Dr. V's disappointing POV

Over at Maverick Philosopher, Dr. V has been tackling, in a series of posts, the question of "Bergoglio," i.e., Pope Francis. In a recent post titled "Why There Probably Won't Be a Serious Inquiry into Priestly Pederasty," Dr. V quotes Stephen Hayward, who correctly notes:

Such an inquiry would require journalists to probe into matters that run afoul of liberal orthodoxy today. It is one thing to probe into bad behavior from unpopular and easily demonized cardinals. Blowing open a cover-up is standard Watergate Journalism 101. It’s another thing to open the door to uncomfortable questions about sexual morality in our anything-goes times. And that’s almost as great a moral failing as the bishops and cardinals who cover up the evil in the first place. The point is, while the media will gladly blast the most lurid and awful (but unproven) details of a grand jury report about what took place in Pennsylvania without question, they are unwilling to look deeper into the potential causes and enablers of this evil. That is nearly as contemptible as the cowardly behavior of the Church hierarchy.

I find nothing to object to in Hayward's quote (which I admit I haven't seen in its full context), but Dr. V follows the quote up by saying this:

Just as the Left cannot tolerate any serious questioning of the morality of abortion, it cannot tolerate any serious questioning of the morality of homosexual practices. Any raising of those questions would raise questions about their entire worldview.

This represents a disappointingly facile conflation of several aspects of homosexual behavior. To my mind, what two consenting adults decide to do with their time is their own business, and is most likely the result of hard-wired proclivities over which these adults have no control. I was born heterosexual; this wasn't a choice I'd made at the moment of my birth. My brother Sean was born homosexual; that wasn't his choice, either, and because society is majority-hetero, it's a burden he's had to live with that has, fortunately, lessened over time—to the point where he was able to get married in 2015, publicly proclaiming his basic orientation. Dr. V, in using the blanket term "homosexual practices," lumps people like my brother in with predatory pederasts and pedophiles—men in positions of authority who prey upon the young and innocent to satisfy their twisted forms of lust. That strain of "homosexual practice" is vile and despicable precisely because it involves taking advantage of someone who doesn't possess the adult power of choice. (This is, by the way, why people should never be allowed to marry children, animals, and inanimate objects. It's a pretty obvious bright-line distinction.)

Dr. V continues:

So what could possibly be wrong with consensual sodomy? But the Church condemns sodomy, consensual or not. Kierkegaard said that Christianity is "heterogeneity to the world." The same is true of the RCC [i.e., the Roman Catholic Church]. It is in the world but not of it. It is a rebuke to it and cannot be secularized without being destroyed.

To inquire seriously into the homosexual culture within the Church and to expose it as the root of the rot would involve touching on questions the Left would rather not touch on.

Note that Dr. V doesn't actually answer the question he poses at the beginning of the blockquote. He simply moves to the "but the Church condemns sodomy" line. To be fair, in the larger context of Dr. V's blog, it's not obvious whether Dr. V personally agrees or disagrees with Church doctrine; he's on record, on many occasions, as outright rejecting (or at least seriously questioning) certain aspects of Church dogma. Dr. V is also not the sort merely to parrot a doctrine as a way of lazily dodging the answer to a tough moral question, so it may be better to assume, here, that Dr. V considers the issue of homosexuality "asked and answered," per the lingo used in courtrooms, based on the many posts he has already written on the topic. That said, I wish Dr. V had, in this post, taken a subtler, more nuanced stance with regard to the current Catholic scandal (which is, in actuality, the same as all the old priestly scandals). He doesn't help his own cause (which I assume to be generally anti-homosexual) when he conflates actual perversions with a more general sexual orientation. The "gay = pederast" stigma has been around for centuries; it's pernicious and should be done away with.