She’s been writing and I’ve been reading her for a long time, but I think Eve Tushnet’s name became much more widely known in 2010, when the New York Times profiled her, identifying her in the opening graph as that (to them) most exotic of all creatures, a “the celibate, gay, conservative, Catholic writer”.

My goodness, these labels, categories and pigeonholes — our increasingly polarized world loves them, because they tell us who we should read or not read, hate or not hate in the blink of an eye — but that just makes them all the more abhorrent, doesn’t it? Most of us are a great deal more than what is made obvious within our “categories.” Eve, for example is — like Leah Libresco at Unequally Yoked –, a most interesting Yalie.

She studied philosophy at Yale University, where she was received into the Catholic Church. She is a freelance writer in DC, and has been published in (among others) Commonweal, The National Catholic Register, National Review, and The Washington Blade. Eve blogs at EveTushnet.com. Her hobbies include sin, confession, and ecstasy.

That would be the mystical sort, not the drug. And as of today, she blogs here at Patheos, where our first order of business may well be to get her into the habit of starting each post with an actual headline!

As you may have noticed from that blurb, Eve, though called a “conservative” by the Times, hones that down a bit, claiming “conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood”. Beyond her writing, Ever has worked full-time for the National Catholic Register and the Manhattan Institute, and for the Institute on Marriage and Public Policy, the Bible Literacy Project, and the National Organization for Marriage. She is trained in classic reasoning, which suits Catholicism so well; it means she is perfectly at-home anywhere and nowhere, and so you will find her writing strewn among all sorts of different outlets, some “liberal”, some “conservative” some secular.

If her freelancing venues are strewn, though, her thoughts are not. She is simply brilliant at looking squarely at any issue, be it deep friendship and confessional intimacy (I would love to see her write on Bl. John Henry Newman and Ambrose St. John) or homeschooling and socialization, or Art, or Books or “the closet” Eve has a way of throwing relentless reason together with the most fluid prose until the the issue (and the reader) must cry surrender or find a better argument.

I had hoped to bring her over to Patheos last year, but it wasn’t the right time. Now, perhaps it is. While I am loath to over-emphasize one issue when Tushnet can write so knowledgeably about so much, she is fantastic on the issue of Catholicism and same sex attraction. Whether it wishes it or not, the Catholic church is being propelled toward an unstoppable and necessary confrontation with the homosexual community. If the church gets it right, this confrontation can become the finest fruit of the New Evangelization. If she gets it wrong, the lesser fruits will not nourish or strengthen the body of Christ to its potential.

I wrote yesterday how pleased I am that the Catholics are daring to talk about the issue without dipping into the goo of sentimentalism, which tends to gum up all it touches. For this reason, I think Eve’s gifts and her remarkable fluency are essential to the engagement, and I am thrilled to have her here at Patheos, where, between Mark, and Marc, Max and Katrina, Tim Muldoon, Fr. Dwight and the rest of us, and now, Eve (and, soon, the addition of some equally provocative/smart/surprising voices), we’re doing our best to keep the conversation faithful, thoughtful, respectful, compassionate and above all, interesting!

Welcome, Eve Tushnet, to Pathoes. To paraphrase Paul Johnson, “come on in; it ain’t awful!”

I think you’ll want to bookmark her.

Related:
Read about Eve’s recent appearance at a Theology on Tap event in Denver

Follow Eve on Twitter here and on Facebook here

Click here to view the embedded video.

Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell [says] The broadcast networks “all but spiked the largest legal action in history to defend our constitutionally protected religious freedom,” [he cited] CBS, ABC and NBC for skimming over news that 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations filed a lawsuit Monday against the Obama administration.

CBS managed to air 19 seconds on the subject. But that was it, between all three networks.

“This is the worst bias by omission I have seen in the quarter-century history of the Media Research Center,” he says, insisting that the networks fear the lawsuit could compromise President Obama’s popularity with voters.

“This is not a mistake, nor is it an editorial oversight by the broadcast networks. This is a deliberate and insidious withholding of national news to protect the ‘chosen one’ who ABC, CBS and NBC have worked so hard to elect.”

Lead stories and in-depth reports are in order, he suggests, following revelations that the Catholic Church unleashed “legal Armageddon” on the White House, promising not to comply with health care reforms that would require religiously affiliated institutions to offer birth control to employees.

