The Books Were a Front For Porn

[Note: I would really like all my readers to review this sort of lengthy piece submitted by an 'ex-gay' person, and comment on it. In summary he seems to be saying that gay people are more shallow (in terms of interest in pornography, penis sizes and shapes, and such) than are straight people. My own personal experience has shown this to be sort of true, and I was wondering about your experiences. Is it true, as the man claims, that 'gay rights' are by and large just a trick being played on us by the 'gay leaders'? If you would read this and add to the comments I will appreciate it, and with your permission I will summarize some of the comments soon in another message. Also please note the new poll question being started today: Is there any virtue in monagomy where gay people are concerned? PAT]

THE BOOKS WERE A FRONT FOR THE PORN
The Truth About the Homosexual Rights Movement

By Ronald G. Lee

New Oxford Review
February 2006

There was a "gay" bookstore called Lobo's in Austin, Texas, when I was living there as a grad student. The layout was interesting. Looking inside from the street all you saw were books. It looked like any other bookstore. There was a section devoted to classic "gay" fiction by writers such as Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, and W.H. Auden. There were biographies of prominent "gay" icons, some of whom, like Walt Whitman, would probably have accepted the homosexual label, but many of whom, like Whitman's idol, President Lincoln, had been commandeered for the cause on the basis of evidence no stronger than a bad marriage or an intense same-sex friendship. There were impassioned modern "gay" memoirs, and historical accounts of the origins and development of the "gay rights" movement. It all looked so innocuous and disarmingly bourgeois. But if you went inside to browse, before long you noticed another section, behind the books, a section not visible from the street.

The pornography section.

Hundreds and hundreds of pornographic videos, all involving men, but otherwise catering to every conceivable sexual taste or fantasy. And you would notice something else too. There were no customers in the front. All the customers were in the back, rooting through the videos. As far as I know, I am the only person who ever actually purchased a book at Lobo's. The books were, in every sense of the word, a front for the porn.

So why waste thousands of dollars on books that no one was going to buy? It was clear from the large "on sale" section that only a pitifully small number of books were ever purchased at their original price. The owners of Lobo's were apparently wasting a lot of money on gay novels and works of gay history, when all the real money was in pornography. But the money spent on books wasn't wasted. It was used to purchase a commodity that is more precious than gold to the gay rights establishment. Respectability. Respectability and the appearance of normalcy. Without that investment, we would not now be engaged in a serious debate about the legalization of same-sex "marriage." By the time I lived in Austin, I had been thinking of myself as a gay man for almost 20 years. Based on the experience acquired during those years, I recognized in Lobo's a metaphor for the strategy used to sell gay rights to the American people, and for the sordid reality that strategy concealed.

This is how I "deconstruct" Lobo's. There are two kinds of people who are going to be looking in through the window: those who are tempted to engage in homosexual acts, and those who aren't. To those who aren't, the shelves of books transmit the message that gay people are no different from anyone else, that homosexuality is not wrong, just different. Since most of them will never know more about homosexuality than what they learned looking in the window, that impression is of the greatest political and cultural importance, because on that basis they will react without alarm, or even with active support, to the progress of gay rights. There are millions of well-meaning Americans who support gay rights because they believe that what they see looking in at Lobo's is what is really there. It does not occur to them that they are seeing a carefully stage-managed effort to manipulate them, to distract them from a truth they would never condone.

For those who are tempted to engage in homosexual acts, the view from the street is also consoling. It makes life as a homosexual look safe and unthreatening. Normal, in other words. Sooner or later, many of these people will stop looking in through the window and go inside. Unlike the first sort of window-shopper, they won't be distracted by the books for long. They will soon discover the existence of the porn section. And no matter how distasteful they might find the idea at first (if indeed they do find it distasteful), they will also notice that the porn section is where all the customers are. And they will feel sort of silly standing alone among the books. Eventually, they will find their way back to the porn, with the rest of the customers. And like them, they will start rooting through the videos. And, gentle reader, that is where most of them will spend the rest of their lives, until God or AIDS, drugs or alcohol, suicide or a lonely old age, intervenes.

Ralph McInerny once offered a brilliant definition of the gay rights movement: self-deception as a group effort. Nevertheless, deception of the general public is also vital to the success of the cause. And nowhere are the forms of deception more egregious, or more startlingly successful, than in the campaign to persuade Christians that, to paraphrase the title of a recent book, Jesus Was Queer, and churches should open their doors to same-sex lovers. The gay Christian movement relies on a stratagem that is as daring as it is dishonest. I know, because I was taken in by it for a long time. Like the owners of Lobo's, success depends on camouflaging the truth, which is hidden in plain view the whole time. It is no wonder The Wizard of Oz is so resonant among homosexuals. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" could be the motto and the mantra of the whole movement.

No single book was as influential in my own coming out as the now ex-Father John McNeill's 1976 "classic" The Church and the Homosexual. That book is to Dignity what "The Communist Manifesto" was to Soviet Russia. Most of the book is devoted to offering alternative interpretations of the biblical passages condemning homosexuality, and to putting the anti-homosexual writings of the Church Fathers and scholastics into historical context in a way that renders them irrelevant and even offensive to modern readers. The first impression of a naïve and sexually conflicted young reader such as myself was that McNeill had offered a plausible alternative to traditional teaching. It made me feel justified in deciding to come out of the closet. Were his arguments persuasive? Frankly, I didn't care, and I don't believe most of McNeill's readers do either. They were couched in the language of scholarship, and they sounded plausible. That was all that mattered.

McNeill, like most of the members of his camp, treated the debate over homosexuality as first and foremost a debate about the proper interpretation of texts, texts such as the Sodom story in the Bible and the relevant articles of the Summa. The implication was that once those were reinterpreted, or rendered irrelevant, the gay rights apologists had prevailed, and the door was open for practicing homosexuals to hold their heads up high in church. And there is a certain sense in which that has proved to be true. To the extent that the debate has focused on interpreting texts, the gay apologists have won for themselves a remarkable degree of legitimacy. But that is because, as anyone familiar with the history of Protestantism should be aware, the interpretation of texts is an interminable process. The efforts of people such as McNeill don't need to be persuasive. They only need to be useful.

This is how it works. McNeill reinterprets the story of Sodom, claiming that it does not condemn homosexuality, but gang rape. Orthodox theologians respond, in a commendable but naïve attempt to rebut him, naïve because these theologians presume that McNeill believes his own arguments, and is writing as a scholar, not as a propagandist. McNeill ignores the arguments of his critics, dismissing their objections as based on homophobia, and repeats his original position. The orthodox respond again as if they were really dealing with a theologian. And back and forth for a few more rounds. Until finally McNeill or someone like him stands up and announces, "You know, this is getting us nowhere. We have our exegesis and our theology. You have yours. Why can't we just agree to disagree?" That sounds so reasonable, so ecumenical. And if the orthodox buy into it, they have lost, because the gay rights apologists have earned a place at the table from which they will never be dislodged. Getting at the truth about Sodom and Gomorrah, or correctly parsing the sexual ethics of St. Thomas, was never really the issue. Winning admittance to Holy Communion was the issue.

Even as a naïve young man, one aspect of The Church and the Homosexual struck me as odd. Given that McNeill was suggesting a radical revision of the traditional Catholic sexual ethic, there was almost nothing in it about sexual ethics. The Catholic sexual ethic is quite specific about the ends of human sexuality, and about the forms of behavior that are consistent with those ends. McNeill's criticism of the traditional ethic occupied most of his book, but he left the reader with only the vaguest idea about what he proposed to put in its place. For that matter, there was almost nothing in it about the real lives of real homosexuals. Homosexuality was treated throughout the book as a kind of intellectual abstraction. But I was desperate to get some idea of what was waiting for me on the other side of the closet door. And with no one but Fr. McNeill for a guide, I was reduced to reading between the lines. There was a single passage that I interpreted as a clue. It was almost an aside, really. At one point, he commented that monogamous same-sex unions were consistent with the Church's teaching, or at least consistent with the spirit of the renewed and renovated post-Vatican II Church. With nothing else to go on, I interpreted this in a prescriptive sense. I interpreted McNeill to be arguing that homogenital acts were only moral when performed in the context of a monogamous relationship. And furthermore, I leapt to what seemed like the reasonable conclusion that the author was aware of such relationships, and that I had a reasonable expectation of finding such a relationship myself. Otherwise, for whose benefit was he writing? I was not so naïve (although I was pretty naïve) as not to be aware of the existence of promiscuous homosexual men. But McNeill's aside, which, I repeat, contained virtually his only stab at offering a gay sexual ethic, led me to believe that in addition to the promiscuous, there existed a contingent of gay men who were committed to living in monogamy. Otherwise, Fr. McNeill was implicitly defending promiscuity. And the very idea of a priest defending promiscuity was inconceivable to me. (Yes, that naïve.)

Several years ago, McNeill published an autobiography. In it, he makes no bones about his experiences as a sexually active Catholic priest -- a promiscuous, sexually active, homosexual Catholic priest. He writes in an almost nostalgic fashion about his time spent hunting for sex in bars. Although he eventually did find a stable partner (while he was still a priest), he never apologizes for his years of promiscuity, or even so much as alludes to the disparity between his own life and the passage in The Church and the Homosexual that meant so much to me. It is possible that he doesn't even remember suggesting that homosexuals were supposed to remain celibate until finding monogamous relationships. It is obvious that he never meant that passage to be taken seriously, except by those who would never do more than look in the window -- in others words, gullible, well-meaning, non-homosexual Catholics, preferably those in positions of authority. Or, equally naïve and gullible young men such as me who werelooking for a reason to act on their sexual desires, preferably one that did not do too much violence to their consciences, at least not at first. The latter, the writer presumed, would eventually find their way back to the porn section, where their complicity in the scam would render them indistinguishable from the rest of the regular customers. Clearly, there was a reason that in the earlier book he wrote so little about the real lives of real homosexuals, such as himself.

