Dueling Petitions

Of course, you’ve heard about the petition on the Whitehouse.gov site that urges President Obama to designate Catholics as a hate group, right?

“Let me tell you about the petition I started to label the Catholic Church as a hate group.”

Well, now there’s a petition to designate the people who made the first petition as a hate group.

My wife says we could turn the other cheek, and she’s probably correct.

But it is kind of funny to call the haters haters.  So, let’s turn the other cheek, but also quickly, as we are turning, call them hateful bigots and then finish by turning the other cheek.

Let’s see if we can get 25,000 signatures before the anti-Catholic bigots can get their signatures.

I saw the petition last week and pretty much ignored it. Petitions on the Whitehouse.gov site are a dime-a-dozen and can be just about any idiotic thing. Besides how could this petition really affect the Whitehouse? They already treat Catholics as second-class citizens and certainly many members of the Obama administration already fall inline with this attitude.

I also notice the irony in that those who describe the actions of others as based on hatred, usually fall into a bigoted stereotype that in no way engages in what others think. Really reading what the Pope actually wrote and coming up with the idea that what he wrote was based on hate said more about the people who created and signed the petition than anything about what the Church teaches.

So if turnabout fair play in calling them haters? The problem with the whole hate crime environment is that is a failure of charity to always describe opponents as having the motive of hate.

Maybe the mindset of some who signed this petition was actually motivated by hate, but I think it is mainly motivated by a false understanding.

“There are no more than 100 people in the world who truly hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they perceive to be the Catholic Church,” – Venerable Fulton J. Sheen

This quote is particularly apropos in regards this view of the Church. Condemning homosexual acts is suppose to be based on hatred of the person with same-sex attraction. Yet the action of the Church is based on the love of the person in not wanting them to sin. If we truly hated persons with same-sex attraction we would not warn them against the sin of homosexual acts. Hatred leads to wanting somebody to continue in sin.

Now I don’t expect proponents of homosexuality to agree that this is a sin. What I would expect is that they at least attempt to understand what the Church actually teaches and to make assertions based on that. To call the Church hateful just displays a bigoted and just plain ignorant understanding. Understanding of another’s view point is not the same as agreement.

The fact that they claim that Pope Benedict XVI’s 2012 Christmas address to the Roman Curia “demeaned and belittled homosexual people around the world”, “Using hateful language and discriminatory remarks, the Pope painted a portrait in which gay people are second-class global citizens,” shows something beyond simple ignorance since the Pope said nothing of the kind and had more to say on the state of marriage and the family today than anything about homosexual marriage or homosexuality at all. They had to totally read this into the speech. Most of the reaction seems to be more towards false press reports regarding this document than to the actual words.

So I would not call the creator of this petition hateful. Either they are just plain ignorant and did not read the document themselves, or that they have really poor skills in reading and comprehension, or perhaps purposely distorted what the Pope said to advance an agenda. Whatever motivated this petition I am not much concerned with. I am more concerned with the ignorance and lack of understanding it shows and how many people display the same ignorance. Although it is also certainly true the Church has not really communicated the message regarding Church teaching at a very wide level. Church teaching when wrung through the filter of the media becomes a parody of distortion.