Equality complaint threatens future of UK's last Catholic adoption agency

[fix]

Of course there is. I have the freedom to do anything I want. If there were no freedom to act immoral no one would do so. License speaks to whether or not I’m permitted to do so. I have the freedom to do many things that I’m not “permitted” to do.

Freedom is doing what is right. Doing wrong is an abuse of freedom. This is for another thread.

You have not shown anything. The article in the OP shows how one unjust law has affected the Church, which I agree with. The rest you’ve simply stated, which is not showing.

What proof do you require to show unjust laws are harmful?

Again, so YOU say. You’re projecting your idea of common sense, logic, natural law, and tradition onto the majority of the country who supports same-sex marriage. You’re a senior member, fix, you should know by now that outside the world of dogmatic religion, there’s no one, commonly held, universally believed version of these things. And our law absolutely supports that difference of opinion.

There is an objective unchanging truth. What others hold erroneously does not prove my position is wrong.

Projection is when those who engage in SS acts claim everyone must accept their behavior as normal.

Another simple statement of what YOU believe to be correct that you simply cannot project onto others. The only ways in which they are victims are based on your religious beliefs. preparing for a quote about natural moral law, tradition, etc - see above. When children are really victims is when you DON’T let their parents get married. For example, a gay man adopts a child legally only by himself. But he raises the child with and makes a home with his partner of ten years. They live in a house in a quiet suburban community, and the child considers both men to be equally his parents. They have the legal ability to do all these things. One day, the man who legally adopted the child loses his job. Therefore he, and more importantly the child, have no health insurance. Even his partner has a great job with great benefits, the child is now going to have haphazard, reactive, healthcare paid for by our tax dollars because his parents can’t get married. In the next state over, we have the exact same situation, except that the two men are legally married. Both love their children, give everything they have to them, teach them to treat people well and be responsible for their actions - as parents should do. But in scenario #2, when one parent loses his job, the other’s benefits go toward the child, and he can continue to get high quality, preventative health care. These are both very real scenarios that occur today. Who’s the victim? Your position says both, but that you’d rather have scenario #1. Well, more than half the country disagrees, and the people are speaking.

The child should never be exposed to this crazy experiment. The problem is much more fundamental then your scenarios. The problem is children should never be in this position in the first place.

I hope this disabuses you and others of the notion that same-sex marriage suddenly and magically allows gay couples to raise children. They already can and do, and they are totally within their legal freedom to do so. There’s nothing you can do about that except voice your opinion which you are completely free to do. Therefore the idea of barring same sex marriage because you believe that would protect children doesn’t even make sense because doing so does nothing to prevent gay couples from raising them. It simply takes away protections from children who already exist. If you want to protect children, allow their parents to marry.

What a farce. Children have no right to be subjected to homosexual pairings as parents. To protect these children we must have laws, reintroduced, to ban homosexual acts and homosexual parenting.

Despite already establishing that what the Church teaches is not directly relevant in the legal proceeding of same-sex marriage, I’m extremely curious. Could you please explain the scenarios in which Civil divorce and remarriage are not always a moral offense?

Start with the CCC:

2383 The separation of spouses while maintaining the marriage bond can be legitimate in certain cases provided for by canon law.177

If civil divorce remains the only possible way of ensuring certain legal rights, the care of the children, or the protection of inheritance, it can be tolerated and does not constitute a moral offense.

The marriage may be declared null or is null for a variety of reasons. The person is then free to remarry.

 

[liturgyluver]

It makes me sad to think of all the thousands if not millions of non europeans who died in two wars keeping that place free. Men who lives could have been better served in their own lands.

War losses are a sad and emotive topic but I don’t quite understand the relevance of your comment to this thread. Perhaps you have forgotten that the wars extended beyond Europe - in WW1’s case to the Ottoman Empire and in WW2 to conflicts in Asia between Japan and Thailand and China. 95% of the non-European casualties were those in the Japan, India, Burma and China fighting a war against Japanese aggression.

