 That's a good way to date me, too, isn't it, huh? But you said nice things, and that was nice. Thank you very much for that introduction. I'm very glad to be here. I've been here several times. It's been a couple of years, but I feel very at home here, and I just love coming to Steubenville. You know that Steubenville is one of the places that is really saving the church, and what this place has accomplished is incredible. So I'm always very happy to be here and be a part of this. And everybody has been very nice to me. I'm sort of a person that has all sorts of unique difficulties in getting here and doing this and doing that. So I give the staff all these challenges. But they really threw me a loop tonight when they put on these microphone. And so I had to take off my earrings. Ladies, you know, you can't speak without your earrings on. I mean, I was just stunned, stunned. They've made some sort of special accommodation for me again, as far as that's concerned. And if it gets troublesome on the tape, they'll let me know. But I just, in my really gracious and adaptable way, I said, no way. So I've been shaken by this. So that may be reflected in my presentation tonight, but I'll try to calm down. As Ron said, we're getting to be the older generation now. And we've seen things that a lot of you haven't. And talk about cassette tapes. I spoke when I first started speaking as a graduate student doing public speaking, speaking in schools and parishes and everywhere. It was on abortion. And I stopped speaking much on abortion because there were a lot of people doing that. But nobody was speaking on the church's teaching on contraception. And then I decided that wasn't controversial enough. So I thought I'd do homosexuality. There are great connections between all of these issues without a doubt. There's a seamless flow between them. But this is a particular challenge of our times that church is teaching on homosexuality. And I'm going to do my best to present the informed and, I hope, sensitive presentation. There are undoubtedly people in this room who experience same-sex attraction. We have it among our friends and families, et cetera. And I truly hope I don't say anything offensive if I do. Tell Ron, and he'll tell me. If you don't want to tell me directly, you're welcome to tell me directly. But that's how I respond to things like, no way. So you've got to be prepared for that. Oh, not true, not true. All right, so starting here, we've stopped to some extent using the word homosexual. And certainly not the word gay very much. Because both of them suggest that this is something that someone is, all right? That someone is homosexual or someone is gay. And somehow that's their identity. And a better description is that they experience same-sex attraction. They experience attraction to a member of the same sex. That doesn't mean who they are. It doesn't mean it defines them, all right? It just means something they experience. We all experience all sorts of temptations, and some of them are sometimes very characteristic of us, very deeply embedded in us. I believe I have been irritable, lazy, and arrogant since I was born, so far as I can tell, right? And this has been a lifetime struggle. I don't know if you know what Benjamin Franklin's autobiography talks about trying to improve in the virtues, and he wrote down 12 virtues that he wanted to work on, and every week worked on one of those virtues intensely, and then went through them again. The two that were the hardest for him to make any progress in were keeping order in his desk and affairs, and then his friends told him he needed to add to his list the vice of pride, and he needed to grow in humility. And as he, towards the end of his life, as he looked at the list, he said he grew in all of the virtues, except order, and pride. He said he managed to seem humble. He said, but he never really was humble. So this interests me, because I'm taking care of my mother now who has dementia, and she's an incredibly appreciative, cheerful person, and I meet other people who are doing the same tasks, and their parents, unfortunately, have become sometimes very unpleasant and even mean, and it's very hard. I'm graced by having an easy task in that respect. And I think, you know, my mother's always been that way. She's always been grateful and cheerful and appreciative. And now, I figure one thing that happened, some of it's chemical that's changing to a mean, bitter person, and that people can't help it, but I think for some people, their filters fall, and I happen to be just one big filter. So I had no idea what's on the horizon for anyone who's taking care of me. But so what I wanna say is it can seem deep, it can seem deep in us. And most of us, when we go to confession, we could just turn on our tape recorder and be the last time, unless we're, and then there's times of spectacular change when all of a sudden you realize you're not doing something you used to do, and you don't have a temptation you used to have. And it's just like, wow, that's awesome. And one thing we're gonna see here, I can't remember right now Jacques Maritain's wife's first name, Raissa Maritain. In her book, she talks about sin and temptation. And she says, it's like all the waves on the ocean. And she said, if we go around and we try to smooth out every wave, we're just gonna get exhausted, we're not gonna do any good. And she said, the turbulence is really down deep. The turbulence is really down deep. So you have to go down deep to deal with what's down deep to deal with what's on the surface. So very much to extent, a same-sex attraction is something that's on the surface. And it feels very down deep. It feels very down deep. But once you deal with some things that are down deep, it can sometimes disappear, it can sometimes get less, but it can certainly get manageable. And we're trying here to figure out how to respond with faith, with truth and love to this phenomenon, that people have sexual attractions to others of the same sex. And it's a difficult thing to do. And I'm not up here because I'm an expert, believe me. I have failed pretty dismal in this regard in respect to some members of my own family. So I know how hard it is to do this, but I'm learning from others. And so I'm trying to let you know what I've learned from others and I'd be happy to learn from you if you have something you think I need to know, please, please tell me. But we're wanting to speak to our brothers and sisters. Often we have this in our family, who are aunts and our uncles, friends, coworkers, sometimes even our parents. These are people who we love. And these are people who we want to be in relationship with. We don't want to break off the relationship. We also want to see them in heaven. We want to be with them for an eternity. We want them to be happy in this world. But many of them in many of the culture think that church's teaching is mean, hateful, homophobic. Those of us who are Catholics don't think that. And it's a challenge to learn how to present this, to present the church's teaching to people. And there's always a difference in an audience between those who are, say, Eucharistic Catholics, those Magisterial Catholics, those who say if the church teaches that I'm lined up and you spend a fair amount of time in front of the Blessed Sacrament and you're trying very hard to let God form you inside and out. There's a lot of receptivity that church is teaching there. Other people are Sunday Catholics and maybe not every Sunday and they call themselves Catholics, but as you know, church is not gonna tell me what to think about certain things. And then you have people who have same-sex attraction who vary, hurt by the church. They think the church is saying there's some sort of, I mean, think of some of the words that have been used, not just by the church, but the culture, pervert, deviant, kind of monster. You think, wow, who would wanna belong to a church