By David Futrelle
There are a lot of guys out there who not-so-secretly resent women for having bodies that get them all hot and bothered.
Warren Farrell, the intellectual grandfather of the Men’s Rights movement, famously warned men to beware of the “cleavage power” and the “miniskirt power” of young women. Incels and MGTOWs today rail against women “torturing” them by wearing skin-tight yoga pants. Hell, last week I wrote about one horny Redditor who blamed women for tempting men by showing their arms in public.
So what about in insidious threat of shoulders, which in addition to being “the laterally projecting part of the human body formed of the bones and joints with their covering tissue by which the arm is connected with the trunk” are also sometimes nice to look at?
Enter Father Kevin M. Cusick. On Sunday, the priest and former military chaplain caused a bit of a stir on Twitter after he suggested that women shouldn’t show their bare shoulders in church lest the sight of such a tempting bit of skin cause the men and boys to suddenly start feeling a bit funny in their pants.
Naturally, more than a few Twitterers took issue with Cusik’s stance. And so he doubled down, and doubled down again, launching into a full-on meltdown that lasted until this morning.
But he topped even those tweets with his final comment on the subject, in which he compared himself, and the treatment he’d gotten from critics on Twitter, to Jesus getting nailed to the cross. No, really.
As it turns out, Cusick’s not just worried about sexy lady shoulders; he’s also worried that women’s bare feet could give priests boners. Several years ago, you see, the Pope said it was ok to include women and girls in Holy Thursday foot-washing rituals. But Cusick worried that foot-washing priests might get turned on by “cute” lady feet.
That last tweet about washing men’s feet seems just a little bit ironic when one starts poking around a little more in Cusick’s Twitter history.
Because, as it turns out, shoulders and feet aren’t his main obsessions. For every tweet he’s written about the dangers of improperly exposed female flesh, there are dozens (hundreds?) of tweet about the evils of gay men and their dirty doings — both in the Catholic Church and in the world at large. (He has much less to say about lesbians.)
In Cusick’s mind, the Church doesn’t have a pedophile problem; it’s got a “homosexual problem.”
Not only is this “homosexual network” intent on sexually abusing boys; it’s also, in Cusick’s mind, “perverting” the Church’s teachings in order to promote the mortal sin of sodomy.
Apparently the only way to ward off this “homosexualist” menace is with the magic of Latin.
He’s a bit obsessed with the whole sodomy thing.
He also has some, well, interesting views on “so-called ‘trans'” folks. Here’s his reaction to a news story about a trans woman teacher.
And here’s his, well, novel theory about the nature of transness.
Needless to say, he won’t be celebrating Pride month.
But Cusick isn’t just obsessed with sex. His Twitter history is a virtual smorgasbord of unhinged takes on almost every hotbutton social issue. He thinks abortion leads to “bloodthirsty mobs on the streets.”
He regularly links to alarming “news” articles on the alleged evils of migrant Muslim “invaders,” including at least one article from rabid far-right Islamaphobe Pam Geller. His own opinions on the subject are only slightly less rabid than hers:
Needless to say, Cusick also hates feminism, especially when it involves young boys being taught that women’s suffrage was a good thing.
But the strangest thing I found in Cusick’s Twitter history? He’s apparently afraid of being enslaved — by Beto O’Rourke.
It’s a weird and more than slightly unhinged reaction to a young man standing on a car spouting vaguely lefty political platitudes. But, hey, anything to get Cusick’s mind off of sodomy, I guess.
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This is sadly not even that far right in the large Catholic universities and seminaries. The US clergy is incredibly reactionary, terrified of the gays, the trans, the womens. Everybody. I was at the main Vatican-overseen university and seminary in America, and I heard this shit every. fucking. day. There are some priests and members of the magisterium pushing for reform, acceptance, openness, awareness of science and sociology and human nature, but sadly, they’re a minority. There’s a big persecution complex amongst devout Catholics, especially young people, and they want to retreat into the Latin Mass, Catholic insular communities, and creating a weird hybrid of Evangelical-levels of display and pre-Vatican II levels of identity. I’ve studied this for a few years, and it’s a concerning trend.
This dude is saying stuff that is common in many, many devout Catholic circles. And sadly, most of it is stuff that Pope Francis echoes, even if he makes a nod to not being a total asshole occasionally. (He equated transgender folks like myself to nuclear holocaust on humanity. Super great, totes liberal. Yuppers.) There’s two Catholic communities in America — liberal-leaning cafeteria Catholics who identify with being Catholic, but are incredibly critical of the current teachings, save for social justice stuff; and these folks. And sadly, these folks have more people in the clergy, in the magisterium, and filling the pews every week.
“Sodomy, the use of the sexual faculty outside of sacramental marriage between one man and one woman, open to new life, exclusively and until death”
Longtime lurker here.
He probably intended this to include MUCH more than just gay people. This could also cover:
– all non-PIV sex between a married man and woman (“open to new life”)
– married men and women using birth control (“open to new life”)
– sex between people not married by clergy…MAYBE even between people married by anyone other than a Catholic priest (“outside of sacramental marriage” – marriage isn’t a sacrament in Protestant churches)
So probably lots more “sodomy” going on in this guy’s mind than the usual definition…thus probably why he thinks it’s “rampant” “at all levels of society.” Then again, this is pretty standard for extremist traditionalist Catholics in my experience.
