Hockey Night on the CBC

 

According to this piece from the CBC, NHL players are “ostracizing” gay and transgender people by not wearing rainbow “gay pride” jerseys. We should perhaps be happy they do not go so far as to call it genocide. Brian Burke, of the Pittsburgh Penguins, insists that resistance on religious grounds makes no sense. He was, he says, born and raised a Catholic, and “I don’t see any conflict” between Catholicism and affirming—not just tolerating, but affirming, or, to use his exact word, “honouring”—gay sex.

Anyone who knows the catechism of the Catholic Church knows he is simply lying, or apostate. 

Paragraph 2357: “Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’ They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.”

Paragraph 296: “Among the sins gravely contrary to chastity are masturbation, fornication, pornography, and homosexual practices.”

The CBC interviewer, supposedly neutral, asks two gay advocates the leading question, “do you think religion is being used to disguise bigotry?” No advocate for religion, or for the dissenting players, is invited to give their point of view.

But one of the gay spokesmen gives the game away. Cyd Ziegler emotes, “I grew up Christian. I grew up hating myself, because I was gay. Because I felt that I would go to hell for eternity.” Bayne Pettinger agrees with him an endorses what he just said.

Obviously, then they know perfectly well that they are in opposition to Christianity and Christian beliefs. They know that Christianity teaches that gay sex, or endorsing gay sex, leads to hell. They are not prepared to live and let live; they want to ostracize Christianity from the NHL, or crush the conscience of individual Christians.

Cyd Ziegler insists otherwise: “The players have the right not to wear the jersey, if their teams allow it. But guess what? I have the right to criticize them.” 

This is a false parallel. The players are not criticizing gay sex. His demand is that they affirm it, or face criticism. There is a difference between objecting to speech, and objecting to silence. He wants compelled speech.

For a proper comparison, think of requiring the players to wear a scarlet A to affirm their support of adultery, or requiring them to endorse on camera theft or the telling of lies. Or, conversely, imagine him as a gay man required to come on the CBC to condemn gay sex; or risk losing his job and his livelihood.

The important and most interesting question here is why homosexuals and transvestites cannot be satisfied with tolerance, and insist on universal public affirmation. Why do they need to compel assent? Why, for that matter, do they need “gay pride parades”? Why do they even need to “come out of the closet”? Straight people, after all, have no parades on the topic of sex, and are content to and expected to remain in the closet their entire lives, keeping their sexual interests behind closed doors.

It is presumably because they have a guilty conscience. Gays and transgenders must constantly be reassured that they are not doing anything wrong, precisely because they at least suspect they are doing something wrong. And because the problem is their own conscience, they can never be satisfied by any speech or action taken by any other. Their demands will just keep escalating. And they will grow more hysterical, beginning to speak of “revenge” and “genocide.” Ultimately, quite possibly, leading to egregiously violent action, like shooting small children in a Christian school. For the Erinyes pursue them, and they are relentless.

Orestes pursued by the Erinyes