“Instead, these networks are sending a clear message to all Americans that the networks will go to any lengths — even censoring from the public an event of this historic magnitude — to prevent the release of any information that will hurt Obama’s chances of re-election,” Mr. Bozell concludes.

Well, that might be the message they are sending. But I think the larger message that perhaps they hadn’t meant to transmit is one of stark terror. Like the kid who hides under the blanket figuring the boogeyman won’t see him, the mainstream media has decided that if they just ignore the 12 lawsuits launched against the Obama administration by 43 Catholic entities, the reality of them will go away; they simply won’t exist, and the Supreme Court won’t see them, either!

Or, you know, they might just be afraid that if people begin to realize that the promised (as in still-not-in-effect) Obama “accommodation” was not the acceptable olive-branched solution they’d pretended it was, they might start wondering what this “constitutional-scholar” of a president is really all about.

Or, they might be afraid that, as Bozell says, news of the suits could negatively impact Obama’s re-election campaign.

Afraid is the operative word, here. What is coming through loud and clear is their fear.

UPDATE: Newsbusters has more and more

And Frank Weathers figured out before anyone that the story would be spiked.

UPDATE II: Props to PBS who managed a report

I’m frankly considering never reopening them!

Feelings are wonderful things and I am glad we have them, but they are often irrational things, as well. Think of the things you “love” and “hate”. Often your passion is irrational to your friends, and — if you’re honest — even to yourself. Because they are irrational, feelings are to be noted and respected, but not to be given the weight of authority. Increasingly, in our culture, that is precisely what is happening. The tyranny of sentimentality, of course, is that if you don’t “feel” the way the culture has decided you ought to, you’re a mean person. If you’re a Christian you will be told — often by other Christians who have mistaken feelings for reason and yes, given it authority — that you are a bad, unloving Christian, because “Jesus loves everyone.”

Jesus does love everyone. He also, as he demonstrated throughout scripture, confronted everyone honestly, with love balanced by both truth and justice. I always think of Christ in the center of the Cross, the culmination of truth and justice, balanced on either side of the horizontal beam. One cannot have Christ and not have truth; one cannot love Justice yet fumble it through a filter of feelings. The Justice and Truth get sticky in all that goo.

This is why Catholicism insists on thinking over feeling — which certainly seems very mean to a world hellbent on doing whatever it feels like — and because the church thinks, it often confounds. The same people who love the bishops for their pro-immigrant stance hate the bishops for their anti-abortion rhetoric, and vice versa, and people get frustrated and express anger that the church is not wholly on board with their ways of thinking.

But the church is not here to be on-board with anyone’s thinking, or even to be loved. She is here to keep Christ, physically and spiritually, in our world and in our lives. That was the whole point of Christ giving Peter the Keys to the Kingdom, and the authority to loosen or hold bound. The church, as His Body and his Bride (the two are one flesh), is meant to confront each of us, as Christ did, with love balanced by truth and justice. Like Nicodemus, whom Christ urged to keep thinking, we are called to reason, and like the hemorrhagic woman who dared to seek healing on the sly, we are meant to face Christ squarely, and be who we are:

When the hemorrhagic woman dared to touch his cloak, he still wanted to know who had approached him in faith; he still wanted her to account for herself and her approaching him. He healed her. He had mercy on her. But he wanted her to declare herself to his face, and before all the rest.

As the issue of the homosexual person, and homosexual marriage, comes to the fore in our social awareness, the Catholics are busily talking and reasoning and feeling; some are feeling more than reasoning, some are reasoning with feeling, but almost all of them are talking. Beyond the bumperstickerspeak and repetition of the feelings being promoted in the pop-culture and on execrable morning talk shows, I dare say it’s the Catholics who are saying the most interesting, compelling and thoughtful things about homosexuality, life, love and faith right now. Here’s a sampling:

I have been arguing, clumsily, for a long time, now, that the homosexual person is created for a purpose and is being called to something unique and beautiful, but I have never quite been able to put my finger on it, which I think has opened me up to some fair questioning.

