Get with the program, Jim

Jim Coyle, a popular Toronto Star columnist, a longtime acquaintance, an occasional reader of my column and a defender of mine at Queen's Park, recently wrote a tirade against the Pope's stand on homosexual and lesbian "sexual-union play acting." (H&Ls mistakenly call it a sex union even though it is a physical impossibility. Study the human body, guys!) I could drive a truck through Jim's logic and historical perspectives, except that they haven't made one large enough.

All the way back to St. Peter, it's been the Pope's job to denounce sin. Jim, you wouldn't want him not to do his job. The Pope's got to defend The Book - the Old and the New chapters both. Aren't all our laws based on precedent? What did you expect him to say - that sodomy and other sexual aberrations were like tennis? Some do - some don't. Gay "marriages" are about as permanent as renting a car. But it is possible to love the sinner and hate the sin. People do it all the time.

Of course, Jim, the Catholic church is a church of sinners, but who's going to throw the first stone? Some columnist in the Queen's Park press gallery? Just think if Bob Carr, a former veteran newsman of the gallery, decided to write the inside story of the gallery - the goings-on, gossip, affairs, parties, scandals, triangles, quadrangles - we'd all have to run for the woods. (Maybe Eric Dowd would be the only one left.) Bob Carr, for heaven's sake, don't do it!

Remember when AIDS first surfaced. it was called the Gay Plague. When homosexuals squirmed at this definition, it was quickly dropped. Remember when the Canadian Red Cross was afraid to stop active homosexuals from giving contaminated blood because of the possible fallout? Innocent people died from contaminated blood and nobody went to jail.

Remember how Variety, the U.S. weekly entertainment paper, carried a list of performers who ran the gamut of professions and whose death notices said they died of AIDS? It was a list of over 50 prominent showbiz personalties (including Liberace and Rock Hudson). People today are dying of AIDS and other sexual diseases, but if it isn't in Africa you don't hear much about it.

I met the president of the Toronto chapter of Courage, an inactive homosexual, who heads up the Catholic organization of chaste homosexuals. A handsome, husky man, he left me counting my fingers when I shook his hand. He told me that he quit the homosexual lifestyle when his mother appeared vividly to him in a dream and warned him about the evil that he was doing.

What about Homosexuals Anonymous in the U.S., a large, growing non-denominational group of chaste homosexuals and lesbians based on the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-point program? Jim, when's the last time the Toronto Star gave chaste homosexuals some coverage?

The Catholic church is not irrelevant. It is only irrelevant to the secular media. Unfortunately, the media have the eyes and ears of the people 24 hours a day and churches have to get by on an hour a week - if that. (However, Jim, we still can't get out of our church parking lot on a Sunday without a cop being there.)

Heading into the dodo bird camp is the media, including the decreasing numbers of newspeople at Queen's Park (as a result of money-saving measures taken by the Aspers, Thomson and others). That means a lot of politically embarrassing stories never see the sunshine.

Another group also heading towards the fate of the passenger pigeon is the parliamentarians. Thorny issues like same-sex unions are decided by Crouton and then announced by him when the MPs are at their cottages or on worldwide junkets. And this travesty is applauded by Ontario's premier, Ernie Eves.

There is still a minority of MPs who favour denigrating marriage by uplifting other "acrobatics" to the same status of marriage. They take this position because of committee chairs they long to fill in Ottawa and the greatest illusion of all - that some day they will be hoisted into cabinet - or, if all else fails, the Senate, a living graveyard of bagmen and expendable politicians.

Our future, most-likely-to-succeed prime minister, Paul Martin, the church-going Catholic, should heed the biblical injunction: "Not all those who say: 'Lord! Lord!' shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but those who do my will."