Celebrity priest Fr. James Martin, SJ, uncritically shared a column Thursday that referred to a proposed law in Idaho as a bill “to criminalize providing health care for transgender minors.” The legislation in question would outlaw female genital mutilation, puberty blockers, and other “gender transition” procedures on children.
“Bill to criminalize providing health care for transgender minors clears Idaho House,” tweeted Fr. Martin, quoting a writeup from the Idaho Statesman.
“Shameless lying,” said CatholicVote President Brian Burch:
The bill doesn’t “criminalize providing health care.” He selectively doesn’t quote: “…outlaws female genital mutilation … would make it a felony to provide minors with puberty blockers, which stop or delay puberty, hormones or transition-related surgeries.”
Martin similarly tweeted out opposition to law enforcement officials in Texas last month when they took a stand against child abuse in the form of sex change procedures.
“State legislatures … have been pursuing bills that have the effect of threatening the health and well-being of transgender children and adolescents and criminalizing the care provided to them by pediatricians and other specialists,” tweeted Fr. Martin in reply to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
That tweet, too, was a quotation – in this case from the Texas Pediatric Association, a medical group that promotes “transgender” treatments for minors. Quoting the group again, Fr. Martin also tweeted: “[P]roviding gender affirming care to transgender children and adolescents unequivocally does not constitute child abuse.”
When confronted in February about defending the administration of puberty blockers to minors – a practice that can permanently sterilize and otherwise harm children’s sexual development – Fr. Martin claimed he was only quoting others, and not endorsing their position.
Burch, however, does not believe that defense has merit. “The bill doesn’t criminalize healthcare,” Burch said of the Idaho bill Fr. Martin tweeted about this week. “It criminalizes puberty blockers and sex change surgery on children.”
“And sorry, Father, but ‘I’m only tweeting the news, not taking a position’ isn’t fooling anyone,” Burch added….
The above comes from a March 10 posting on CatholicVote.org.
The Church would be better off without Fr. Martin doing what he’s doing. He’s a force of evil. But he’s a bellwether: anybody who supports him or endorses him, as has Bishop Robert Barron, should be considered suspect.
Kevin, I fear you are right. Fr. Martin is very popular now with some good writings, but even rat poison is 98% good corn meal, and these tweets are pure poison. To me he is symptomatic of the corruption in the Jesuits at this time.
Why don’t we leave medicine to medical professionals. If they say a treatment isn’t child abuse, why not listen to them?. If a woman with breast cancer has a doctor recommended mastectomy, do we call that mutilation? Do we get all up in arms and say oh but the Catholic Church is against mutilation? No we don’t. We call it medicine.
Your mind is so far gone. You drink the liberal Kool-Aid down to the last drop and ask for more.
You have more fellow crazies than you do fellow Catholics.
YFC, I could not pass this one up.
Plenty of medical professionals (without a financial interest in the sex reassignment industry) that say it is abusive. It isn’t the expert that is talking, is it? It’s the message you want to promote.
Muddy reasoning and false comparisons are exactly how irreversible damage to children occur (please at least give this a fair look:https://www.amazon.com/Irreversible-Damage-Transgender-Seducing-Daughters/dp/1684510317).
To compare a woman with breast cancer to a young girl at war with her body is an incoherent comparison (and offensive to women who bravely battle breast cancer.)
My question to Fr. Martin is why does he have such hatred toward adolescent girls (more that twice girls than boys have gender dysphoria) and why won’t he condemn sexual grooming of adolescents by transgender activists in public schools?
Wrong. Comparing genital mutilation to breast cancer is just wrong logically
Your faith in the medical establishment does you no credit. Remember ads of doctors recommending cigarettes for health. Or Google thalidomide babies. Or wrong way Fauci
You can’t blindly follow experts.
Who said anything about genital mutliation? What are you even talking about?
The fact that you don’t recognize the difference speaks volumes about you. And not good volumes either.
The article said that it was outlawed by the bill. Second sentence.
YFC, I would bet 100 to 1 that you are considerably brighter than the “questions” your post at noon on 11 March would suggest. You know that the comparisons you make are hilariously inapt. You post them to provoke—and to advance your woke homosexual and gender-modification preferences.
I agree that “we [should] leave medicine to medical professionals”—when only medical expertise is needed to answer the questions raised. But many medical procedures are inextricably bound to moral and legal decision-making in which “medical professionals” have no expertise. Can you seriously suggest, for instance, that what constitutes child abuse can be defined solely by medical opinion alone? Society has already decided against you: not just medicine but law defines child abuse.
