“I spent the summer before college reading Shakespeare and staring out the window and occasionally being a roadie for my friend’s band,” says Eve Tushnet, the celibate, gay, conservative, Catholic writer. That was all good fun, she says upon meeting in Union Station, but she was ready for more, although she knew not what. “I was hoping for something very different in college.”
It is common, this freshman urge for self-invention. The football player tries his hand at poetry; the classical violinist fiddles in a bluegrass band. But Ms. Tushnet ”” whose parents, Mark Tushnet and Elizabeth Alexander, are a well-known liberal Harvard law professor and a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, respectively ”” did not imagine that she would become a Roman Catholic, nor that 10 years after graduation, her voice, on her blog and in numerous articles, would be one of the most surprising raised against same-sex marriage.
As the hundred or so daily readers of eve-tushnet.blogspot.com, and a larger audience for her magazine writing, know by now, Ms. Tushnet can seem a paradox: fervently Catholic, proudly gay, happily celibate. She does not see herself as disordered; she does not struggle to be straight, but she insists that her religion forbids her a sex life.
“The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants,” Ms. Tushnet wrote in a 2007 essay for Commonweal. While gay sex should not be criminalized, she said, gay men and lesbians should abstain. They might instead have passionate friendships, or sublimate their urges into other pursuits. “It turns out I happen to be very good at sublimating,” she says, while acknowledging that that is a lot to ask of others.
Fascinating. I would have liked to hear more about her conversion, but I guess I’ll have to check out her blog to find out more. Coming from a very liberal family, her dad a non-observant Jew and her mom a Unitarian, it’s intriguing how she says that the truth of Christianity sort of sneaked up on her, and she was won over before she realized it.
I particularly liked the line, “[i]The sacrifices you want to make aren’t always the only sacrifices God wants.[/i]” So true.
David Handy+
Another line that might be appropriate is “If you could choose your sacrifice–it wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice.”
It is nice to read about someone who is willing to live a life of sacrifice in this hedonistic, egocentric, selfish age.
The N.Y. Times, Wow!, The N.Y. Times.
There is a deeply problematic element to the writer’s self-identification. While she may be orthodox in practice, it simply is not permissible for her to define herself as “proudly gay”. This is antithetical to the Church’s teaching. To define one’s identity by one’s sexuality is the cornerstone of “gay culture”.
What an intriguingly unpetulant article! It certainly makes me want to frequent her blog.
Her 2007 Commonweal essay remained one of the most read articles for a very long time. Hers is a perspective that Christianity, grappling nowadays w/ this issue, needs to hear. And apparently, many want to hear it. It’s neither the “gays are made that way, so celebrate it” view nor the gays-as-second-class-citizens view.
I ran across this article in the Times quite by accident. We may put her attitude in opposition to the two articles run here by the homosexual in California who pointed out that “monogamous” relationships between homosexuals are largely smoke and mirrors.
The difference is the difference between self indulgence and self discipline, between the dionysian society and the apollonian society. The Pilgrims hanged homosexuals, but they would have understood her attitude, her moral posture immediately. Larry