The Fever-swamp has...

... been using the Orlando Massacre (by a Muslim with same-sex attraction) to bash Christians (and others) who don't adopt their ideology of defining people by their sexual identity.

But is it loving to define people by their sexual identity?

Is it even healthy?

//Only, I was truly invisible to these men; for they could only see a “gay” person – a member of the LGBT community, someone who had been born “gay,” someone who needed to accept their gayness – no matter how bad it got.

Then, I met someone who was infinitely caring and sympathetic, but he also didn’t look at me as a “gay” man or a member of the LGBT community; he looked at me as a man, and as a member of his community, as a “human person, made in the image and likeness of God.” This saintly disciple of Christ was Fr. John Harvey. And he once said: “Our uniqueness as persons is not rooted in our sexual inclinations, but in other intellectual, volitive and bodily characteristics. Our personhood is much more complex than our sexual identity. To center personal identity in a homosexual inclination is to accept a false identity.”

Often, I remember the men who died of AIDS, over 300,000 “gay” men in the US alone have succumbed to the disease, and I knew just a few. But, they came from different parts of the country, from different ethnic backgrounds, and from different creeds, but, for the most part – we all shared an intense desire to be loved. In his Introduction to Fr. Harvey’s 1987 book “The Homosexual Person,” Fr. Benedict Groeschel wrote: “If there is any group of people who are aware of the painful need for love, it is those who, for want of a better name, are called homosexuals. In working with this part of the human family for more than a decade, I have come to appreciate that they more than most others experience a profound hunger for love, for love that does not fail.”

Why many of us looked for this “love” within a collective identified as the “gay” community is a complex and difficult question. And, the where, and with whom, we sought to fulfill this love – is not what ultimately defines any of us. Instead, our true fulfillment is in how we found, not our identity, but God. James Martin S.J. – look beyond “gay” into the deeper realms of our humanity and into that part of us, as Fr Groeschel wrote, is our “…hunger for God.” We do not want your labels, we want what every man and woman desires: a chance to move beyond ourselves, so we too might one day understand and know God.//