And consider this. You oppose purely elective abortion; i.e., neither the mother’s physical nor mental health is involved. Our current President and cronies insist that such elective abortions are “women’s health care”. Many “medical professionals” fully agree. Do you hold that these types of abortion should be allowed across-the-board without regard to ethical and moral considerations because “medical professionals” have said so.
You’ve become a “one note johnny”. While calling yourself a Catholic, you oppose Church teaching that homo-erotic actions are always objectively mortally sinful; and you advance woke gender fluidity notions which the Church opposes. Try to widen your horizons and see yourself as a person rather than a homosexual.
YFC I do better when I don’t ask questions that put words in my mouth, especially when the words have nothing to do with the conversation. How about that? See, I did better!
“Why don’t we leave medicine to medical professionals.” Sorry YFC, but medical professionals have in many instances left science to become highly politicized. If you have any respect for the Natural/Moral Law, upon which Catholic ethics is based, discern which procedures follow, and which violate, God’s laws. Then you would not bring up inapplicable examples such as mastectomies.
Sorry. Mastectomies happen and they mutilate a woman’s breast. And for good reason: to save her life . It’s quite horrifying for most in that situation but they choose life.
You can’t even connect any dots in that argument. You say medicine has left science iin favor of politics then make a political argument about why medicine should be political. Science and medicine is not based on Catholic teaching. They are based on science.
YFC post of March 11 at 9:45 pm
YFC, your post concludes that science is based on science. Groundbreaking!
There are values in medicine and individual practitioners have their values.
I know a doctor who values diet over medicines.
He gives information to patients that most doctors don’t (or don’t until it is too late and then send you to the nutitionist or diabetes specialist.)
In the case of puberty blockers or surgery on healthy tissues, a lot of doctors have the value that it is not worth the risks.
YFC, what science are you talking about?
Bottom surgery is so complicated and the complications are many and diverse.
Everybody here is just trying to protect children from suffering.
You may feel that the distress from the incongruency between a trans child’s gender identity and their physical reality is so bad that it is worth any physical risk to lessen it.
Others do not.
this is a little trivializing but…Dolly Parton has plastic surgery with all its risks because in her words “She would rather die than look bad.”
I’ve looked bad all my life but I’ve never had plastic surgery. It is not worth the risks to me. It has at some times in my life caused me distress but I just know that you could end up worse off and it is expensive and people make fun of you etc etc etc. This is also how God made me so I accept it and offer it up.
I realize that the pain of gender dysphoria is much worse.
I think you have to care for the individual person in medicine.
I had a child on the spectrum and our neurologist warned us that there were a lot of unscrupulous practitioners who would exploit parents like us.
This bill is meant to protect children.
You contradict yourself. You say children should be dealt with as individuals but you favor a bill that treats all children the same.
I did not say that I favored the law.
FGM is illegal in the US and it is illegal to transport someone out of the country to have it done elsewhere.
I would not allow a child of mine to take puberty blockers or to have top surgery and especially not bottom surgery.
When they are 18 they can make the medical decisions that they choose.
I always know when I’ve hit a nerve and made a good out. When everyone revolts.
Cigarettes good for health? Um no I doNG remember that. I remember when the surgeon general put health warnings against cigarette smoking and I remember my father dying of emphysema and heart disease.
Nothing is that simple that only one discipline can manage it. Doctors and scientists need philosophy, theology, and God Himself to form the minds, hearts, and actions of all humanity. It is not medicine to mutilate a body when the soul and the mind are not in conformity with God’s creation. Jim Martin would serve Catholics and the church if he were to teach what God teaches in the Bible, elucidated in the catechism, so that people be free from temptation to mutilate.
Well said. Fr. Perozich. The one place these poor souls could fly to refuge for healing has been turned into a barren wasteland by the unwise tweets of Fr. Martin.
Martin maintains his high profile position at the Vatican, yet Bishop Fernández Torres gets canned for speaking the truth, in accordance with Catholic teaching, the Scriptures, human history and natural law.
Is this an example of White privilege?
Notice that White is excluded from the rainbow.
Pray for Rev. Martin and his highly complex psychological state, which he says his superiors told him not to disclose. (Otherwise, he’d want to be totally transparent with his audience.)