 

[latin_rite]

War losses are a sad and emotive topic but I don’t quite understand the relevance of your comment to this thread. Perhaps you have forgotten that the wars extended beyond Europe - in WW1’s case to the Ottoman Empire and in WW2 to conflicts in Asia between Japan and Thailand and China. 95% of the non-European casualties were those in the Japan, India, Burma and China fighting a war against Japanese aggression.

I have not forgotten. I was talking about europe as the thread is about a European country.
MAny Japanese died in ww1. In europe. But when i talked about non europeans. I was talking about ppl from Canada, U.S, Australia, New zealand etc.

 

[gnosisofthomas]

I have never ever heard that. So I decided to check on Wikipedia:

The label “gay” was originally used purely as an adjective (“he is a gay man” or “he is gay”). The term has been in use as a noun with the meaning “homosexual man” since the 1970s, as in “gays are opposed to that policy.” Although some dislike this usage, it is common, such as in the case of “LGBT” (“lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender”), and particularly in the names of various organizations such as Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) and Children Of Lesbians And Gays Everywhere (COLAGE). It is sometimes used as a singular noun, as in “he is a gay”, such as in its use to comic effect by the Little Britain character Dafydd Thomas.

So according to you, is it also offensive when Obama uses the word “gays”?

“My attitude is that gays and lesbians should have access and opportunity the same way everybody else does in every institution and walk of life,”

Or is it only then offensive when a Catholic uses the term?

Again, for me, this is the first time I am hearing that. If the term were offensive, which does not seem to be the case as per my homework, I wouldn’t use it.

This now is kind of reminiscent of Catholics being accused of homophobia for renouncing gay marriage.

I’m gay, and “gays” doesn’t offend me. What does offend me is the sentence you used it in:

There are gays who are victimising children.

There may be some gays victimising children, but there are also plenty of straights doing it. If you’re going to argue against gay people being able to adopt, don’t base your argument on the possibility that they *might *abuse a child – statistically, straight men are more likely to molest children than anyone else. Abuse often has more to do with power than with sexuality.

 

[kelvinf]

I’m gay, and “gays” doesn’t offend me.

Good to know that.

What does offend me is the sentence you used it in:

There may be some gays victimising children, but there are also plenty of straights doing it. If you’re going to argue against gay people being able to adopt, don’t base your argument on the possibility that they *might *abuse a child – statistically, straight men are more likely to molest children than anyone else. Abuse often has more to do with power than with sexuality.

What I said was in response to this:

You’re actually victimizing children because of what you believe to be the sin of their parents. It’s outrageous.

By victimise, we weren’t referring to child abuse.

I stand by what I said. We believe a child needs a father and a mother. Gay marriage is not natural. Having 2 men or 2 women adopt and raise a child as parents is not good for the child because the child needs a daddy and a mommy like all other kids.

[SIGN]

You are in a Catholic forum and plenty of what is discussed here will offend you. So, you’ll have to have a broad back as I am not the only Catholic member who holds that same-sex union is not, and will never be, on equal footing with heterosexual marriages. Regardless of what contemporary law dictates. For all the reasons that various posters with same view have already stated in regard thereto.

[/SIGN]

 

[Santi2]

I stand by what I said. We believe a child needs a father and a mother. Gay marriage is not natural. Having 2 men or 2 women adopt and raise a child as parents is not good for the child because the child needs a daddy and a mommy like all other kids.

Kelvin, I posted this elsewhere earlier today. Hopefully, those who cannot understand our position will, at the very least, listen to this adopted child.

"Hello to all. I say it once again. My name is Benoît Talleu, I am 17 years old. I am from Vietnam but they adopted me as a baby.

My parents adopted seven children, and I am the oldest. [screaming] I am in this fight against gay adoption, along with associations for adopted children, because I have seen how this discussion has unfolded. People talk about this as if the primary concern were not US – the adopted children, ourselves.