or go to a church that thinks that, right? So we have to make sure that we're, more always changing our language. Believe me, because language always starts to take on meanings that you might not have meant. I mean, I've lived long enough that I, we once did call people retarded and it wasn't a bad thing to say. And then you called them mentally handicapped and it wasn't a bad thing to say. And then you called them mentally challenged and it wasn't a bad thing to say. And now you call them special means, right? And everyone eventually, they take on a connotation that you don't want so you find a new term. That's one of Fra Angelica's paintings of saints. And again, I just wanna stress the fact that it's highly likely that several individuals there experience same-sex attraction. It's not an impediment to sainthood, right? The attraction itself. It's all what we do with the struggles that we have in this world. Some people wanna say that St. Francis was homosexual. And the only evidence they have is that he seemed like a gentle soul and he was slight of build and deer in a way. Sorry, those, I mean, a lot of heterosexuals, I hope, are that. You notice that rose bush in that picture, right? You see it, the rose bush. If you go to a CC in the church that's down the hill, there's a rose garden with that, you know, a descendant of that rose bush there. And at one time St. Francis, the pure St. Francis was suffering such severe sexual attractions that he threw himself into a rose bush, hoping that the pricks of the thorns would distract him from his sexual thoughts, right? St. suffered these things. Well, the rose bush was so privileged to be in contact with the pure flesh of St. Francis that it no longer has thorns on it, right? So this is a rose, a brand of rose that doesn't have thorns. Now this is a fresco in the crypt of the Basilica of St. Francis. And you have there, I think I can do, maybe I have to go up here? Where do I have to go to do, that works, all right. There's St. Francis, he's being washed, you can see by angels. And it's sort of a, it's a storyline. This is also St. Francis being brought into heaven by his fellow, by saints that he's prayed to and friends that help him get to heaven. And over here we have the devil that's trying to get in here and drag Francis down. But these frescoes all celebrate different virtues. And this virtue is the virtue of costitas, chastity. And then we have over here, mundizia and fortitude, that you have to have purity and courage, courage to be chased. So this is what Francis tried to teach people, right? This is the story, it's not an easy thing, it's a struggle. The devil's trying to get you to commit sexual sin. Your friends, the saints, God are trying to bring you into heaven through chastity. So Christ himself, of course, speaking to young people, told them, keep my commandments and go and sin no more. Easier said than done. But let's keep our focus, that's it. Keep my commandments, go and sin no more. And of course, he heals us, he heals us. Always turn to Jesus, always turn to Jesus and marry in the saints when you're struggling. And they will help you, right? Now these are some of the truths we need to know. I'm gonna elaborate a lot of these. One is, I've mentioned this to some extent that those with SSA, same-sex attraction, think they can't be otherwise. This is their identity. We have to keep that in mind. And we can't be cavalier, you can change if you want to. You can do this if you want to. They feel that very deeply, and we have to respect that in some way, right? We have to respect that in some way, right? We have to understand what the church teaches. We have to understand what are the kinds of life histories that lead to SSA. When no one gets up in the morning and says, I wanna have same-sex attraction, right? It's not that kind of a thing. It's not the kind of things, you know, I could be attracted to men or I could be attracted to women, but I'm just gonna choose what I'm attracted to. That doesn't happen, right? So how did it happen? How did it happen that some people experience, it's something they discover about themselves. It's not that they really chose this. It's something they discover. Like, all of a sudden they say, wow, I see this, I'm much more attracted to members of the same sex than the opposite sex. How did that happen, right? More truth we need to work on. What the gay experience is. We have to understand the isolation, the heartbreak, the low self-esteem. Now you obviously meet many people with SSA, same entertainment world all the time. People are very full of self-confidence and delight and joy and everything. Many people who suffer same-sex attraction are extremely charming and attractive in many, many ways, right? But sometimes that's a mask for some much great deeper sense of not belonging and it's attempting to belong aggressively so because they have a lot of insecurity, right? What the gay lifestyle is. And we're gonna look at some of the physical, psychological and social pathologies that go with the gay lifestyle. I'm not going to go into great detail now because it's really, I think it's fair to say, shocking, shocking. Our cultures made us think that it's just two attractive young men who have adopted a baby or two and just leading just a parallel life to heterosexual couples or it's two old men or two old women sitting at a kitchen table just being companions in their old age. I'm not saying that there's not some truth to those things but there's many other truths that most people have no idea about in respect to the gay experience as many people have no idea what goes on in college campuses in regard to sex. No idea, right? I hope it's not true at Stupendville. I doubt that it is. But even my parents, back when I went to college in 1968 I went off to college. They had gone to colleges where there were curfews. They had to be in the dorm at 10 or 11 at night. There was no co-ed visitation in the dorms at all, right? You got dressed up for dinner. The men wore jackets and the women wore skirts and you sat down and you were served dinner, right? When they sent us off to college they had no idea about the drugs and the sex and the alcohol and everything else that was going on. They thought they were just sending us off to the same kind of experience they had. As people now know, you're sending your children off to dens of iniquity most of the time and they're going to face temptations that maybe you did face. Maybe it's a generation go which was just as bad as it is now. But it was bad in 1968. That's partly where 1968 is the year. And at any rate, my parents had no idea what they were sending us out to and a lot of people had no idea what's involved in the gay lifestyle. Maybe looking for the church's teaching very nice place to look is the catechism. Straightforward, clear, start there. Father John Harvey, bless his soul, worked in this area for decades. Has this beautiful book homosexuality in the Catholic church clear answers to difficult questions? He's the founder of Courage. He had a heart and soul for people who suffered same sex attraction and trying to help them achieve holiness. And US bishops have put out a pamphlet called Ministry to Persons with the Homosexual Inclination Guidelines for Pastoral Care. There's other church documents in 1975. There was Persona Humana, a declaration on certain questions concerning sexual ethics, so it wasn't treated as a separate issue at all. In 1985, there was on the pastoral care of homosexual persons and non-discrimination against homosexual persons. So those are pretty old. It's really time for the church to write another document on this topic. It's really time. I'll be interested to see when it comes out, but things have changed enough. They've changed a lot since 1975 and 1985, and we need a new document. I and a couple other people ran a conference in Detroit last year called Welcome and Accompanying People with Same Sex