I agree with Katerina about media directing their mockery at the women. Their mockery should be directed at the men for shaping and controlling these womens’ lives to think, act and dress the way they do. The uniformity of these dresses clearly mark subservience towards men. Let’s encourage women everywhere to be free rather than mock them for where they have come from.

Exactly right.

Ya’ll should check it out.

Poor Tony sounds like the type of guy who’s afraid to read the newspaper, lest he come across a Macy’s ad with a woman in a ‘provocative dress’. You know, it may foster in him, he fears, a rationalization to go out and rape and pillage.

As far as the dresses go, I think they’re kind of nice. If a woman wants to wear them, I think they might make a nice addition to their wardrobe. An added advantage is that every guy they meet will not think they’re an open invitation fir sexual activity, and guys might have time to concentrate on their heart and soul.

Not necessarily a bad thing.

mortally sinful, deviate, fornication, perversion, disordered – The GOOD NEWS, baby! It’s like one is 5 minutes away from cutting off one’s testicles and waiting for the spaceship (btw, in early Christianity, it was quite common for men to self-castrate – literal ‘eunuchs for the kingdom’.

This old school Catholicism makes the Jehovah’s Witnesses look like debauching hedonists. Welp, I’ve seen enough, I don’t wanna see no more. I feel with you, Uta.

First, there is normal marital activity, which the Church teaches as good an natural. She celebrates it as good procreative activity ordered towards the kingdom of god.

Now there are a multitude of ways of deviating from this good standard, most of which are mortally sinful. However, it should not be difficult to see that some of these are lesser evils and divates from the standard in fewer ways than others. For example, even though fornication is a mortal sin, it is surley less of an evil for an engaged couple to engage in this sin than for a married father of many children to visit a prostitute. Would you not agree?

There are various and different kinds of perversion, and some are worse than others because they bring us farther from the good natural state.

I don’t want to get into details here because it is a public forum, but if you want a resource with more detail pick up and older moral theology manual, the kind designed to prepare priests for what they would hear in the confessional. This will treat these varius sins, and specifically tell why each is wrong and will also explain why some are more grave than others.

Not an answer to my questions.

“That is where we disagree.” OK. Explain.

It seems like there is a preference not to engage on this issue. And I am truly sorry about that.

I can’t know the consciences of Catholics that engage in standard — that is to say, rote and unthinking, and therefore actually DIS-respectful — appeals to church teaching on homosexuality. But my conscience tells me clearly that I can understand and respect the church teaching, and also see that there is more work to be done here; that there are ways to talk about the disgusting perversion of sexuality in popular culture, the need to to preserve the sacrament of marriage, and ALSO not lump all gays in with all of that, not lump all gays together, etc. There are ways, in other words, to engage respectfully with church teaching, without using it as a way of covering your eyes so as to simplify your life.

Conscience NATURALLY places objective teaching into question — WITHOUT necessarily rejecting it, without questioning the authority of the church. It is NATURAL to voice conscientious questions, even to question the accuracy of church teaching in certain areas — WITHOUT immediately advocating disobedience, etc.

This has happened and will happen again. You might note, for example, the experience of the fathers of Vatican II, de Lubac and Congar and others who were quite clearly (subtly) questioning church teaching (without disobeying it). They suffered for their conscientious thinking, and they helped to shape the church that today you are so ostensibly loyal to.

What I am saying has nothing at all to do with trivial “cafeteria Catholic” b.s. — I am acknowledging the truth embodied — imperfectly, as it is and MUST be on this earth — in the church’s teaching on homosexuality. And I am asking you and others to think with me on this.