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 Homosexuality Called Greater Health Risk than Smoking Feminists Blamed for Perceptions of Males as Violence-Prone |
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By Jack Nichols
Melbourne, Australia— Dr. George Pell, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne,
Australia, spoke out Sunday against what he called the "gay agenda" and against women working for the equality of the sexes who are guilty, he claimed, of stereotyping males as violent and as uninvolved in child-rearing.
The Archbishop also said that same-sex love-making poses a much greater health risk, because of AIDS, than does smoking, and warned that the Catholic Church would attempt to quash any``gay agenda'' in Australian schools.
Nevertheless, Archbishop Pell continued,: ``We will be doing nothing to encourage the spread of the gay agenda in the Catholic schools and we will be consistently working to oppose it." Archbishop Pell's commentaries were made to reporters Sunday following his refusal to give communion to rainbow-sash attired gay Catholics at St. Patrick's Cathedral. In lieu of communion, the 20 protestors were offered "a blessing" which they refused. They hung a wreath on a church railing which they said would memorialize the youthful victims of homophobic attacks suffered in Catholic schools. The gay Catholics appealed to their church to protect such youths from the rejection, despair and ignorance that insisted upon their remaining invisible, weighted down by feelings of hopelessness. In turn, the Roman Catholic official took aim at teen suicide statistics (showing that 30% of such deaths were despairing gay youths) blaming homosexuality rather than Roman Catholic intransigence for such tragedies. He said that these suicides are simply "another reason to be discouraging people going in that (gay) direction." Feminists & the Media Also Attacked Archbishop Pell also preached Roman Catholic opposition to the principle of the equality of the sexes, claiming that both the media and feminist activists have stereotyped fathers as either "wimps-- weak and unreliable" or violence-prone machos who are "selfish and unable or unwilling to commit themselves to other people." "Changing sexual mores have contributed to this, as has the anti-male ideology of some feminism," he charged. Eva Cox, a well-known Australian feminist replied to Archbishop Pell saying: "put a sock in it and get in touch with reality…Stereotypes don't come from feminism, they come from life." Ms. Cox believes, she said, that "most of the perceptions of fathers are of decent, reasonable men who are more aware of the needs of their children than fathers 20 or 30 years ago." Other persons active in Australia's public life also expressed their dismay over the Archbishop's outburst, pointing out that feminists are not to blame for divorce rates, nor for the increase in violent crime rates in which males comprise nearly 95% of all violence-prone citizens jailed. |