Attraction, Pastoral Approaches to Same Sex Attractions. This book is that we have here, The Living, the Truth, and Love, published by Ignatius Press, it's half of the essays that were in talks that were given at the conference. Another conference is going to be held in January in Phoenix. I don't know if there's been advertised yet, but look for it. The people who were there loved it. We had 400 people, many of them, most of them honestly involved in church ministry and some way priests and DREs and high school principals and teachers and people who hold none of those roles, but people who are very, very interested in pastoral ways of dealing with this topic. And so this book is extremely good, and one of the most important parts of any treatment are testimonies. Testimonies of those who have lived the lifestyle, right? And two of my favorite books are these. Out of a Far Country, which is a book written by a son and his mother, Christopher Ewan and Angel Ewan. It's an absolutely remarkable text of a spiritual journey. Neither of these two are currently Catholic. I just like to think of people that way. You're not yet Catholic. They're not currently Catholic. I think they will be someday, but at any rate, they're extraordinary stories of conversion and to see God's grace working in people's lives. These books are great. The other one by Rosario Butterfield, she's got a second volume, if you would say, telling her story. She was a lesbian professor at Cornell University in New York State. Very high profile, had lived as a lesbian for many years. And just a nice, a little interesting part of the story. She was baptized Catholic. I don't know that she was raised much Catholic. Think of the name, Rosario. Anyway, she had decided she needed to read the Bible to see how stupid it was about homosexuality. But she was a very good scholar, so she worked with original languages and commentaries and everything. And she wrote something that was pretty negative about the Bible for a local newspaper. And a Protestant minister, she got a whole bunch of mail, a lot of letters, and she got a letter from a Protestant minister. And she sort of was putting into piles of negative and positive. And then she read his. She didn't know where to put it. It was so lovingly written. It was so beautifully understanding and reaching out to her. So she ended up calling him, becoming very, very good friends with him, and just had this amazing conversion and now is married with children. And this embarrasses me, because it's not true of me. But she reads the Bible through at least once every year. And you can see that the Bible just informs her every thought that she finds some way that scripture supports where she's going and what she's doing. There's two videos that are fantastic. There's one called, and they're both available. You can watch them on YouTube, no expense. Desire of the everlasting hills produced by courage. It's the testimony of three people. I think it is just three. It's very artful, very sensitive stories of three people who have lived, have same sex attraction, have lived that out in certain ways and returned to the church. Very powerful. Another is called the third way. Same thing has about a dozen or so people. Not as artistic as the first one, but also very effective. Now, these are some of the principles that seem to be driving us. And to some extent, you'll see the confusions quite quickly. Catholic church teaches, Christianity teaches, Jesus teaches, everyone deserves to love and be loved. John Paul II said that's how a human person is someone who is meant to love and be loved. That's what we're here on earth for, right? Is to love and be loved. And the fear of most people with same sex attraction, if you don't allow them to have a romantic intimate sexual relationship, that they'll miss out on that, right? They'll miss out on that. They will be lonely. And then they translate this into everyone should be able to marry the person he or she loves. Now, my guess is there's a whole bunch of people in this room. I'm sure the person you married is a person you love, but many of us were heartbroken more than once in our life. Didn't get to marry the person we loved, right? Many people don't get married. There's a confusion here about what love is. It's not only sexual love or marital love that is love. That's what Christianity tells us. And the first relationship always has to be with Jesus. And that's where we have to first fall in love and build that love relationship. And every other relationship will go better if that's our primary focus is building our love relationship with Jesus. This is how the person often with same sex attraction feels very alone that they'll forevermore be alone if they leave the gay lifestyle. And there is a kind of ethic of hospitality and care in the gay community. They take care of each other. Those who have been dying of AIDS or suffering from AIDS are surrounded by people who love them. They are not abandoned, all right? So they found something again. They found the odd ball out. They're different from everyone. The catechism tells us the number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Since it's not negligible. Sometimes you see those Jesse Waters and those kinds of things on TV where you go around and just randomly interview people. And some people go around and randomly interview people and ask how many people do you think, what percentage of people do you think experience same-sex attraction? People will often say something like 50% or 30%. It's much closer to under 2%, right? We'll look at that in a minute. It's not 2% of 300 million people is a lot of people. So it's not negligible, all right? But it's not 30% and it's not 50%. So we have to recognize that. It's a small percentage, all right? The inclination, which is objectively disordered, and that phrase bothers people so much. They just think, you know, saying there's something, there's something so wrong with you because you're objectively disordered. Now it doesn't think about the person. It says about the inclination is objectively disordered. And the church teaches that any sinful inclination is objectively disordered. My being irritable is objectively disordered, right? My being lazy and egotistical is objectively disordered, right? You can see the same thing about any inclination to sin, right? So it's just, it's simply stating a fact, all right? It's a problem, all right? Like a lot of other problems we'll look at, all right? It constitutes for most of them a trial. I mean, most people honestly with same-sex attraction would not want their children to have it, right? You see, it's hard, it's hard to live with this. It's a trial, it's not easy. And they must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. You know, there was once a time in the church where prostitutes were considered to be unbelievably disgusting sinners, you know? Vile, vile women, all right? Who were selling their bodies, and how bad can that be? A couple years ago I went to give a talk in Vancouver and I met a man named Hugh. And Hugh, at one time himself, was a sexual addict. And he had gone through all sorts of conversion and reformation and all sorts of things. And now he was, he'd been very wealthy. And now he'd bought a house in the inner city of Vancouver and he ministered all of his life to prostitutes. And I said, how many prostitutes are there in Vancouver? He said, and he gave me an exact number. I don't know, it was something like 756. And he took me into a room where all their pictures were on the wall, all 756 names and birthdays were with each one of them. And he said, aren't they beautiful? And I want to tell you, they were not, right? They were not. These were some of the most beaten, battered, depressed, sad-looking faces I'd ever seen. If they'd only been in the profession for 10 months a year, some of them were attractive. But most of them were no, they must, I'm sure, they