As part of my regular environmental scan I came across this. It showed up in my Google alert for Hare Krishna. This is an excerpt from an interview with Patricia Dugan, a family practice lawyer in Philadelphia, USA. It is interesting because it demonstrates some of the currents of thinking at the moment. A preacher has to know their field of action. I have added my italics, and some comments at the end.

“There are a lot of gay priests. Is it significant? No,” Dugan said. “The same numbers that are proportional in the real world is what you’re going to get in the priesthood. This is not an issue of gay or straight. As a lawyer, there’s a rule: if you’re going to be a priest you’ve got to be celibate. Is it a good rule? I don’t think so. I think priests should be able to get into real relationships and I think before somebody gets ordained they should have to spend a year paying a mortgage.

“I think celibate means that you’re going to live a celibate existence in your life. Whether you’re bi, gay, straight, it doesn’t matter�the issue is celibacy, not inclination, in my book. I think as long as you have some good priests who are gay and celibate (we both mention 9/11 hero Father Michael Judge), I think you are not going to see a ban on gay priests.”

There are people in the Vatican who are gay, she says. “They didn’t get there because they are gay or because they are straight, they didn’t get there for any other reason but that they are good priests and part of the best and the brightest. They are there because they earned it. As long as those people are there, there will be no exclusion. You can’t exclude lay people� women� gays� I mean who’s left? Jesus didn’t exclude anybody.”

I think this is pretty typical of how people will see things. As I mentioned in an earlier piece, increasingly villification and discrimination against gays will be considered like discriminating against women or black people. Just not the done thing.

See the whole article here: The WeeklyPress@Philly1.Com