Enter Michael Voris; he’s one of those guys I sometimes get annoyed at and I sometimes defend. In this video (found via Mark Shea), he does a fine job of putting his finger on the exact spot I was unable to find, and does it with beauty and depth, here. In fact, he moved unsentimental old me to tears at one point:

Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s the stuff. Well done, Michael.

But we’re not done. Remember Joshua Gonnerman, who last week wrote in First Things that Christian-baiter Dan Savage had made a fair point in one of his recent rants? This week, he follows up, writing: Why I Call Myself a Gay Christian:

The central locus of my identity, which shapes all other aspects of it, is Christ. But no one, upon honest self-reflection, can realistically claim that this entirely does away with all other aspects of one’s identity. Christ is the foundation which shows how other aspects of my identity can and cannot be expressed, but other aspects of who I am do say something significant about me.

Oscar Wilde — a deathbed convert — once said, “I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.” In responding to this Christian argument for homosexual marriage that is so packed with heavy syrup we could add some ice cream, drizzle a raspberry and call it a peach melba, Marc Bares does opt to go with brute reason:

You are arguing that because Peter could not withhold baptism from anyone who desires it, we cannot withhold marriage from anyone who desires it. Right? Two problems here:

Peter would surely not have denied baptism to any one who asked for it. However, I’m quite confident he would have denied baptism to any one who said, “I would like to be baptized. By this I mean I would like to get a spray tan and become an expert at soduku.” Why? Because the issue here isn’t whether or not to give the man baptism, the issue is that what the man wants isn’t baptism at all.

In the same way, the reason the Church doesn’t grant gay marriages is not because gays are somehow worse sinners than others and therefore not eligible. The reason is simply that they don’t want marriage at all, for marriage is a covenant between man and woman. This is made very starkly and stunningly clear, not in the Old Testament — which you seem remarkably able to ignore — but in the New . . .Because God create male and female, a man seeks union with a wife. So to ask for a gay marriage — at least to a man living during the time of Peter — would have been like asking for a spray-tan baptism.

But even then, asking for a gay marriage is in no way comparable to asking for Baptism.

Baptism is a sacrament of initiation. It is the sacrament by which one enters the Church. Because the Church — the Body of Christ — contains the fullness of Truth, anyone entering from from outside of the Church is necessarily in some degree of falsehood. Marriage is not a sacrament of initiation. It is a sacrament given to those already in the Church, those already inside that fullness of Truth. So your argument is essentially that, because Peter baptized those in falsehood into the Truth, those already in the Truth should be allowed to live out a falsehood.

It is brute reason, and it may even be hitting below the intellect, but you must admit, the Catholics are keeping it interesting.

And here at Patheos, this imperative cultural, spiritual and religious discussion is about to get a lot more interesting.

But more on that, tomorrow.

UPDATE: A good piece by Bishops James D. Conley, who writes of attending a Theology on Tap featuring Eve Tushnet, in Denver.

There are, of course, many people—Catholic and non-Catholic—who are attracted to members of the same sex; the numbers are not negligible. Like Eve, there are many other Catholics with same-sex attraction who are earnestly committed to living in conformity with the Gospel—which can mean a life of unique difficulty.

Few Catholics are able to speak about an issue so personal as reconciling sexual identity with faith. But Eve did so artfully—she spoke clearly, honestly and with the kind of vulnerability that should be commonplace in a Christian community. She offered a genuine insight into the challenges that chaste, faithful, same-sex attracted Catholics face—and those challenges are not insignificant. Eve spoke about sublimating her sexual desires for women into expressions of love that are in harmony with Church teaching. She has tried to understand the Church’s teaching on same-sex attraction—that engaging in homosexual acts is outside of God’s plan for sexuality. Eve was clear that same-sex-attracted Catholics face challenges that single laypeople or clerics do not face in living chastely. All of us should be sensitive to that.

But Eve also offered insights into the virtue of chastity that are profoundly meaningful for all Catholics. She offered three key practices essential to living a life of chastity: developing authentic friendships, a dedication to hospitality and service, and a real commitment to an active prayer life.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.com

A fantasy [that people have, of possessing] property takes no account of the fact that, for the great majority of mankind, life is a struggle. On those grounds I would see this idea of choosing one’s own path in life as a selfish attitude and as a waste of one’s vocation. Anyone who thinks he already has it all, so that he can take what he wants and center everything on himself is depriving himself of giving what he otherwise could.

