Houston Voice
By DYANA BAGBY
Friday, December 30, 2005
EDITORS’ NOTE: As 2005 draws to a close, many media outlets will announce their selections for person of the year. In past years, Houston Voice editors have selected a Story of the Year instead.
This year, the Story of the Year was, in our view, the extraordinary efforts of one individual to not only put a halt to the acceptance of gay people legally and within the mainstream culture, but to roll back such acceptance to an earlier, less tolerant and more discriminatory time.
Presiding over what some describe as the “strongest bully pulpit in the world,” Pope Benedict XVI, just eight months into his tenure, has unilaterally targeted gay men and lesbians as moral threats to society.
From banning gay priests to publicly lobbying against same-sex marriage rights in Spain and Italy, Pope Benedict XVI appears to be taking a swift approach to excluding gay people from equal rights across the globe. ...
In November 2002, in the midst of the church sex abuse crisis, the Vatican press office announced that the Congregation for Catholic Education was drafting guidelines for accepting candidates for the priesthood that would address the question of whether gays should be barred. However, the document reportedly had been in the works well before then.
Gay Catholics and others have criticized the Vatican for blaming gay priests for the child sex abuse scandal, which they argued had nothing to do with homosexuality.