Gudrun Schultz
SAN ANTONIO, Texas, February 7, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A prominent Dominican has written a review praising the gay cowboy film Brokeback Mountain as “an engrossing story, a plea for tolerance, and a sad, emotional film that will touch anyone who has ever been in love.”
Fr. Tom Condon, OP, student master for St. Martin de Porres Province of the Dominicans, writes about the propaganda-laden film with a strangely tender voice, given that it openly portrays sex between cowboys as beautiful and precious. His praise for the film flies directly in the face of Catholic teaching that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered” and “under no circumstances can they be approved.”
Brokeback Mountain works hard to seduce the watcher into sympathy for the “love” between the hardened but sensitive cowhands, but in fact it is a weighty pitch for legitimizing homosexuality that carefully avoids the raunchier aspects of the original story by Annie Proulx. In her account the men develop a sexual “taste” for each other that never carries with it such emotional baggage as the movie would like us to believe—sex between the cowboys begins out of boredom and isolation and continues as a sort of physical addiction which they feed on a periodic basis.
Fr. Condon says the movie haunts him—he finds uncontrolled emotion between the two men, meeting after a two-year absence, to be “beautiful and startling.” The misery caused to their wives and children, as they continue their clandestine relationship over 20 years, is entirely eclipsed for Fr. Condon by the pathos of the two men missing each other in between “fishing” trips.Â
Condon appears to be entirely unfazed by the more sordid elements of the film, concentrating as he does on a vision of the movie as “an exploration of the mystery of the depths of human sexuality and relationship.” (see his full review here: https://www.domlife.org/moviereviews/BrokebackMt.htmÂ)
Tead Behr, a Christian movie reviewer points out these facts about the film: (It uses) “about 58 obscenities (including many “f” words), 15 strong profanities, …references to urinating; two extreme scenes of bloody violence include shot of castrated man and man’s head is beaten bloody until he is dead, and scenes of violence where men fight and wrestle in a rough way, and homosexual sodomy scene plays almost like a homosexual rape; very strong sexual content includes depicted homosexual and heterosexual sodomy (with a hint of sadomasochism during one or more homosexual scenes), depicted homosexual kissing and groping…etc. (see the full review here: https://www.movieguide.org/index.php?s=reviews&id=7031&am… )
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) also originally gave the film a positive review, although slightly more tempered than Fr. Condon’s. After LifeSiteNews criticized the Bishops for rating the film as ‘L’, appropriate for a limited adult audience, two notches higher than the most severe rating of ‘O’ for morally offensive, the rating was changed down to an ‘O.’
Fr. Condon ends his review by musing over the long way society has yet to travel in overcoming “misunderstanding, prejudice and fear,” although he says we’ve come a long way in “openly discussing…gay marriage and the ordination of homosexuals.”
To express concern over Fr. Tom Condon’s review to the Dominicans, contact:
Fr. Marty Gleason
Provincial
Southern Dominican Province
1421 North Causeway Blvd. Suite 200
Metairie, LA 70001
Phone: (504) 837-2129
Fax: (555) 555-5555
Email: coÂ[email protected]Âor [email protected]
Bro. Carlos Azpiroz Costa, OP
Master of the Order of Preachers
Br Dominique Renouard
Vicar to the Master of the Order
Br Gerald Lee Stookey
Assistant for the Provinces of the U.S.A.
All three above at Tel. : 39-06-57-94-05-55
General Curia
Piazza Pietro D’Illiria 1
Rome, 00153
Italy
See previous LifeSiteNews coverage:
USCCB Changes Rating on Brokeback Mountain to Morally Offensive
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/dec/05121607.html
US Bishops’ Organization Gives Glowing Review of Homosexual-Sex Propaganda Film
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2005/dec/05121503.html