A Catholic high school in Charlotte, North Carolina is under fire after one of its regular guest instructors last week delivered a lecture that reportedly blamed poor parenting, single parenting, pornography and masturbation as the causes of homosexuality. Sister Jane Dominic Laurel is accused also of telling students at a mandatory school assembly at the Charlotte Catholic High School that gay people have have between 500 and 1000 sexual partners, and of portraying same-sex couples as child abusers.
QNotes, a North Carolina-based LGBT news outlet which is reporting and closely following the story published one student’s account:
“Then she started talking about how gays [sic] people are gay because they have an absent father figure, and therefore they have not received the masculinity they should have from their father,†reads one student’s account of the message. “Also a guy could be gay if he masterbates [sic] and so he thinks he is being turned on by other guys. And then she gave an example of one of her gay ‘friends’ who said he used to go to a shed with his friends and watch porn and thats why he was gay. … Then she talked about the statistic where gay men have had either over 500 or 1000 sexual partners and after that I got up and went to the bathroom because I should not have had to been subject to that extremely offensive talk.â€
Students and parents are demanding an apology from the school.
QNotes published a letter (PDF) that accuses the school’s chaplain and Sister Jane Dominic Laurel of enabling “the dissemination of the misleading, offensive, and hateful messages,” and taking advantage of their positions “to push your own prejudices and bigotry upon the Charlotte Catholic community despite this community’s deliberate efforts to avoid it when presented as an extracurricular event.”
Using outdated or false statistics to tell children and young adults that their LGBTQ friends, family members, and colleagues are the result of their parents’ missteps is damaging. Suggesting that LGBTQ members of the very audience you were addressing owe their sexual identities to pornography and masturbation is abhorrent. Presenting these false ideas to high school students not only advocates discrimination of LGBTQ students, but also tells those individuals that they are damaged or incomplete. Consider for a moment the severe and ongoing effect this type of message has on the current LGBTQ students at Charlotte Catholic. Consider the power this message has to empower bullies of these same students.
Last week’s presentation represents a betrayal of trust. Your responsibility to provide nurturing and informative education to the students of Charlotte Catholic was shrugged off. Your mission to truthfully convey the teachings of the Church—the teachings of love, compassion, and humility—was replaced by teachings of hate and intolerance.
There is also a Change.org petition with over 2000 signatures. In part, it reads:
We resent the fact that a school wide assembly became a stage to blast the issue of homosexuality after Pope Francis said in an interview this past fall that “we can not insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptives methods.†We are angry that someone decided they knew better than our Holy Father and invited a speaker who addressed the issue of homosexuality to our school to speak twice in the course of one school year.
We the students of Charlotte Catholic High School are confused why time was spent condemning the practice of homosexuality when we could have been spent condemning: world hunger, gun violence, the death penalty, unjust care of the elderly, human trafficking, genocide, discrimination etc.; OR been promoting: love, prayer, the Beatitudes, practical ways to serve Christ, patience, just war theory etc.
QNotes reports that Sister Jane Dominic Laurel has previously partnered with the Ruth Institute, formerly an arm of the the National Organization For Marriage.
In a video of one of her lectures from two years ago, Sr. Dominic teaches (wrongly) that couples who regularly attend church have a 90 percent or greater chance of not divorcing, and couples who use “natural family planning” are the least-likely to divorce.
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