Review Out in the Silence | poetslandscape

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http://www.Imdb.Com/identify/tt1564058/

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Out in the Silence (directed by Dean Hammer and Joe Wilson) played recently at the 9th Annual Chicago Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Facet’s Multimedia in Chicago.  It is about documentary film-maker Joe Wilson coming back to his hometown of Oil City, Pennsylvania to document the case of a teenager C.J. Mills who had been so harassed at his high school for coming out as gay that he was forced to leave it in favor of being schooled at home.  Joe Wilson, who had grown up quietly gay in the town before leaving it as soon as he left for college, had come to hear of C.J.’s case from C.J.’s mother who wrote him after Joe Wilson had put an announcement in Oil City’s local paper following his recent (gay) marriage to Dean Hammer with whom he lived happily for years in Washington D.C.

C.J.’s story presented in a very gentle way in this film will nonetheless certainly cause a veritable spectrum of immediate reactions in a whole host of people hearing/reading about the film.  I would note here simply that while the Catholic Church, obviously, does not support gay marriage and considers homosexuality to be an intrinsically disordered condition, it nevertheless opposes mistreatment and _most_ discrimination against homosexuals.  Whether or not this position is ultimately tenable is definitely not for me or anyone else to necessarily argue here.  However, my point is that the Catholic Church, while honestly having doctrinal issues over morality of gay sex (or any sex that isn’t open to the possibility to creating life) and therefore opposes gay marriage and finally gay adoption (yes, one position links to the next and down this three rung chain), it nevertheless _also_ recoils (I believe) with _sincere_ revulsion at the thought of violence perpetrated against gays.  Ah, if the writers of the Book of Leviticus only knew of penguins...

Having in my opinion dealt with pastoral situations wherein education Catholic households needed to cope with children coming out as homosexual ? And I am surely glad and I do agree with even the whole Catholic Church in addition rejoices that the VAST MAJORITY of Catholic mother and father (and ALL of them, one hundred%, that I?Ve _ever known_ or labored with in this example) come to ACCEPT THEIR GAY CHILDREN -- I don?T suppose it's miles a awful issue for Catholics to look a film like this, due to the fact this movie deals with actual lifestyles.

All of us believe what we do (and largely as a result of our origins and upbringing) and the vast majority of us wish to be as good as we can be.  But I think ALL of us are also sickened at the thought of a 16 year old being beaten-up for ANY reason, be they that he/she was black, Jewish, Arab, or gay.  All of us instinctively understand (and again THE CATHOLIC CHURCH UNDERSTANDS) that there’s something deeply wrong with that.

As such, irrespective of what one may think/agree with regarding homosexuality in a doctrinal/theoretical feel, this film's simply worth seeing because most parents likely need our youngsters / younger people to be glad and certainly no character desires to see sixteen 12 months olds being terrorized or crushed-up.

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