Catholic Hierarchy Displays Arch Cynicism
In Attacking Court’s Gay Marriage Decision

The hierarchy of the Catholic Church has recently embarked on a campaign to discredit the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling that homosexual men and women – gay men and gay women – have the right to declare publicly who they love above all else and intend to share their lives and fortunes with for their future through the bonds of legal marriage.

At first blush, this attack on the Supreme Court’s decision appears to be the height of arrogance and irony, given the revelations of pedophilia that recently have swept over the Catholic church, but it’s much more than that, and in these recent actions are revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of the Catholic philosophy as articulated by the church administrators.

The basic religious falsehood is the intimation that homosexuality is in contradiction to God, and the basic secular falsehood is that somehow the ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Court intrudes upon religion.

Neither position is true, and the attempt by the Catholic Church hierarchy to involve itself in this issue seems so patently self-serving that it cries out for commentary.

First, in terms of the law, all that the Massachusetts’s Supreme Court made clear is that there is no sound judicial reason to prevent any human beings, regardless of gender, who love one another and wish to make a life commitment to each other from doing so. This is a simple rule of law. No church is being required to sanctify the union of gay men or gay women! All that has been declared by the judiciary is that gay people should have a right to get married in the eyes of the state; i.e., The Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The right to have a civil ceremony presided over by a Justice of the Peace, or a duly authorized public official, is all that the court has stipulated.

The second question, of course, is much more complicated, because it involves an interpretation of what is divine. Leaders of virtually every major religion, and many smaller religious groups and sects as well, have long implied that homosexuality is somehow a choice made by an individual, and therefore is a deviance from the heterosexual perfection that God endowed upon humans at birth. But while this has been a convenient device for churchmen and zealots throughout the ages, supported unfortunately by the self-serving prejudices of the various and usually anonymous human authors and interpreters of the bible, there is no scientific basis in fact to support the bias.

It is a hard and inescapable truth that some men and some women are born with a natural attraction to members of their own sex. Few if any make a conscious choice to become homosexual, rather the opposite is the constant; i.e., the homosexual discovers, usually beginning at puberty, that he or she has different sexual desires and tries to overcome them and become heterosexual. The sad history of decent young men and women failing in that attempt and committing suicide or otherwise harming themselves is long and deeply tragic, and it is illustrated the world over.

Within this same context is a question that embodies the most basic premise: Are all human beings the creation of The Almighty, whatever that being may be? If one has any religious belief, that answer must be a resounding affirmative. In fact, don’t most human beings in every corner of the world, have some innate sense that there is something above and beyond them? And hasn’t history shown that over and over again?

Given that reality there is a concomitant question: If all human beings are a reflection of their Creator, and some human beings are homosexual, what is truly God-like perfection? This is the perfect conundrum that has historically driven the religious debate, and it is the same one that biblical authors throughout history tried to resolve by declaring that homosexuality is aberrant and against the will of God, when in fact what is illustrated is the diversity of God.

Too often those early individuals who struggled to organize the concept of the Supreme Being into religious orthodoxy fell far too short of any egalitarian ideal of raising human consciousness. Their human frailties and prejudices got in the way. And in one vital instance, instead of accepting God’s diversity as a source of inspiration and acceptance, they denied it. Since then, the view that God only created heterosexuals has been repeated, with unabating frequency throughout the recorded history of the human race, and certainly it’s foundation and framework includes the actions of those powerful writers who penned the various passages of the bible.

The greatest irony, perhaps, is that if one accepts God, regardless of religious affiliation or the lack thereof, it should not be that difficult to believe that the Supreme Being is as diverse as we are.

And given that God, for reasons known only to God, has shown such diversity by creating both heterosexual and homosexual beings, there is every reason to support the enlightened decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. This is a step toward inclusion for God’s minority that will allow gay men and women to more easily live normal, moral lives. The vast majority of homosexual men and women, of course, already do live such lives, and are never tainted by such sins as pedophilia, but their lives are partly lived in shadow for fear of ostracization and opprobrium from the heterosexual majority. They are made to feel guilty for circumstances that were never in their control, but were a part of them from birth.

If one believes that God imbues every mortal human being with an immortal soul, whether at the point of conception or later, then one must also believe that God understood fully what comprised that being, including sexual orientation.

Yet in the midst of an opportunity to show an understanding of the value of state sanctioned marriage in lifting up an entire group of fellow human beings to a long-deserved equality before the law, the Catholic hierarchy is illustrating a cynicism that nearly defies description.

Apparently their basic premise is that an attack against any secular recognition of the rights of homosexuals will endow them and the church with a sort of newfound righteousness, and that will perhaps allow the Catholic hierarchy to redeem itself and its religious organization from a history of wanton pedophilia

But pedophilia is a sin that involves both heterosexuals and homosexuals, and if a tally were conducted of pedophilia cases across the nation it is very likely that heterosexual pedophilia will record much greater numbers of recorded instances. This is probably true on a world scale as well, since after all heterosexuals are in the great majority. Yet in all events, pedophilia is a vicious and reprehensible crime, while heterosexuality and homosexuality are simply states of being that humans were born with and cannot alter. To be a pedophile is a decision made consciously, a temptation not resisted. To be a homosexual or a heterosexual is not a matter of conscious control.

The administrators of the Catholic Church are employing the coldest, most calculated cynicism in an attempt to confuse this issue. Perhaps they hope by their opposition to the state supreme court to reclaim a moral position and the ecclesiastical authority that they have largely lost through recent revelations of their systematic ability to repeatedly forgive their own priests for acts of pedophilia.

Confession, obviously, implies that the divine power, God, is just and forgiving, and loves all human creation, which no matter how flawed in its use of free will is after all the work of His own hand. To admit to have dishonored more than oneself by seeking to gratify sexual desires by abusing innocent children must also dishonor the Creator’s work. To be able to seek absolution for the mistake, the sin, and to seek redemption through penance so that the soul could be cleansed and begin again, reforming itself into the actions of a better human being, is understandable.

But what is not understandable is the church hierarchy’s decades long – or worse yet, perhaps centuries long – methodology of allowing confessed or, even more pathetic, discovered clerical pedophiles to return to contact with innocent children.

The very idea of confession and absolution is that God understands the fallibility of humans, His creation, and that God wants to see men and women move past their mistakes. This belief is intrinsic to the concept of confession, but the historic goal was to correct and improve conduct, not to provide a revolving door of temporary grace, whereby a continuous flow of self-gratifying, misanthropic behavior could be reconciled, and all the worse that it would happen within the robes of clerical authority.

Yet as has been clearly illustrated in almost countless recent court cases, the Catholic system kept forgiving its own for the most unforgivable sins, which in some cases were repeated over and over again and overlooked over and over again.

It would have been much better if the Catholic hierarchy had remained silent on the issue of homosexual marriage, but it did not, perhaps it could not, and in all events it has now opened the discussion to its fullest extent, and it must bear the consequences. It would be heartening to see the Catholic Church truly start accepting its own sins, and illustrate the true remorse and corrective action it has so often demanded of its faithful. Above all it should not try to confuse or obfuscate its unfortunate and ugly recent history by attacking others whose only issue is one of natural being, not of conscious choice.

MB 12/2003