Editorials

...But he was uncharacteristically overconfident in that assessment...

...For the moment, then, we restrict ourselves to a comment only, and an indirect one at that...

...it was henceforth labeled a "sexual disorientation disturbance" requiring treatment only when the concerned individual was actually disturbed by it...

...The Russians can be skillful dissimulators...

...Alice Walker's fiction suggests the answer is sometimes yes...

...But that is also why individuals aware of the suffering inflicted on homosexuals by social and religious prohibitions may nonetheless hesitate to endorse the full panoply of changes proposed by gay activists...

...The destruction of flight 007 showed the Soviet Union to be contemptuous of humane norms, but it also showed the Soviet Union to be rigid, defensive, unsteady, fallible, and fragmented in its leadership, if not even divided by Byzantine conspiracies...

...For many gay and lesbian Catholics, that question is answered affirmatively, but for many others in the church it's still a vexing one...

...So far the most popular response to the shooting down of flight 007 has been President Reagan's...

...People like Will are forced to construe some Machiavellian purpose to the Soviet deed, in his case that the essential note of the Russian regime is intimidation and "the benefits are clear enough (the benefits of intimidation, especially of Japan...

...images of promiscuity that go far beyond what homosexuals have pointed to as a real problem in their sexual world...

...Can homosexual love be a source of grace...

...What is called for cannot be provided in the space of an editorial, nor can it be provided, we regret to say, by simple reaffirmations of traditional teaching by Rome...

...There are certain assaults on human life so sudden, concentrated, and remorseless that even a world grown accustomed to daily accounts of bloodshed gasps...

...it was the fifteenth anniversary of the Warsaw Pact's descent on Czechoslovakia's brave effort at "socialism with a human face...

...Yes, there are some in the anti-nuclear movements in Europe and the U. S. who really want to believe that the Soviets are nothing more than underdogs trying to fend off a bullying U.S...

...The only real love Celie ever knows through most of the tale comes from other women, first from her sister Nettie for whom she sacrifices herself, and then, remarkably enough, through a lesbian relationship with her husband's lover, a jazz singer named Shug Avery...

...In a badly split vote, with over a third of the membership abstaining, the APA's membership confirmed the trustees' decision...

...EDITORIALS: THE LESSORS OF FLIGHT 007 ON SEPTEMBER 1, the Soviet military, in order to enforce its notions of national security, deliberately executed 269 civilian travelers on Korean Airlines flight 007...

...Like the mysterious disease AIDS itself, the origins of homosexuality remain in dispute...

...HOMOSEXUAL LOVE Homosexuality is a condition that affects roughly five percent of the total U.S...

...perhaps they,will learn something from the 007 affair and not consider it just a case of unfortunate Kremlin public relations...

...Such figures suggest it's unlikely to become the reigning social, much less a moral ideal, for us...

...ruthless pursuit of power and bumbling, counter-productive bureaucratic rigidity...

...We knew that before...

...That is what makes it so threatening, on the one hand...

...But no one has in fact been intimidated, except possibly any pilots tempted to take shortcuts across Soviet airspace or be careless in their navigation...

...For in the same year the trustees of the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders...

...That is why America's Soviet policy must be equally multi-dimensional, consisting neither of unilateral reliance on Kremlin benevolence nor of this administration's single-note quest for more armed power...

...T)hey are also bound to strive for the same ideals in their relationships...

...indeed, even some who accepted a number of the report's specific conclusions questioned its underlying assumptions and methodology...

...And it's the latter connection that's truly transforming, life-giving...

...There is much about homosexuality we simply don't know...

...We do not pretend that this insight resolves the larger questions only that progress in resolving the larger questions will not be made without this insight...

...To be more specific, is it not a case of soul and spirit being quickened through a homosexual love which embodies those virtues of care, fidelity, and sacrificial love the Bible tends to associate exclusively with heterosexual marriage...

...The media quickly became so insistent that the Russian action had undercut resistance to the MX, the Euromissiles, and Reagan's tough line in Central America, that even if that were not so at first, it soon would be...

