It's Time to Block Charles C. Thompson From Using the Bathroom Until His Body Explodes From Being Filled With Pee

I've reviewed our options and I think this is the best one.

A pandemic is raging through our country, reflecting a catastrophic failure of our government to respond to a crisis. Demonstrations against police brutality continue to grow, as activists urge us to reimagine a society that is not built on violent enforcement. The American economy is collapsing under staggering unemployment and a looming housing crisis as rents come due in a few days. Fortunately, the moral witness of His Excellence Archbishop Charles C. Thompson of Indianapolis has risen to meet the moment and declared: we’re not doing enough to hurt trans children.

Thompson, who is consistently in my ever-reshuffling list of the Five Worst American Bishops (along with Dolan, Paprocki, Strickland, and Tobin not the Tobin in New Jersey the one in Rhode Island), and who made some news last year for firing a gay teacher in his archdiocese and then unsuccessfully attempting to fire another teacher who didn’t work in his archdiocese, is, unfortunately, at it again. As NCR reported this week, he’s put out a new policy for transgender students in the arch, which boils down to “they’re not allowed here, and if they come here, we need to make them as miserable as possible”. Students whose gender identities do not conform to their biological sex at birth are subject to expulsion or denial of admission. Students can only be referred to with pronouns, and only use bathrooms, locker rooms, etc., corresponding to their biological sex; I suppose the go-to groaner joke would be, “do you have priests that are going to check everyone’s genitals during registration”, but thankfully this blog is far too highbrow to go there. Additionally, and perhaps most worryingly, the policy includes this:

Should a young person "experience dissonance between their biological sex and the roles and norms advocated by society," the new archdiocesan policy recommends that they, along with their parents, bring the issue to the attention of a pastor and trained professionals "who might best assist them in clarifying and defining issues of self (and sexual) identity in accord with Catholic Church teaching."

Telling teens struggling with difficult questions of sexual identity to go with their parents to a pastor if they’re not meeting “the roles and norms advocated by society” has not historically been a good sign that an insitution is going to generally be Christlike. In fact, it sounds an awful lot like a back door into widely discredited and very harmful conversion therapy, and specifically Double Secret Conversion Therapy, since the policy also includes the passage, in all caps, “THIS POLICY IS NOT TO BE INCLUDED IN FACULTY/STAFF OR PARENT/STUDENT HANDBOOKS”. So, Archbishop Thompson is putting together a policy which, best-case, is very discriminatory (and in violation of current Title IX case law, although presumably this would be protected under some bullshit RFRA statute), and worst-case, is going to hurt people, vulnerable young people, very badly, and he doesn’t want anyone to know about it. I’m starting to think that perhaps this man is not really cut out for being one of the direct successors of the Apostles.

As reported in the Indianapolis Star, LGBTQ support groups, including GLAAD, have already condemned the policy, but there’s plenty to critique just as a Catholic. Catholic morality - not Catholic Social Teaching that conservative assholes will dismiss as “not really Catholic”, but all of Catholic morality - begins with acknowledging the dignity of the person in front of you, with acknowledging that even if you do not fully understand that person, you acknowledge that they are made in the image and likeness of God, that they are loved infinitely by the creator of the universe, just as you are. When you don’t do that, when you question or refuse it, you open the door to prejudice and discrimination, you enable the students and parents at your schools to start saying hateful things knowing that they have the tacit approval of their bishop. I’ve read a lot of assholes writing about this - Heilman and Ahmari and Thomas and Tobin and Voris - and refusing to acknowledge the dignity of the person in front of you leads to the same place for all of them, which is brittle awful hatred (as well as terrible sentence structure). Thompson is worse then all of them, because he has this brittle awful hatred as well as the power to turn it into archdiocesan policy, policy that is weaponized against one of the most vulnerable groups in society today, one that has horrifyingly high suicide rates among youth, one where the murder victims are stacking up to the point where the American Medical Association is ready to declare it an epidemic. They are among the first people we should be rushing to serve pastorally. But instead, the USCCB wrote in 2019, in opposition to federal civil rights legislation (sure of course):

“LGBT” people are not subject to systemic discrimination on the scale that has historically warranted the creation of a new federal policy, such as was necessary when the Civil Rights Act was passed. Widespread patterns of segregation or denial of basic goods, services, or opportunities to people who identify as “LGBT”are not evident. On the contrary, “LGBT” people today are often held in high regard in the market, as well as the academy, local governments, and media. Some studies suggest that people who identify as homosexual earn higher incomes than the national average.

I’m not sure what the fuck this is, or why the bishops felt it necessary to put quotes around LGBT so it looked like they were saying it “sarcastically”. Plus, as NCR pointed out in a separate piece, some of the studies footnoted in that passage are widely discredited, so they can’t even do their homework right (and they want to write school policies…). But, more importantly, being queer or trans isn’t fucking trendy or fake. Not when the government is working its ass off to take away their rights and their health care, not when they’re dying or taking their own lives at alarming rates.

Thompson shouldn’t be a bishop, but we (the laity) have no way to remove him from the episcopate, although there’s been some good responses from Catholic activists in Indianapolis. I have taken it upon myself to review our other options. I don’t believe that violence is an acceptable response in these circumstances, but I would like some sort of grotesque Dante-esque punishment for the archbishop for working so hard to strip Catholics in his archdiocese of their dignity. So, I’ve come up with what I believe is a decent, and borderline poetic, compromise: we must do whatever it takes to block Archbishop Thompson from getting to a restroom. We must board up the one in his office, we must station guards at the restrooms at every school he could visit, business owners should refuse to let him in. If he thinks bathrooms are a terrifying front in the gender wars, one where he has to personally set a secret policy on who can use which bathroom, he should avoid them at all costs. And when his body explodes from being too filled with pee, I’ll have a fleeting moment of happiness before we have to get back to the fight to make sure the Catholic church is treating dignified human beings like dignified human beings.