Yeah, this article seems very confused from the start. I'm still unclear what the author was trying to _really_ convey. There's a strange and sustained attempt to suggest some bizarre equivalence between LGBT and Catholic monastic orders and trying to characterize the latter as subversive like the former, "challenging" this or that. Maybe, as you say, American Protestant culture had real issues with celibate life, but in the Catholic view, the good of marriage, which for Catholics is elevated from natural institution to the status of sacrament, is sacrificed for the higher vocation of the religious life (Catholics speak of the married life also as a vocation). But this is not a denial of the goodness and rightness of the natural family. If anything, it is its affirmation. The natural family remains the fundamental pattern that is mirrored in these orders just the same as it is even in government, though perhaps in a more distant fashion. Families where, say, the grandparents take care of their grandchildren is not the natural family, but it is not opposed to nature and not a perversion of it and still patterns itself on the natural family. The same with adopted families. The impediment, such as the death of the parents, forces the formation of a family arrangement that would not naturally be the case, but this does not mean it is disordered (please note: "not natural" is not the same as "opposed to nature"; it is not the natural end of toes to push elevator buttons, but doing so is not per se opposed to their end either). In other words, not natural is not necessarily evil, but evil is necessarily unnatural. Or, not natural is not the same as opposed to nature, but evil is opposed to nature and thus unnatural.

The author seems to be trying to use monastic life and whatever fraternal friendships might arise between members of monastic orders as an vaguely salacious instrument to attack the sole legitimacy of marriage understood as heterosexual union naturally ordered toward procreation and raising of children, and she seems to do this by manufacturing precedent. According to a Catholic understanding, monastic life in no way undermines these notions.

Strange article.