were attractive at some time, but this lifestyle takes its toll. And he loved every one of them, right? And he would go to them and he would help them get to their, they had a team, they had teams of people. We always wanted to, so you took little packages of candy and medicine and sorts of things, toiletries and say, you know, can many of them have children? And you've seen, could we take a note to your children? Do you need a ride to your medical appointment? Whatever. But the church now sees them as victims, right? And they are victims. Most of them are victims of terrible childhoods. Most of them, a lot of them been sold into prostitution by their parents who are drug addicts, right? So we don't look at them anymore as terrible, despicable, horrible human beings. We look at them as really wounded, wounded people that deserve our love and our care, radically so, right? So we say must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. I mean, there's been a time when, you know, the homosexual is considered to be loathsome, right? Loathsome. And now you say, no, this is my brother's, my sister, it's my uncle, it's my father, my friend. I love this person, right? I don't want separation from this person, right? Says every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives. And if they are Christians, to unite the sacrifice of the Lord's cross, the difficulties they may encounter from their condition. And isn't that just true of all of us, right? We are meant to unite our sufferings to the Lord's sacrifice in the cross, right? And that's what all of us have to be doing. If it's our irritability or laziness or whatever it is, we have to go in front of Jesus and say, here it is, do something with it. You're the healer, help me, all right? The fences against chastity in the catechism. I just want you to look at the order of these. But the catechism is listing sins against chastity, lust. I don't want any hands up, but, you know, right? Masturbation, no hands, right? Fornication, no hands. Pornography, don't tell me. Prostitution's probably not, probably not. Rape, I don't know. Victims, I'm sure. Homosexual acts. Homosexuality isn't being singled out. I mean, all of those on there, heterosexuals are pretty darn involved in those things, right? So it's not that we're singling, these are all objective disorders, all right? These are all things that cannot be ordered to God's will. None of these things can be done and said God's happy about it, all right? That's what it means for something to be disordered. It can't be ordered to God's good. Of course, why is that? Original sin. Feel sorry for yourself, it's okay. All right, stupid Adam. You know, rotten Adam, skunk Adam. And it was Adam, even though he ate it, but if Adam had said, no, that was a bad deal, but instead what'd he do? It was her, not me. Right? Very unmanly thing to do, huh? Right. Oh yeah, okay, Eve had something to do with it too. All right, all right, all right. But the point is, we inherit this and we all would have done the same thing, so we can't really blame them because we would have done the same thing if we'd been there. But the point is we are born weak, all right? We're born with these. And so we can't be surprised if we find ourselves with same-sex attraction or irritability or egotism or anything. We can't be surprised. We can't say, oh, I'm a rotten person because I'm this way, right? It's this foolish. What you say is I'm human, all right? I've been hit by Original sin in a certain way. I've been affected by Original sin in a certain way. It's my way that, I mean, I didn't choose it. I didn't choose to be irritable. I didn't choose that. But you know, spend a little time with me. It won't take long. Anyway, Corinthians, I love this. Corinthians 6, spent a lot of time with this. Paul says, you know perfectly well that people who do wrong will not inherit the kingdom of God. People of immoral lives, idolaters, adulterers, catamites, sodomites. Now those both are different versions of homosexuality. Notice that we have idolaters and adulterers before them. Catamites, sodomites. Thieves, usurers, drunkards, slanders, swindlers. Yeah, it doesn't mention irritable people or lazy people. I just want you to notice. Okay, we'll never inherit the kingdom of God, all right? That's pretty threatening, because most of us are on there in some way. All of us are idolaters in some way. We worship the false gods of some kind, okay? But he says, these are the sort of people some of you were once, but now you have been washed, clean and sanctified and justified through the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and through the spirit of our God, all right? We just bring our sinfulness to Jesus and he washes us clean, all right? So you find something in yourself that you really find revolting or you don't know how to deal with it. And you say, I don't want to deal with this. We'll say, there you are, you're there, but Jesus came, he knows, he certainly knows. These are just pictures of a priest now, a bishop, two nuns and Gregory Burke who just became the Vatican's public relations man. The Catholic Church really does believe that a celibate life can bring happiness, right? That you can be perfectly happy not having sex. Our culture doesn't believe that, but we believe that. And a lot of people aren't having sex. Their spouses, even people who've gotten married, their spouses have left them, their spouses have died, their spouses have illnesses, right? That's not the life they wanted for themselves, right? But they are now, all right? And all of a sudden you say, I married this man, this woman, I thought my life was gonna be this and now it's crashed. They say they're not failures, right? But their life is hard. They don't have everything they want, but they can be very, very happy honestly. You dig down deep, you lean on Jesus, right? Again, this is World Youth Day. I mean, you imagine the sexual sin that's going on in those people right there. I mean, they're young people, all right? But where are they? They're in Rio because they love Jesus and they love the church and they love the pope and they know that there's some way to handle what they're dealing with, right? And they're finding it there. First principle of all first principles, male and female, he created them. God did not create them male and male or female and female. When people talk about natural law, I mean, I don't mean to be flippant, which I often can sound because probably I am. Yeah, flippancy, let's add that. Irritability, bomb of law, flippancy. Sarcasm, irony really. I think it's irony. I think it's just really sophisticated irony that we're dealing with here, all right? Anyway, my sophisticated irony says, you know, that clearly in homosexuality, the parts don't fit. If God had meant man to be with male and female, the female, he really messed up, right? He really messed up. It's a very awkward situation, right? And male and female are a lovely match, right? A lovely match in so many ways. That's the way that God made us, right? Right, complementarity, that's what this is all about. Everyone, again from the catechism, everyone, man and woman should acknowledge and accept his sexual identity. Physical, moral, and spiritual difference and complementarity are oriented towards the goods of marriage and the flourishing of family life. I mean, our culture is so sexually confused that if you say something like those that sex is meant to be an expression of love, people go, well, that's an interesting idea, right? I just thought it was a physical need that I needed to find someone to help me meet. But love, it's meant to be an expression of love, and it's meant to be welcoming to new life, that that's what it's for, right? And I shouldn't be having sex unless I wanna be a parent with the person I'm having sex with. Whoa, that's really, never heard that before. Worth considering, right? What's a whole new light on things, right? It says the harmony that couple and of society depends in part on the way in which the complementarity needs and mutual support between the sexes are lived out. We're very confused about sex, have been for the history of mankind, but most particularly since contraception, and it's ruined the family and thus everybody else is suffering. Society and the couple, the family, children, we're all suffering. It says each of the two sexes is an image of the power and tenderness of God. Male's an image and the female is image. With equal dignity though in a different way. The union of man and woman in marriage is a way of imitating in the flesh the creator's generosity and fecundity. God is love, and what does love do? Love overflows. Love overflows into more love and new life and more love and new life, and that's what it is. And when a man and a woman get married, it's bringing all these families together and creating new love relationships and bringing forth new children. Oops, I didn't mean to stop that. Therefore, a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh. And what have they told? Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. And that's not something that same sex sex can do. All human generations proceed from this union. That's probably 15 years old, that picture, but that's my parents on their 50th winning anniversary and their claim, right? And that's what my parents did. It's pretty great, isn't it? I know that's probably small in a court of Steubenville terms, but it's still pretty impressive, okay? I'm the cool one with the glasses, sunglasses there. That's not really cool one standing there, yeah. All right, I'll talk more about this about T.O.B. and the body, but this is where we're all headed, all right? This is Mary. I want you to think a lot about this. I used to think these coronation scenes were kind of, oh, I just did something to the sound system. I bounced around here, sorry. I used to think that pictures of the coronation were like sappy and sentimental. I'm confessing tonight. I hope I will be absolved by a number of you priests tonight so I don't have to go again. Anyway, Mary and Jesus, you know, and there they are, king and queen on their throne, and it's all gold and shiny and everything. And the older and more spiritual I hope I get, the more I am just blown away by these, right? Because Mary is not just Mary, Mary is Mary. Mary is Mary. You fall in love with Mary and you know Jesus, how much Jesus is in love with Mary, Mary is in love with Jesus, and oh my gosh, the love that's going on there and all the saints love them and oh, there's so much love there, it's incredible. And then of course, Mary represents the church, right? She represents the church. And so that's Jesus loving us as church, as church. But that's always, that's also Mary as every single human soul, right? You're gonna be sitting right there someday. Every one of those saints is basically sitting right there. Jesus is looking on every one of them with the loving eyes which he looks on, Mary. They didn't have sex, right? Sex is not necessary for love, for deep, intimate, satisfying, restorative love, right? So we gotta get over that. Now these are, I'm gonna have to go a little faster, but I can do it too, right? No, I'll do, oh, somehow manage this. All right, there are various objections to church teaching. One is that same sex attraction is natural and people mean by that, there are many in the population. We've talked about that, we'll talk more. Some people think it's genetic, people are born that way largely because people, they can't remember a time when they didn't feel this way. I've seen at least three young men from the time they were toddlers that I was pretty convinced they had same sex attraction, right? Comes early, it comes early. And I'm not saying just because it's not genetic, doesn't mean it's not biological in some way, that there aren't some chemicals that have been in the womb, whatever has happened. Again, people think it's natural because some same sex attractive people have self identified as SSA since an early age and some people claim the experience of homosexuals show that it is good. So how can it be wrong if people are happy and joyful in this lifestyle? Well, I'm gonna go fairly quickly here because I'm talking slow. We're using two sources as the church does. The church uses reason. Reason means we look around and we see what's going on. So we'll use a lot of science here. Actually, people who have done studies and those studies are extremely helpful for getting at the truth. You know, we have discovered through studies that young children do well who have a father in the home, right? We now have studies that prove this for those of doubters of you who think it makes no difference whether a person has a father in the home or not. I mean, we've done studies on things that everybody knows. We've forgotten the most obvious truths on the face of the earth. People need a mother and a father who are committed to each other for their life. My parents knew that. They didn't have any scientific studies that show that, but now we do. Revelation, right? God knows how stupid we are. And so he tells us things that we could figure out on our own. Don't kill, don't commit adultery. He already gives us the 10 commandments, right? And then he tells us stuff we couldn't figure out on our own, like love your enemies, right? That's a contradiction in terms of if there ever was one, right? Enemies are people who hate you and why wouldn't you hate them back? But Jesus tells us we should love them. So anyway, we have two sources of truth here. The American Psychiatric, I'm gonna skip this part, just to tell you that the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was not a psychological disorder. And they did it on the basis of no evidence at all, all right? There were no studies that were showing. Up to that point, up to 1973, if someone came in who had same-sex attraction to a therapist, the therapist said, well, I can help you with that. I can help you with that. I know you're suffering. It's like people with anger management, people who have depression. I can help you with that, right? But now all of a sudden it's perfectly normal and you come in and you say, I have same-sex attraction and I feel bad about it. I said, well, you need to just accept yourself because it's perfectly normal and natural and there's nothing wrong with you, right? And that was not on the basis of any studies at all, right? Again, it was a vote, not evidence. So let's look in a sense what same-sex attraction is. It's really a symptom. It's a symptom, as I said, like it's waves on the top of the water of other problems that are down deep, which is certainly true of my irritability and my laziness and whatever else I can call myself. It's really because I haven't centered myself in God. That's why those are there. If I'm self-centered, then if someone forts my plans, I get irritable. Well, that's because I haven't centered myself in Jesus. I've centered myself in me, right? So if you're sending yourself in Jesus, things start to are very different in your system, very different. It's a defensive response to present conflicts. Let's talk about that a bit more, but it means you're troubled in some way. You feel rejected, you feel lonely, and it's a way of solving a certain problem that's there. It's a reaction to unresolved childhood trauma. Look at that. It's a reparative drive to fulfill unmet, homo-emotional needs, right? What this means is people don't feel comfortable. They don't feel fully loved by their own sex, right? By their father for males. Females are always more complicated. Females, sometimes it's because they think femininity is weak and silly and ridiculous, and they don't identify with that, right? So they can't really feel affection from other women because they think other women are, again, silly, et cetera, et cetera. The healthy heterosexual