If you ask what adoptees want, they will give you only one answer: ONE MOTHER, ONE FATHER. The words “mommy and daddy” are the first words that an adoptee learns. Adoptions allow an orphan who has no parents to place a face on these words.

The orphan – He dreams of his future parents. He imagines them. The desire comes from the depths of his being, this desire for a mother and a father. And it is the orphan that must be heeded first. We must state this with full clarity: For an orphan, there must be a father and a mother.

The difference here is between “needing” and “wanting.”

The orphan needs a mom and a dad.

The couple “wants” a child.

Between “needing” and “wanting,” I leave it to you to choose.

Is adoption a way of offering a baby to parents who don’t have any?

Adopting is not only for people who are sterile. It is not a necessity that a couple be sterile to adopt. Adoption is NOT a remedy to make sterile people feel better. We are not a remedy. We are not medications. We are not here to make you feel better because of the natural agony you feel over having no child.

We are not a prize for you, we are not a right for you. You engage in violence to speak of us as if you have a right, being us. Our biological mothers had the courage to entrust us with an orphanage. That doesn’t mean that we are objects. She may have been in a hopeless situation, perhaps there was no father around. She couldn’t make it, but that is not an insult to us.

To give gay couples the “right” to us is a betrayal. It betrays our biological mother’s trust and courage. The orphan needs a mother and father. That is not to denounce gay rights to adopt. It is merely to state a creed:

ALL BORN OF MAN AND WOMAN. ALL ADOPTED BY MAN AND WOMAN.

We hear people say, “living with a gay couple is better than staying in an orphanage.” Hear what I say about such an assertion: That statement reeks of dishonesty. There are tens of thousands of hetero couples waiting to adopt us.

They say: “a gay couple is better than nothing.” That is shocking. THAT IS HOMOPHOBIA!

The best thing for a child is to have a mom and dad. I will not cease to repeat it. To say that an orphan, because it is in an orphanage, does not deserve to have any mother, or does not deserve to have any father, that is CRUEL! IT IS UNJUST! IT IS A DENIAL OF EQUALITY!

Listen here-- they have already said that insemination and surrogacy have been struck as provisions from the law for gay marriage and adoption. And I ask you – what is bad for a child who comes from insemination and surrogacy, can it be good for an adopted child? Yes, gay couples may be in love, I do not doubt that. But the needs of the baby in that orphanage WILL NOT CHANGE. The demands we state on behalf of that baby WILL NOT CHANGE.

We hear, “oh things have evolved. So many countries are okay with gay marriage.” But I tell you – we are a great nation. We are a great democracy.

THIS BILL FOR GAY MARRIAGE IS PURE SELFISHNESS. THE LAW BELONGS TO PROTECTION OF THE WEAK, NOT TO PANDER TO THOSE WHO ARE STRONGEST. Mothers and fathers exist for children, not the other way around.

France is the nation where the rights of man were born. So we are also the nation for the rights of the child. We are not the nation where children are a right, we are a nation where children have rights.

Mr. President, I tell you now, that we are the ones who matter in all this – by this I mean all orphans, all orphanages, all adopted children."

englishmanif.blogspot.co.uk/2…ted-asian.html

 

[gnosisofthomas]

By victimise, we weren’t referring to child abuse.

I stand by what I said. We believe a child needs a father and a mother. Gay marriage is not natural. Having 2 men or 2 women adopt and raise a child as parents is not good for the child because the child needs a daddy and a mommy like all other kids.

So why not fight to have children taken away from single parents? Obviously by your logic, that’s not a good situation either.

Life just doesn’t always work out according to your ideal view of how things should be. The important thing is for a child to have a parent or parents who love them, and give them the best life possible. It would be better for a child to be raised by a loving supportive gay couple, than by his/her abusive biological parents who don’t want the kid.