Man is not there to make himself, but to respond to demands made upon him. We all stand in a great arena of history and are dependent upon each other. A man ought not, therefore, just try to figure out what he would like, but to ask what he can do, and how he can help. Then he will see that fulfillment does not lie in comfort, ease and following one’s inclinations, but precisely in allowing demands to be made upon one, in taking the harder path. Everything else turns out somehow boring, anyway. Only the man who “risks the fire”, who recognizes a calling within himself, a vocation, and ideal he must satisfy, who takes on real responsibility, will find fulfillment. It is not in taking, not on the path of comfort that we become rich, but only in giving.
— then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, God and the World page 258

One of the reasons I have always liked Katrina Fernandez is that she has the soul of an artist and the sharp-elbowed honesty of one who has spent some time sketching among the longshoremen: she is both elevated and earthy in her perspective. In this, she reminds me a little of Heather King, whom I have referred to as “a mystic with a bit of a mouth”

Some of that, I’ve always thought, suggested the self-bandaging of a person who had survived serious wounding and found a way to cope. I know a little about that. Today, Katrina peels back some of the gauze, in the brave hopes that she can help heal someone else’s deep wound or — better yet — prevent some wounds from every happening.

There is no consolation to be had for the mother that loses a child. She will grieve in her heart for the rest of her life. Abortion; however, not only robs a child of it’s life and a mother of it’s child, it also robs the mother of her grieving. She is not allowed to grieve because she cannot publicly claim the title Mother.

Abortion advocates will never admit a post-abortive woman is a Mother because to admit that would acknowledge the existence that there was once a child. Not a clump of cells, but a very real living child. When girls begin menstruating they are not called mothers to a clump of cells, yet so many people really believe an abortion is just like having a heavy period or passing a large menstrual clot. This was how it was described to me when I found myself in their clinic fifteen years ago. Two years later when I returned to have a second abortion the lie had not changed.

Read the whole piece. Bravo, Katrina! You have, make no doubt, helped many women today!

There is such a wideness in God’s mercy; praise Him.

This is an article, I am sure, that will be of interest to Bruce Spiingsteen, whose daughter demonstrates her own equestrian skills every summer in the Hamptons.

We still do not know much about Barack Obama’s past, or his wife’s — we know only what they want us to, and the incurious media remains…incurious — but we know about Mitt Romney’s misguided hijinks from 50 years ago, his church’s misbegotten “militia” from 150 years ago, and now Ann Romney — who by the way has “never worked a day in her life” — gets an examination of past litigation (from which she was eventually dropped) examined, with a lengthy look at her love of equestrian dressage.

Really, this is a nothingburger of a story, but the examination of past litigation was really just an excuse for the paper to deliver a subliminal message: Oooooo…this wealthy person has a “pricey” hobby, while you’re eating a bologna sandwich and realizing you can’t even afford a “staycation.”

You know what else is a really “pricey” hobby?

Ted Kennedy, sailing the New England coast, his view of Nantucket unobstructed by ocean wind farms

John Kerry’s sailing yacht

Someone really needs to tell the press — and the Democrats they serve — that every time they want to play class-warfare by illustrating the offensiveness of the rich and “pricey” lifestyle of Mitt Romney, they will have to deal with illustrations of rich Kennedys on “pricey” sailboats; rich John Kerry’s “pricey” sailboats; rich Nancy Pelosi boarding a “pricey” private jet; rich Charlie Rangel napping at his “pricey” Costa Rican villa; rich Jon Corzine — somehow not in jail or even under investigation — hanging at his “pricey” summer house by the water, not far from rich Katie Couric’s “pricey” new digs; rich Michelle Obama vacationing somewhere exclusive and “pricey” and elite.

Really, the class warfare thing is very ill-considered, small-spirited and ultimately self-defeating. Most people do not begrudge the rich their “pricey” playthings, and many, many of the people seeking to sow these seeds of resentment are themselves the rich men and women of the media (who were not always considered the social equals of the elites, by the way) living lives quite out-of-touch with the lives most of us lead. When very rich people sneer at other very rich people — who just happen to belong to a different tribe — for the offense of being rich, it’s just a weird and self-indicting cognitive dissonance.

