A few years ago — two or three, maybe four — I was in the Deadline Detroit offices when a YouTube video crossed my feed, somehow. I don’t remember who sent or posted it, but I vividly remember the video: It featured four or five young men, employees of the Church Militant, a right-wing Catholic group based in Ferndale, a suburb here.
The guys were boxing, shirtless, in a Ferndale park on a fine summer day. I don’t remember if they were gloved or just barehanded, but they were boxing in the 19th century style, which is to say hands held high, like you see in old woodcuts. They were mostly moving around each other, throwing little jabs and crosses, not connecting hard, more like shadowboxing with the threat of a bruise or bloody nose around the edges. “We are enjoying manly, fresh-air exercise on a beautiful day,” was either the voiceover or maybe a title. Again, can’t remember. I watched it for a while and thought, this is the gayest thing I’ve seen in a month.
I didn’t save the URL, and when I looked for it later, it was gone. I searched and searched, googled everything I could think of, but it was gone. Last week, I had lunch with my friend Michael, who was ordained as a priest in a schismatic Catholic church earlier in the year. I told him about the video, and he said, “That’s the gayest thing ever.”
Wednesday I read an AP story about the leader of Church Militant:
The founder of a far-right, unofficial Catholic media group has resigned for an unspecified violation of the organization’s morality clause, the group said in a statement Tuesday.
Michael Voris stepped down as president of St. Michael’s Media and Church Militant, a Michigan-based enterprise established to address what Voris’ official biography calls “the serious erosion of the Catholic faith in the last 50 years.”
“Michael Voris has been asked to resign for breaching the Church Militant morality clause,” the organization said in its statement. “The board has accepted his resignation.” More details were not provided, and the board said it “has chosen not to disclose Michael’s private matters to the public” but asked for prayers for him as he is “focusing on his personal health.”
….In 2016, Voris acknowledged that when he was younger, he had for years been involved in “live-in relationships with homosexual men” and multiple other sexual relationships with men and women, actions he later abhorred as “extremely sinful.”
The Church Militant, which is also a schismatic group, likes to play dirty. During Covid, they sent an operative, a woman, to knock on the door of the music director for the archdiocese, the cathedral organist. He answered and she told him she and her wife were looking at buying a house in the neighborhood, but they were worried they wouldn’t be tolerated. The music director assured her he and his male partner had lived in the neighborhood for years and had never had any problems. She was wearing a hidden camera and captured the exchange on video. They aired it, and soon the music director was out of a job.
They are pro-Trump, of course. On election night 2022, they had a media credential and were doing live standups from the TCF Center, where the absentee ballots were being counted. I’m told the reporter doing the standups was the same woman who stung the music director.
I don’t think I’m going out on a particularly shaky limb to speculate what the breach of the morality clause might be. But they’ve asked for privacy at this difficult time.
A fuller story about the parting, from the Freep.
In other news at this hour, dogs are biting men. Film at 11. Happy Thanksgiving.
Jim said on November 23, 2023 at 4:50 am
Not forgetting that the “Catholic Church” is actually a Pedophile Cult – they LOVE little boys and girls / mainly boys .
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David C said on November 23, 2023 at 6:39 am
Is there any conservative church that isn’t a pedophile cult? They have to get them all groomed up early before they grow up to have opinions and stuff.
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Suzanne said on November 23, 2023 at 8:15 am
This simply reinforces my theory that the hard right is full of people drawn to do things they think sinful and egregious so they believe if they simply make said behavior illegal, the temptation will be taken away from them and their lives will flourish. Out of sight, out of mind kind of thinking.
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Deborah said on November 23, 2023 at 9:39 am
Happy Thanksgiving!
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FDChief said on November 23, 2023 at 9:42 am
These people seem not so much gay as really worried that they’ll be called gay by someone (who seems to live in their heads) and they can’t get over being worried about that. It’s like getting hit on by another guy and getting pissed off rather than shining it on as a compliment on their good looks – that reaction says more scathing things about their masculinity than they think it does.
But sede vacantist wingnuts are weird in general. They’re upset because a patriarchal sect with a deeply troubled record on sexual abuses is marginally less shitty towards women and non-cis/het people? Because they want the Church to be meaner and more Bronze-age narrowminded? Oh, please.
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Icarus said on November 23, 2023 at 10:22 am
Happy thanksgiving to all
We are in Chicagoland, staying in lovely and exotic Schaumburg visiting my toxic mother. We cannot stay at her crapshack so we have to spring for a hotel. We opted for the cheaper suburb
S this year rather than the more expensive West Loop.
