same-sex attraction. Each is a discrete moral issue, demanding varying theological, moral and public-policy responses.
The issues are easily distinguishable, even if our pastoral responses to each are difficult. And, of course, public policy implications differ according to these variations.
For example, accommodating same-sex attracted persons at schools or public facilities raises no questions about invading the space or privacy of opposite-sex persons. Same-sex-attracted persons are not campaigning to use the restrooms or training rooms of people of the opposite biological sex.
So-called “transgender” persons, however, consider it genocide to restrict restrooms by biological sex. Keeping the LGBTQ+ label intact means that we “threaten the existence” of same-sex-attracted people when we deny access of so-called transgender people to restrooms of their opposite biological sex.
So-called “transwomen” also have a stake in keeping the label together with regard to athletic contests. Stories of biological men dominating women’s sporting events have become more and more common. For example, a biological male dominated Ivy League swimming in the United States, even winning a national collegiate championship last winter in the female division.
More recently, a biological male won the prestigious women’s edition of the Tour of the Gila multistage bicycle race. The same cyclist has sights set on the Tour de France Femmes this coming July. Because these athletes fly under the unity of the LGBTQ+ umbrella, to attack this gross unfairness to women is to attack people with same-sex-attraction, even though their issues are not remotely related. This is not only unfair to the women victims of these athletic contests, but also to people who struggle with gender dysphoria and same-sex-attraction, but who have no interest in identifying with these injustices.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church insists that people with same-sex attraction “be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”
Of course, the logic of this admonition extends to persons with gender dysphoria or who struggle with issues of gender identity.
But the same does not apply to moral and political agendas that seek to normalise the notion that a man can become a woman, that force female athletes to compete against males, or that underwrite grooming and recruiting adolescents and pre-adolescents by men with fetishes for women’s clothing.
We do not treat people with same-sex attraction with respect, compassion, and sensitivity when we allow them to be herded under the agenda of LGBTQ+ ideology.