New Biblical commentary and Protestant objections

You make some good points here, points which, I confess, I didn't think through.  Before I begin, let me be clear that when I say "Protestants" here, I mean many Protestants --- that is a very, very wide spectrum, all the way from Anglo-Catholics who are almost indistinguishable from their Roman counterparts, the kind who say the Rosary, call their liturgy "the Mass", kneel for communion, practice Adoration and Benediction, and so on, to Baptists and Pentecostals who speak in tongues, and in extreme cases of the latter, handle snakes and drink poison.  It's a huge net.  I just say that, so as not to be accused of generalizing unjustly.

There are, indeed, Protestants, who think that with enough faith, and enough prayer, and enough whatever, they can "pray the gay away", and that such an orientation will vanish, moreover, that having such an orientation is, indeed, sinful in itself.  It's a disorder, a consequence of original sin, but fact is, it usually can't be eradicated, at least not entirely.  The SSA person just has to live with it, practice absolute continence, reconcile to a life of celibacy, and get on with life.  Catholicism has no issue with this.  If an SSA Catholic does seek to "pray the gay away', that is of course their prerogative, but they know that, in all likelihood, it's not going to work.

But Catholicism has a place, indeed an honored one, for lifelong celibacy, whereas Protestantism really doesn't.  The general expectation in Protestantism is that "pretty much everyone gets married", and while you had "old maids" and "spinsters" in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and nobody thought too much of it, it wasn't common.  At least among the Protestants in whose midst I was raised, there wasn't even the hint of "she must be a lesbian", that wasn't even thought of.  That is someplace that no self-respecting Protestant would even have visited in their mind, least of all if the woman had no stereotypically "masculine" traits (but we all know, or should know, that outward appearance often says nothing whatsoever about one's sexuality).  If by chance someone went late into life without being married, it was just dismissed as "she never found the right man" (or "he never found the right woman"), as though it was something that should have happened, but didn't.

And Protestants are huge on the concepts of "respectability" and "moral uprightness".  This is one of those things you'll never read in any catechism book, but having been on both sides of the fence (raised among Protestants, came to Catholicism in my adolescent years), I've noticed that Protestants are not shy about praising other people for their goodness, either to their face or in the third person.  I really don't see that among Catholics, at least not as much, or not as "front and center" as Protestants do.  I do seem to recall, may have been The Imitation of Christ, that Catholics are actually admonished not to praise other people, unless it is the case of a diffident person who needs encouragement.  (My own godmother, a devout traditionally-minded Catholic who later had some lapses I won't go into here, is an excellent case in point.  She was not one to dispense praise.  When she praised you for something, you knew you had earned it!  At a family reunion where the almost-totally-Protestant family members were going on about how "good" this one was, and how "good" that one was, she just, as my mother would say, "drew long breaths", as though her one last good nerve had been worked.  Again, it's not a Catholic thing.  Not in any catechism, but just stop and think about it.) 

Catholics, at least traditionally, know that the person who appears holy may have secret sins, even if only internal ones, and that the person who appears to be a moral cipher may actually have an internal holiness that isn't obvious.  I don't know to what extent Protestants have a concept of someone carrying a hidden cross within oneself, and having to struggle throughout life to avoid sin.  In a very real sense, in Protestantism, "my sins aren't really mine", if I have "accepted Jesus as Lord and personal Saviour", indeed, for some Protestants, it is "once saved, always saved", and if they "backslide", they may lose that respectability in the eyes of their fellows (again, a very important thing in their world), but even if they die in their sins, they'll still go straight to heaven.  "Backsliders" are, nonetheless, frowned upon, and one of the hallmarks of a Protestant is that they appear to the world as not committing any sins (there's that "respectability" thing again).  Unless I dreamed it, I once heard a well-known television evangelist say "Christians don't sin".  I also saw that on a bumper sticker one time, and if you can't trust a bumper sticker, what can you trust?

So given this mindset, the Protestant who believes, who seeks to live virtuously, who is "saved", but is still assaulted internally with same-sex attractions, is in a bit of a predicament.  There's an inclination to sin that shouldn't be there, but, alas, it is.  A Catholic, on the other hand, who is SSA, merely recognizes that this is a psychic wound --- St Paul was certainly wrestling with a "thorn in the flesh", we don't know what it was, it very well could have been SSA --- and knows it is something they can never act upon without sin.  In the Catholic mind, this could well be the thing that leads them to greater holiness.  Think of it as the grain of sand that the oyster uses to make a beautiful pearl.  I'm not sure Protestantism can assimilate such an idea.

The Catholic Church can, indeed, be --- and should be --- a welcoming home for anyone who is SSA and seeks to know, love, and serve Almighty God, by having a place for the person who remains celibate for life, and doesn't need to account to anyone for why that is the case.  We are content to say "they have a calling to the single life" and simply to leave it at that.  Lifelong singleness and celibacy is something Protestants really don't know what to do with.