I don't see how the contradiction between The Church and the Homosexual and the autobiography could be accidental. Why would McNeill pretend to believe that homosexuals should restrict themselves to sex within the context of monogamous relationships when his life demonstrates that he did not? I can think of only one reason. Because he knew that if he told the truth, his cause would be dead in the water. Although to this day McNeill, like all gay Christian propagandists, avoids the subject of sexual ethics as if it were some sort of plague, his life makes his real beliefs clear. He believes in unrestricted sexual freedom. He believes that men and women should have the right to couple, with whomever they want, whenever they want, however they want, and as often as they want. He would probably add some sort of meaningless bromide about no one getting hurt and both parties being treated with respect, but anyone familiar with the snake pit of modern sexual culture (both heterosexual and homosexual) willknow how seriously to take that. And he knew perfectly well that if he were honest about his real aims, there would be no Dignity, there would be no gay Christian movement, at least not one with a snowball's chance in Hell of succeeding. That would be like getting rid of the books and letting the casual window-shoppers see the porn. And we can't have that now, can we? In other words, the ex-Fr. McNeill is a bad priest and a con man. And given the often lethal consequences of engaging in homosexual sex, a con man with blood on his hands.

Let me be clear. I believe that McNeill's real beliefs, as deduced from his actual behavior, and distinguished from the arguments he puts forward for the benefit of the naïve and gullible, represent the real aims and objectives of the homosexual rights movement. They are the porn that the books are meant to conceal. In other words, if you support what is now described in euphemistic terms as "the blessing of same-sex unions," in practice you are supporting the abolition of the entire Christian sexual ethic, and its substitution with an unrestricted, laissez faire, free sexual market. The reason that the homosexual rights movement has managed to pick up such a large contingent of heterosexual fellow-travelers is simple: Because once that taboo is abrogated, no taboos are left. I once heard a heterosexual Episcopalian put it this way: If I don't want the church poking its nose into my bedroom, how can I condone it when it limits the sexual freedom of homosexuals? That might sound outrageous, but if you still believe that the debate is over the religious status of monogamous same-sex relationships, please be prepared to point out one church somewhere in the U.S. that has opened its doors to active homosexuals without also opening them to every other form of sexual coupling imaginable. I am too old to be taken in by "Father" McNeill and his abstractions anymore. Show me.

A few years ago, I subscribed to the Dignity Yahoo group on the Internet. There were at that time several hundred subscribers. At one point, a confused and troubled young man posted a question to the group: Did any of the subscribers attach any value to monogamy? I immediately wrote back that I did. A couple of days later the young man wrote back to me. He had received dozens of responses, some of them quite hostile and demeaning, and all but one -- mine -- telling him to go out and get laid because that was what being gay was all about. (This was a gay "Catholic" group.) He did not know what to make of it because none of the propaganda to which he was exposed before coming out prepared him for what was really on the other side of the closet door. I had no idea what to tell him, because at the time I was still caught up in the lie myself. Now, the solution seems obvious. What I should have written back to him was, "You have been lied to. Ask God for forgiveness and get back to Kansas as fast as you can. Auntie Em is waiting."

In light of all the legitimate concern about Internet pornography, it might seem ironic to assert that the Internet helped rescue me from homosexuality. For twenty years, I thought there was something wrong with me. Dozens of well-meaning people assured me that there was a whole, different world of homosexual men out there, a world that for some reason I could never find, a world of God-fearing, straight-acting, monogamy-believing, and fidelity-practicing homosexuals. They assured me that they themselves knew personally (for a fact and for real) that such men existed. They themselves knew such men (or at least had heard tell of them from those who did). And I believed it, although as the years passed it got harder and harder. Then I got a personal computer and a subscription to AOL. "O.K.," I reasoned, "morally conservative homosexuals are obviously shy and skittish and fearful of sudden movements. They don't like bars and bathhouses. Neither do I. They don't attend Dignity meetings or Metropolitan Community Church services because the gay 'churches' are really bathhouses masquerading as houses of worship. But there is no reason a morally conservative homosexual cannot subscribe to AOL and submit a profile. If I can do it, anyone can do it." So I did it. I wrote a profile describing myself as a conservative Catholic (comme ci, comme ça) who loved classical music and theater and good books and scintillating conversation about all of the above. I said I wanted very much to meet other like-minded homosexuals for the purposes of friendship and romance. I tried to be as clear as I knew how. I was not interested in one night stands. And within minutes of placing the profile, I got my first response. It consisted of three words: "How many inches?" My experience of looking for love on AOL went downhill rapidly from there.

When I first came out in the 1980s, it was common for gay rights apologists to blame the promiscuity among gay men on "internalized homophobia." Gay men, like African Americans, internalized and acted out the lies about themselves learned from mainstream American culture. Furthermore, homosexuals were forced to look for love in dimly lit bars, bathhouses, and public parks for fear of harassment at the hands of a homophobic mainstream. The solution to this problem, we were told, was permitting homosexuals to come out into the open, without fear of retribution. A variant of this argument is still put forward by activists such as Andrew Sullivan, in order to legitimate same-sex marriage. And it seemed reasonable enough twenty years ago. But thirty-five years have passed since the infamous Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York, the Lexington and Concord of the gay liberation movement. During that time, homosexuals have carved out for themselves public spaces in every major American city, and many of the minor ones as well. They have had the chance to create whatever they wanted in those spaces, and what have they created? New spaces for locating sexual partners.

There is another reason, apart from the propaganda value, that bookstores like Lobo's peddle porn as well as poetry. Because without the porn, they would soon go out of business. And, in fact, most gay bookstores have gone out of business, despite the porn.

[Note: Just as many 'gay' web sites without porn pictures and stories to read get very little readership it seems. Web sites replete with porn pictures and movies claim to have circulation among readers in the hundreds of thousands each day.]


Following an initial burst of enthusiasm in the 1970s and 80s, gay publishing went into steep decline, and shows no signs of coming out of it. Once the novelty wore off, gay men soon bored of reading about men having sex with one another, preferring to devote their time and disposable income to pursuing the real thing. Gay and lesbian community centers struggle to keep their doors open. Gay churches survive as places where worshippers can go to sleep it off and cleanse their soiled consciences after a Saturday night spent cruising for sex at the bars. And there is no danger of ever hearing a word from the pulpit suggesting that bar-hopping is inconsistent with believing in the Bible. When I lived in the United Kingdom, I was struck by the extent to which gay culture in London replicated gay culture in the U.S. The same was true in Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Homosexuality is one of America's most successful cultural exports. And the focus on gay social spaces in Europe is identical to their focus in America: sex. Cyberspace is now the latest conquest of that amazing modern Magellan: the male homosexual in pursuit of new sexual conquests.

But at this point, how is it possible to blame the promiscuity among homosexual men on homophobia, internalized or otherwise? On the basis of evidence no stronger than wishful thinking, Andrew Sullivan wants us to believe that legalizing same-sex "marriage" will domesticate gay men, that all that energy now devoted to building bars and bathhouses will be dedicated to erecting picket fences and two-car garages. What Sullivan refuses to face is that male homosexuals are not promiscuous because of "internalized homophobia," or laws banning same-sex "marriage." Homosexuals are promiscuous because when given the choice, homosexuals overwhelmingly choose to be promiscuous. And wrecking the fundamental social building block of our civilization, the family, is not going to change that.

I once read a disarmingly honest essay in which Sullivan as much as admitted his real reason for promoting the cause of same-sex "marriage." He faced up to the sometimes sordid nature of his sexual life, which is more than most gay activists are prepared to do, and he regretted it. He wished he had led a different sort of life, and he apparently believes that if marriage were a legal option, he might have been able to do so. I have a lot more respect for Andrew Sullivan than I do for most gay activists. I believe that he would seriously like to reconcile his sexual desires with the demands of his conscience. But with all due respect, are the rest of us prepared to sacrifice the institution of the family in the unsubstantiated hope that doing so will make it easier for Sullivan to keep his trousers zipped?

But isn't it theoretically possible that homosexuals could restrict themselves to something resembling the traditional Catholic sexual ethic, except for the part about procreation -- in other words, monogamous lifelong relationships? Of course it is theoretically possible. It was also theoretically possible in 1968 that the use of contraceptives could be restricted to married couples, that the revolting downward slide into moral anarchy we have lived through could have been avoided. It is theoretically possible, but it is practically impossible. It is impossible because the whole notion of stable sexual orientation on which the gay rights movement is founded has no basis in fact.

René Girard, the French literary critic and sociologist of religion, argues that all human civilization is founded on desire. All civilizations have surrounded the objects of desire (including sexual desire) with an elaborate and unbreachable wall of taboos and restrictions. Until now. What we are seeing in the modern West is not the long overdue legitimization of hitherto despised but honorable forms of human love. What we are witnessing is the reduction of civilization to its lowest common denominator: unbridled and unrestricted desire. To assert that we have opened a Pandora's Box would be a stunning understatement. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen, it looks to be a bumpy millennium.

When I was growing up, we were all presumed to be heterosexual. Then homosexuality was introduced as an alternative. That did not at first seem like a major revision because, apart from procreation, homosexuality, at least in theory, left the rest of the traditional sexual ethic in tact. Two people of the same gender could (in theory) fall in love and live a life of monogamous commitment. Then bisexuality was introduced, and the real implications of the sexual revolution became clear. Monogamy was out the window. Moral norms were out the window. Do-it-yourself sexuality became the norm. Anyone who wants to know what that looks like can do no better than go online. The Internet offers front row seats to the circus of a disintegrating civilization.

Take Yahoo, for example. Yahoo makes it possible for people sharing a common interest to create groups for the purpose of making contacts and sharing information. If that conjures up images of genealogists and stamp collectors, think again. There are now thousands of Yahoo groups catering to every kind of sexual perversion imaginable. Many of them would defy the imagination of the Marquis de Sade himself. People who until a few years ago could do nothing but fantasize now entertain serious hopes of acting out their fantasies. I met a man online whose fondest wish was to be spanked with a leather wallet. It had to be leather. And it had to be a wallet. And he needed to be spanked with it. Old-fashioned genital friction was optional. This man wanted a Gucci label tattooed across his backside. He could imagine no loftier pinnacle of passion. And he insisted that this desire was as fundamental to his sexual nature as the desire to go to bed with a man was for me. Furthermore, he had formed a Yahoo group that had more than three hundred members, all of whom shared the same passion. There is no object in the universe, no human or animal body part, that cannot be eroticized. So, is the desire to be spanked with a leather wallet a "sexual orientation"? If not, how is it different?