women. So they move towards other women to get their love. So they're trying to get love that they didn't get from members of their own sex. It's an emotionally based condition. It's a need for the same sex parent's love. Now, this doesn't, we're gonna talk about this in a minute, I can talk about it now. It doesn't always mean the parent didn't love the child and even didn't work very hard to show the child love. It's perceptions. It's perceptions. Every parent, my theory is every parent lives with this huge angst that, you know, when they're 25, your child is gonna say to you, when I was six, you said this. And ever since then, I have this. And you go, oh, did I, really? I don't think I said it, no, I said I didn't mean it that way and I never meant to hurt you. And, well, my whole life has been ruined because you said this, right? Does every parent know you're just hands? But my guess is, yeah, you all feel that. Well, sometimes, honestly, it does happen, right? It does happen. The kid says, you know, you always played catch with him and he never played catch with me. I guess you thought I was a sissy. And the father might just say, no, why didn't he just love to pay catching you didn't? That was all it was. No, no, no, you made me feel like I was just awful. I was a sissy, I was just like, yeah. It happens. And nobody's, it's not the kid's fault. Who knows why the kids get these ideas in your heads? I mean, I was just talking to someone, children say the most, I have a four-year-old nephew who whenever he's disappointed, he says, you can't do this to me. Where did he get this? He's four. I mean, but he does it, you know. So it's not their fault either. A need for gender identity. There's every male in this world at some point wants to be masculine. He wants to be more masculine. That's for male, that's a goal in life. Want to be one of the guys. And for some reason he thinks he can't be. And women don't have that quite to the same extent that we want to be one of the girls. But we do want to be lovely and loved and some of us think we just can't do it. We're not up to that, we can't compete. All right, so I'm gonna go the other way. I'm not gonna try to win a man because I'll never be able to do that. But I might be able to win a woman. Fear of intimacy with someone of the opposite sex. One of my friends always said he never believed any of the stats about teenage sexuality. But he says for a teenage boy to have the courage to walk across the room to talk to a girl this just doesn't happen. And it really only happened when the girl started being the aggressors. Anyway, this problem that everybody feels like you're gonna be rejected, you're gonna be mocked, you're gonna be just dismissed. And you say, well, especially if you're a young boy, 12, 11, whatever, 13, 14, and you're saying you don't feel like you're manly and you're not athletic enough and then there's some older man a 19, 20, 25-year-old who starts buying you gifts, et cetera, starts playing with you sexually and all of a sudden that's who you think you are. Because here's a man who does love you and he introduces you to all his male friends who think you're darling. And what happens, right? This is one of the ways it happens, one of the ways. So I'm just gonna go through this for a minute, we don't need that. I've mentioned this already, only one to three and a half percent of people are same-sex attracted. In 2011 of about 35,000 people, they did a study and the total of people who identified as same-sex attracted, and this includes people who are called bisexuality, there's only 1.6% who said that's who I am of the total population of males. 1.3% said they are same-sex attracted and 0.7% of females. It's very interesting to me, but only about 6% of males have experience with same-sex sexuality. Currently, in 1992, among women, it was about 4% had ever experimented. Now it's around about 11% for women. Now why has that happened? Because it's accepted in our culture. And many young women when they go to college, again, they don't wanna compete for men, but they don't wanna be lonely on Saturday night either. So some women are becoming what they call lugs, lesbians until graduation, right? So they're experimenting with it because it's an option in our culture. There is no evidence that same-sex attraction is genetically caused. The consensus is that it's a combination of social, biological, and psychological factors, right? You could be a person who's especially sensitive, a person who's not extremely athletic, a woman who doesn't like pink and bows and all this stuff, and you like playing baseball, et cetera. And it's kind of a social thing, a psychological thing. And now in our culture, where you sort of label people one thing or another, you think that's who you are. As far as it being natural, there's no evidence, no evidence, absolutely no evidence of genetic basis. That's mean, for instance, children of homosexuals are not more likely to become homosexual. So if it's parts of the genes, you would expect the children of a homosexual person, the person with the same-sex attraction to be homosexual. Twins are not more likely to be SSA. I'll tell you about a study in a moment. The causes of homosexuality actually point to pathology and the health consequences of homosexual activity are very serious. How often does the second twin also have SSA? They studied 71 twin pairs, and researchers found that seven of the 71 twin pairs matched as both having same-sex attraction. That meant that 64 of the twin pairs did not match, right? If it were genetic, you would expect all 71 who are identical twins pairs, both to be homosexual. Even if it were genetic, we talk about, and this is questioning now, about whether there's a propensity among some ethnic groups or individuals to be alcoholic. But simply because you have the propensity doesn't mean that that's who you are or what you must be, right? You need to live with it. All right, contributing factors, we've talked about this family influence, social influence, cultural influence, situational influence, and virtue factor. Again, how much you are ready to do the hard work, the hard work of becoming virtuous. Clinical factors for male, and we've talked about this father conflict, mother conflict, peer rejection womb that you've been, many of these young people say, whenever they were choosing, the guys say, whenever they were choosing up for teams, I was the last one chosen, right? Felt that their peers rejected them. Poor body image, they're overweight, or they're too skinny, or they're something, and they don't feel that they are like the other males, and many male homosexuals are just adversely obsessed with the muscles of other men, because it's something they don't see belongs to them. Many of them have been abused. We'll look at that in a moment. Physical, sexual abuse, and neglect. The parents failed to encourage same sex identification. There's a point in every child's maturation where the father has to bond with the son and make the son feel like he's one of the guys, right? And the girl as well has to do some shifting to attracting her father and feeling like she's other than her father. The sports woman, again, not feeling they are athletic and parental loss. Possibly the father's gone. The father's absent from home. I spoke to one woman who said that when her son was about 13, he was showing signs of having same sex attraction, and she went to her husband, and she said it's your fault. And it's not always the case, but in this instance, she said it's your fault. She said you ignore him. You're much more interested in your activities and your sports and everything you are in him. You don't seem to like him even. And the father, the son wasn't much like the father, and she said to him, I'm gonna hold you accountable if our son turns out to be gay. And she said the father from that point on started showing the son all sorts of attention, taking his