Martin does not have a position at the Vatican.
no position, “Apr 12, 2017 — On April 12, Pope Francis appointed James Martin, S.J., America’s editor at large, as a consultor to the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communications,” according to America magazine, the Jesuit’s magazine.
Are those Jesuits bending the truth again?
Like gender, the truth cannot actually be bent.
A consultor is not a position at the Vatican, but I see where you got it now.
Bishop Torres was removed for refusing to meet with the Pope and the other Puerto Rican bishops. It had nothing to do with his faithfulness to Church teaching. Obviously.
Would you please provide a reference to that (your stated reason for his removal)?
Thank you.
Since when is a bishop required to meet with other bishops of his nation or bishops’ conference? (It’s actually not required anywhere.)
This is the best article I’ve seen on the situation.
“I was informed that I had committed no crime but that I supposedly ‘had not been obedient to the pope nor had I been in sufficient communion with my brother bishops of Puerto Rico.’
https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/250617/catholic-bishop-in-puerto-rico-says-his-removal-by-pope-francis-is-totally-unjust
I read the same article. It doesn’t say he refused to meet with other Puerto Rican bishops. And, besides, he is not obligated to meet with them. What is not being “in sufficient communion with” other bishops of Puerto Rico? Not golfing or going dining and drinking with them? Has anyone seen anything about “sufficient communion” in the Scriptures, Tradition or Canon Law?
This situation with this bishop doesn’t pass the smell test.
Why the double-standard (in contrast with Rev. Martin)?
Please try harder to understand the Church.
You guys crack me up. You all say I’m wrong logically without even proffering a logical answer in response. Did you actually take a course in logic or critical thinking? I’m guessing not.
And Joe Biden, Kamala and Jen Psaki think they are perfectly cogent as well and are flabbergasted that people don’t automatically agree with them. It’s a defect characteristic of left-wingers.
YFC, you will twist words in any way possible to drum home the LGBT pervert agenda.
YFC, you didn’t need us guys to “crack you up”. Your published views over the years prove that you’ve been “cracked up” for a long time–and accomplished that all by yourself.
There are people recommending that we follow the doctor’s recommendation and “follow the medicine”. Dr. Mengele was right?
Hmmm… that gives me the creeps.
The illogic of transgenderism is that if physical anatomy and genetics do not determine maleness or femaleness, then maleness and femaleness have no objective nor coherent meanings.
A man can never become a woman. A man can be disfigured to have more or less the appearance of a woman, but he will never be a woman any more than a Nissan can be turned into a Porsche by switching manufacturer’s logos or identifying it as a Porsche. A Nissan is one thing, and a Porsche is another; one cannot be turned into the other. Same with men and women.
A car owner who believed his Nissan was a Porsche and decorated his Nissan to appear like a Porsche and identified it as a Porsche would be wrong and everyone would laugh at him.
A man who thinks he’s a woman and takes steps to appear like a woman and identifies as a woman is similarly wrong, and everyone should pity him for his mental illness instead of enabling the fantasy by going along with it.
Fr. Martin, please stop hurting people with your advocacy of a harmful, anti-human ideology that is entirely incompatible with Catholic faith besides being incompatible with the objective truth about human biological nature.
Has anyone here actually read the bill? IT is Idaho House Bill No.675, authored by Rep. Bruce Skaug. It has two “main” parts: one is to exclude female genital mutilation as this practiced by certain Muslim and African communities, and the second part is a prohibition against starting transgender procedures and hormones for minors. That’s it. It has nothing to do with those young people who, once they reach of 18, decide on their own to pursue surgery and hormones. What is very interesting to me is that is that most physicians who treat minors for gender dysphoria counsel parents to wait until 18 as so much normal human growth is occurring. By introducing hormone therapy into a child, for example. one can effectively stunt normal growth and create a sterile person. Think about your 14 year old self. Is your 14 year old self the same as your 40 year old self? Unlikely. We change, develop, grow and mature. This bill simply allows kids to grow up normally and address their gender identity when appropriate. To say this is Texas and Idaho have it right. The question before us: When will those who espouse a revisionist understanding of human sexuality and biology be satisfied? The answer, if history serves is NEVER.
Nobody in comboxes reads anything. They just react to headlines or trigger words in comments, and they emote.
” The legislation in question would outlaw female genital mutilation, puberty blockers, and other “gender transition” procedures on children.”
I’d really like to know how Fr.Martin can, in good conscience believe that his views on this are in keeping with the Catholic Faith when the so called transgender people destroy or attempt to destroy their bodies, and especially children, which in turn often prevents procreation, among other things.