There was a time when I would have snorted, "Of course it is different. You can't share a life with a leather wallet. You can't love a leather wallet. What you are talking about is a fetish, not a sexual orientation. The two are completely different." But the truth is that all the gay men I encountered had a fetish for naked male skin, with all the objectification and depersonalization that implies, that I now consider the distinction sophistical. Leather is skin too, after all. The only real difference between the fellow on the Internet and the average gay man is that he preferred his skin Italian, bovine, and tanned.

Over the years, I have attended various gay and gay-friendly church services. All of them shared one characteristic in common: a tacit agreement never to say a word from the pulpit -- or from any other location for that matter -- suggesting that there ought to be any restrictions on human sexual behavior. If anyone reading this is familiar with Dignity or Integrity or the Metropolitan Community churches or, for that matter, mainline Protestantism and most of post-Vatican II Catholicism, let me ask you one question: When was the last time you heard a sermon on sexual ethics? Have you ever heard a sermon on sexual ethics? I take it for granted that the answer is negative. Do our priests and pastors honestly believe that Christians in America are not in need of sermons on sexual ethics?

Here is the terrifying fact: If we as a nation and as a Church allow ourselves to be taken in by the scam of monogamous same-sex couples, we will be welcoming to our Communion rails (presuming that we still have Communion rails) not just the statistically insignificant number of same-sex couples who have lived together for more than a few years (most of whom purchased stability by jettisoning monogamy); we will also be legitimizing every kind of sexual taste, from old-fashioned masturbation and adultery to the most outlandish forms of sexual fetishism. We will, in other words, be giving our blessing to the suicide of Western civilization.

But what about all those images of loving same-sex couples dying to get hitched with which the media are awash these days? That used to confuse me too. It seems that The New York Times has no trouble finding successful same-sex partners to photograph and interview. But despite my best efforts, I was never able to meet the sorts of couples who show up regularly on Oprah. The media are biased and have no interest in telling the truth about homosexuality.

I met Wyatt (not his real name) online. For five years he was in a disastrous same-sex relationship. His partner was unfaithful, and an alcoholic with drug problems. The relationship was something that would give Strindberg nightmares. When Vermont legalized same-sex "marriage," Wyatt saw it as one last chance to make their relationship work. He and his partner would fly to Vermont to get "married." This came to the attention of the local newspaper in his area, which did a story with photos of the wedding reception. In it, Wyatt and his partner were depicted as a loving couple who finally had a chance to celebrate their commitment publicly. Nothing was said about the drugs or the alcoholism or the infidelity. But the marriage was a failure and ended in flames a few months later. And the newspaper did not do a follow-up. In other words, the leading daily of one of America's largest cities printed a misleading story about a bad relationship, a story that probably persuaded more than one young man that someday he could be just as happy as Wyatt and his "partner." And that is the sad part.

But one very seldom reads about people like my friend Harry. Harry (not his real name) was a balding, middle-aged man with a potbelly. He was married, and had a couple of grown daughters. And he was unhappy. Harry persuaded himself that he was unhappy because he was gay. He divorced his wife, who is now married to someone else, his daughters are not speaking to him, and he is discovering that pudgy, bald, middle-aged men are not all that popular in gay bars. Somehow, Oprah forgot to mention that. Now Harry is taking anti-depressants in order to keep from killing himself.

Then there was another acquaintance, who also happened to have the same name as the previous guy. Harry (not his real name) was about 30 (but could easily pass for 20), and from a Mormon background, with all the naïveté that suggests. Unlike the first Harry, he had no difficulty getting dates. Or relationships for that matter. The problem was that the relationships never lasted more than a couple of weeks. Harry was also rapidly developing a serious drinking problem. (So much for the Mormon words of wisdom.) If you happened to be at the bar around two in the morning, you could probably have Harry for the night if you were interested. He was so drunk he wouldn't remember you the next day, and all he really wanted at that point was for someone to hold him.

Gay culture is a paradox. Most homosexuals tend to be liberal Democrats, or in the U.K., supporters of the Labour Party. They gravitate toward those Parties on the grounds that their policies are more compassionate and sensitive to the needs of the downtrodden and oppressed. But there is nothing compassionate about a gay bar. It represents a laissez faire free sexual market of the most Darwinian sort. There is no place in it for those who are not prepared to compete, and the rules of the game are ruthless and unforgiving. I remember once being in a gay pub in central London. Most of the men there were buff and toned and in their 20s or early 30s. An older gentleman walked in, who looked to be in his 70s. It was as if the Angel of Death himself had made an entrance. In that crowded bar, a space opened up around him that no one wanted to enter. His shadow transmitted contagion. It was obvious that his presence made the other customers nervous. He stood quietly at the bar and ordered a drink. He spoke to no one and no one spoke to him. When he eventually finished his drink and left, the sigh of relief from all those buff, toned pub crawlers was almost audible. Now all of them could go back to pretending that gay men were all young and beautiful forever. Gentle reader, do you know what a "bug chaser" is? A bug chaser is a young gay man who wants to contract HIV so that he will never grow old. And that is the world that Harry left his wife, and the other Harry his Church, to find happiness in.

I have known a lot of people like the two Harrys. But I have met precious few who bore more than a superficial resemblance to the idealized images we see in Oscar-winning movies such as Philadelphia, or in the magazine section of The New York Times. What I find suspicious is that the media ignore the existence of people like the two Harrys. The unhappiness so common among homosexuals is swept under the carpet, while fanciful and unrealistic "role models" are offered up for public consumption. There is at the very least grounds for a serious debate about the proposition that "gay is good," but no such debate is taking place, because most of the mainstream media have already made up their (and our) minds.

But it is hard to hide the porn forever. When I was living in London, I had a wonderful friend named Maggie. Maggie (not her real name) was a liberal. Her big heart bled for the oppressed. Like most liberals, she was proud of her open-mindedness and wore it like a badge of honor. Maggie lived in a house as big as her heart and all of her children were grown up and had moved out. She had a couple of rooms to rent. It just so happened that both the young men who became her tenants were gay. Maggie's first reaction was enthusiastic. She had never known many gay people, and thought the experience of renting to two homosexuals would confirm her in her open-mindedness. She believed it would be a learning experience. It was, but not the sort she had in mind. One day Maggie told me her troubles and confessed her doubts. She talked about what it was like to stumble each morning down to the breakfast table, finding two strangers seated there, the two strangers her tenants brought home the night before. It was seldom the same two strangers two mornings running. One of her tenants was in a long-distance relationship but, in the absence of his partner, felt at liberty to seek consolation elsewhere. She talked about what it was like to have to deal on a daily basis with the emotional turmoil of her tenants' tumultuous lives. She told me what it was like to open the door one afternoon and find a policeman standing there, a policeman who was looking for one of her tenants, who was accused of trying to sell drugs to school children. That same tenant was also involved in prostitution. Maggie didn't know what to make of it all. She desperately wanted to remain open-minded, to keep believing that gay men were no worse than anyone else, just different. But she couldn't reconcile her experience with that "tolerant" assumption. The truth was that when the two finally moved out, an event to which she was looking forward with some enthusiasm, and it was time to place a new ad for rooms to let, she wanted to include the following proviso: Fags need not apply. I didn't know what to tell Maggie because I was just as confused as she was. I wanted to hold on to my illusions too, in spite of all the evidence.

I am convinced that many, if not most, people who are familiar with the lives of homosexuals know the truth, but refuse to face it. My best friend got involved in the gay rights movement as a graduate student. He and a lesbian colleague sometimes counseled young men who were struggling with their sexuality. Once, the two of them met a young man who was seriously overweight and suffered from terrible acne. The young man waxed eloquent about the happiness he expected to find when he came out of the closet. He was going to find a partner, and the two of them would live happily ever after. The whole time my friend was thinking that if someone looking like this fat, pustulent young man ever walked into a bar, he would be folded, spindled, and mutilated before even taking a seat. Afterwards, the lesbian turned to him and said, "You know, sometimes it is better to stay in the closet." My friend told me that for him this represented a decisive moment. This lesbian claimed to love and admire gay men. She never stopped praising their kindness and compassion and creativity. But with that one comment she in effect told my friend that she really knew what gay life was all about. It was about meat, and unless you were a good cut, don't bother coming to the supermarket.

On another occasion, I was complaining to a lesbian about my disillusionment. She made a remarkable admission to me. She had a teenage son, who so far had not displayed signs of sexual interest in either gender. She knew as a lesbian she should not care which road he took. But she confessed to me that she did care. Based on the lives of the gay men she knew, she found herself secretly praying that her son would turn out to be straight. As a mother, she did not want to see her son living that life.

A popular definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing, while expecting a different result. That was me, the whole time I was laboring to become a happy homosexual. I was a lunatic. Several times I turned for advice to gay men who seemed better adjusted to their lot in life than I was. First, I wanted confirmation that my perceptions were accurate, that life as a male homosexual really was as awful as it seemed to be. And then I wanted to know what I was supposed to do about it. When was it going to get better? What could I do to make it better? I got two sorts of reactions to these questions, both of which left me feeling hurt and confused. The first sort of reaction was denial, often bitter denial, of what I was suggesting. I was told that there was something wrong with me, that most gay men were having a wonderful time, that I was generalizing on the basis of my own experience (whose experience was I supposed to generalize from?), and that I should shut up and stop bothering others with my "internalized homophobia."

