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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Buttercap missed some points (sorry, I won’t break my promise), but when you thinks it’s stupid but know it’s not about “flying is unnatural, don’t use planes! te he he he” — it’s still an improvement 🙂
You won’t stop being lazy, you mean.
(humans can’t fly. The planes fly? How is this a gotcha?)
Now answer this question, from Catalpa:
You won’t, because you like to weasle around the actual points, and pretend to make others.
Also, because you’re lazy.
Twitter is not a Catholic church. Anyone, Catholic or not is free to criticize Cusick’s words. His tweets are not beyond reproach simply because he’s a priest. Catholic doctrine has fuck all to do with the legitimacy of the criticism his positions are receiving.
And yeah, stumbling block rhetoric is rape culture. Purity culture is rape culture. This is hardly a new or radical position.
@everyone except yzek:
Oh, yes please. You know what’s terrible? That in a world of so much misogyny David created a place of comfort. The horror of knowing that someone, somewhere is comfortable, that someone, somewhere logged on and for a moment felt amusement or community or strength in the face of all this misogyny, that horror must be stopped.
No comfort for Mammotheers! No comfort for feminists! It’s not enough to be subject to misogyny 23 hours per day, the world requires that we remove the tiniest scrap of solace from the lives of women.
Comfort. Must. Be. Opposed.
Ensuring that there is never a respite from misogyny: this is Yzek’s noble, catholic crusade.
So, yet another guy who talk of France without knowing the smallest thing about what happen here. That alway tick me off on a more personal level.
Now you’re misquoting. Cusick wrote about everyone IN CHURCH, which is subtly different, because it describes not a position of some external LGBT supporter which doesn’t care about Church teaching whatsoever, but an insider, who should know better. And also didn’t said “supports” tacitly or not, but “loses credibility” [as a Catholic].
With that restriction, I agree that we must equally reject all kinds of sins against human nature, no matter how “insignificant” they seem when trying to compare them to most atrocious because James 2:10 (For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.)
I consider reducing the above to “using condoms is supporting child rape” as a strawman tactic.
@Yzek
Is rape culture, yes.
If you can’t describe it mathematically, it ain’t a natural law, chum.
Also accurate. Sin, young man, is when you treat people as things, including yourself. That’s what sin is.
(Points for recognizing the quotation)
Guilty as charged: no enough willpower to reply to everyone involved.
… and a burden of proof is taken from me, what a relief!
Oh my god the fake Incel yutz is still here. Come on be entertaining troll. I’ve got 30 minutes before my older students show up and I’m bored.
Thrice-cursed comment filter keeps swallowing my comments
Anyway, long time lurker wanting to know why you lot keep taking the bait. The trolls aren’t here to be proven wrong or to be educated on feminism, they’re here to get a rise out of you. They’ll only stop trolling when you stop caring or ,better yet, ban them m. “Feeding then until they burst” doesn’t work unless you want to get angry. Then again, considering this site’s nature, that might be the point
I love love yzek’s bootlicking of the church and handwringing over sins, while committing many sins over and over that Jesus himself condemned in the strongest words.
Quite typical both for pathetic incels of his ilk, and catholic priests like the one discussed in the article.
@yzek:
But it is precisely about this. The Catholic church doesn’t declare non-flying to be intrinsic to the nature of man as created by god, but that’s exactly what the meta-ethical reasoning is. There is no effort to research what is natural. There is no effort to keep statistics on what is natural. The church will simply declare something “natural” and then ban activities and even objects that are seemingly (to them) in conflict with that nature.
The “flying is unnatural, don’t use planes” example is meant to communicate that the understanding of “nature” within natural law doctrine is primitive and denies science about what activities are normal in human populations. For instance, it is thoroughly normal for human beings to masturbate. Children aren’t generally taught to masturbate: they don’t need to be. Human children living in environments with abundant privacy (as in wealthy, urbanized countries) discover the activity for themselves and engage in it every bit as much as children of dispersed, agricultural societies and even hunter-gatherer societies.
The type of society has no bearing on whether members of a society masturbate. There could hardly be better proof that masturbation is “natural”, and yet the church denies science to claim that it is “unnatural”. How do they manage this? They resort to the trick of focussing on the “god” portion of the “nature of man as created by god” reference condition.
God doesn’t masturbate, they assert, so we shouldn’t assume that this is “natural” (despite all the evidence that it is). They could freely admit that their law isn’t natural, but is imposed by their religion. But they don’t. They attempt to legitimize, to ennoble their rules and their reasoning. So despite the insistence that this is “natural” law and not religious law, they deny nature altogether.
Do they raise children in carefully controlled environments to prevent them encountering descriptions or definitions of masturbation to see if the behavior nonetheless “naturally” or spontaneously occurs? No Freuding way.
If they’ve switched for some inexplicable reason from the nature of humans to the nature of their god, do they produce observational reports detailing how long they spent watching god waiting for signs of masturbation? No, of course not. They declare it and they’re done.
When people point out that if God was having any sex, it would have been with himself and therefore all the truly natural sex is as gay as Richard Simmons, the church references the “as created” portion to insist that it is logical to make allowances for the peculiar realities of the human condition – in this case, the fact that all the donations to the church dry up after 100 years if none of the parishioners have sex.
But this merely admits that the state of the catholic god’s being is not the yardstick of man’s nature. Yet, as we’ve seen, the actual evidence of naturally occurring behavior is also not the church’s yardstick of man’s nature.
It is literally no different from saying that man, as created by god, did not fly and could not fly, and thus flying in defiance of god’s act of creation is in defiance of natural law.
