Sourpuss Andy

Time Mag has named B16 "European Newsmaker of the Year." Yeah, it's probably the most unexciting title to ever be vested on the Pope. In what was otherwise a fine, reserved appreciation of his first 8 months as Pope, the author had to include a silly quote from your favorite and mine, Andrew Sullivan:

After the release of a new Vatican document that would prohibit any person who was openly gay — even if celibate — from becoming a priest, the writer Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic, said Benedict "has identified a group of people and said, regardless of how they behave or what they do, they are beneath serving God. It isn't what they do that he is concerned with. It's who they are."

No, Sully, Benedict would gently correct you: you're the one who willfully chose to subsume your identity as a person into your sexuality when nothing in Christianity has ever taught that. Benedict believes you are a human person before you're gay, a sinner-saint before God, just like all of us. You want to elevate homosexuality to the level of ontology, which is just philosophically and logically absurd. Benedict simply insists that we are more than our sexuality, far more, and that it's a tragic error to teach otherwise. Too many priests out there are teaching otherwise. That's the wrongful action he's after, not who you are. Next to the man the article describes, Sullivan just keeps stereotyping himself as the ever-petulant high school homecoming queen who got her dress muddy.