No, the article is out of step with Catholic theology. I read the article. It is profoundly heretical. I looked at the list of references. Since I’m well acquainted with names in Catholic moral theology, I know that none of these is recognized as authentic in the area of Catholic sexual morality. The Vatican is the voice of Catholic theology; it cannot be “out of step” with itself.
I read this article also, which was published in '03. Yes, I understand the difference between ritual and belief, but the wild card that was inappropriately omitted was the factor of overt opposition. As I said in my earlier reply to St. Anastasia’s post, it depends on the level of unbelief and discomfort. If you are interiorly in major opposition to an essential teaching, that is a destructive situation, to yourself if not to others around you. And if you are vocal in your unbelief, you are in fact undermining your faith community, and your prayer life will be compromised as a result.
Elizabeth, thank you for your reflections. Those are key questions I will ask my gay friends – why they stay rather than abandon their natal church, and why remain true to their sexual orientation rather than abandoning it.
Who told you the USA is a secular democracy? Don’t you know that in the United States, so-called gay marriage has always been voted down? Twice in the most populated state - California? If Catholics support this - overwhelmingly - it hasn’t made any difference. Only a few politicians and judges are forcing this on the people. Not Catholics.
You’re kidding, right? 40% of all births in the US are to unwed mothers. If every gay couple in America adopted two kids it wouldn’t hold a candle to the number of single mothers resulting from sex outside of marriage.
So are you saying that one immoral act (homosexual activity) should be granted legitimacy because another immoral act (fornication) is commonplace? This is faulty logic. If anything, parents need to educate their children on the sanctity of sexual relationships, as is their grave duty.
I said nothing of the sort. A factual assertion was questioned, I responded with a fact. I never commented on the morality, immorality or justification of anything. The only thing faulty here is your reading all of that into my post.
Your scenario is pure speculation. I read an article where a gay man is not too happy about bringing what he called a “gayby” into his relationship with his partner. “We’re not supposed to reproduce, right?”
Possibly the rest of the world worries about fundamentalism in the U.S., but if that was significant, or even existed in a perceptible way, one would surely have heard about it sometime. I am aware that leftists in various places think of it, or Christianity itself, as a bogeyman of some sort.Legal arguments might just have something to do with legalization, given the clue in the words.
There’s a difference between relativism and replacing laws that are wrong.
Slippery slope from legalizing same-sex union to Islamic fundamentalism? Given that the US spends more on arms than Europe, Russia and China combined, yet has less than 5% of the world population, forgive the rest of the world if it sometimes worries more about the rise of US fundamentalism.
I agree that it is extremly unlikely that all gay couples will adopt two kids. My point was to refute the suggestion that gay couples could have a larger impact on the number of children raised without a father or mother in the home than fornication. My only point is that, looking only at the numbers, many more children are born to single mothers than are adopted by gay couples.
On what do you base your assumption that the majority of those mothers are cohabitating with the father of the child? I don’t have any stats on that handy, but that is not my understanding or consistent with my experience. Most single mothers I know are not living with the father, and often have trouble getting any kind of support from the father. I think that the biggest difference between your typical single mother and your typical gay adoptive couple is that the adopted child has two parents - even if they are the same gender. Besides, even if half of unwed mothers live with their baby-daddy, that would still leave nearly a million children born every year to truly single mothers. The small number of gay couples that choose to adopt will never be numerically close to that figure.
Yesterday I was invited to deliver three guest lectures at a Catholic girls’ high school. One of the most participatory students was a lovely, intelligent, and articulate young woman in the senior class. The teacher told me afterward that Laura had been abandoned by her mother who gave birth to her at fourteen. She was adopted and raised by two gay men, and is turning into a fine young woman with plans for career and family.
This is anecdotal, and as such has no explanatory power.
Of course it’s anecdotal – I am not trying to explain anything. In fact, I cannot explain why these gay dads failed to transform this young woman into a lesbian, and why – ironically given her upbringing – she hopes to marry a man!
Quite possibly because that the psychological factors that have the greatest influence on sexuality are not the gender identity of the parent, but the treatment of the child. Among lesbians there is a strong occurrence of some kind of abuse (whether it be emotional, physical, or sexual) by the father, eroding her trust in men. Among homosexual men, the factors seem to be linked to emotionally distant fathers and overbearing mothers. I hav never argued that homosexual couples will lead them to raise homosexual children. That particular line of reasoning is problematic, at best. I Have issues because it gives legitimacy to an intrinsically morally disordered behavior.
I said that the father was actively involved.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
That also did not include, btw, households which maintain regular, frequent contact with the natural birth father. That was merely, in 2000, the percentage listed as head of household being one parent (usually, not always, the mother). It did not factor in percentages of actively involved fathers, so even with updated 2010 figures, there is no available published statistic for the level of involvement of either the two natural parents, or a natural parent + person of the other gender acting in loco parentis who may be a cohabitator (also a frequent, though not majority, event). When both parents are alive and acknowledge their parenthood, the opportunity for some level of interaction with both of them is monumentally greater than the level of zero for those who use phantom sperm or egg donors.
The deciding, and huge, difference was bolded. The child of a straight single mother, even if the natural, live father (not anonymous sperm donor) absolutely never contacts the child again (a rare situation, although it happens occasionally), has a better chance of having half a clue what the other gender is all about, on a regular, routine basis than if his “parents” are gay, because of the social circle involved in the two opposing situations, and the frequent motivation of the single mother to re-marry.
OK, so 26.7% of children are being raised in a home with only one parent. As you point out, we don’t know how many of them have some other person they can look to as a model for the opposite gender of their single parent. Of course, the same is true for children raised by two women or two men, we don’t know how many may have an opposite gender person involved in their care and development, either. What is clear is that there is zero chance that anything close to 27% of children will be raised by a gay couple in the foreseeable future. Your original point, as I understood it, is that gay parenting is or may be numerically more significant than the single parenting issues created by fornication. That can’t possible be true, no matter how one spins the numbers.