Wouldn’t it be better if we talked about creating jobs so more people can pursue their own potentialities and find their own pleasant hobbies?

John Nolte angrily notes:

The Los Angeles Times refuses to disclose the contents of a video tape in its possession that reportedly shows Barack Obama lavishing praise on his friend Rashid Khalidi, a close associate of Palestinian terrorist Yasser Arafat, at a 2003 Chicago dinner party sponsored by the Arab American Action Network and attended by Bill Ayers. The Times does, however, have all kinds of time to vet Ann Romney, going so far as to dig into a lawsuit she was part of involving a horse . . . At over the 1300 words — which is 1300 more than The Times has given the explosive allegation that the Obama campaign bribed Reverend Wright in 2008 — the piece purports to be a profile of a woman suffering from MS who finds what the headline calls, the “pricey private world” of dressage, therapeutic. But the language of the article is pure sneering smear and an obvious attempt to aid and abet the Obama campaign’s crusade to define the Romneys as out of touch elitists who can’t possibly understand the problems of the average American — you know, like a community organizer turned failed president can.

Silly Nolte; doesn’t he know that the only way to get the press to do their jobs is to put Republicans in office?

At 11 a.m. Eastern time today, 43 Catholic dioceses and organizations — including Our Sunday Visitor and the University of Notre Dame — filed religious liberty lawsuits against the federal government in a dozen different jurisdictions around the country.

At issue are regulations that require Catholic organizations, employers and insurers to provide or facilitate abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception — in violation of their consciences.

Equally troubling is the extreme narrowness of the government’s new test for determining which religious organizations are exempt from this mandate — which would appear to exclude Catholic schools, health care facilities, charities and others like Our Sunday Visitor.

Their strong editorial:

It seems to us hardly a coincidence that this suit is taking place in our centennial year. Founded 100 years ago by then-Father John Noll, Our Sunday Visitor from its beginning sought to inform Catholics about the issues of the day, form them in the Faith, and defend that Faith from attack. It was Father John Noll who stood up to those who attacked Catholic immigrants as un-American and seditious. It was Father John Noll who faced down false preachers who spread slanders about the Church. It was Father John Noll who resisted the power of the Ku Klux Klan when it was such a powerful political force. And it is in his courageous spirit that we invoke as we engage in this great struggle today.

We know that many Americans — and even many Catholics — are confused about this debate. Politicians and elements of the news media have sought to make it a war against women or contraception, and they have portrayed the Church as seeking to impose its values on others or as being covertly political.

We also acknowledge that many Catholics do not understand the reasons for the Church’s moral opposition to contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs. This lack of understanding points to a significant catechetical need that the Church should address internally.

We reiterate, however, that this is not about the legality of such practices in society, nor is it about how many Catholics understand the Church’s position. It is about the Church’s right to practice what it preaches.

You can find a pdf of the filing, and more, here

CNS report here

UPDATE: Over at the USCCB, Cardinal Dolan applauds

Bad Catholic: has fun with it

YIM Catholic has comments on the lawsuit from the President of Univ. of Notre Dame

Wow: Ed Morrissy has a very fast and very good roundup of reactions and related stories! Well done, Ed! He notes we didn’t go looking for this battle, and:

The institutions filing lawsuits don’t just comprise a few ultraconservative institutions, either. The University of Notre Dame hosted a speech by President Barack Obama in 2009, but today insists that Obama and his administration are attacking religious freedom in their complaint

MORE…

At dotcommonweal Grant Gallicho doesn’t understand why some schools and diocese who have been (or, will be — it’s promised!) “accommodated” and are thus “exempt” are participating in this lawsuit. Me, I think its because they understand that, “exempt” or not, “accommodated” or not, the government is fundamentally overstepping its bounds with this mandate which, as noted in the filing, contains no limiting principle to the government’s interference with religious freedom if the mandate stands.

That matters. A whole lot.

A breakdown of who is filing what, and where

Kathryn Lopez is particularly delighted with Notre Dame’s inclusion in action.

The repaint on this Holly Golightly doll is most impressive to me — it went from a standard-looking doll’s face to a clear and beautiful representation of Audrey Hepburn. Arwen is pretty remarkable, too — but they’re all really terrific. What a gift; what a fun way to make a living! Check it out!