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Tuesday, June 8, 2010

NYT features lesbian Catholic!

I too was surprised when I read the headline.  Ms. Tushnet presents very good points!  Read below to discover.

Articel courtesy of EWTNNews.com
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The New York Times recently featured lesbian writer and blogger Eve Tushnet, [at right] a conservative Catholic woman who vocally opposes same-sex “marriage” and promotes what she believes to be happy, chaste lives for homosexual individuals.

In a June 4 article, the Times describes Tushnet as “fervently Catholic, proudly gay, happily celibate.” While openly homosexual, Tushnet does not see herself as disordered, nor does she attempt become heterosexual. Instead, she speaks out through her writing in support of the Church's teaching on chastity.

Tushnet has been openly homosexual since about age 13. Her father is a non-practicing Jew and a well-known liberal Harvard law professor, while her mother is a Unitarian who had formerly worked as an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer.

Tushnet entered Yale in 1996 and during her first year, attended a meeting of a conservative group, the Party of the Right, adding that she initially went “specifically to laugh at them, to see the zoo animals,” according to the Times.

However, the writer said she was shocked to find herself drawn in by the group she had come to ridicule. “I was really impressed, not only by the weird arguments but the degree to which it was clear that the people making them lived as if what they were saying had actual consequences for their lives, that had required them to make sacrifices,” she explained.

To her surprise, Tushnet discovered the students in the Party of the Right to be compassionate as well as intellectual.  According to the Times, she found the Catholics in the group particularly inviting because they showed her that the existence of sin did not simply mean that “you are bad.”  Instead, it means “precisely the opposite.”

It means you have a chance to come back and repent and be saved.”   [Bingo!]

Tushnet began reading spiritual books and attending Mass, and by the time of her sophomore year, was baptized. [Alleluia! Welcome home!]

After working briefly for the National Catholic Register, Tushnet has worked since 2002 in magazine writing, computer programming and freelance research.  She writes for Catholic publications like Commonweal and secular magazines such as The Weekly Standard. Additionally, her blog, eve-tushnet.blogspot.com, records her more personal reflections and attracts about 100 readers each day. 

Tushnet also volunteers weekly at a Christian pregnancy-counseling center.

Writing about the problems of same-sex “marriage” in an article for The New York Post in 2007, Tushnet said that allowing such “marriages”  can “bring one of three outcomes.” [Read this part here.  It is very good!]

The first is a “two-tiered marriage culture, where heterosexual couples are asked to do the hard things (sex only within marriage, marriage for life in most circumstances) and homosexual couples work out their own marriage norms.”

The second, said Tushnet, is a reshaping of marriage “into an optional, individualized institution, ignoring the creative and destructive potentials of ‘straight’ sex.”

The third possible outcome, Tushnet said, would “encourage all couples to restrict sex to marriage and marry for life, and hope that gay couples accept norms designed to meet heterosexual needs.”

For these reasons, Tushnet vocally supports reserving marriage only for heterosexual couples. She told the Times that it “makes sense to have an institution dedicated to structuring and channeling” heterosexual relationships, which she describes as having the potential to be “either uniquely dangerous or uniquely fruitful.”
Homosexual men and women should live celibate lives that include chaste friendships with members of the same sex, said Tushnet. She also spoke of the need to sublimate homosexual urges into other pursuits, explaining that she has become very good at doing so.

Tushnet does not believe that homosexual relations should be criminalized, but calls instead for voluntary abstinence. “The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants,” she wrote in a 2007 essay for Commonweal.

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You can read more about Eve over at her blog and by reading her profile by clicking here.  She is even on Facebook.  Click here for her page.

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