I began seeing a counselor when I was a graduate student. Matt (not his real name) was a happily married man with college-age children. All he knew about homosexuality he learned from the other members of his profession, who assured him that homosexuality was not a mental illness and that there were no good reasons that homosexuals could not lead happy, productive lives. When I first unloaded my tale of woe, Matt told me I had never really come out of the closet. (I still have no idea what he meant, but suspect it is like the "once saved, always saved" Baptist who responds to the lapsed by telling him that he was never really saved in the first place.) I needed to go back, he told me, try again, and continue to look for the positive experiences he was sure were available for me, on the basis of no other evidence than the rulings of the American Psychiatric Association. He had almost no personal experience of homosexuals, but his peers assured him that the book section at Lobo's offered a true picture of homosexual life. I knew Matt was clueless, but I still wanted to believe he was right.

Matt and I developed a therapeutic relationship. During the year we spent together, he learned far more from me than I did from him. I tried to take his advice. I was sharing a house that year with another grad student who was in the process of coming out and experiencing his own disillusionment. Because I had been his only gay friend, and had encouraged him to come out, his bitterness came to be directed at me, and our relationship suffered for it. Meanwhile, I developed a close friendship with a member of the faculty who was openly gay. When I first informed Matt, he was ecstatic. He thought I was finally come out properly. The faculty member was just the sort of friend I needed. But the faculty member, as it turned out, despite his immaculate professional facade, was a deeply disturbed man who put all of his friends through emotional hell, which I of course shared with a shocked and silenced Matt. (I tried to date but, as usual, experienced the same pattern that characterized all my homosexual relationships. The friendship lasted as long as the sexual heat. Once that cooled, my partner's interest in me as a person dissipated with it.) It was not a good year. At the end of it, I remember Matt staring at me, with glazed eyes and a shell-shocked look on his face, and admitting, "You know, being gay is a lot harder than I realized."

Not everyone I spoke to over the years rejected what I had to say out of hand. I once corresponded with an English ex-Dominican. I was ecstatic to learn that he was gay, and was eventually kicked out of his order for refusing to remain in the closet. He included an e-mail address in one of his books, and I wrote him, wanting to know if his experience of life as a homosexual was significantly different from mine. I presumed it must be, since he had written a couple of books, passionately defending the right of homosexuals to a place in the Church. His response to me was one of the last nails in the coffin of my life as a gay man. To my astonishment, he admitted that his experiences were not unlike mine. All he could suggest was that I keep trying, and eventually everything would work out. In other words, this brilliant man, whose books had meant so much to me, had nothing to suggest except that I keep doing the same thing, while expecting a different result. There was only one reasonable conclusion. I would be nuts if I took his advice. It took me twenty years, but I finally reached the conclusion that I did not want to be insane.

So where am I now? I am attending a militantly orthodox parish in Houston that is one of God's most spectacular gifts to me. My best friend Mark (not his real name) is, like me, a refugee from the homosexual insane asylum. He is also a devout believer, though a Presbyterian (no one is perfect). From Mark I have learned that two men can love each other profoundly while remaining clothed the entire time.

We are told that the Church opposes same-sex love. Not true. The Church opposes homogenital sex, which in my experience is not about love, but about obsession, addiction, and compensation for a compromised masculinity.

I am not proud of the life I have lived. In fact, I am profoundly ashamed of it. But if reading this prevents one naïve, gullible man from making the same mistakes, then perhaps with the assistance of Our Lady of Guadalupe; of St. Joseph, her chaste spouse; of my patron saint, Edmund Campion; of St. Josemaría Escrivá; of the blessed Carmelite martyrs of Compiégne; and, last but not least, of my special supernatural guide and mentor, the Venerable John Henry Newman, I can at least hope for a reprieve from some of the many centuries in Purgatory I have coming to me.

So, what do we as a Church and a culture need to do? Tear down the respectable façade and expose the pornography beneath. Start pressuring homosexuals to tell the truth about their lives. Stop debating the correct interpretation of Genesis 19. Leave the men of Sodom and Gomorrah buried in the brimstone where they belong. Sodom is hidden in plain view from us, here and now, today. Once, when preparing a lecture on Cardinal Newman, I summarized his classic Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine in this fashion: Truth ripens, error rots. The homosexual rights movement is rotten to the core. It has no future. There is no life in it. Sooner or later, those who are caught up in it are going to wake up from the dream of unbridled desire or else die. It is just a matter of time. The question is: how long? How many children are going to be sacrificed to this Moloch?

Until several months ago, there was a Lobo's in Houston too. Not accidentally, I'm sure, its layout was identical to the one in Austin. It was just a few blocks from the gas station where I take my car for service. Recently, I was taking a walk through the neighborhood while my tires were being rotated. And I noticed something. There was a padlock on the door at Lobo's. A sign on the door read, "The previous tenant was evicted for nonpayment of rent." The books and the porn, the façade and what it conceals, are gone now. Praise God.

The New Oxford Review is a Catholic monthly magazine. February 2006, Volume LXXIII, Number 2. Copyright 2006 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with permission. http://www.newoxfordreview.org/

--Ronald G. Lee is a librarian in Houston, Texas.

Prisoners in Los Angeles Jail Forced to Stay Naked

The perverts who run the Los Angeles jail system have now decided to keep their inmates naked at all times, like caged animals. Are these the same people who are saying our system is so much more superior than Abu Garhib? Read on ...

L.A. Deputies Forced Inmates to Strip

More than 100 inmates were forced to strip naked and had their mattresses removed for a day earlier this month as sheriff's officials tried to quell two weeks of violence in the Los Angeles County jail system, authorities said.

The punishment on Feb. 9 at Pitchess Detention Center was an attempt to calm inmates who had repeatedly attacked each other, even after privileges such as access to mail, television and phones were taken away, Sammy Jones, chief of the custody division, told the Los Angeles Times in Saturday's edition.

Sheriff Lee Baca said he supported the move.

The series of jailhouse clashes — largely between black and Hispanic inmates — began Feb. 4 with a riot involving nearly 2,000 inmates at a detention center dorm in Castaic, about 40 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. The melee left a black inmate dead and almost 100 inmates injured.

Last Sunday, a black prisoner arrested for investigation of drug possession died after fighting with three Hispanic inmates, authorities said. It was unclear whether the violence, which occurred in a six-person cell at the downtown Men's Central Jail, was racially motivated, police said.

More fighting erupted Thursday when about 40 black, white and Hispanic inmates traded punches for 30 minutes. Four suffered minor injuries, authorities said.

Sheriff's officials will ask the district attorney's office next week to file charges against 21 inmates allegedly involved in the violence. Some could face murder charges, authorities said.

Los Angeles County has the largest local jail system in the nation with more than 18,000 inmates spread across eight facilities.

Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said the revelations about safety concerns in the dorms, as well as the stripping of inmates as punishment, pointed to a "huge systemic problem."

"They don't have the staffing and the facilities to operate a detention and incarceration system according to professional standards," Rosenbaum said. "These are procedures they're making up as they go along because the staffing and facilities and other professional measures are not in place."

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

Bishop Robinson Admitted For Alcoholism Treatment

Bishop is treated for alcoholism
Rene Saunders, Associated Press


SUMMARY: The Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson, has checked himself into a treatment facility for alcoholism.

CONCORD, N.H. -- The Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson, has started treatment for alcoholism.

"I am writing to you from an alcohol treatment center where on Feb. 1, with the encouragement and support of my partner, daughters and colleagues, I checked myself in to deal with my increasing dependence on alcohol," Robinson wrote in an e-mail to clergy on Monday that was released Tuesday by the Diocese of New Hampshire.

Robinson's assistant, the Rev. Tim Rich, said Tuesday there was no crisis that led to Robinson's decision to seek treatment but rather a growing awareness of his problem.

In his letter, Robinson said he had been dealing with alcoholism for years and had considered it "as a failure of will or discipline on my part, rather than a disease over which my particular body simply has no control, except to stop drinking altogether."

Rich said the news surprised him and many other clergy.

"We did not see it in any way impact his ministry in the diocese," Rich said.

The Rev. David Jones, rector of Robinson's home church, St. Paul's in Concord, said he had never seen any sign that Robinson had a problem with alcohol.
Robinson was elected bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 and confirmed by the national church, causing an upheaval not only in the Episcopal Church, but the worldwide Anglican Communion of which it is part.


He will spend four weeks in rehabilitation. Spokesman Mike Barwell said the diocese would not disclose the location.

In the Episcopal Church system, such matters are handled within the diocese. Between sessions of the diocesan convention, the "standing committee," an elected panel of priests and lay parishioners, normally decides supervision of the diocese during a bishop's absence and other questions regarding his administration. The national church gets involved only in rare cases of formal charges involving misconduct.

The diocese's standing committee said its members support Robinson "and we commend him for his courageous example to us all, as we pray daily for him and for his ministry among us."

In addition to touching off protests and struggles for control and property in the Episcopal and other Anglican churches, Robinson has found himself a celebrity.

At New York's Gay Pride parade last spring, marchers and spectators crowded around him for more than three hours, reaching out to touch his hand, crying and thanking him.

"It sounds soap-operaish to say, but I'm the son of a tobacco sharecropper who didn't live in a house with running water until I was 10 years old. I can't believe I'm here, you know. So I find it very difficult to be anything but grateful," he told The Associated Press in an interview later last year.

Copyright © 2006 Planet Out.

New Orleans Evictions Leave One Feeling Sick

Stan Goff: The Federal Eviction Management Agency (FEMA) & The Louisiana National Guard

We already know what class the federal government represents. In any choice between profit and people in need, the people will lose every time. Our government is big business writ large, and big business is Darwinian. That's why the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), a federal bureaucracy allegedly organized to help people like the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, has terminated its "direct payment program for hotel rooms through Corporate Lodging Consultants (CLC)" triggering a mass eviction program of more than 4,500 hurricane survivors from hotels across the country.

Now that our attention-deficit compassion fatigue has kicked in, these 'low-class dark people' hanging around the hotels, it seems, are not good for business.

