STOP THAT ELEPHANT

Vatican Instructs Legislators On Gays: Backing Marriages Called 'Immoral' (Alan Cooperman and David Von Drehle, August 1, 2003, Washington Post)

The Vatican fired a booming shot yesterday in the rapidly escalating political battle over gay marriage, issuing specific instructions for Catholic lawmakers to oppose any effort to give legal status to homosexual unions.

According to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- the Vatican's agency for policing Roman Catholic orthodoxy -- "the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition [to gay marriage] clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favor of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral." [...]

Gay rights advocates have made steady strides in the past two decades. But public opinion polls in the United States have shown a sharp increase in opposition to gay unions since the Supreme Court's sodomy decision and conservatives hope they can make opposition to gay marriage a winning political issue. The Vatican's statement yesterday could help those efforts.

"There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God's plan for marriage and family. Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law," the Vatican declared in a document that restated previous church teachings.

That much at least is certainly true, but this is an area where the Church's paedophile scandal really takes a toll. Having populated the priesthood with homosexuals, thereby precipitating the crisis, must weaken the Church's moral authority at least to some degree. But that concerns the institution itself rather than the doctrines--in fact it demonstrates the fearsome consequences even the Church will suffer when it ignores its own moral teachings--and no good could be served by destroying a second institution (marriage) just because this one (the Church) has some serious self-inflicted wounds. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 1, 2003 12:51 AM