The American Spectator

I am a Catholic and people often ask me, how can you be openly gay and be a Catholic? And my response is always I’m openly gay, because I’m a Catholic, because God taught me not to bear false witness to who I am and my faith is something that I really have no choice over. I’ve tried. I’ve had a terrible struggle with my own faith, but God wouldn’t let me go and he keeps bringing me back and he keeps saying to me, in the Eucharist and in the church I love you and you belong here. And I want you to have a loving relationship and I feel that my own relationship is a gift from God. I cannot alone in my conscience before God believe otherwise. So I can do no other. I’m here because I have no choice.

br> Somewhere Martin Luther is wishing he’d had a better intellectual property lawyer.

No doubt Sullivan has treaded a harrowing road, though that far from necessitates the conclusions he’s reached. Let’s take out “openly gay” and add other activities traditionally considered less than savory. “And my response is always I’m an extortionist/murderer/rapist/thief/liar/Daily Kos reader, because I’m a Catholic, because God taught me not to bear false witness to who I am and my faith is something that I really have no choice over.” I believe Sullivan here is drawing upon the works of a famed Doctor of the Church. His name, unfortunately, escapes me, but I recall he’s the patron of sailors, growers of iron-rich vegetables, and flat-chested women. “I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam,” he says in Against the Blutoians.

p>After his appearance with Larry King and the gang, Sullivan told his readers, br> /p>

I’m absorbing the email flood …and will try and get back to everyone, but several are asking if I have written on these subjects. Er, yes. My first book, Virtually Normal, makes the key arguments about why the Catholic teaching on homosexuality is incoherent on its own terms. My second book, Love Undetectable, is a memoir of my faith-journey through the plague years, an account of the origins of homosexual orientation, and a celebration of friendship as a core Christian virtue. If you’re interested, check them out. Part of my next book, The Conservative Soul, tackles the deeper philosophical issues behind Catholicism’s treatment of sexuality as a whole — straight and gay — as well as presenting a defense of a non-fundamentalist Christianity as the Christian life closest to Jesus’ example.

br> Isn’t it annoying when authors ride a hobbyhorse to the point of saddle sores? I’m glad to see Sullivan’s mind boasts more than one track. I know I’m looking forward to The Conservative Soul . It’s on my reading list immediately after The Liberal Soul , the new book due out from Jesse Helms. But I hear he’s not done. Not by a long shot. He’s already at work on what he hopes to be his masterpiece. As yet untitled, it tackles why the very design of the universe, from galaxies and quasars to neutrinos and quarks, points to why that so-called Vicar of Christ in Rome is nothing more than a goose-stepping reactionary bent on keeping Andrew from the altar.

In Time, Sullivan thunders against the Christianists and their machinations. He dings Rush Limbaugh for hanging the moniker “party of death” on the Democrats “because of many Democrats’ view that some moral decisions, like the choice to have a first-trimester abortion, should be left to the individual, not the cops.” I’ll let pass his howler that implies abortion in America is limited to the first trimester. If you’re a Christian and, like your co-religionists since the Age of the Apostles, believe that abortion is more than a “moral decision,” you’re a Christianist.