The hotel bills were paid with FEMA money, after CLC -- a giant "lodging management service" corporation -- got its cut, of course. So while thousands of FEMA housing trailers sit pristine and unused behind chain-link fences up and down the Gulf Coast, with many being used to house high-dollar government workers from Republican-crony contractors. Those numbered at the disaster trough range from AshBritt, a Florida-based contractor leviathan with close ties to neo-segregationist Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (who served as Bush's fundraising chief) to morgues run by Kenyon (subsidiary of the Texas-based, friend-of-George, scandal-tarred Service Corporation International, implicated in the dicarding of corpses).

Catastrophe is big business, and a humanitarian response to catastrophe is not profitable. We are now witnessing, in the most concrete way, how suriviors of a strom can become victims of their own government -- which counts them as disposable. Just as Kenyon disposed of the dead, FEMA is now overseeing the disposal of the living. I once heard a hurricane insurance adjustor living on his houseboat in Galveston refer to his profession as "storm trooper." Get it? Storm... Seems an apt apellation for this case, no?

But there are actual troopers out there who didn't sign up to put on a pair of jackboots. They are the National Guard of each state. Together with the usual perfidious incentives like "money for school" in exchange for "one weekend a month" (This has become a grim joke now in Iraq.), many people join the National Guard out of altruism. They have grown up with the images of the National Guard rescuing people in distress, people from their own states and communities -- like hurricane survivors in the Gulf Coast. I spoke with one of these Louisiana National Guard troops (who has requested anonymity until he separates from service) on the phone two nights ago, and I've been seething ever since.

The National Guard is now being empolyed to assist the extremely sketchy New Orleans Police with these hotel evictions; and some of the troops don't like it a bit.

Said this distressed young man on the telephone, "This is f***ing unbelievable. We were given an operations order to herd our fellow New Orleanians onto buses like cattle or convicts in the middle of the night. They weren't even allowed to pcik up their belongings. We [the National Guard] were responsible to inventory their stuff and bag it up."

There is a really big New Orleans round-up scheduled, he advised me, on Monday night, February 13th.

Happy Valentine's Day.

The reason, according to this source, that these operations are being conducted at night is to evade press coverage and public outrage. The same people who were wiped out by Katrina are now being disappeared under the direction of FEMA and its adoptive parent, the union-busting Department of Fatherland Security.

When I was in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast two weeks ago to plan for the upcoming Veterans' and Survivors' March for Peace and Justice, this once bustling city had huge sections that looked like the third world. Ominously, many residents describe some areas as "Baghdad." The National Guardsman with whom I spoke is an Iraq returnee, and he has plenty to say about that experience as well... nothing positive. He said that he had returned from one cruel military occupation abroad to what seemed like another one at home. Indeed, one can drive around New Orleans right now and see armed soldiers stationed on street corners just as I have seen as a soldier myself in the colonized peripheries of the third world.

It would likely be illegal for me to ask Louisiana National Guardsman to refuse to be the instruments of domination to subjugate their own neighbors as if they were unwanted livestock. It was also once illegal to harbor fugitive slaves.

So I will say instead, let your conscience be your guide. You did not sign up to be storm troopers. This administration wants to impose a one-party security state, but they can only do it if they can depend on you to suspend your critical judgement with the declaraton that "I'm just doing my job."

As the old line went from Cool Hand Luke, "Callin' it your job don't make it right, boss."

Copyright © 2006 HuffingtonPost.com.

Outing Cardinal Egan

A priest's lawsuit alleges the Catholic Church is hiding pedophile clergy—and offers a stunning reason why

by Kristen Lombardi

Father Bob Hoatson Says Closeted Catholic Leaders Can't Protect Abuse Victims—And He's Naming Names

Who knows whether Cardinal Edward Egan is sleeping soundly these days. But as head of the New York archdiocese—as the top Roman Catholic prelate in the state—he'd have every reason to be restless after the recent advent of a little-noticed lawsuit.
The suit, now pending in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, was filed on December 13 by Bob Hoatson—a 53-year-old New Jersey priest considered a stalwart ally among survivors of sexual abuse by clergy. Hoatson, the now-suspended chaplain for Catholic Charities in Newark, is suing Egan and nine other Catholic officials and institutions, claiming a pattern of "retaliation and harassment" that began after Hoatson alleged a cover-up of clergy abuse in New York and started helping victims.

But that's not all his lawsuit claims. Halfway through the 44-page complaint, the priest-turned-advocate drops a bomb on the cardinal: He alleges that Egan is "actively homosexual," and that he has "personal knowledge of this." His suit names two other top Catholic clerics in the region as actively gay—Albany bishop Howard Hubbard and Newark archbishop John Myers.

It's not that Hoatson has a problem with, as the suit puts it, "consensual, adult private sexual behavior by these defendants."

No, what Hoatson claims is that, as leaders of a church requiring celibacy and condemning homosexuality, actively gay bishops are too afraid of being exposed themselves to turn in pedophile priests. The bishops' closeted homosexuality, as the lawsuit states, "has compromised defendants' ability to supervise and control predators, and has served as a reason for the retaliation."

Hoatson realizes what he's up against. "I stopped and I thought long and hard about these allegations," he says. "It's time the church confronts this dysfunction. I couldn't do this outside of filing a lawsuit. The only thing the church responds to is negative publicity or a lawsuit. If I kept trying to do this within the system, I would be gone."

The case hinges on several statutory and legal claims. It argues that Egan and the other bishops retaliated against Hoatson for being a whistle-blower, that they intended to harm him and his career, and that they engaged in a conspiracy to do so.

Joseph Zwilling, Egan's spokesperson, denies the allegations, saying, "There is no truth to any of the statements he has made concerning Cardinal Egan." His counterpart in the Newark archdiocese, James Goodness, calls the charges "patently untrue." Goodness has released a four-page statement painting Hoatson, an archdiocesan priest in good standing until he was placed on administrative leave, as "a troubled individual" who bagged his parish duties to minister to victims.

About That White Report

In February 2004, Andrew Zalay came forward with the first of what would become a flurry of allegations that Bishop Howard Hubbard, head of the Albany diocese, had had homosexual encounters. Flanked by his Manhattan attorney, John Aretakis, Zalay told reporters at a press event that he'd discovered the 1978 suicide note of his brother, Tom, who had written about a sexual relationship with the bishop in the '70s.

That announcement set off a chain of events ending with the so-called White Report, the findings of a private investigation requested by Hubbard and commissioned by diocese's lay review board. Former U.S. prosecutor Mary Jo White, whose name carries great credibility, was paid $770 an hour by the diocese for her four-month inquiry, consisting of 300 interviews, 20,000 records, and exonerating lie-detector tests on Hubbard and eight other priests and former priests. The following is a road map of the 525-page report's contents:

THE ALLEGATIONS:

• Hubbard had a sexual affair with Tom Zalay in the late '70s.

• Hubbard paid a teenage street hustler for sex in the late '70s.

• Hubbard had homosexual affairs with three Albany priests.

• Hubbard had patronized gay bars.

• Hubbard had engaged in gay sexual activity in Albany's Washington Park.

THE CONCLUSIONS:

• White found "no credible evidence" to substantiate the charges that Hubbard had homosexual relations with Zalay, the street hustler, or the three priests.

• She found "no credible evidence" that Hubbard "ever led a homosexual lifestyle or engaged in homosexual relations at any time."

• She determined similar charges "could be expected to emerge" again, and warned they "should be met with considerable skepticism."

• White said Aretakis had a habit of forcing his clients to sign false statements.

• Aretakis says he's "never told a client to lie or offer up a false statement, nor would I ever do that." He has denounced the report as not being neutral because White was hired by the lay board to investigate its boss—Hubbard. He and his clients refused to cooperate with her because, he argues, "She had a classic and a substantial conflict of interest."

White, for her part, did not return the Voice's phone call. In February 2004, when she announced the start of the investigation, she laid out the reasons she could remain independent—for instance, she is not Catholic, had never met Hubbard, and had never represented him or the Albany diocese before. Asked about the appearance of a conflict, she said, "There is not a chance at all that I would undertake this [in] other than a totally independent way, and the money is totally irrelevant to that independence."

Four months later, she received $2.2 million for the project. Hubbard got his name cleared.


"If anyone should have been pitied during Fr. Hoatson's parish assignments," Goodness writes in the December 14 statement, "it probably would have to be the pastors who had to put up with . . . Fr. Hoatson's 'malingering'—shirking one's duty."

Hubbard spokesperson Kenneth Goldfarb has lashed out at the priest's Manhattan lawyer, John Aretakis, a leading foe of the bishop who has represented 100 or so people claiming they were molested by Albany clergymen (see "Who Would Take a Case Like This?"). "This is not the first time Mr. Aretakis has made those allegations," Goldfarb says, pinning the charge about Hubbard's alleged homosexuality on the lawyer, not his client. "This is all orchestrated by Mr. Aretakis. He has a long history of coming up with claims that have no basis in fact."

Two years ago, a flurry of allegations that Hubbard had sexual relationships with several men, including a teenage street hustler and three diocesan priests, rocked local churches. Hubbard, who denied the charges, called for an investigation, and his handpicked lay review board hired Mary Jo White, a respected former federal prosecutor in Manhattan. White was paid $2.2 million for a four-month inquiry that ended up clearing Hubbard of all accusations (see "About That White Report"). Aretakis represented the two main accusers.

Aretakis puts little credence in the investigation, calling it "the most expensive piece of fiction ever produced." He denounced White for essentially investigating her own client, and he and his clients refused to cooperate.

Now that similar allegations are written in a lawsuit, the landscape has changed. Now, Aretakis has the platform to try to prove them—and he says he's prepared to do it. He says he's accumulated a list of priests and witnesses who have agreed to provide "firsthand evidence of the sexual proclivities" of Egan, Hubbard, and Myers, if subpoenaed. Some have written statements relaying "homosexual relationships with these bishops," he maintains; others know people who have had the affairs.

Aretakis declined to show the Voice any written documentation on the three bishops, saying, "I don't want to reveal my hand at a time when I don't need to." He describes the evidence against Egan and Myers as involving consensual contact with adult men. Egan has a sporadic history of gay affairs, Aretakis claims, most of them dating back to his time as a seminarian. The lawyer alleges Myers has had gay affairs more recently, some within the past five years.

