Bill Donohue is having fits today over a just-completed study that links the intensity of religious education in childhood to suicide rates among gay men. Not surprisingly, growing-up hearing that you’re “intrinsically disordered” is unhealthy; not surprising, either, is that Donohue is having none of it, and yaps around the edges.
Consistent with other studies, this one concluded that lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and those who are questioning their sexual identity, have a higher rate of suicidal ideas and attempts at suicide than heterosexuals. But it breaks with most other studies on an important point: it asserts that gays who take their religion seriously are more likely to have suicidal thoughts, and are more likely to attempt suicide, than those who are not religious.
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More bias can be detected by considering a remark made by John R. Blosnich, one of the four authors. He spoke to the Huffington Post about the problem facing religious-minded gays, commenting, “It can be very scary to be caught in a space where your religion tells you that you are a ‘sinner’ just for being who you are.”
He should identify which religion he is talking about. It is certainly not true of Catholicism: homosexuals are regarded as children of God, the same way heterosexuals are.
Clearly, Donohue is unacquainted with the output of Andrew Sullivan or blog-buddy Michael Hamar.
Why on earth does anybody care what the Bible says about anything? Nobody has ever proved the existence of any supernatural being, including the incandescent sociopath that Abraham was so proud of. Further, modern quantum mechanics has annihilated the philosophical “necessary being” class of arguments. Nobody has ever proved that the being whose existence they can’t prove has any interest in talking to us. Nobody has ever proved that the Bible’s production was superintended by the being whose existence they can’t prove. That last is especially problematic — to thinking grown-ups I mean, not Southern Baptists — because the being whose existence they can’t prove did a poor job of protecting His message to us; not a single scrap of any of the “original autographs” is known to exist. That book on your nightstand is not the book inspired or authored by Our Invisible Friend, but a hand-me-down bastardization of it.
You might think all these difficulties would make Holy Men wary of pronouncing upon the desires of Our Invisible Friend, but … No. They grandly pronounce themselves “presuppositionalists” — meaning that, lacking a scintilla of objective evidence, they presuppose the existence of at least one supernatural being, that it is a male who wishes to talk to us, and that he somehow inspired the Bible, et cetera, et cetera — and then devote themselves to minutely parsing these undocumented texts and telling everybody what to do.
The clergy are the most intellectually corrupt class of men in society and, honestly, it baffles me that anybody, anywhere, takes them seriously instead of treating them as figures of ridicule.