Chewing Guam: How An Archbishop Terrorizes The Gay Community - Then Spits Out An Apology!

Poor Guam. During most of WWII, it was brutally occupied by the Japanese. After WWII it was derisively called "The parking lot of the Pacific. It's natural beauty has been glossed over in favor of jokes like "chewing Guam." It's a frustrated piece of America's tiny strongholds in the Pacific. It is the furthest American outpost (6500 miles from the west coast). It has no voting power in the U.S. legislature. It has only 175,000 people. And it's GDP is based on tourism.

Now it's only slightly more notable because its Roman Catholic Archbishop, Anthony Sablan Apuron, wrote a "pastoral letter" to the Catholics of Guam telling them that Western Civilization was going to crumble because of gay marriage and that if Bill 185 passed (accepting all civil unions equally, but not defining marriage as between a man and a woman) Guam would be steeped in debauchery and crime in no time. It's the type of letter cobbled together with faulty reasoning that you expect a Christofascist to write. In fact, it's almost text book Christofascist.

But this passage rankled:

"Islamic fundamentalists clearly understand the damage that homosexual behavior inflicts on a culture. This is why they repress such behavior by death...It may be brutal at times, but any culture that is able to produce wave after wave of suicide bombers...is a culture that at least knows how to value self sacrifice."

Read the entire annotated text HERE in another post.

Within 24 hours, the letter created a firestorm of reactions from as far away as New York and Washington to Andrew Sullivan's column. The archbishop cobbled together one of the most amazingly disingenuous responses every written:

"I (want) to make it clear that persons with same-sex attraction were not the target of my pastoral letter, nor was it meant to condemn anyone in any way. If I have hurt anyone, please forgive me."

That requires a response of a large, no, MASSIVE WTF!!??

The letter is such a damning polemic against to homosexuality that anyone taking it seriously would be prompted to bash or kill the first gay they see (or think they see) so that they could get rid of something impeding God's plan for the human race.

From The Sheffield Forum (UK)

It's also rather telling that whilst he might step back from endorsing suicide bombing as a means of furthering the Vatican's dark age social agenda he doesn't distance himself from Fundamentalists executing homosexuals.

I can see this putting those on the board of the far right persuasion in something of a quandary as whilst this guy might be speaking with admiration of Islamic Fundamentalists on the other he really really hates gays...

And from the blog StarDestroyer.net:

The archbishop of Guam has a major case of fatwa envy.

This man should be called out, replaced, and suffer the consequences of a disgraced prelate. But Pope Benedict will probably show support in a less public way: beckon him to Rome and have him assume a Vatican post. The irony in that will be that Benedict will act in a way to a homophibic Archbishop the way his dioceses have dealt with pedophile priests: smile and sweep them under the rug by shipping them off to another diocese.

Just a thought.