son to work with him and the things he liked to do. And whatever the son did, he did with the son, went and did all the activities the son did. And she said that after a year and a half, he showed no signs of same sex attraction. And the father and son were truly in love with each other. You know, one would come in the room and the other one would just light up, all right? Dad's home. And that'll be interested in what I have to say. You know, and the father sees the son and here's my son. I'm interested in what he's been doing, all right? And there was just a complete transformation of the kid. Female same sex attraction, many of the same things, father conflict, mother conflict, peer rejection room, poor body image, abuse, male betrayal, huge part of it. Many lesbians have been very promiscuous with males, all right? And don't trust males. Males leave you. Males are abusive, all right? Women are nurturing. Women are loving, all right? So there's a sense that they've been abused by men and they have extreme loneliness. Childhood abuse, I'm gonna run through these, not give you these numbers, but it's much higher. It's like three or four times higher for people of same sex attraction than OSA is other sex attracted, all right? Weak gender identity, we've been through that, all right? Will you have it for your whole life? Sexual attractions can change. It's not, you can pray the gay away. Though of course sometimes God, you know, make the blind see, make the lame walk. Sometimes it can be sudden. But for most people being cured or just being settled with whatever is their trouble with takes some time. There can be change without intervention. Some of these stories that we see are people who have gone into a church community that have absolutely loved them, have walked them through the scriptures, talked to them about Jesus, how much Jesus loves them and eventually they feel loved in a community. They have friends, they feel loved by Jesus and they're no longer troubled by their same sex attraction. What's the other one there? Gender confusion and fluidity, okay. These are different studies that show change with active intervention with some kind of psychotherapy. And again, they usually don't address the same sex attraction directly. They deal with resentment against the father, failure to forgive, all right? Anger management, poor body image, all right? Feelings of rejection. And those are the underlying turmoil that causes the problems on top. Just at most people, a lot of people, a lot of people, not most. And our culture soon will be most. Preteen, the study of preteen kids, about 12 years old, when asked what their sexual orientation was, 26% said they didn't know. I have to say that when I was 12, I would have said I don't know what a sexual orientation is, all right? So that's a little confusing for me. But teenagers, 8% have engaged in same sex sexual behavior. And by adult years, 20 years old, again, only one to 3.5% experience same sex attraction. So it can be a kind of a phase that a child goes through as they're trying to figure out who they are. Again, there's a fascinating things about change. This man, Spitzer, was the one who, I won't read all that, but a man named Spitzer, a psychologist, a psychiatrist. In 1973, he was one of the major movers behind changing homosexuality from a pathological condition to a normal state in the American Psychiatric Association. Many years later, he heard about all these people who had successfully undergone psychotherapy and had changed. He didn't believe it. So he decided to do his own study. And his own study showed that in fact, some people can have successful change by therapy. Again, the question of change is possible. The Catholic Medical Association has a very good little pamphlet called homosexuality and hope. And they have all sorts of great studies and stats and everything. And what they've discovered is, say, of 100 people who go through psychotherapy for same sex attraction, 33% can enter into a successful heterosexual relationship, right? Get married and have children. It doesn't mean that they don't suffer same sex attraction anymore, necessarily, right? It just means that they can have an attraction to someone of the opposite sex and sustain that and have a happily married life. 33% can get to a point where even though they don't have any attraction to the opposite sex, they're not really greatly troubled by their same sex attraction. Again, they've come to peace with themselves. And there's another 33% that don't change. Now, that breakdown is pretty much true for any psychological disorder, for people who go through therapy, right? 33% gets more or less well, right? Another 33% pretty much can handle, they now have coping mechanisms for what they struggle with. And 33% don't make any progress. I'm absolutely certain that dieting is pretty much like that, if not even worse, right? I have been on many, many diets and I have lost a lot of weight, right? And I have gained it right back and more, right? Why? Because I don't do what I was doing when I was losing weight, right? I stop. I eat the more chocolate, I eat the candy, I eat big portions, right? So you say you can't change, you can't lose weight? Or do you want to say some people just want to go back to their old habits, right? I had a friend once going to marriage counseling and a very horrible marriage from the start. They went to tons of marriage counseling and I said, well, what do they teach? He said, one thing he said, well, every day, about three or four times a day we're just supposed to hold hands for two or three minutes and just look in each other's eyes and not say anything. And I said, oh, how's that work? Oh, she says it's wonderful. She said, I can't tell you how wonderful it is. It just feels great. I love him when he does that and he loves it. And I said, and so why are you still doing it? Oh no, we're mad at each other. Well, maybe if they were doing that, they wouldn't be so mad, you know? But you stop doing the very things that help you, all right? All right, this is just to show, going through these very quickly, but you can see here, we have heterosexual and we have homosexual. I should have these two colors, but it's always the heterosexual that's the smaller and the homosexual that's the bigger. Proportion of people who experience depression, proportion of people have mood disorders. Heterosexual is almost always three times less than the homosexual has any one of these conditions. Anxiety disorder. The larger lines are people with same sex attraction, gender anxieties or alcohol dependence, other drug dependence, suicide, ideations and self harm. Men are three times more likely to have suicidal ideations who have same sex attraction. Women, two times more, et cetera. And this is also true in countries that accept same sex attraction. Everyone says that gay relationships are the same as heterosexual relationships. Isn't that true? I know I'm almost, I got six seconds. Well, let's see how I can do. Only about 40 more slides to go through. Anyway, about 23% of heterosexual couples have male infidelity, males in heterosexual couples cheat. With male same sex couples is between 82 to 100%. Male same sex relationships are not the same as heterosexual relationships. They're just not, the complimentarity and the satisfaction that heterosexuals get in relationships is simply not there. How to love persons with SSA? First, pray that God will show you how to love them. Don't make it up yourself. Sit in front of the Blessed Sacrament and say my son just told me he has same sex attraction. My daughter just told me this. How should I love this person? Pray about it. Say, I don't know. I can't begin to know, I have no idea. Well, there's lots of things your kids do have no idea how to deal with, right? I have a friend who was all the little girls who wanted to play soccer, she never played soccer. She was totally unathletic. She went to the