Hotel isn’t bad but ugh in the eating area the TV is set to Fox News. Just a few minutes of listening to that blatantly biased crap and I can see why people like my in-laws are woefully misinformed and angry.
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alex said on November 23, 2023 at 10:34 am
La Voris leaves a bad taste.
Miss Thing reminds me of so many Catholic men I’ve known who’ve devoted their lives to keeping up appearances and shivving other gay men when they’re not actively seeking them out for some fun on the downlow.
Pitiable, really, but their lives are a hell of their own making.
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Mark P said on November 23, 2023 at 11:21 am
… and, the “Methinks the Lady Doth Protest Too Much” Award this year goes to … drumroll please! … Mike Johnson! Come on up, Mike! You can leave your torch and pitchfork at your table.
And, now for something completely different. We were going to eat Thanksgiving dinner out Wednesday, and the only place we could find that had turkey and dressing was IHOP. So we ordered the T&D, and after a while the server came back and said they were out of dressing. I wasn’t about to eat a Thanksgiving dinner without dressing, so I just had a hamburger. But it will all work out, because a neighbor is bringing us Thanksgiving dinner cooked by his wife. I think they feel sorry for their helpless elderly neighbors, so they bring us food occasionally. And we thank them!
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tajalli said on November 23, 2023 at 12:44 pm
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Having my usual traditional non-traditional feast, this year homemade black bean chili with beef on this sunny, non-breezy, cool day with great silence in the neighborhood. Gravity is also working in its upstanding fashion. All is well.
The owners of the local Grocery Outlet were doing the checking so employees could have the day off and customers could still pick up the last minute fixings, for which I expressed my gratitude fulsomely.
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alex said on November 23, 2023 at 2:00 pm
Poultry cooties everywhere after spatchcocking a barely thawed turkey but the garden still has rosemary and sage and even some freeze-dried thyme, so we’re good there.
I’m following the Ree Drummond/Pioneer Woman method this time around and basting with herb butter, only I subbed raw honey for her maple syrup in the herb butter. And forgot to liberally salt and pepper it at the outset but did so at the 30-minute mark.
So far the bird’s upper body is nice and crispy brown but the rest is pale, so I turned it around. Hope it helps.
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Deborah said on November 23, 2023 at 2:30 pm
We are solo this year, we got invited to 3 different places for the holiday but they involved traveling which we are loathe to do right now because we’re leaving for NM soon. My husband is making cassoulet, something he has done a couple of times before, this time he’s making an easier version but it’s still fairly time consuming. For someone who doesn’t like people make a hoopla of Thanksgiving he’s knocking himself out. It smells fantastic, it has everything but the kitchen sink in it, lots of different meats. This time he’s using Giganti beans, which are just as the name, gigantic. I can’t wait to eat. We also bought a bottle of good French wine to go with it and I got some ice cream for dessert, no pie for us, I broke my one and ony pie plate a couple of weeks ago so nothing to make it in.
There were a couple of obviously gay guys but in the closet that I went to college with. After they graduated they each married a homely, motherly type and both of the guys became extremely, rightwing assholes, fundamentalist christian, extremist in the Lutheran church. I’ve lost track of them over the years, but I always wondered if they ever ditched that and ended up living their lives the way they were meant to be. Nah, probably not.
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Jason T. said on November 23, 2023 at 2:32 pm
From the Freep article:
Commentary | Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone except Voris.
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LAMary said on November 23, 2023 at 3:40 pm
The older brother in Colorado still hasn’t come out to me or anyone else in the family. He’s in very bad shape: cancer, heart disease, copd, spinal microfractures, diabetes, severe anemia. He’s been in the hospital for over a month. He’s given me POA and some instructions about what goes where if/when he dies. But come out? Nah. I’m not cruel enough to tell him that everyone else in the family has assumed he’s gay for at least the last 50 years. Just found out that my other surviving brother is in the hospital with cancer and diabetes too. His daughter is worried about her mother who is showing signs of dementia. Also their house is in foreclosure. Seems my bro hasn’t paid any property taxes in years.