...Such tolerance is a real gain, although it can also slide into a complacent and patronizing refusal to listen further to the voices of gay Catholics or to calls for a more thoroughgoing reconsideration of the church's official teaching, which still radically denies that theological virtues can be infused into homosexual relationships in any way parallel to the case with heterosexual bonding...

...It is true that in recent years homosexuals in the church are no longer regarded as an abhorred pariah class, and pastoral guidelines encourage confessors to be compassionate and encouraging...

...That the church should, in effect, ask moral heroism of homosexuals as a consequence of a choice they never made is one thing...

...Those victims, we know, are but a few of the thousands upon thousands of innocent lives sacrificed every month, in all corners of the globe, on the altars of national security and ideological fervor.But that terrible fact should not lessen our horror at the destruction of the Korean airplane and its passengers...

...Homosexuals," said that report, "have the same rights to love, intimacy, and relationships as heterosexuals...

...The lessons Mr...

...Opposition to Kremlin policy has been stiffened in both Japan and Europe, as any Machiavellian might have foreseen...

...But other matters raise questions large enough about society and sexuality heterosexuality far more than homosexuality that the evolutionary operation of extended discussion and reflection seems appropriate...

...And Moscow's attempt to justify itself was of a piece with the original crime...

...The reductio ad absurdum of this search fora "rational" Russian objective is the theory that the Kremlin was out to get Birchite Congressman Larry McDonald...

...Certainly Moscow's response to the world's outcry revealed harsh truths about its system...

...The shocking thing," he writes, "is how shocked people are...

...Since then there's been research, questioned for ideological bias in some quarters, which claims that homosexuals are no more prone to personality defects than heterosexuals...

...Still, the straggling parade of vague and contradictory Russian explanations displayed anything but a relentlessly efficient, united government machine...

...Can soul, real spirit, be breathed into homosexual love a love that is not procreative...

...Reagan would have us learn about the Soviet regime, however, were both more and less than the event revealed...

...As with the psychiatrists, then, opinion is divided, but the preponderant view backs heterosexual marriage as the normative context of genitality the context in which, as Georgetown's Father Richard McCormick puts it, human love has the fullest chance of thriving...

...delusions that homosexuality can simply be transformed into heterosexuality by sufficient will power...

...This is so even when common nonsense about gays is dispelled stereotypes of child molesting (which proportionately marks heterosexuals more than homosexuals), effeminacy, or "butchness...

...Perhaps recognizing, however, that the critical test of authentic Christianity lies in the justice and charity owed socially stigmatized groups, increasing numbers of American bishops have supported the work of Dignity and reasonable civil rights legislation in behalf of homosexuals with a few scandalously notable exceptions...

...And generalizations about homosexual behavior are about as hard to come by as they are for heterosexuals...

...the "natural selection'' of cold-blooded leadership and the installation of fearful, shortsighted mediocrities...

...We, too, are ail-too-willing to do that...

...Centrist and liberal criticism has been muted, partly out of relief that the administration launched no precipitous initiatives which at worst could have moved the world closer to war and at best might have provoked another demoralizing contretemps with our European allies...

...It'd kill your mammy...

...Besides immediate demands for an apology, compensation to the victims' families, and Soviet compliance with standard international aviation procedures, the president implied that the most appropriate countermeas-ures were more support for his administration's arms buildup, in particular the MX missile...

...that the church should unqualifiedly demand it strikes many as unfair...

...Where open prejudice once held sway, there's now a degree of tolerance...

...thus intimate sexual expression among homosexuals continues to be regarded as deficient, "essentially imperfect...

...This proposal also went too far for many leading moral theologians...

...never tell nobody but God...

...Is this Goethe's art of transforming truth into poetry...

...But such people are not the serious core of dissent from the Reagan hard line, nor have they ever been representative of either Western opinion or policy...

