Avila’s Demonizing Did Not Create Healthy Dialogue, Says TWO
BURLINGTON, Vt. – Truth Wins Out applauded the resignation of Dan Avila today from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, where he served as Policy Advisor for Marriage and Family. Avila resigned after receiving much criticism for a column he wrote for the Boston Pilot that suggested Satan might cause people to become gay.
“Daniel Avila’s column was hurtful and deeply offensive, and we are grateful that he quickly resigned,” said Wayne Besen, Executive Director for Truth Wins Out. “Demonizing never creates a healthy dialogue and Avila represented a major obstacle to the church’s claim to respect all people.”
The offensive column caused such an uproar that the Pilot, America’s oldest Catholic newspaper, retracted the screed. Avila was forced to offer a weak apology that said his column “[does] not represent the position of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the column was not authorized for publication as is required policy for staff of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.”
“The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops were correct to accept Avila’s resignation,” said John Becker, Director of Communications and Development for Truth Wins Out. “There is no place for such extremism and Avila’s poisonous remarks served to further alienate LGBT Americans from the Catholic Church.”
In his column Avila wrote:
“…the scientific evidence of how same-sex attraction most likely may be created provides a credible basis for a spiritual explanation that indicts the devil. Any time natural disasters occur, we as people of faith look back to Scripture’s account of those angels who rebelled and fell from grace. In their anger against God, these malcontents prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. They continue to do all they can to mar, distort and destroy God’s handiwork. Therefore, whenever natural causes disturb otherwise typical biological development, leading to the personally unchosen beginnings of same-sex attraction, the ultimate responsibility, on a theological level, is and should be imputed to the evil one, not God.”
At the time, TWO sent out a press release criticizing Avila’s remarks and commented further in a Washington Post blog. Earlier today, the LGBT advocacy group called for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to fire Avila. Last month, TWO filmed Avila’s anti-gay speech at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC.
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[...] is natural, then it can be a devil’s work. TweetFrom: http://www.truthwinsout.org/ By: Wayne Besen Via: Francisco [...]
The obsession with women and their reproductive capacities is all about producing new vulnerable minds to infect with the malignant memeplexes of religion. The horrors of gay sex and marriage are similarly related: no heterosexual sex means no babies. The memeplexes have no validity in real life so they survive only by using threats, promises and always seeking propagation.
See: TED 2008: Humans Are Just Machines for Propagating Memes, Susan Blackmore Says http://bit.ly/kP4Qq8
Solution: Be less “tolerant” of religion: it’s dangerous nonsense. Support civil and human rights for all. Actively confront the propagation methods such as interference with reproductive control. Demand loss of tax benefits for engaging in political activity. No one-sided Bible “education” in public schools; only elective well-rounded classes about all the world’s religions should be tolerated.
Oooh! “Malignant memeplexes of religion.” Savors of “nattering nabobs of negativism.” And Susan Blackmore’s statement that “Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes” is one of the more pretentious rhetorical flourishes to have come down the pike. But perhaps she’s correct in her third reason that people resist the notion of “memes as organisms;” i.e., “The third possible reason is maybe it’s a load of garbage.”
Memeplexes, my (Episcopal) church is not dangerous nonsense. We run a soup kitchen, a food cupboard for those who don’t have enough money to buy sufficient groceries, run a meeting place where the homeless can talk and get a hot lunch everyday, we just started a high caliber school for disadvantaged children (in an abandoned inner city church), run a summer camp for these same kids every summer, have helped homeless families get furnished (by us) apartments that they can afford, visit the elderly in their homes and nursing homes and just sent a medical mission to rural Honduras; and we also run a low to no-cost clinic for those who are too poor to have insurance or pay for medical care. This clinic is run *gratis* by a group of physicians and nurses and a woman priest from our church. How many people have you ever helped or volunteered to assist?
And on the aesthetic side, we have restored and helped save beautiful old gothic architecture churches as well as the most sublimely beautiful music, art and liturgy that have come down to us from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It’s a weekly oasis of majesty and peace in a crazy world of fleeting pleasures, and cheesy, banal ‘art’ and entertainment. WE are not the ‘dangerous’ ones, but it sounds like your call for ‘intolerance’ certainly is!
Gary, you are sounding like the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican.
Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back.
I don’t follow religious news much but didn’t the Episcopal church have a split recently over the “gay” issue? Sounds like some Episcopalians are indeed intolerant.
I understand that some people are deeply offended by this, but it’s hard to see why that is so. To me, it just seems too funny to get offended over. I mean this guys explanation of gays sounds really f*****g nuts, and the same goes for the bishops who fired his dumb a*s. It doesn’t make a bit of difference to me if they have a different theological explanation than his crazy idea because I know that their explanation is just as f*****g crazy although in an insignificantly (to any rational person) different way.
To be more precise, I consider all such explanations to be as bizarre as any psychotic’s delusions (but the theologians are not technically mentally ill, or I would not mock them), rather I consider these fools to be self-deluded, which is actually a worse fate in my opinion than genuine mental illness because it’s self-inflicted.
If the a**hole Avila were just some loon in the corner mumbling incoherently to himself, sure, I think I could afford to laugh at him. It’s offensive to me, first of all, because his ranting is so disconnected from reality, and secondly, because other people are LISTENING to him. It’s not just the disrepect, it’s the abuses of us that are justified because of this profound lack of respect.
The offense gets played out in real and damaging ways in our lives and is a result of this kind of crap being floated out there. If the devil made me, then why should you give a flying f*** about any part of my life?
To be clear, above post is response to Bemjamin.
ok, oldbaldguy, that makes sense. But don’t you find their idiotic worldview to be comical too, at least it’s NOT injurious to others, like when the fanatics blamed the tsunami and nuclear disaster on Japan for not being a Christian nation and – get this – because the emperor apparently had illicit sex with the Sun Goddess. The deluded nut job who dreamed-up that classic bit of idiocy also claimed that the earthquake which caused the tsunami opened a portal to Hell releasing the very demon who was responsible for the Nazi holocaust. oooooooh! Now that’s just hilarious to me because those warped a******s actually believe that nonsense. I mean how f*****g crazy do you have to be to take that comic book story seriously?
Nonetheless, your point is well taken, they’re not just fools – they’re dangerous fools. I’d bet some of them even long for the old days when they could burn sinners and nonbelievers at the stake!
I meant to say “at least when it’s NOT injurious to others”
[...] same-sex marriage nationwide. (Dan Avila, the bishops’ Policy Advisor for Marriage, was forced to resign this month after publishing a column in which he stated that homosexuality was caused by the [...]
[...] group is so extreme that its Policy Advisor for Marriage and Family, Daniel Avila, was forced to resign late last year after publishing an inflammatory column in which he stated that homosexuality is [...]
[...] Dan Avila, then serving as the USCCB’s “Policy Advisor for Marriage and Family,” resigned in disgrace after TWO and many other groups condemned him for writing that homosexuality was caused [...]