library and got a bunch of videos and watched red books and became a soccer coach, right? Because she loved her daughter and she wanted to help them, right? Parents, it's not all about you. You're gonna say, what did I do? And when I've told you, it makes it sound like you're at fault. But it's not all about you. It's about now this relationship, how do I sustain this relationship? How do I help this child? I mean, if you're at fault in some way, again, tell God, ask for forgiveness and then move on, right? Accept them and that doesn't mean approval. But you don't cut them out of your life. You don't shun them. Maybe you pay a lot more attention to them. You call them more often and ask them how things are going. And you tell them they're praying that they'll get that job and you're praying that they'll get that raise. You know, praying that they get accepted at that school and just keep them in your life and talk the way you talk. You pray for people, you pray for them. No, mom, I know what you're praying for, really. Look, of course I am a son, but I am also praying for these other things, right? Lovingly share your beliefs about homosexuality. I was mentioning, let's come up in a minute, I think, here. Don't be afraid to meet their partners. That's very important. I have a friend who, after she came to our conference, she started thinking very differently about things. She had a son who said he had same-sex attraction and wanted to bring his partner home. And all she had for her son was love and all she had for the partner was hatred, right? The partner is causing my son to go to hell, right? He's seducing my son, he's this, that and the other thing. You know, she learned at the conference. The partner is somebody else's son, right? He's probably a pretty adorable person. Your son loves him, right? Probably something to love there, right? You'll probably find him charming and lovable. And he actually might be very curious about what the Catholic Church teaches. And be happy to talk to you. Often you can talk to your son, as you often find out, you can talk to the son by talking to the friends, right? So you show your son you're not, you can't have him come stay in your house as a married couple, just as you can't have cohabiting couples come and stay at your house. But you have to say you're not afraid of this person and then this one, this will be challenging for you. All this will be challenging for me. But go to their places. One of the books says if your son goes to gay bars or go to gay parades, go with him. He'll be mortified that you're there, all right? And he'll start to see things as you see things. And you'll say, what is going on here? If I don't want to bring mom and dad to this, what's going on, right? Spend time with them. Assure them that God loves them. Share your personal relationship with Christ. Pray and fast for them. Just as you would for a child who's cohabiting, a child who is having an affair with a married person, just think of what you would do for that person and do pretty much the same things. Then there's a new video out now, something like we can, what is it? We can change, we can do anything, anything's possible. Of people who have real handicaps in this world who manage to find profound happiness. All right, I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna stop, I'm not gonna stop right, I'm gonna stop probably here. Homosexual persons are called chastity by the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection, right? And we all have a steep hill to climb as far as reaching Christian perfection. It requires an enormous amount of spiritual work, right? Receiving the sacraments, praying, going on retreats, doing Eucharistic adoration. The program that Courage has, the program Courage, which is a support group for people with same-sex attraction, it is a program that's very close to Alcoholics Anonymous, which is pretty much a spiritual program that everybody should follow, right? You know, mass every day, if you can, spiritual reading, accountability, and you know, I wanna say, I have a friend who's going through Alcoholics Anonymous and she's going through the part where she goes and makes amends to everybody she's hurt. Oh my gosh, my rest of my life would be probably just from this evening, you know? I have how much work to do, but it's such a beautiful thing. And when she tells me what she goes through and when she tells me what the program requires of her, I say that's a way of spiritual perfection, right? So what we're asking of homosexuals, we should be asking of everyone, right? Everyone. All right, I'm not gonna do the same-sex marriage thing because I'll be asked during the question and answer. Let me just say this, that everybody believes are such a thing as unnatural sexual relationships. Nobody believes that you should be able to marry the person that you love, right? Because you might love your brother, right? Or your father. I mean, how many little girls wanna marry their father, right? How many little boys wanna marry their mother? What do you say? You can't marry the- Oh, but I love him the most, ah, all right? Unnatural relationships, incest, adult and child, polygamy, brother, sister, doctor, patient, teacher, student, all right? So all of us can fall in love with people that we shouldn't have sex with and we shouldn't marry. That's not unusual. It's not unusual, all right? No, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing that, I'm not doing that. Oh yeah, this I am, just this, here it is. Again, chastity includes an apprenticeship in self-mastery which is a training in human freedom. The alternative is clear. Either man governs his passions and finds peace, which is, it's a job, all right? You don't go up in the morning and say, well, today I think I'm gonna govern my passions, all right? Try it, all right? Or he lets himself be dominated by them and becomes unhappy, but we do know, I mean, when I'm dieting and I'm being successful, I'm so proud of myself. I'm so happy, I feel so good, I look so good, and then I get unhappy and I decide chocolate is the only response to that, okay? Well, it's not true with men in masturbation, pornography, et cetera, all right? You feel good when you're not doing it and then all of a sudden something hits you. You get an unmet need of some kind. I'm unhappy, this will satisfy a need. Well, stop, say I'm unhappy. And you say, let me ask Jesus or Mary how to solve this. Let me ask them how to solve this. They're probably not gonna send you even to the chocolate. Chocolate's not intrinsically evil, all right? But they're probably not even gonna send you there. They do me a lot, because they know me, but. Anyway, man gains his dignity when ridding himself of all slavery to the passions. He pressures forward to his goal by freely choosing what is good, and by his diligence and skill, effectively secures for himself the means suited to this end. This is all in the catechism. So, oh, I found this blank slide. I like it, because you can put on there anything I didn't say that you wanted to hear. There you go. All right. So this is where I hope to see all of you, all right? In heaven. And you notice, I love this because they're all so diverse, different clothing, different sort of possessions that they're holding, because they're not just all little robots and little similar things. They're all very diverse human beings who did very diverse things in their lives. And we're just gonna have so much fun meeting each other and hearing each other's stories. And some of those stories are going to include, like those two books that I mentioned, they're beautiful stories of God's grace in their lives, of people who had same-sex attraction. And I read those stories, and I say, I'm so glad I know that story, right? So it's because you have the problem, doesn't mean your life isn't a beautiful story, right? You respond to grace, it will be a very beautiful story. Thank you.