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Jeff said on November 23, 2023 at 10:54 pm
Not paying property taxes creates some complications. (sighs deeply)
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4dbirds said on November 24, 2023 at 9:34 am
My parents were unenthusiastic Methodists. We kids went to the base protestant church only occasionally. Our church attendance seemed to go up when my parents went through periods of what they thought was working on their marriage. One of the first intimate things my husband confided in me was that he was molested by his priest. I was horrified. He said his parents didn’t believe him. I’m so glad I was mostly shielded by anything religious. A few years ago, a shirt-tail relative of his was outed by the Philadelphia Inquirer as one of the many priests who molested young boys (not my husband) over many years. It was pretty awful and of course, involved stealing money from the parish. Everything tawdry seems to boil down to people enriching themselves. I’m Godless and so are my children. We don’t bother with church but when we travel to do like to visit churches and cathedrals for the art and history.
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Deborah said on November 24, 2023 at 11:02 am
4dbirds, how awful for your husband. A young man I worked with many years ago revealed that he had been molested as a kid by a priest. He told me when it all came out in the news, I was surprised he told me, I was his boss then. He was super angry about it, understandably.
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nancy said on November 24, 2023 at 11:11 am
Did I ever tell the priest diaper story here?
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basset said on November 24, 2023 at 11:30 am
Don’t believe so… sounds like something that could not be unread.
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Pam said on November 24, 2023 at 12:23 pm
I caught the tail end of an interview with a gay woman on TV. I don’t know any of the details of why she was being interviewed, who she represented. That info came before I stepped into the interview. She was talking about how hellish one’s life can be when you’re always worried about someone “finding out”, about possible violence against you, about getting and keeping a job, about relationships and about fitting in somewhere. I stopped and considered what she said because I had never thought about in that way. I guess it all depends on your family and friends, and how they treat you. But I thought it was just sad that some people have to live like that, possibly to where it makes them crazy enough to join a schismatic church.
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Deborah said on November 24, 2023 at 12:58 pm
Please tell us the priest diaper story.
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Jeff Borden said on November 24, 2023 at 2:47 pm
We all need the priest diaper story, please.
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4dbirds said on November 24, 2023 at 2:54 pm
Deborah,
It was very difficult for my husband to tell me about it but as time has gone on, he knows the shame isn’t his and although he doesn’t advertise it, he will gladly tell people what he thinks of the Catholic church and its abuse of children. Our ‘relative’ is mentioned here. https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/Priests-named-in-report-of-grand-jury.html?
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nancy said on November 24, 2023 at 4:30 pm
OK. A good friend of mine here was an altar boy in his parish, in the ’60s, when Catholic churches were still full and parishes had two, three or four priests in residence. His after-school job was answering the rectory phone, which he thought was a big responsibility and took pride in. But there was another boy with a different job, who was often asked to come upstairs to Father’s room, which made him envious — it seemed he got a privilege beyond what he deserved. Finally, my friend asked what they were doing up there.
“Trying on diapers,” the kid said without a trace of embarrassment. “You should try it sometime. They’re really comfortable.”
The priest left for a new assignment sometime after that, and if it had anything to do with his infantilism fetish, no one said a word.
“And what happened to that altar boy?” I asked. They’d lost touch, but my friend said he heard he died fairly young, a hopeless drunk.
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Deborah said on November 24, 2023 at 5:07 pm
Wow Nancy, that is sick. That poor kid.
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diane said on November 24, 2023 at 5:30 pm
It was common for boys to be hired to work evenings in rectories when I was a young Catholic. I always thought it was unfair that girls could not be hired for that job and there was no comparable, seemingly cushy job working for the nuns in the convent. It turns out that several of those boys that I knew or knew of in those jobs were molested. I was raised very Catholic and was fairly practicing until my mid-twenties. Now I cannot fathom why anyone would be Roman Catholic.
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Peter said on November 24, 2023 at 5:51 pm
I have a friend who had one of those after school jobs in the rectory. At his rectory, the office had a separate door to the outside, and the office door to the rest of the rectory was locked on both sides at 3:00 p.m..
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Jeff said on November 24, 2023 at 6:06 pm
Just to note: there are about 38,000 priests in the US. An external study of 1950 to 2000 in the Roman Catholic Church here estimated at most 4% of clergy had been accused, with a definite floor of at least 1%. Of course, over the time period you had new priests and deaths & retirements, but call it a total population of 100,000. You end up with a thousand to 4,000 molesters.
My tradition has about 5,000 clergy; working on standing review in the 1980s & 1990s, it was a commonplace that among our clergy there would be credible accusations against 3%, but many fewer would turn into charges or convictions. I developed my skepticism of background checks from that time: I knew of too many very well documented cases that for a variety of reasons never were pursued, usually because victim or family didn’t want to go through the experience. Youth Protection policies (that sadly some people still fight against following) began to be more common in all church groups after 2000, in large part because most background checks only catch those who have been both charged & convicted. You don’t hear about my group because we’re smaller, that’s all. Catholic priests are a bigger pool.