 

[fix]

So why not fight to have children taken away from single parents? Obviously by your logic, that’s not a good situation either.

Life just doesn’t always work out according to your ideal view of how things should be. The important thing is for a child to have a parent or parents who love them, and give them the best life possible. It would be better for a child to be raised by a loving supportive gay couple, than by his/her abusive biological parents who don’t want the kid.

No, it would be better the child is not exposed to either situation.

 

[kelvinf]

Kelvin, I posted this elsewhere earlier today. Hopefully, those who cannot understand our position will, at the very least, listen to this adopted child.

Thanks for sharing that.

 

[kelvinf]

So why not fight to have children taken away from single parents? Obviously by your logic, that’s not a good situation either.

Life just doesn’t always work out according to your ideal view of how things should be. The important thing is for a child to have a parent or parents who love them, and give them the best life possible. It would be better for a child to be raised by a loving supportive gay couple, than by his/her abusive biological parents who don’t want the kid.

The Church teaches that Holy Matrimony is by its very nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring.

If God wanted children to be fundamentally raised by a single parent, he would have said so or made it possible for each individual to be able to conceive and bare a child without the need of the opposite sex.

A single parent is not a desired situation. No one wishes to grow up and become a single parent. A single parent is not the default. It is usually the result of an undesired situation.

Adoption is a solution to a problem and not inherent. Again, it is better for a child to be raised by his or her parents. Children waiting for adoption could be raised by different parents so that they at least get to have someone they call daddy and someone they call mommy–a family.

Having 2 gay persons adopt a child is quiet contrary to an undesired situation of a single parent finding his or herself raising a child. In fact, the former is intentionally denying the child a father and a mother.

The fact that gay people can only rely on other people’s children clearly shows how unnaturally gay union is. If there are no children available for adoption, such persons are back to square one. All we see are people trying to fight for a right that they can’t have by nature.

If you want a child, then you need the opposite sex. Since a child comes as a result of the union between a man and a woman, the child therefore needs a man and a woman.

 

[Prie_dieu]

St Magaret’s will loose. They will cease to operate or cease to be Catholic. Either way Glasgow will loose out…

Ad Jesum per Mariam!
Prie-Dieu.

 

[Cider]

Life just doesn’t always work out according to your ideal view of how things should be. The important thing is for a child to have a parent or parents who love them, and give them the best life possible. It would be better for a child to be raised by a loving supportive gay couple, than by his/her abusive biological parents who don’t want the kid.

The choice is not limited to abusive hetero parents or loving gay ones as you put it.

 

[gnosisofthomas]

The choice is not limited to abusive hetero parents or loving gay ones as you put it.

I didn’t say it was.

 

[aguafiestas]

As a Scot living in Scotland I am vastly amused that Catholic monarchs of the Middle Ages were just and fair. A few maybe: most not at all but that is history and unfortunately they left us with the “Divine Right to Rule” which it seems to me the present day governments of Europe have adopted and successfully! All political parties want homosexual and lesbian and transgender and whatever else marriages. It is dressed up as equality, even though civil partnerships are not legal for heterosexual couples. This “equality” means that St Margaret’s Adoption must allow children to go to same sex couples in spite if assurances built into the Equality Act(Scotland) 2010 that it would enjoy the same rights as when it began in the 1950’s.
To our friends in Northern America it is not just Europe where society is disintegrating; it is all of western Society. Which political parties support Marriage? which allow freedom of conscience? We are fighting back against this cultural tsumami but it is hard and we need many many prayers.

 

[Lochias]

Of course there is. I have the freedom to do anything I want.

And with that freedom of choice comes consequences. I hope you don’t find that out the hard way, after your life here on earth is spent and all of eternity is before you, rife with the choices you’ve made in the name of “doing anything you want.”

In the meantime, myself and others who realize just what’s at stake will never stop fighting against the horrible damage that same-sex marriages can and will do to the family unit and the Christian way of life. We do not have to accept the lies that you have, and we never will.

