The devoted Christian writers at Renew America are usually good for a few laughs. Fox-borne conspiracies, the omnipresent Satan, Thom Jefferson the fundie, and all types of apocalypse. Poor spelling. It’s a proud and pitiable site. They’ve been on an anti-Mormon tear for months, which surely must please Jesus.

Every once in a while a post shows up that’s different. This one by Catholic News Agency columnist Louie Verrecchio is such a thing. In it, he makes arguments that are notable for several reasons:
1.) They’re more cogent than most.
2.) They come out of the ‘intellectual’ Christian community.
3.) They address homosexuality.

Louie believes he knows of what he speaks, or he wouldn’t remind you that his opinion “has been endorsed by Cardinal George Pell of Sydney, Australia; Bishop Emeritus Patrick O’Donoghue of Lancaster, England, Bishop R. Walker Nickless of Sioux City, IA, USA and others.” We know we’re reading a top notch Christian editorialist.

This is his post: “Bullying: A pseudo crisis of convenience.” You’ll have to indulge me because the arc of his arguments gets a bit long, so I’ll skip to homosexuality. On that he writes:

As the [Dan] Savages of the world would have us believe, a large percentage of human beings have always been “born gay,” but it is only thanks to the good efforts of people in the LGBT community that increasingly more of these kids are now able to come out of the closet.

This would be our argument. Louie knocks it down by telling us what he and other Christian intellectuals already know:

Nonsense. The LGBT community has done nothing but yeoman’s work in making sure that sexually under-developed, confused adolescents who are wrestling with unnatural, disordered desires exist in spades.

Louie speaks of developing homo-sexuality. Some kids are only partially developed, and therefore confused. I’m trying to think of an apt analogy for this theory. It’s like when your two year-old puts a stick in his mouth, and his desire for food is confused. Once he gets older (more ‘developed’), he’ll know that his mouth is really meant for cake and pie. He’ll taste actual food and he’ll learn to love it.

From there, these champions of justice do everything they can to make sure that these unfortunate children are summarily deprived of the help they really need, because God forbid anyone acknowledge the underlying psychological and spiritual maladies that accompany homosexuality.

Chaos sets in. And that’s when gay activists tell the young child to eat even more sticks. And dance (yes!) to his heart’s content because he’s really a wood-gobbling fag. Oh no. You see the problem.

The reality is that people like Dan Savage and his “husband” are simply using these poor kids to further their own self-satisfying agenda.

As if the people like Dan could have a “husband” because that’s not “legal.” Anyway, that’s the story of homosexuality. In short: immaturity plus acceptance equals fake. Homosexuals just aren’t sexually real. They’re unedited miscues, preserved by enabling. Ebonics comes to my mind, as if that were “language.”

Now we draw back from these details, and we look at the whole post. Working backward from homo-sexuality . .

With K-thru-12 schoolyards from sea-to-shining-sea boasting a bumper crop of soft-bellied boys who have been raised to believe that every incident of normal youthful conflict is best resolved by mommy in a parent-teacher meeting, the time was apparently ripe for launching a corresponding ersatz crisis; namely, that dreaded social epidemic known as “bullying.”

. . we see that today’s typical American boy is a wussy. Holy smokes. That’s a difficult charge to level at millions of young people, but it sounds somewhat clever since it lacks evidence. I sense why bishops and cardinals like this ‘Louie’ guy (how again do you herd 20,000 species of beetle onto an ark?). Now we go all the way back, to the top:

. . liberal social engineers are hell bent and determined to see to it that society doesn’t allow a healthy sense of maleness (e.g., attributes like competitiveness, protectiveness and leadership) to take hold in the next generation of husbands and fathers; ergo their deliberate effort to discourage the development of authentic masculinity in male children from boyhood to adolescence.

. . we liberals are wiping the whole of masculinity off the map. Right. [And why, btw? Louie: 'Because liberal guilt over the way Grampa treated women.' Louie does not grasp how making all men gay might be even crueler to future grammas.]

Let’s be honest: this is raving madness. Where the hell could this lunacy have come from? You wonder, then it clicks. That fancy Christian model, again — each individual male is exactly like the next one. The fully-developed destination for each of us is effortless heterosexuality, remember? So something’s got to explain the huge number of queers. And here’s your fancy answer: we leftists have been decimating male identity. We figure we’d be stop the march of masculinity in its tracks before it fell upon macho. Hence, America has been cranking out shiny new limpwrists “in spades.”

So let’s just stop bullying the bullies, shall we? Before this country’s seen its last red-blooded kid crying before Matthew Shephard’s picture, or something worse.