Element of Understanding

The Guam Catholic Archdiocese adopts the Dinesh D'Souza line of argument and says laws promoting gay rights show Islamic terrorists have an "element of truth" to their claims about American society:

The culture of homosexuality is a culture of self-absorption because it does not value self-sacrifice. It is a glaring example of what John Paul II has called the culture of death. Islamic fundamentalists clearly understand the damage that homosexual behavior inflicts on a culture. That is why they repress such behavior by death. Their culture is anything but one of self-absorption. It may be brutal at times, but any culture that is able to produce wave after wave of suicide bombers (women as well as men) is a culture that at least knows how to value self-sacrifice. Terrorism as a way to oppose the degeneration of the culture is to be rejected completely since such violence is itself another form of degeneracy. One, however, does not have to agree with the gruesome ways that the fundamentalists use to curb the forces that undermine their culture to admit that the Islamic fundamentalist charge that Western Civilization in general and the U.S.A. in particular is the “Great Satan” is not without an element of truth. It makes no sense for the U.S. Government to send our boys to fight Al Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan, while at the same time it embraces the social policies embodied in Bill 185 (as President Obama has done). Such policies only furnish further arguments for the fundamentalists in their efforts to gain more recruits for the war against the “Great Satan.” ...

Wowzers. I find it particularly noteworthy that the archdiocese clearly finds Islamic terrorists to be morally superior to gays and lesbians. Not good people, but clearly superior. That's some cross-cultural understanding I'd rather not get behind. But it does follow a noted (and despicable trend) by which gay rights will "destroy the earth", are a graver threat than slavery, and are worse than child rape.