But the idea that Catholicism is uniquely plagued is problematic. Scouting, Protestant churches, any youth serving organization — you simply have to work on the assumption that around 3% of all the finest people who want to help you with youth programs have compulsions or derangements not easily identifiable from the outside, so you MUST have programs that set up guidelines which disable the ability of molesters to operate freely. That’s my reason for not disagreeing, but adding that aside.
Whether Catholics or any other Christian group, the doubly damnable part is that ideally we should be vetting & training clergy so the incidence of molestation among them is at worst MUCH lower than the average population. I fully understand that pointing out priests aren’t molesting more than men in general, nor my own clergy cohort, is to no one’s credit at all.
When the system learns about molestation and does nothing, or hides abusers from consequences, that’s the crisis which, again, isn’t unique to diocesan bishops. We have a school district in Ohio with a horrid story coming out that apparently students and parents had been reporting to admins since 2004, but somehow was allowed to continue for nearly two decades. But it was a married couple, and so didn’t ring the expected bells. That’s the heart of what has to be understood: molesters don’t always look & act like you’d think, and that helps keep some of them free to act out their impulses.
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FDChief said on November 25, 2023 at 9:01 am
My guess is that any hierarchy is going to have an abuse problem unless the organization 1) is aware of the likelihood and 2) is aggressive in taking actions to prevent it. So churches, armies, things like Scouts…you combine a heavily top-down Authority with lots of potential prey? Ummm…
Throw in a “celibate” clergy? Oh, no problem! Let’s take a part of human nature that has toppled empires and driven people to madness and Just Say No – that’ll work, right?
The sad part is my understanding is that the whole celibate thing was a late classical/early medieval gimmick to preserve Church property. Lacking legal heirs meant the clergy supposedly wouldn’t try and pass their benefice to the kid(s). So, like the “selling indulgences” that was a huge part of the corruption that kicked off the Protestant schism, it was the greed of the institutional Church that proved its own worst enemy.
If only someone – maybe a great holy man or spiritual leader – had, say, warned them about the issues inherent in greed for temporal wealth. Imagine how much of that pain and trouble they could have avoided!
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jcburns said on November 25, 2023 at 9:26 am
HBD, Nance. We seem to be accumulating them!
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susan said on November 25, 2023 at 10:59 am
HBD, Nancy! “It’s weird to be the same age as old people.”
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alex said on November 25, 2023 at 6:33 pm
Happy happy!
https://media.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTc5MGI3NjExNmxydHZpMzUyYTlmcHFkdWpuN2U0MzJmdWg0azdnYTk4Y3VscTlleSZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/QA6pxg7MEcwYo/giphy.gif
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Dorothy said on November 25, 2023 at 7:00 pm
Jumping in to wish you a very happy birthday, Nancy.
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Julie Robinson said on November 25, 2023 at 8:31 pm
Happy Birthday, Nancy! Hope you’ve had a terrific day.
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Jeff said on November 25, 2023 at 8:51 pm
Joy of the day to you, Nancy; hope there was more than pumpkin pie for your celebrations!
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jerry said on November 26, 2023 at 2:32 am
Happy Birthday, Nancy, from you British (rather older) twin!
Myra and I had a fabulous lunch with two of our sons at NOPI a great restaurant in Piccadilly. If you’re visiting London I’d check it out – not cheap but great food.
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4dbirds said on November 26, 2023 at 9:52 am
Happy birthday, Nancy.
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ROGirl said on November 26, 2023 at 1:27 pm
Many happy returns!
The oven sensor of my less than year-old stove is stuck open. It happened for no apparent reason when I was turning on a burner last week, an error code came up, I had to call for service (switching the breaker off and on didn’t help) and the first available appointment is for Wednesday. At least the stove still works.
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Suzanne said on November 26, 2023 at 2:05 pm
Happy birthday!
It’s snowing rather heartily in my neck of the woods. Not happy about it.
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MarkH said on November 26, 2023 at 2:23 pm
Happy Birthday, Nancy!
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jcburns said on November 26, 2023 at 3:37 pm
Ahem…today (the 26th) is Nancy’s Birthday Boxing Day.
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tajalli said on November 26, 2023 at 3:46 pm
Happy Birthday, Nancy!
https://xkcd.com/2859/
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Deborah said on November 26, 2023 at 4:36 pm
Late happy birthday if the date was actually yesterday. Sorry I missed saying it earlier.
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