Claim by catholic Priest: “Homosexuals often commit the most physically brutal crimes that the police see.”

John Zuhlsdorf, a catholic priest who blogs over at Fr. Z’s Blog, has made the most bizarre claim I’ve ever seen.

He starts out with

Homosexuals often commit the most physically brutal crimes that the police see.

And as you might expact, that opening line by itself drew a lot of twitter attention, so much so, that he now finds he is having to backpeddle and has added the following …

UPDATE: Some people in the tweetosphere are having a spittle-flecked nutty about the sentence I wrote, above. At least I think that is why there is a spittle-flecked nutty going on. On review, I should revise it to say rather that “violent crimes committed by homosexuals are often really brutal”

What exactly does this revision mean, that perhaps there are violent crimes that are not brutal. Nope, that he was wrong, and knows he was wrong, but can’t find a meaningful way to bend the words and assert that it is not what he meant.

In essence, what he has here is an immoral anti-gay rant that exposes him as a homophobic bigot.

He goes on to outline how a “Catholic” lady who was Murdered by Gay Man ‘Died a Martyr for Her Faith’ and that the woman’s “murder was widely ignored by the media,” He reports that the woman, Mary Stachowicz, a 51-year-old mother of four children and devout Catholic, was beaten, stabbed, raped, and strangled to death by then-19-year-old Nicholas Gutierrez …. raped!! I thought he was claiming that the murderer was gay.

In fact, his key point appears to be unfair media exposure, he writes …

As the bishop said: “A Google search on the Internet for the name ‘Matthew Shepard’ at one time produced 11,900,000 results. Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old college student who was savagely beaten to death in 1998 in Wyoming. His murder has been called a hate crime because Shepard was gay[If his murder was a hate crime, was not also the murder of Mary Stachowicz?]

“A similar search on the Internet for the name ‘Mary Stachowicz’ yielded 26,800 results. In 2002, Mary Stachowicz was also brutally murdered, but the circumstances were quite different.

He also claims: …

This is where we are headed.  Mark my words.  [Another point: I think we will see an escalation of violence as the “new abnormal” takes root.]

That is his emphases there, not mine, in fact, he used not just bold, but bold red text. So what are we to make of all this, well lets see then.

Claim: “Homosexuals often commit the most physically brutal crimes that the police see.” ….his evidence for this generalization and truly daft claim? Nothing at all. This specific crime happened back in 2002, so has anything like it happened since then? Not that I’m aware of, yet in stark contrast the number of beatings, suicides and murders of gay people motivated by pure hatred stirred up by lunatics such as this rather clueless religious kook both before and since 2002 are almost countless, so much so, that it gets its own category in Wikipedia.

Claim: “I think we will see an escalation of violence as the “new abnormal” takes root” … his evidence for this? Nothing at all. “Abnormal” … really! … this from a guy who abstains from all sex thinks people who are born with an attraction for the same sex are abnormal, and yet this has been observed in every species on the planet. As for the supposed uptick in violence, Stephen Pinker wrote a book in 2011 entitled The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined arguing that violence in the world, especially the western part, has declined both in the long run and in the short, and suggests explanations why this has happened. If you read his book, you will find that he does not simply express an opinion, but offers actual statistics that demonstrate this.

Mr Zuhlsdorf may indeed think he is taking the high moral ground here, but he is in fact doing no such thing and is instead simply cranking up the homophobic rhetoric a few notches. He might indeed be striving to be a decent human being, but his religion will rather sadly not allow him to ever achieve that.

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