Have loved the blog for years, BTW. Laughing at this stuff is so much better than descending into anxiety over it.
He seems to spend all his waking hours thinking about penii.
BREAKING: Voluntarily Celibate Man Has *OPINIONS* About Women’s Sexuality. Depth of experience in question. News at 11.
Methinks he should be reading his Bible a bit more. From Matthew 5:29:
I’m not saying that he should actually blind himself, but if Jesus approved of it then who is he to argue?
*Content warning for rape; ED; Suicide*
This is unbelievable; but of course, all too tragically true. I don’t know whether to be sad, or incandescent with rage at those responsible.
https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/04/noa-pothoven-raped-girl-17-dies-by-legal-euthanasia-in-the-netherlands
@Anonymous
Matthew 5:30 is actually one of my tattoos.
Dude talks like he grew up with Judge Claude Frollo as his role model.
Would not surprise me if this guy was part of the Make American straight again thing that is happen in Orlando on the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting.
If by “the French is being slaughtered by the invaders” he means we are mildly irritated by the transparent attempts of the US right to meddle in french politics, yeah, sure.
(though despite the money, “expertise” and media attention they lavish on our local fascists they’re doing a pretty bad job of it fortunately)
@Alan
Oh my gods. That… is thoroughly enraging on so many levels. It’s just such a complete failure of society, and I know it’s not unique to the Netherlands either – the US medical system would be happy to do the same, if it were legal.
Fuck patriarchy. So much.
But Jesus was all right with having his feet washed by a woman. Was he just too holy to get a boner from it?
I see this fellow is going for the older definition of sodomy as any “unnatural form of sexual intercourse,” as the OED has it, rather than anal sex specifically. Though I always thought that meant anything non-procreative, as opposed to “not married.”
How exactly will the Latin Mass stop us queers in our quest to destroy Catholicism again? I’m not really seeing how it would change anything.
A small, nasty inner voice is muttering “So how many children has this one raped?”
Death rattle of a dying institution, killed by it’s own hubris, corruption and arrogance. Fuck the Roman Catholic Church.
Going back to the Latin Mass will chase off a bunch of people. Which is probably the point. The congregations will probably end up being a bunch of conservative old timers who remember the era before Vatican II, and some young fanatics who wish they were born then.
Same sex marriage simulation sounds like some variation on one of the Japanese dating games, except with cute guys instead of cute girls.
The moment I saw ‘endless Vatican II style debate that […] ends up nowhere’ my brain went “Oh good lord, one of those.” (And I’m not even Catholic. Grew up Anglican/Episcopalian, or as a friend of mine put it, ‘Catholicism-lite: all the ritual, half the guilt.’)
@Rabid Rabbit:
Was thinking of that myself. There must be some sort of religion version of Dunning-Kruger, where the ones loudest about their religion also seem to understand the least about it.
Dang it, Fred Clark at Slacktivist found an animated gif of ‘Come down off the cross, we could use the wood’ being written in a cross shape some time back, and I can’t find it now. It would be just so appropriate here.
Rabid Rabbit, you’re right – the medieval church did define any non-procreative sex as sodomy:
https://going-medieval.com/2019/01/09/on-dildos-and-penance/#more-689
As far as legalized abortion goes, when he’s talking about
does he mean Operation Rescue?
@tim gueguen:
Actually, I’d be rather surprised if there weren’t yaoi dating sims…
(*risks typing ‘yaoi dating sim’ into Google*)
Yep, there are. Even was an English one called Seiyuu Danshi on Kickstarter last year, with the player character being an aspiring voice actor.
Practically every Catholic church in the world has a nearly naked man with a six pack hanging on display up front, and this guy is worried about the effect some lady’s bare shoulders is going to have on the flock?
@Michael Long
Don’t hold the funeral just yet. It hasn’t survived 2000+ years through dumb luck alone, and as long as there a few people who follow its traditions it’ll keep on going through sheer inertia. Which, incidentally, is also why it’s been so slow to change- inertia is the thing that keeps it alive most of all.
The holy trinity.
Just ran across this, “As Christianity became more widespread so did head coverings, later medieval woman covered their ears with crespines as it as said the ear was a sexual organ because it was where the Angel Gabriel whispered into Mary’s ear to let her know she was going to give birth to Jesus.” Those lascivious women and their sexy ears!
Interesting reading on a related topic: The Atlantic recently published a cover story by former priest James Carroll titled “Abolish the Priesthood“. Men like Cusick are the ones Carroll was thinking of when he wrote these lines, which sum up his argument:
I’m not dead !
Ah, but i forget you mean “white” French. My bad.
By the way, yesterday was the Aïd el-Fitr here. We are bound to have some pastries today, at work, brought by our “invading” muslim colleagues. Depending from their origins, we are going to be “assaulted” with kaʿb al ḡazāl or tcharek…
Anyway, those kind of extremist priests should be defrocked. The multiple scandals involving the Catholic church are leading to a wave of renunciations of baptism among the fidels. Those kind of priests just throw more oil on the fire, and the Vatican usual discourse does not help.
Have a nice day.