Gay Priests: I've been thinking about this a bit, and I've decided that, since I'm not religious, I don't have a say. As with the Boy Scouts, churches are private organizations, out of the reach of politics, political correctness, and the modern sensibility that suggests legislation (else litigation) to solve any honest disagreement. Thus, if any church believes, doctrinally, that homosexuality is sinful, that's their business. It does say in the Bible that homosexual acts are an "abomination." Again, if churches want to take this passage seriously, that's their business. I'll take it as their right to say so, even though I disagee with them and have some serious logical problems with it. (I'll wait for all those who believe logic has no place here to leave the room.)

By way of disclaimer, none of this is to say that we don't have the ability (and the duty) to distinguish predators from priests, a duty gone lacking for so long in Massachusetts. I believe the argument has already been successfully made that to conflate homosexuality and pederasty is to commit a fallacy -- for some a willful fallacy. Moving on . . . In the Bible, gay sex is addressed about a thoroughly as masturbation is (and do recall that Yahweh slew Onan); neither "sin" makes it into the ten commandments. That is to say, when Yahweh told Moses the ten most important things, "Thou shalt not bugger" just didn't qualify. Note that Moses himself had violated one of these commandments: he had killed. Yahweh had seen this and, later, punished Moses for his infraction. Nonetheless, it didn't seem, to Yahweh, to disqualify Moses from his central role in leading the Chosen out of bondage.

The same argument can be made that King David, adulterer, liar, and killer -- by machination -- of the husband of the woman he covets, was not only blessed enough in the eyes of Yahweh to lead the Chosen, but he was blessed enough that he, fruit of the tree of Jesse, established the royal family out of which the messiah would be born (Isaiah 11:10, "And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious"; Matthew [1:1] even calls Jesus, "son of David").

These observations in place, it seems that, if you're going to buy into this whole god thing, you have to be ready to accept that god calls whom he chooses to lead, in ways that are mysterious. As Yahweh said to Job, "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding."