The L.A. Times posted an interesting article about Justice Antonin Scalia's take on homosexuality – basically that gay "identity" does not exist — only the "act" of doing something homosexual. In the article is this interesting bit about Scalia's son Paul:
The notion that there are no homosexual people, just homosexual acts, is an ancient one. Until recently it was the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church. Scalia's son Paul, a Catholic priest who has served as chaplain to Courage – “a spiritual support group to help those with same-sex attractions live chaste lives” – continues to resist the idea of a gay identity. He has written: “We must always distinguish the person from the attractions. Most errors in this area come from the reduction of the person to the attractions: to say, ‘A person who has homosexual attractions must be homosexual.' This reduces the human person to the sum total of his sexual inclinations.”
In a 2005 article in the magazine First Things, Paul Scalia warned against the labeling of high school students as “gay” and even took the Vatican to task for using the term “homosexual person,” which, the younger Scalia said, “suggests that homosexual inclinations somehow determine, which is to say confine, a person's identity.” Of course, this is a straw man; psychologists and other who speak of a gay identity don't argue that “gay” is an exhaustive description of an individual's personality traits, only that there is more to being gay or lesbian than participation in sexual acts.
Jeremy Hooper notes that Justice Scalia's church promoted an event dealing with the "challenge of same-sex" attractions at which his son was the key speaker.
We've posted about 'Courage' here before. Among other things, the group claims that men are gay because they're estranged from their fathers. They also hold "athletic camps" with the goal of teaching men with same-sex attractions to become manlier by making them play football and other contact sports.
