NYT on ‘celibate, gay, conservative, Catholic writer’ Eve Tushnet

Regular readers of InsideCatholic will know Eve Tushnet for her many excellent articles that we run here regularly. Over the weekend, though, she was introduced to a larger audience via a profile in the New York Times as “a gay Catholic voice against same-sex marriage”:

“The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants,” Ms. Tushnet wrote in a 2007 essay for Commonweal. While gay sex should not be criminalized, she said, gay men and lesbians should abstain. They might instead have passionate friendships, or sublimate their urges into other pursuits. “It turns out I happen to be very good at sublimating,” she says, while acknowledging that that is a lot to ask of others.

Marriage should be reserved for heterosexuals, whose “relationships can be either uniquely dangerous or uniquely fruitful,” she explained in an e-mail message. “Thus it makes sense to have an institution dedicated to structuring and channeling them.”

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But same-sex marriage, she wrote in The New York Post in 2007, “can bring one of three outcomes: A two-tiered marriage culture, where heterosexual couples are asked to do the hard things (sex only within marriage, marriage for life in most circumstances) and homosexual couples work out their own marriage norms; reshape marriage into an optional, individualized institution, ignoring the creative and destructive potentials of ‘straight’ sex; or encourage all couples to restrict sex to marriage and marry for life, and hope that gay couples accept norms designed to meet heterosexual needs.”

The piece does a great job of taking Eve and her beliefs seriously — “if nobody ever calls me self-hating again, it will be too soon,” she says — no small feat, given that her particular niche can make her something of an oddity among Catholics and the gay community alike. We are lucky to have her. Check out her blog for more.

 

Author

  • Margaret Cabaniss

    Margaret Cabaniss is the former managing editor of Crisis Magazine. She joined Crisis in 2002 after graduating from the University of the South with a degree in English Literature and currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She now blogs at SlowMama.com.

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