For Hubbard, it's a different story. On the condition that his clients' identities be shielded, Aretakis allowed the Voice to view videotaped interviews with two men who allege they had sex with Hubbard for money as troubled teens, one in the 1970s, one in the early 1980s. Neither was included in the White investigation, though their allegations do resemble ones it ruled unfounded.

One of the men is now in prison and couldn't be reached before press time. The other, reached through Aretakis, told the Voice independently that the details on the tape are true and that he gave the testimony of his own free will. Now married and living upstate, he has sought help from Aretakis for a potential abuse case against an Albany priest who he says also paid him for sex and introduced him to Hubbard. He says he may sue Hubbard as well.

Goldfarb, Hubbard's spokeperson, refused to let the Voice speak to the bishop about the tapes. "He's been through the mill with this and there's no reason to go through any of this again," he said. Goldfarb again cited the White report, which he said fully cleared Bishop Hubbard. Allegations like these aren't unexpected, he said—indeed, the report predicted there would be more and advised viewing them with considerable skepticism. Read the report, he said, over and over, adding, "It's as if all this preponderance of evidence is being weighed against two people who haven't filed a lawsuit and who won't identify themselves at this time."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It's people like these two men, victims who are struggling to seek justice from the Catholic Church, whom Hoatson says he's aiming to help with his lawsuit. He's asking the courts for $5 million in damages, which he says he'd use for a 24-hour victims' ministry. The suit hinges on alleged harm done to him as a whistle-blower, but he says the real issue is that the bishops' sexual activities have compromised their ability to police predators.

"I have to tell the truth," he says. "I've gotten enough information to indicate that promiscuity on the part of these bishops is the reason they're covering up clergy abuse."

Whether his claims are true or not, Hoatson is making history. Richard Sipe, a former priest and scholar who has written about clergy sexual abuse and homosexuality in the Catholic Church, explains that it's rare for a priest to sue a bishop in court for retaliation—he has heard of only one case before this. It's almost unthinkable for a priest to say in court records that three of his area's top bishops are actively gay.

"That's a very significant move," Sipe says. Such he-said, he-said allegations can be near impossible to prove in any case, let alone when the subjects are powerful and respected church leaders. But, he adds, "even saying it in a lawsuit will force the subject of the bishops' sexuality out in the open."

And that could spark something of a revolution. Says Sipe, "This lawsuit could be the beginning of a movement."

Hoatson comes across as an unlikely revolutionary. He looks nothing like a Catholic priest, dressed on a recent Tuesday in jeans and a sweater. The wardrobe isn't by choice. Four days after he filed the suit, Newark archdiocesan officials put him on leave. Though he still gets his $1,700 monthly stipend, he's prohibited from presenting "himself publicly as a priest," as the December 20 decree states. He can no longer wear his collar or say Mass at the two parishes where he works.

Sitting in a coffee shop on Astor Place, he talks for hours about the way religion has colored his life—the way he'd had a "mystical experience" at 13 in which he saw himself as a priest, for instance. By 18, he'd entered the Christian Brothers order of monks, where he would teach in parochial schools for two decades. He felt so drawn to the priesthood that he enrolled in the seminary in 1994, at 42.

"I was called to the priesthood by God," he explains. "I never really understood why."

Hoatson believes he got that reason in the winter of 2002, when the clergy-abuse scandal exploded in Boston and across the country, in dioceses from California to Kentucky to New Hampshire and Iowa. Back then, Hoatson was serving as school director at Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish, in Newark, watching the crisis unfold on TV. He got word of a victim going public with charges that a Boston monsignor had molested him in the 1980s. The victim turned out to be Hoatson's former student; the official, a former school chaplain.

Hoatson called his onetime student, and soon was making regular trips from Newark to Boston, helping the man come to grips with the trauma of abuse. When other victims came forward, he hooked them up with lawyers or escorted them to confront dioceses. Word spread among survivors in New York and New Jersey about the generous priest. Hoatson has rescued victims from heroin dens; visited them in prison; collected them from shelters; paid their rent. Last year, he set up a ministry known as Rescue and Recovery International out of his Rockaway Park, Queens, apartment.

"He's like a guiding light," says Richard Regan, of Rochester, New York, who says a now-deceased Queens priest molested him and his five siblings in the '50s. Ken Lasch, a retired priest in the Patterson, New Jersey, diocese, calls Hoatson "a locomotive—in the lead and full speed ahead." Hoatson would think nothing of letting predatory priests know he's watching, Lasch says. "Bob is that type of person. Once he sees corruption, he goes after it."

Hoatson puts it another way: "This has become a mission for me."

His work has made him wrestle with his own experiences of sexual abuse. As a 22-year-old seminarian in the Christian Brothers, he says, another brother repeatedly molested him over a four-year period. Several years later, he confided in his superior, who Hoatson says assaulted him as well. "I knew it was abuse," he says, but he never identified it as such until years later. Now, he counts himself among a handful of priests who've named their alleged abusers; his lawsuit recounts what he says is molestation he suffered at hands of the two brothers in the '70s and '80s.

What finally triggered his suit was Hoatson's fear that he'd be stopped from working with victims. On May 20, 2003, according to the lawsuit, he testified at an Albany hearing sponsored by the New York State Senate. There, he criticized Catholic bishops for shielding predatory priests. That's exactly what happened in Boston, where the release of internal church documents revealed how Cardinal Bernard Law and his underlings had shuffled pedophiles from parish to parish for decades, covering up abuse while putting children at risk. Bishops who engaged in this practice, Hoatson testified that day, had "selected evil over good, denial over admission, lying over truth-telling."

Three days later, he was relieved of his duties as Good Counsel Parish school director. Hoatson contends that Newark officials told him, as he recalls, "The archbishop [Myers] has asked that you tone down your language." They handed him a termination letter.

His suit claims that Hubbard dialed up Hoatson's boss to complain and, as it states, "had the plaintiff fired from his position." It charges that Egan and his representatives "contributed and became involved in retaliation" as well.

Church officials deny these allegations. "Cardinal Egan did not nor did anyone representing the New York archdiocese ever contact the Newark archdiocese about Father Hoatson," Zwilling says. Goldfarb says that "nothing of consequence" connects Hubbard and the Albany diocese to Hoatson's firing. "There is nothing to this," he adds.

Goodness, Myers's spokesperson, maintains that Hoatson was removed from his school post solely because he'd asked to be transferred seven months earlier. By February, the archdiocese had accepted his request. "This preceded by months any comments he would make to the New York legislature," Goodness argues.

Yet only after the Albany testimony did Hoatson receive a formal letter letting him go, "effective immediately." It would take another eight months before Myers reassigned the priest to the Catholic Charities chaplaincy, in early 2004.

The hiatus allowed Hoatson to pursue his work with victims full-time, and he championed their cause at demonstrations, in letters to the editor, before area bishops. At Catholic Charities, he said Mass for employees and did routine parish work, all while keeping up his crusade. He says he'd managed to fulfill his ministry without much interference from the archdiocese until November 2005, when Myers issued a "precept" binding Hoatson to certain conditions. The document orders him "to cease activity in his own business"—his victims' ministry—and "to show proper reverence and obedience to his ordinary."

Goodness says the archbishop handed down the precept because "Father Hoatson had not been adhering to conditions of priesthood." The priest, he notes, resides in Queens even though he's required to live within the archdiocesan district. Hoatson says he doesn't feel safe in his assigned residence because of the alleged harassment.

He isn't the only one who believes he's being treated differently. Lasch, a lawyer trained in church canon law who has advised his fellow priest, says, "The diocese has exhibited a pattern of prejudicial treatment against Bob." He adds, "I see it as making it difficult for him to do his work."

Either way, Hoatson thinks he knows what's up. "I have to be gotten rid of because I'm trying to break the cycle of sexual disorder in the church," he explains. The disorder includes what he describes as "a promiscuous homosexual culture" perpetuating the cover-up of clergy sexual abuse. Egan, Hubbard, and Myers have hidden predatory priests because they're hiding their own gay activities, he charges.

To stop the abuse, he says, "you have to admit what is going on in the church with its homosexual culture."

What Hoatson is saying is, in many ways, nothing new. Speculation over homosexual bishops has circulated among the Catholic faithful for decades.

The topic remained largely off-limits—until the clergy-abuse crisis. That's when a loose network of victims' advocacy and church-reform groups sprang up, demanding accountability and pressing for change. Not only has this survivors' movement encouraged people to come forward and tell their stories, but it has also pushed the church to acknowledge the scale of clergy sexual abuse. To date, according to the Catholic bishops' own figures, 9,660 people nationwide since 1950 have accused 4,089 priests of molesting them. In New York City, 140 victims have named 49 abusive priests; in Albany, it's 141 and 69 respectively.

Among those who've tracked the crisis, it's not hard to find people who believe that the reason some bishops have shielded predatory priests is that they fear exposure of their own sexual activities. Anne Barrett Doyle, of BishopAccountability.org, a nonprofit archive documenting the clergy-abuse crisis, explains that this belief "is widely accepted by activists and scholars and for good reason." Recent cases have shed light on abusive bishops who, in turn, had covered up for others, she points out.

Consider, for example, the case of Bishop Thomas Dupre, of Springfield, Massachusetts. In March 2004, he abruptly retired and fled his diocese when confronted with allegations that he'd molested two men decades earlier. Until then, Dupre had been the target of fierce criticism for his handling of some 14 accused priests, many of whom held powerful positions as his underlings.

Hoatson supporters consider his lawsuit—and his outing of purportedly gay bishops—a logical step in the fight for accountability. For Catholic leaders may have acknowledged that abusive priests preyed upon children for decades, but they haven't owned up to their complicity. "Personally," says Maria Cleary, of New Jersey Voice of the Faithful, a church-reform group that has worked with Hoatson, "I feel some things just need to be said at this point. There comes a point in any change process when you have to start pushing the envelope."

