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10/18/2013
Ryan T. Anderson continues to prove his plan doesn't end at marriage
If you follow the marriage debate, you're surely familiar with the Heritage Foundation's Ryan T. Anderson. Over the past year or so, the far right has exalted Anderson, who is a protege of NOM cofounder Robert George, into a place of prominence. He's sort of the leader of the tiny "young people opposed to marriage" contingent that the anti-LGBT movement is desperate to portray as sizable.
But as I've shown you in the past, Ryan Anderson is not someone who just stops at marriage rights. He is someone who believes, per his own admission, that gay people are to live chaste lives. He usually doesn't say as much now because he knows that such an admission is a liability to the mainstream "protect marriage" movement. But it's there.
And sometimes it sneaks back out, like when he tweets a column…
…that is all about why religious colleges should not honor their openly gay students:
Notre Dame has no reason to celebrate patterns of same-sex attractions or bisexual attraction, or confused understandings of one’s sexual identity as male or female, as “beautiful.” These conditions are particular trials, more difficult than some but not as challenging as others, with which some people are burdened. To celebrate these attractions or understandings as unique and beautiful is morally problematic and pastorally catastrophic.
…
NOCD is not like Alcoholics Anonymous: a support group to which people turn in order to seek support and guidance as they first, acknowledge their problem, and second, strive to overcome it. In fact NCOD, in its celebratory nature, does exactly the opposite: it teaches individuals to accept as entirely unproblematic attractions and understandings that stand in need of continual moral purification.
It is imprudent of Notre Dame to encourage students to readily co-identify with other individuals under the mantle of an international political activism campaign (the Human Rights Campaign), when that campaign has as a goal the legal and social eradication of the same beliefs that Notre Dame wishes to instill in its students.
As far as Notre Dame’s pastoral ministry is concerned, celebrating acts of auto-identification precisely as acts of identification as LGBT is perhaps the least efficient way to convey to those students the message that pastoral guidance concerning their sexuality is needed.
FULL PIECE: Come Out and Celebrate? by Michael Bradley [Public Discourse]
And let's be clear: Ryan is promoting it because he believes it. Again, the language of this column is fully in line with one that Ryan himself wrote while a student at Princeton.
If he wants to be a top voice in the marriage movement, then Ryan T. Anderson needs to be honest. His goal extends far beyond our ring fingers. That is not a mere footnote in this conversation—it is key.
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