What would Jesus say?
“But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”
“Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body”
He would say that just like the church changed its teachings on capital punishment and usury, it’s time for the church to change its teachings about human sexuality. He’d be wrong, but that’s what he would say.
Of course an East Coast elite priest should insert himself into Idaho politics.
After all, what do those potato heads in fly-over country know anyway?
And, what are priests ordained for anyway?
Some Idahoans don’t even know that Mr. Potato Head was fixed and has transitioned to simply Potato Head. They like him only because he’s a skinhead. One Potato Person recently came out and identifies as a sweet Potato. Another said they were bok choy.
I-D-A-H-O, Idaho, Idaho, go, go, go!
I am certain that I am not “Your Fellow Catholic” and that I am not in favor of the pseudo sciences like Eugenics, Alchemy nor Gender by Imagination.
When I was a boy I was alternately Davy Crockett and Superman. I “identified” as both. Now, if I were to have sought out a bear to “wrastle” with a Bowie Knife or launched myself from a tall building with a red cape I would have been hospitalized or put in a box and buried.
Now, it seems, even some “Catholics” would support my very immature and irrational decisions. Of course my family would have none of that.
A few years ago a young man came to me and told me that he could cause any airliner to crash. I live near the flight pattern about 20 miles east of LAX Airport. I took him into our parking lot and asked him to just make one of the planes do a little dip, so I could see his power. He made excuses and told me that his psychologist had told him it was OK and good to think that way. I didn’t believe him. I told him again to show me how he could do what he claimed. Again he demurred. We spent about 15 minutes outside and finally I said: “Let’s face reality. You can’t do it, and I’m glad you can’t. You should be glad too!” He left. A few days later he came back and thanked me. He said: “You’re the only person who’s been honest with me. I still FEEL like I can do that. But now I know I can’t and it’s a relief!”
Any science that supports a lie is simply nonsense in a very nice, white sterile bag.
Can someone please cite a Gospel passage in which Jesus tells his disciples to hate LGBTQ people? I’ve been searching the scriptures and can’t find any such verse.
Oh, sheesh… here we go. Nobody hates people with gender dysphoria nor same-sex attraction.
We hate that they are trying to normalize what is abnormal.
If you do bother to open the scriptures, some of what you will find includes:
God made them male and female.
This is why a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two of them become one flesh.
Scripture supports male and female as fixed sexual natures and that one is ordered to the other for union.
You will find nothing to support LGBTQWERTY ideology.
who ever claimed that there was such a Gospel passage? you are good at constructing straw men, though.
Why do LGBTQ people hate children so much? And in case anyone is wondering, there might be, like 8 people in Idaho that give a rip about what Fr. Martin is saying.
Can someone please cite a Gospel passage in which Jesus tells his disciples to groom distressed and vulnerable children to be at war with their bodies and minds? I’ve been searching the scriptures and can’t find any such verse…weird….
William Robert, why do you even want that?
Christ hates lies and the deception from the prince of this world, and the LGBT syndicate are his agents
So… if you believe you should be blind we should demand a doctor poke your eyes out so you can realize your delusion. Should a doctor be compelled to severe your spinal cord or amputate healthy limbs if your dysphoria tells you that is how you should be? What’s your “logikal” thought on these situations YFC?
Granny, people don’t just show up and demand these things. They are lead through years of counseling before irreversible decisions are made, to make sure that their mind and body are aligned. BTW when I was growing up people demanded that their boys be circumcised. No medical benefit. But for some, a lifetime of psychological harm. Where’s the outrage?
YFC, Google “transabled”.
YFC, that was contorted. Sophistry is that kind of logik, just magikal.
Fr. Martin’s article in America about LGBT people and the saying Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin, is a must read for all Catholics. Let’s not be selective.
He wants the entire LGBT satanic agenda accepted and made into a sacrament.
Father James Martin has been a disgusting eyesore in the Catholic Church for decades. Pope Francis should remove Father Martin immediately! The bad Father is a master of confusion and seems to be doing the work of the Father of all liars not the work of the Holy Father and the Holy Catholic Church.
God loves Father Martin and God loves you.
Father Martin has not committed a sin. You have.
You are not alone.
If you just stick to purifying yourself and not judge others like Jesus said (you know, the speck in his eye vs. the plank in yours), you can come back to this later and see more clearly.
Father Martin is a wolf in wolf’s clothing! Enough said!