Pat Serrano, of Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, seconds that: "You need to express yourself loudly to get the church's attention."

If victims and their allies feel more emboldened to question bishops' sexuality, it may be because the church has raised the issue all on its own. Last November, the Vatican handed down a document known as the "Congregation for Catholic Education," in which it denounced homosexuality as "intrinsically immoral" and "disordered." It suggested that homosexual men cannot be celibate, and banned formerly active gay seminarians from ordination.

Sipe, the author and scholar, says the Vatican document "has opened up the question of sexual orientation among the priesthood," including the hierarchy. And it's set the stage for a potential backlash, incensing gay priests and causing Catholic faithful to think twice about the church's hypocrisy. For years, gay Catholic groups like Dignity USA have refused to call gay bishops on it, keeping an anti-outing policy.

"There's conflict in the gay community with the idea of outing a bishop," he says. Indeed, he says one Dignity leader showed him a private list of 142 bishops who are purportedly homosexual. Some are celibate, others not. But nothing has ever come of it.

The Vatican's antics on homosexuality could change all that. Michael Mendola, of Dignity New York, the local chapter, says gay priests have kept their mouths shut about bishops' sex lives because they "don't want to jeopardize their relationships with the dioceses." But he knows plenty of good, caring gay priests who, in his words, "are tired of all the nonsense going on in the church with homosexuality these days." They're tired of the way the Vatican has pinned blame for the clergy-abuse crisis on homosexuals. And the way far-right Catholic groups have tried to purge the church of gays.

Some may grow so tired of being persecuted that they could break the veil of silence. Once news of Hoatson's lawsuit gets out, Sipe predicts, "I think others may follow."

Whether that happens remains to be seen, of course. In the meantime, Hoatson's suit must make its way through the courts. Attorneys for Egan, Hubbard, and Myers did not return a phone call from the Voice seeking comment for this article. But letters they sent to U.S. District Court judge Paul Crotty, who is presiding over the case, suggest that they intend to try to dismiss it on legal grounds. As Daniel Alonso, the Manhattan attorney who represents Egan and the New York archdiocese, writes in his January 19 letter, "We propose to move to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted."

Hoatson's suit could well get quashed before it ever reaches an open courtroom. Yet in the court of public opinion, he may already be winning. Survivors, at least, are rallying around the priest, cheering him on in listservs and Internet discussion boards, lauding him as courageous beyond belief. "Father Bob is no dummy," says Regan. "He's a priest who has a lot to lose by coming forward with this suit."

And that's just what worries some of his allies who think he's crossed a line. They fear his allegations against the bishops may backfire, undermining his credibility and, worse, his victims' ministry. One fellow clergyman doesn't doubt that the bishops have targeted Hoatson for whistle-blowing. But he can't quite wrap his mind around why the priest decided to bring the bishops' sexuality into the mix. "Once you make those claims, there is no turning back," the cleric says.

To Hoatson, though, it comes down to the truth. All he wants is to save his church, he says, and sometimes, you have to destroy something in order to rebuild it.

"I answer to a higher authority, and this is what God has asked me to do," he says. "God is calling on me to dismantle the insanity and corruption."


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Jacob Robida Dies Following Shootout in Arkansas

Massachusetts gay bar shooting suspect dies

The teenager involved in a bloody attack on three men in a Massachusetts gay bar died early on Sunday morning from wounds sustained in a gun battle with Arkansas police, a police spokesman said.

"Jacob Robida died at 3:38 Central Time (0938 GMT)," Arkansas State Police spokesman Bill Sadler told Reuters. "His body will now be released to the state crime lab."

Robida, who had fled 1,500 miles to the Ozark Mountains, was shot twice in the head by police shortly after he crashed his car following a 16-mile (26-km) chase, police said.

The 18-year-old, who had become the subject of a nationwide manhunt after he was accused of wounding three people with a gun and a hatchet in a New Bedford, Massachusetts, gay bar last week, shot and killed a police officer in Gassville, Arkansas on Saturday after the officer pulled the Pontiac over for a routine traffic stop, police said.

When the high-speed chase ended and police approached the car, Robida traded fire with police who then shot him through the window, police said. A 33-year-old woman from West Virginia, who police said knew the teenager, was found dead in the car after Robida was shot, police said.

Robida died at CoxHealth Hospital in Springfield, Missouri, where he was taken in critical condition on Saturday after being captured, police said.

Robida walked into Puzzles Lounge in New Bedford late on Wednesday evening, ordered two drinks and asked the bartender "Is this a gay bar?"

After being told it was, the teenager, moved to a back area, pulled a hatchet out of his coat and lunged at several men, striking two in the face in the early morning hours on Thursday. He then drew a gun and began firing, witnesses and police said.

DEATH NO SURPRISE

On Sunday afternoon the mother of Alex Taylor, one of Robida's victims, said her son remained in a hospital in very serious condition after having been hit in the head with the hatchet. Robert Perry, another victim, returned to Puzzles on Saturday evening with a bruised right eye and gash on his cheek. No information was available on Sunday about the third victim.

As news of his death spread through the once-prosperous whaling town on the state's southern coast, police said they were not surprised that the high school dropout died after a shootout.

"We had a feeling he would either commit suicide or try to commit suicide by cop," New Bedford police captain Richard Spirlet said. "Those who commit suicide by cop want to have a shootout with police and know they are going to be killed."

At Robida's grandmother's house the telephone was picked up and immediately placed down again. His mother could not be reached for comment.

Robida's room, searched earlier in the week by police, was filled with neo-Nazi literature and posters slurring gays, Jews and blacks, plus a makeshift coffin.

The mood in New Bedford on Sunday ranged from relief that Robida will not be back to fear that someone else might try to finish what the teenager had planned in the only U.S. state where gay marriage is legal.

"When people use words that are hateful and mean-spirited, people are empowered to act violently," said John Vasconcellos, a local gay activist.


Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited.


[Editor's Note: I know that 46 years ago (1960-61) when Illinois was in a position much like Massachusetts is today -- the only state in which homosexual behavior was considered legal -- the attitude by gay people was much the same: On one hand people were glad to see the state taking this progressive stance, yet there was the constant worry that our new found 'freedom' in Illinois might be a signal for people from other places -- or even Illinois -- who did not like us to cause trouble. But unlike today -- 2006 -- where the gay lifestyle is much more common and (as 'they' phrase it) "special rights for gay people" are all around, I do not think in 1960 there were that many loud-mouthed agitators working against us.
PAT]

Jacob Robida Captured in Arkansas

Teen Wanted in Gay Bar Rampage Is Caught

A teenager suspected of a rampage in a Massachusetts gay bar was captured here Saturday afternoon, but only after two people were killed: a police officer gunned down when he tried to stop the suspect's car and a female passenger of the teen, caught in a shootout with police several minutes later, state police said.

Jacob D. Robida was taken to a Springfield, Mo., hospital, according to state police spokesman Bill Sadler.

Police Officer Jim Sell from the northern Arkansas town of Gassville was shot as he attempted to apprehend Robida, Sadler said.

The teen sped away and exchanged gunfire with police in nearby Norfork, where the 18-year-old was wounded and a female passenger was killed, Sadler said. He did not know the name of the woman or her relationship with Robida.

Investigators had searched for Robida since Thursday's attack at a bar in New Bedford, Mass. Three men were wounded, one critically, with a hatchet and a gun.

The hatchet used in the attack was found outside the bar, but detectives believed Robida still had the gun.

Robida was a high school dropout who friends say glorified Naziism but never expressed any specific prejudice against gays.

"This is insane," said Heather Volton, 22, of Fall River, Mass., who had known Robida for more than a year. "That kid never so much as raised his voice at me ... This is all pretty much a shock to me, like everyone else."


Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

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His Friends Say "This was not him" ; Shocked by Report

Suspect's Friends Jolted by Gay Bar Attack
By RAY HENRY, Associated Press Writer

A teenager accused of going on a rampage at a gay bar with a hatchet and a gun sometimes glorified Nazism and had a swastika tattoo but never previously expressed any prejudice toward gays, friends say.

Jacob Robida, 18, was wanted in Thursday's attack at Puzzles Lounge that left three men wounded, one critically. He remained at large Friday.

Police have labeled the attack a hate crime and said Robida would be charged with attempted murder, assault and civil rights violations.

Heather Volton, 22, of Fall River, said she has been friends with Robida for more than a year. She said he had a swastika on his hand, but "the kid never so much as raised his voice at me."

Another friend, Jennifer Crosby, 24, also of Fall River, identified herself as "part black and a lesbian" and said Robida never expressed any hostility toward gays.

Police officers went to Robida's home Thursday and spoke to his mother. According court papers, she said Robida came home around 1 a.m., bleeding from the head, then left. In his bedroom, officers found Nazi regalia and anti-Semitic writings on the wall.

A man who answered the door at Robida's mother's house Friday morning ordered reporters off the property.

At least one of the wounded men remained hospitalized Friday. A second was released, and hospital officials would not disclose the whereabouts of the third victim.

The man who was released, Robert Perry, had a black right eye, a five-inch cut on his right cheek and a bullet hole in his back. He said his assailant hit him in the face with a hatchet first, then shot him.

"What was going through my mind is that I was going to die soon. This is the end. I knew I was going to die," Perry said in television interviews Friday night.

Police said they were examining material Robida posted on his Internet home page. The site is full of references to a rap group called Insane Clown Posse, which is known for its explicit lyrics and sinister clown makeup. The band's label, Psychopathic Records, has a logo depicting the silhouette of a man wielding a hatchet.

Rep. Barney Frank, an openly gay congressman whose district includes New Bedford, said the community has a history of tolerance. Frank pointed out that the city re-elected Gerry Studds in the 1980s after he became the first member of Congress to publicly announce he was gay.

"This is not some general problem with the people of New Bedford," Frank said. "This is one disturbed 18-year-old."

