But Ya Are, Blanche!

You are a bunch of bigots:

The Catholic Church has demanded an apology from the BBC over a video that referenced the impact of religious homophobia from a “Bible basher.”

BBC Scotland’s The Social project released a powerful spoken word video earlier this month exploring what homophobia feels like in 2018.

The video, which has attracted millions of views on social media, is a first-person account of a man grappling the fear of casual homophobia from strangers while walking with his boyfriend. . . .

Addressing the anti-gay preacher he adds: “See him? He thinks it’s faith but under all that din it tastes like cardboard and it smells like hate.”

So of course, it's an attack on the Catholic Church:

Bishop John Keenan of Paisley has written to the Director of BBC Scotland to demand an apology for the video, which he claims “sanctions the idea that Catholics engender public hated of homosexuals.”

Well, the hierarchy do. The laity, at least in America, not so much. I don't know if Catholics in the UK have the same tendency to ignore the pronouncements of the bishops that American Catholics do, but I wouldn't be surprised.

As for that "public hatred" bit, a spot check on the Church's teaching:

The current Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes the Church's teaching on homosexuality as follows:

Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. 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.

(Emphasis added.)

That doesn't sound much like acceptance to me.

Keenan goes on:

Keenan added: “In the current climate of growing hostility to Catholics I would appeal that the BBC guard against adding fuel to the fire. In that regard I would ask that the Corporation now reach out to Catholics to understand their concerns, that they are being portrayed in a prejudicial way.

“When it comes to important public debates about the wellbeing of the human person and the truth and meaning of human sexuality Catholics feel their views are becoming increasingly marginalised, almost criminalised’ by a narrative in BBC news, comment, arts and elsewhere that amounts to ‘LGBT views good, Catholic views bad,’ an assumption which you must know is simplistic and imposed, and which is not strengthened by longitudinal research.

If the views of the Church on human sexuality are becoming marginalized, perhaps it's because they are totally out of line with reality. And the "longitudinal research" comment is nonsense -- seriously, what does that even mean? "Longitudinal research" on what? Every bit of research that's been done on homosexuality has confirmed that a) it's a perfectly normal variation in sexuality, and b) the overwhelming majority of the difficulties that gay men and lesbians experience comes from things such as the teachings of the Catholic Church.

If the Church wants apologies, how about it start by apologizing to all the gay people whose lives it has ruined?

Here's the video. If you haven't seen it, it's worth watching. And for those who have trouble with heavy Scottish accents, it's subtitled: