[Mrs. Don-o]

A (fellow Catholic) friend was troubled that we were demanding from "gays" what we demand from no one else: that they live a life of loneliness and frustration. Thinking about it, I realized he was making the assumption that for the rest of us, heteros, life is just a sexual wonderland with no sacrifice, or not that much sacrifice.

I think the God-honest truth is that almost all of us, for part of our lives at least, have to live a level of sexual continence which is more difficult than we were bargaining for.

You are living a difficult sexual continence when you are young and full of fire, but unmarried;

or when, after years of careful discernment, you have taken a vow of celibacy and BAM! Mr. or Ms. Made-for-You glides smilingly into your life;

and again when you are married but because of geographic distance or chronic illness or disability, your spouse is long absent from your embrace;

and again if you have a wrecked marriage in your background, civilly divorced but canonically still valid;

or when your spouse emotionally "unfriends" but an old acquaintance is suddenly sending out vibes of friend-friend-friend and like-like-like.

What I'm saying is that everybody, no matter what their "orientation," has to learn to live chastity with an uneasy grace, not infrequently through long seasons of loneliness and struggle.

There's no room for "triumphalism" here by "straights"; neither is there room for "pride" by "gays". What Christ teaches us through His Law is right, because it is based on the truth about our human nature, and on our own real flourishing in this life and in the next.

But living it is not easy for anyone. Living it requires ardent prayers for each one of us, by the whole Communion of Saints .

[xzins]

I am convinced that the sex drive is very powerful still in the married. Therefore, they say no all the time to sex.

However, and this is a huge difference with the gays, Since natural sex is potentially procreative that means it is following the design made by God, The Great Designer.

Homosexual sex, on the other hand, is potentially deadly, and that means it is contrary to design and unnatural.

Homosexuals, both male and female, have much shorter lifespans than do heterosexuals, with males by a couple decades... living lives full of disease: biological and psychological.

So, we who care about them are the ones who tell them to change their behavior via grace & control.