Associated Press writers Andrew Ryan and Brandie M. Jefferson contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

[Editor's Note: According to a newspaper report in the Standard-Times newspaper in New Bedford, Jacob Robida graduated from a police training program in July, 2001 sponsored by the local police department there.
PAT]

Armed 18-year old Attacks Patrons in Gay Bar

Armed Teen at Mass. Gay Bar Injures Three By RAY HENRY, Associated Press Writer

A young man dressed all in black went on a rampage at a gay bar with a hatchet and a gun Thursday, wounding three patrons in what police said appeared to be a hate crime.

One victim was in critical condition.

Police searched for 18-year-old Jacob D. Robida, who was wanted on charges of attempted murder, assault and civil-rights violations.

According to court papers, Robida's mother told police that he briefly stopped by the house less than an hour after the brawl and was bleeding from the head. In Robida's bedroom, officers found Nazi regalia and anti-Semitic writings on the wall.

"Obviously we have a man who's dangerous, who's not rational, and he has weapons," said prosecutor Paul Walsh Jr.

A bartender said it was around midnight (eastern USA time, Wednesday night/start of Thursday) when a teen wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and black pants walked into Puzzles Lounge, a gay nightspot in this historic seaport city of 94,000 people, about 50 miles from Boston.

He flashed an apparently fake ID and ordered a drink, then asked if the place was a gay bar and was told it was, said the bartender, who asked to be identified only by his first name, Phillip, because of fear for his safety.

The bartender said the teen finished his drink and walked back to where two men were playing pool. He shoved one of them to the ground, then pulled a hatchet from his sweatshirt and began swinging at the man's head, cutting him, Phillip said.

Other patrons tackled the man, sending the hatchet sliding across the floor, the bartender said. Then the attacker pulled a gun, shot a man, and then fired another bullet into the chest of a patron who was leaving the bathroom, the bartender said.

He then ran off into the night.

Police recovered the hatchet and found a knife outside. The knife was not apparently used in the attack.

According to court papers, a woman in the bar recognized Robida as a current or former student at New Bedford High School. School officials would not confirm whether he was enrolled there.

Robida graduated in 2001 from the city's Junior Police Academy, a "boot camp" that teaches discipline to 12- to 14-year-olds, many of whom are referred by juvenile courts or social services agencies, Acting Police Chief David Provencher said.

Police identified the injured men as Robert Perry, Alex Taylor and Luis Rosado. One has a gunshot wound to the chest, another a gunshot wound to the back and severe cuts to his face, and a third suffered multiple cuts, police said. They would not specify which man suffered which injuries.

All three victims remained hospitalized. Police said one was in critical condition, but would not say which man.

A family friend who answered the door at Robida's home said his mother had no comment.

The owner of the bar, Richard F. Macedo, said he planned to be open Thursday night because closing would amount to giving in to homophobia. "We absolutely do not respond to homophobia like this," he declared. He said the place and its customers have never been targeted before because of their sexual orientation.

"We've been here almost 15 years," Macedo said. "All it takes is one bad egg."

Some bar patrons, however, said there has been occasional low-level harrassment over the years.

About 150 people, including Mayor Scott Lang, attended a candlelight vigil outside the bar Thursday night.

"This was a crime against everyone in this city," Lang said. "In our town, this is an unacceptable form of behavior which will be punished. This absolutely will not be accepted."

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.

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Meet Vernon: a Blogger on Death Row

A fellow who is on death row has started a blog; or actually a lady on the 'outside' has started it for him; whatever he writes she publishes, and letters and comments from readers get forwarded to him in the prison where he is at. The blog appears to be mostly people who are opposed to the death penalty, as I am, and you may wish to look it over or add some comments of your own at
The Meet Vernon Blog

My comments as given on that blog are reprinted here, below for your consideration.
PAT
=========================

This will be sort of long, and it is my intention to say why I do not believe either very long prison sentences [such as, for example, a 'life' sentence, or 50 years or similar] is ever appropriate and why a 'death penalty' sentence is generally wrong without the explicit consent of the person being executed.'

First of all, if a person does not know what prison is about the first day he gets sent there, it is doubtful he will know about it twenty or thirty years later.

If a prison is going to serve any therapeutic purpose at all -- and that was the original meaning of the wordpenitentiary -- a place to hopefully practice and become penitent or sorry and ashamed of one's behavior, that cannot happen as they are run now.

Assuming that the anti-social behavior Vernon and other prisoners similarly situated are accused of is correct -- a big 'if' in many cases and assuming our overall intention is to rehabilitate if all all possible such persons then why are we tossing them in together in a penal setting? If we were sick for any reason, we would go to a doctor for treatment, a personal and private matter. We would not sit around in the doctor's waiting room spreading our illnesses around to others also waiting.

First. let's consider length of time in prison, and let's call our prisoner Mr. John Doe. This is just my personal opinion, but I believe most prisoners either will or will not be rehabilitated in a period of several months or perhaps one or two years, max. But John Doe should receive intensive therapy during that period and not be routinely in association with other prisoners. His therapists or teachers would provide him with a modicum of ways to survive in the world. For some (many? most?) prisoners things like teaching them to read and write (both skills woefully lacking in many prison populations) would be important. So many people in the outside world do not realize that often as not, crimes (at lesst crimes of violence -- about the only ones which call for prison punishment) are not committed by people who wake up one day and say "I am going to go out and rip off some old lady's purse for the hell of it" or "I am going to go out and buy drugs (rape/molest, etc) someone for the hell of it". If people came out of prison having learned from the experience and with a job waiting for them and a family and a home, chances are they will not go back to prison.

So it may be too much to expect of the Corrections Industry, which, after all, depends on its livelyhood by taking in as many prisoners as possible, but I would definitly try to set my aim at keeping folks out of repeat visits -- recidivism -- to prison. You make their necessary visits to same short, and sweeet and heavy on therapy. Prisoners do not need to associate with each other as a routine thing. Whatever got me here to prison is none of your concern, nor is whatever happened in your life any concern of mine. Mostly I would keep prisoners isolated in their cells for that reason. Our purpose here is to repair your life style, not have inmate social events like basketball games, movies, free time to chat with other inmates, etc. Of course that is assuming you are giving the inmates short, more bearable sentences. We are not planning to keep you here for ten or twenty years, we are talking about keeping you here for six months to a year. We want you to get out while memories of the world as you knew it are still fresh in your mind. I would rather have you back in the world for a fresh start while the technology and your work skills were still relevant if I am to have any hope at all that you will not re-offend.

Now I sort of approve of the 'three strikes and you are out' concept. Our fictional prisoner, John Doe came in prison the first time with a relativly clean sheet as those things go. Some minor offense ... but under my proposed system there would be no probation, no court supervision, etc; I would just say penitentiary for one and all. John Doe serves his three or six months in an intensive setting, hopefully never to return. A big task in his final month or two of incarceration would be to insist he have employment somewhere on his release, support from his family if he has one and housing. I dare say the authorities could issue him a debit card with several hundred dollars on it to 'tide him over' through getting a job and an apartment, etc.

I know the Illinois Department of Correction would never go along with this; they earn their living by having the same old repeat offenders back all the time, but at least some correctional officials are not as corrupt as the ones in Illinois.

Now our John Doe did not quite catch the routine the first time around and he gets sent back a second or a third time. On his second and third time around, the time of incarceration grows a little, and we continue his therapy where it left off the first time. Now he has been in prison three times, each time for sort of heinous crimes ... and he gets convicted a FOURTH time, for something simple and basically not too offensive, such as shoplifting.

I can hear your complaints now: a Four Time Offender! Some would propose executing him, but I suggest this: Any judge in any court would have the authority to suspend the 'three strikes' rule for a fourth time. As a therapist for John Doe while in prison, my inclination would be to congratulate him, "Good John! You have started to learn your lesson haven't you? Before your crimes were quite heinous, now this time around you are just into petty stuff again!" (For murders and other violent crimes I would not just give six months or one year sentences; maybe three or five year sentences to start with.)

After three times around (or a fourth time if any judge used his discretion to allow it; concievably even a fifth time if the crime was 'petty enough' and approved by a relatively high court) now here comes John Doe back again:

At this point we say to John in effect like this: "John, you have claimed your innocence a few times, and we have tried to work with you. Now, we have reached the point where we can do so no longer. Maybe it is our own shortcomings as a society, God help us, or maybe in fact you have been guilty even once or twice? of the various offenses charged to you. But in any event you can no longer be part of our society ever again. So within the next thirty days you have to reach a decision or we will reach one for you.

You can either decide to accept the remainder of your life in prison -- in a warehouse setting -- with others who have chosen the same thing, or you can be put to death, you will make the choice. You can choose to be hung, to be gassed, electrocuted, or lethal injection, as you wish. If you require us to make the choice, we will use 'lethal injection' because our experts have told us that is the least painful and vindictive, but we would prefer that you choose, a method of death or permanent incarceration in a warehouse like setting. You can even commit suicide at any time during this month if that is your choice. We are not trying to 'get even' John, it is just that in our own human limitations we see no way to work with you any further as a member of our society.

During this final month of your
'semi freedom' you will be locked up here, but you will have any books or other literature you wish brought to you at any reasonable hour. You will have a telephone at your disposal, and John, we strongly encourage you to seek counsel from your friends and family on what to do. You can be in contact with your attorney as you wish, or perhaps your pastor or other advisors. But John, we must order you to make absolutely no contact with the families of your victim(s) or otherwise abuse your telephone priviledges. That will cause you to lose the use of the telephone.

In the event we were somehow wrong or you wish to seek pardon for your crime(s), your attorney will know the procedure to use if you call him.

And John, your choice is due in thirty days. If, during that thirty days we find you dead in your cell,we will know you chose the way to end your dilemma. If we do not find you dead, then on day thirty we will ask for your answer, and lacking recieving same we will use lethal injection. If we receive an answer from you about your preference, you may assume it will be handled that way within a few days of that point.

=========================

Now I do not know about the other readers here, but given a choice of being executed (or committing suicide) or life in prison, I would be inclined to go with the former, since death -- as awful, I suppose as it would be -- still does not scare me nearly as much as a lifetime in prison.

Public responses welcome.

Patrick Townson