...While the military dictates that brought down flight 007 callously departed from the policies of other nations, including American forebearance toward wandering Soviet bloc airliners, enough uncertainties remain about this incident to make it a relatively blurry lens for examining the Soviet reality...

...Some injustices may be so readily recognized and repaired that immediate action is called for...

...Alice Walker's fiction rings roundly true and powerfully wise...

...Will and, despite his current measure of restraint, the president must deemphasize these non-Machiavellian, non-purposeful aspects of the Soviet "evil empire" because, ironically, their own policy of meeting intimidation with almost nothing but counter-intimidation actually depends on the Soviets being superbly rational in calculating their national interest...

...But most of us are not shocked by some sudden discovery that Moscow is willing to sacrifice innocent lives in pursuit of its interests...

...The controversy over the morality of sexual intimacy between members of the same sex is only a publicly dramatic part of the debate and uncertainty about sexual morality generally...

...In 1973, Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death could confidently describe the social science view of homosexuality as a "problem of ineptness, vague identity, passivity, helplessness all in all, an inability to take a powerful stance toward life...

...Democratic nations including our own sometimes prize national security higher than innocent life, but public review provides a check sometimes, alas, more potential than effective on gross abuses...

...Moscow, of course, outdid the Lebanese in not only avoiding responsibility but transforming an atrocity into a patriotic duty...

...For weeks after an event like this perhaps the last one was the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps by Lebanese Phalangists we preoccupy ourselves with the questions how and why and what now...

...By this reasoning, procreative love is the norm...

...population, that is, some ten or more million people, or perhaps one hundred persons in an average parish of one thousand families...

...Firing on a plane intruding over highly sensitive airspace seems almost like a positively mild expression of concern for" sacred borders" when compared to sending a force of 60-100,000 to cement a Soviet puppet along the USSR's southern flank by strafing villages and burning people alive...

...Our answers to those questions should be as precise and sober as we can make them...

...The Soviet's "barbaric act," he said, revealed the true face of totalitarianism in effect, that it was the "evil empire" and the tireless purveyor of lies he had previously made it out to be...

...We did not learn, for example, that the Soviet regime was ruthless and rigid and no respecter of human life from this action over Sakhalin...

...Hawks like Mr...

...Last month not only marked the third anniversary of Solidarity's suppressed struggle...

...But generally, episcopal voices have not followed the line of the 1977 study of sexual ethics commissioned by the American Catholic Theological Society of America which sought to eliminate the double moral standard between homosexuals and heterosexuals...

...Told in the form of letters to God ("You better iiq...

...That is why a commentator like George F. Will entirely misses the central point when he argues that no one should be startled "when the Soviet regime acts in character...

...In this case they were only inept ones...

...For our part, we believe that the evil of the Soviet system is multi-dimensional, that it includes aggressiveness and defensiveness...

...And so it goes...

...Of course the furor over AIDS has led us to ponder again the subject of homosexuality, as has a recent exhortation to American bishops by the pope...

...It does no service to the dead or honor to their memory to engage in national catharsis or translate this loss into political maneuvering...

...And hence the condition for a homosexual's full participation in the church must be that of a vowed celibate's asceticism...

...The greatest shock lies in Moscow's willingness to sacrifice innocent lives in ways that are, to every appearance, not in its interests at all...

...A "sometimes" which the candid experience of Christian lay people reveals as also applying to heterosexual marriages...

...The strongest criticism of this position has come from the right, where the president is denounced for speaking loudly and carrying a small stick...

...and toa:-lost sister, it was the story of the awakening of a poor, uneducated Southern black woman, Miss Celie, who didn't know how to fight, only passively survive...

...But part of the liberal and centrist reticence has been due to the undeniable measure of truth in the president's words...

...Not only the USSR and the United States, after all, but the entire planet carries a lot of innocent passengers...

...So much did these qualities strike two of the leading arbiters of American art that last year they awarded her novel,, The Color Purple, the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book-Award...

...Witness the contrasting Israeli and Lebanese reactions to the Beirut massacre...