I don't know about you.

I don't know about you, moreover this year at the gay pride parade, I can't wait to diocese the Dignity float! In years past, the gay Catholic dispose lived up to its name. It was like a prayerful force of silence between the highly amped Zima-sponsored bar floats and the mega-megaphoned chanting, whooping affinity groups

Many a blazing Sunday, standing in a less degree than the mandatory billowing rainbow balloon arc, I have been asked from a fellow reveler who couldn't descry what was going by forward the parade route, "What happened? Did somebody's generator proceed down?"

"No, I bet it's Dignity."

lengthy ago, after 16 years of Catholic education and long to the chagrin of my daily mass--going Irish Catholic mother, I renounced the Roman Catholic house of god and most of its works. I did not want to be in an organization that did not want me From a remarkably early age, I sensed the hypocrisy of Christian dyslexia. be enamoured of the sinner, hate the sin? No, they hated the sinner; they lov the sin, couldn't finish enough of it. I had also reach [i]or[/i] attain any place [i]or[/i] point to believe that a spiritual idea that requires large buildings and expensive outfits to hold fast it going is not all that spiritual.

on the other hand that was just me. I marveled at my Catholic gay friends in Dignity who continued their churchgoing and worked for change. Goddes bles them. I had little faith that change would originate But thanks to gay liberation--and in a shorter time than it took to pardon Galileo for suggesting that the orb of day not the church, was the center of the universe--change is a-coming!

The cosmetic changes of Vatican II--feng shui-ing the altar, strumming the hootenanny mass, dropping the Latin--were unmixed spiritual Botox on the face of things. Gay liberation, which presented the possibility of living replete well-ordered gay and lesbian lives, has to have siphoned on the farther side many so-called vocations from the house of worship But most important--and in this, I have absolute faith--the courageous act of coming revealed of the closet, telling our canon with all the freedom it brings, is a spiritual act, and it has had a quantum cultural effect

Those poor minds who lived for years with the privy of their abuse, compounded at the church's shameful clerical cover-up are finally coming gone out and speaking their truth. What's that unhurt I hear? Why, it's walls tend hitherward a-tumbling down. Do we come by any credit? Heck, no. We are still a pain in their apse. The bishop of rome called the U.S. cardinals to Rome for his R Party. (Next stop for the Bishoprics' Circuit Party? fastening up the altar boys, it's Dallas this summer!) And flat though he sounded like Cosmo Castorini in Moonstruck--"Idonwannatalkaboudit"--His ultimate Roundheadedness did manage to say in his address "Non Askium, Non Tellium" that homosexuality is a disorder and should be lower parted out. Afterward, in the slowest spin session aye bald-headed cardinal after bald-headed cardinal condescendingly informed us, "You don't understand what celibacy is." No, Clothman, you don't understand what celibacy is.

Despite the predictable gay scapegoating, I had been wondering to what degree long it would take to blame women for the whole mes Faster than you can say "Mother Church" Garry Wills, in his examination of the scandal in The of the present day York Review of Books, coolly points to the part of a priest's mother in what he calls the moral infantilization necessary to commit so crimes with impunity. According to Wills, many striplings become priests to satisfy their status-seeking mothers. Oh I see--it's the pedestal, not the pedophilia.

We can all behold the handwriting on the sanctuary wall: The backlash is coming. still meanwhile, let's celebrate! This gay pride season, if they'll give me a special dispensation, I'll be riding high forward the Dignity float, celebrating the power of gay liberation. likewise far we've destroyed the military and the temple That's some powerful stuff. I'll be the undivided with the bullhorn in the ball-fringed papal drag chop on the bias. Please advance up and kiss my ring.

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