Jesuit Scranton U. Hosts Gay Marriage Advocate and Atheist NBA Star

[Jesuit] Scranton [U.] Hosts Gay Marriage Advocate and Atheist NBA Star

blog.cardinalnewmansociety.org/2012/10/22/scranton-hosts-gay-marriage-advocate-and-atheist-nba-star/

Former professional basketball player, atheist, and gay activist John Amaechi spoke at the University of Scranton “Day of Inclusion” in front of more than 100 people last week.

The Jesuit university said it was “an effort to promote an inclusive, culturally competent, and mindful environment, free of bullying and harassment.”

But inclusiveness doesn’t seem to describe Amaechi’s feelings towards religious believers. Amaechi, a self descried atheist, said in interviews he finds the idea of an afterlife “so crazy” and that “the delusion is just ridiculous.”

In another interview, he said he doesn’t tell religious believers that they’re “complete morons,” but he admitted he “may hold that thought in my head at times.”

Amaechi, who played professional basketball, was labeled by the University as “an experienced psychologist, educator, social entrepreneur, motivational speaker and human rights activist in the US and Europe.” They didn’t mention that he has acted as a spokesperson for the pro-gay “marriage” Human Rights Campaign Coming Out Campaign, a program “designed to help gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people come out and live openly.” Amaechi has said he doesn’t like the term “gay marriage” and much prefers the term “marriage equity.”

Amaechi’s invitation to the campus was a result of collaboration between the Office of the Provost, the Scranton Inclusion Initiative, the Office of Equity and Diversity, Scranton Athletics Department and Employee Wellness Program.

Amaechi spoke to the audience about tolerance, but in previous interviews he negatively compared the Catholic Church to Penn State University’s handling of a sexual abuse crisis.

Such visible, radical transformation, organisational introspection and transparent self-critique is absolutely absent with the Catholic Church (with regard to abuse), as such PSU will be forever changed by this scandal and through continued and as I said, not yet really rolling changes, they will come through it changed for the better, with a perspective, openness and a complete intolerance for anything that even suggests a move back to the culture and climate that allowed this horror to happen.

No one, Catholic or otherwise, can make that same set of assertions about even a high-level desire for proactive, wholesale, purposeful and open transformation within the Catholic church. They are simply a more insular, less transparent organisation, who become better at protecting themselves (legally and otherwise) with every revelation and more bound and justified in their self-protection, by a sense of persecution with every allegation… they survive and become ever more capable of similar horrors in the fear that reformation (a dirty word in Catholic circles anyway) would mean they cease to be what’s most important to them… but that’s a story for another day.

So much for tolerance.