A pain in the apse. (don't get me started).

I don't know about you, but this year at the gay pride parade, I can't wait to see the Dignity float! In years past, the gay Catholic group lived up to its name. It was like a prayerful moment of silence between the highly amped Zima-sponsored bar floats and the mega-megaphoned chanting, whooping affinity groups.

Many a blazing Sunday, standing under the mandatory billowing rainbow balloon arc, I have been asked by a fellow reveler who couldn't see what was going by on the parade route, "What happened? Did somebody's generator go down?"

"No, I bet it's Dignity."

Long ago, after 16 years of Catholic education and much to the chagrin of my daily mass--going Irish Catholic mother, I renounced the Roman Catholic Church and most of its works. I did not want to be in an organization that did not want me. From a very early age, I sensed the hypocrisy of Christian dyslexia. Love the sinner, hate the sin? No, they hated the sinner; they loved the sin, couldn't get enough of it. I had also come to believe that a spiritual idea that needs large buildings and expensive outfits to keep it going is not all that spiritual.

But that was just me. I marveled at my Catholic gay friends in Dignity who continued their churchgoing and worked for change. Goddess bless them. I had little faith that change would come. But thanks to gay liberation--and in a shorter time than it took to pardon Galileo for suggesting that the sun, not the church, was the center of the universe--change is a-coming!

The cosmetic changes of Vatican II--feng shui-ing the altar, strumming the hootenanny mass, dropping the Latin--were mere spiritual Botox on the face of things. Gay liberation, which offered the possibility of living full, well-ordered gay and lesbian lives, has to have siphoned off many so-called vocations from the church. But most important--and in this, I have absolute faith--the courageous act of coming out of the closet, telling our truth with all the freedom it brings, is a spiritual act, and it has had a quantum cultural effect.

Those poor souls who lived for years with the secret of their abuse, compounded by the church's shameful clerical cover-up, are finally coming out and speaking their truth. What's that sound I hear? Why, it's walls come a-tumbling down. Do we get any credit? Heck, no. We are still a pain in their apse. The pope called the U.S. cardinals to Rome for his Red Party. (Next stop for the Bishoprics' Circuit Party? Lock up the altar boys, it's Dallas this summer!) And even though he sounded like Cosmo Castorini in Moonstruck--"Idonwannatalkaboudit"--His Extreme Roundheadedness did manage to say in his address "Non Askium, Non Tellium" that homosexuality is a disorder and should be rooted out. Afterward, in the slowest spin session ever, bald-headed cardinal after bald-headed cardinal condescendingly informed us, "You don't understand what celibacy is." No, Clothman, you don't understand what celibacy is.

Despite the predictable gay scapegoating, I had been wondering how long it would take to blame women for the whole mess. Faster than you can say "Mother Church," Garry Wills, in his examination of the scandal in The New York Review of Books, coolly points to the role of a priest's mother in what he calls the moral infantilization necessary to commit such crimes with impunity. According to Wills, many boys become priests to satisfy their status-seeking mothers. Oh, I see--it's the pedestal, not the pedophilia.

We can all see the handwriting on the sanctuary wall: The backlash is coming. But meanwhile, let's celebrate! This gay pride season, if they'll give me a special dispensation, I'll be riding high on the Dignity float, celebrating the power of gay liberation. So far we've destroyed the military and the church. That's some powerful stuff. I'll be the one with the bullhorn in the ball-fringed papal drag cut on the bias. Please come up and kiss my ring.