The church uses arbitrary and anti-science tactics to evade imposing any requirements that would be to the church’s disadvantage. Likewise, they use arbitrary and anti-science tactics to excuse any church traditions from scrutiny (like unnatural celibate communities) that a truly natural law would otherwise condemn.
The worst things about so-called “natural law” aren’t even the specific ethical guidelines which are terrible in some instances but not bad and even good in others. Instead what is worst about “natural law” is the meta-ethical methodology. It’s solipsistic, irrational, and inherently deceptive in the way that it encourages and endorses the constant use of an equivocation fallacy to ever justify the power and wealth of the church even when the ethical guidelines they obtain from natural law contradict the plain teachings of the church’s own husband: Jesus the Nazarene.
Natural law is both contemptuous and contemptible, and if you can’t see “flying is unnatural, therefore don’t fly” as an adequate satire of the capricious, immoral, and hypocritical acts of gaslighting that the church names “reasoning according to natural law” then the problem – much surer than any imaginary hell – is with you, not with anyone here.
It’s funny that you accuse me of misquoting Cusick when you cut my post to specifically exclude the example I provided of someone IN CHURCH condoning “sodomy”- i.e. the priests who support the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV.
He did not say that they lose credibility as a Catholic. He said that they have no authority to condemn child sexual abuse, because they failed to condemn all sodomy.
This implies that they are required to either support all sodomy (and therefore support child sexual abuse) or they must reject all sodomy (and therefore condemn anyone who engages in non-procreative sex).
Sin isn’t against human nature, buddy. It’s against God. Humans are naturally sinful, that kind of why Jesus needed to show up in the first place.
Also yutz you know that one time a bunch of married men wouldn’t stop being a horn dog for a married women in the bible and told Jesus he should make her cover up. What did Jesus do? He got them a knife and told them to cut out their own eyes if they couldn’t stop looking because they were dishonroring her and being adulterers to their wives.
How about you take a bit of Jesus teaching and cut out your eyes if you can’t refrain from looking at women and little girls at your church. I had a dude a lot like you at church when I was little. He told me my legs were giving him boners when he was a man in his 40s and I was 13.
@ObSidJag:
Love this!
What pulled me definitely out of religion is the realization that there is an entire field, with several centuries of work behind it, entirely on the interpretations of the supposed word of God.
The problem it cause to me is that it’s a concrete case where an omnipotent, omnibenevolent god would just do better than that. Because of the supposed benevolence, he actively want people to understand what he expect from them, because it’s just cruel to leave an ambiguous book and let people burn in hell for all eternity because they were confused on its meaning. And because of the omnipotence, he completely can write the bible as a clear moral manual. Even if we suppose he would find crass to write it in a magical language everybody instinctively know how to read, he also can write it in a way nobody could ever make an error while translating it.
Natural law often mean “cherry-picked from the bible (or other books)”. In some way, it *have* to be cherry picked because the corpus of work is a self-contradicting mess, but that don’t make it any less cherry-picked.
As to the claim it’s made from observation of the natural world, I would oppose that almost all of thoses laws are in direct opposition of what is actually observed. Like, we know there is a lot of homosexuality in the animal world, at least some trangenderism, and relatively few animals get into permanent couples.
Well, that’s somehow the wrong answer (from the Christian perspective).
The good answer, of course, would entail that it’s an expression of hatred for people because of their ethnicity and religion.
Well, you still didn’t answer why this particular priest gets to attack other Catholics for their views but people here can’t?
I, for one, find sex-obsessed catholics like Cusick a bane to faith who drive thousands of people away from Church.
Though it’s not like he’s an exception when looking at the clergy.
Wait hol up.
This site never billed itself as a catholic blog that only professes catholic doctrine. How is it bigotry when you came here to be offended at the existence of dissenting views?
Nah, that would be too easy. So let me make a statement.
Purity culture and people who use the stumbling block rhetoric are absolutely part of rape culture, but there really isn’t a basis for this in Christian / Catholic doctrine, only in patriarchal entitlement.
As far as rape is concerned, the victim can never be a “stumbling block” because no one goes around and tries to incite people to rape them. That’s wholly on the rapists’ part.
Truly you are a low effort troll.
I’d urge you to owe your hatred, scorn and pride instead of hiding behind religion and other Catholics, like so many priests are doing.
Better yet, reconsider your ways.
“I didn’t expect you”
*Raises a hand in the back of the room.*
I’m ok with criticizing the church-as-a-whole.
I’ve very familiar with Catholic doctrine. That’s why I’m an atheist.
@yzek:
Let me TL:DR you. You believe stuff that is not compelling to people who don’t also believe it. The only “authority” your beliefs have is that which is created by the beliefs. You can point out that the bible says X all you like. I think the bible is hateful bunk. You can say that hateful things the priest said are supported by the bible.
All you’re saying is that what the hateful priest posted is in line with hateful bunk.
Granted, you are also coming out as someone who also believes and supports hatefulness. I have to give you credit for that.
Do you not see the difference between these two statements?
(1) Women are required to cover their shoulders, legs, cleavage, and (in the past) hair. This is required because we require it, as per our dress code.
(2) Women are required to cover their shoulders, legs, cleavage, and (in the past) hair because existing where men can see them makes men incapable of controlling their urges.
So let’s get a poll going. Is yzek a new troll, or an old favorite in a new chasuble?
I’m not quite ready to vote seagulls yet, but…
Double post, never mind.
Is it cheating if I recognize it only because someone in the comments was referencing this quote a few posts back? 🙂
(I did read the book very long ago)
Yzek’s cheery comment on how David is the only one who can ban him reminds me of that one troll we had, the one who kept saying that the community couldn’t make statements about the kinds of behavior are acceptable here, because David is the one who makes the rules. What was his name again? I think it was some generic white dude name, like Graham or something.