 

[Lochias]

I really am not sensitive about the fact that we disagree and don’t find that disrespectful. I just think that telling someone who thinks of themselves as a family that they’re not a real family does not show respect, compassion, and sensitivity, especially to the children involved.

Sometimes, the truth hurts. Jesus never promised us a rose garden, here on earth.

You may believe that gay couples are victimizing children, which is fine, but that viewpoint can never do anything to prevent them from doing so, and so even with your viewpoint, it only makes matters worse for those children to take away the benefits that their parents would get and therefore afford to them if they were married.

Better for them to be taken away completely, and raised in a home free of the destructive results of a same-sex marriage. Same sex marriages abuse children by their very nature.

Nota bene - referring to gay people as “gays” or “the gays” is offensive to them and their allies and so there’s no need to use them when there’s a number of non-offensive terms you can use.

That’s the word they’ve been using to self-identify with for years. We can’t call them “gay”, we can’t call them “homosexuals” because other people have screamed about how “insensitive” that was…what’s left? “Different?”

 

[Santi2]

St Magaret’s will loose. They will cease to operate or cease to be Catholic. Either way Glasgow will loose out…

Ad Jesum per Mariam!
Prie-Dieu.

St Margaret’s Children and Family Care Society has been successful in its appeal to keep its charitable status.

In a unanimous ruling, the Scottish Charity Appeal Panel has decided in favour of the adoption agency, and overturned a ruling by OSCR (the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator) that St Margaret’s must lose its charitable status.

A spokesman for St Margaret’s said: “We are delighted and relieved that the threat hanging over us has been lifted. Our only wish is to continue to do the good work for which we have been recognised by the authorities, of placing children in need of families with loving parents.”

Archbishop Philip Tartaglia of Glasgow, president of St Margaret’s, said: “We are grateful for this wise decision. It means that families who are ready to adopt can look forward to the future with a little more serenity, and children in great need can be placed into loving homes. St Margaret’s is a small agency which does great work for the wider community and helps transform the lives of some of the most vulnerable children in society. It would have been have been a great pity if it had been forced to close.”

catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/01/31/scotlands-only-catholic-adoption-agency-is-saved/

 

[kelvinf]

St Margaret’s Children and Family Care Society has been successful in its appeal to keep its charitable status.

In a unanimous ruling, the Scottish Charity Appeal Panel has decided in favour of the adoption agency, and overturned a ruling by OSCR (the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator) that St Margaret’s must lose its charitable status.

A spokesman for St Margaret’s said: “We are delighted and relieved that the threat hanging over us has been lifted. Our only wish is to continue to do the good work for which we have been recognised by the authorities, of placing children in need of families with loving parents.”

Archbishop Philip Tartaglia of Glasgow, president of St Margaret’s, said: “We are grateful for this wise decision. It means that families who are ready to adopt can look forward to the future with a little more serenity, and children in great need can be placed into loving homes. St Margaret’s is a small agency which does great work for the wider community and helps transform the lives of some of the most vulnerable children in society. It would have been have been a great pity if it had been forced to close.”

catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/01/31/scotlands-only-catholic-adoption-agency-is-saved/

Wow, if I understand very well, this charity will be able to continue doing their job, placing children only with traditional families; and this is happening in the UK (LOL)?

That’s great news!

 

[lutheran_farmer]

As a supporter of same-sex marriage, I just want at least some people to know that most of us aren’t as militant as it may seem - the militant ones just get all the publicity. I, as well as most people I know who support same-sex marriage, think that religious organizations should be under no obligation whatsoever to perform any service that goes against their beliefs. I hate that we usually only hear from the most militant gay rights activists, because I think our differences of opinion and value can coexist much more easily than it is often made to seem.

That is nice to know. Thank you.

 

[Contra_Mundum_1]

Santi2,

thanks for the update. This is wonderful news.