Homosexuality and marriage

[Mgray82]

The evil in the situation you cite is divorce, not parenthood. I can find no evil in an adult giving a home and nurture to a child.
Perhaps the greater evil is whatever caused the child’s biological parents to give up the child in the first place.
Do you think that such children should not be adopted?
Do you think it’s better for them to be raised in orphanages or the foster care system?
I admitted that it is probably best for children to be raised by their biological parents, but what id one or both of them is abusive or neglectful? What if they are addicts? What if they are promiscuous?

As one who was raised by parents who were not biological, I thank God every day for the love I received.

As I said, in a perfect world, things would be different. Families would stay together. Parents would be capable and loving. Children would have a stable environment to grow up in. This isn’t that perfect world, and if a child can have a home where the child is loved and nurtured and provided for, I believe that’s better than the contrary. What more would you like from me?

This seems to be sophisticated logic for the idea of; “well, the world is not perfect anyways so what the heck?” Had the Church had that attitude, it would’ve caved millennias ago.

I don’t want anything from you. We do AGREE on a few things. I’ll join in prayer for the softening of your heart and salvation of us all.

I do believe I as well have reached the end of this exchange.

 

[buffalo]

Whose morality? Christians who come to the table with predisposed views that homosexuals are an abomination? Perfect choice.

The problem is that people can’t distinguish a religious issue with a civil rights issue IMO.

There is no civil right to marriage of any kind.

 

[buffalo]

Just as blacks weren’t “equal” because they were ignorantly defined as sub-human.

What Church was the leader against American slavery?

 

[buffalo]

In the UK as part of our legal system’s development Church Law had a role to play in the early development. In many ways the churches were the first attempts by man to have systems to live by.

We see the influence of this in the language of case law were for example the mens rea of murder would include phrases like ‘wicked intent’ or ‘evil intent’. As the systems matured we now just use ‘intent’ or ‘recklessness’ - without the requirement of old fashioned church concepts of ‘evil’ or ‘wickedness’.

Your claim is evil does not exist?

 

[buffalo]

My mom raised me. She never told me anything about being a man. I turned out pretty darn awesome if I do say so myself. So we already know a single mom can raise a boy and a single dad can raise a daughter. Are you saying that TWO women raising a boy or TWO men raising a girl would screw it up?

That is lowering the bar. The best situation is an intact family with a father in the home. Deep down everyone knows this.

 

[buffalo]

How exactly are they “vastly different”? Can’t both change a diaper or care for an infant? Can’t both give love and support? Can’t both work jobs and provide? Can’t both help with homework? I don’t see a huge discrepancy actually.

Which one is the father? Which one is the mother? A child deserves both biologic parents. They complement each other to the benefit of the child.

 

[buffalo]

It still appears that your focus is on the bedroom. My experience of married couples is that the sex may be important the first few years, but the relationship does not last because of the sex. Nor do people grow in holiness because of the sex. I would suggest that if you want to see married love, visit a retirement home that hosts married couples, or even better, a nursing home. There you will witness married love.

Please don’t try to make an argument on the basis of what Jesus doesn’t say. That can lead us far from a productive conversation.

As for inquiring minds, they will have to do their own homework.

Uh, we do not know the totality of what Jesus said per John. St Paul does address it though. Now your argument has to discredit St Paul.

 

[RevDon]

I’m just wondering if our Church Fathers would have supported the idea of homosexuals being married. Or perhaps one of the apostles…

…they weren’t.

This is nothing more than stubborn human worldly agenda’s being purchased straight from the evil one himself. We’re all sinners and need to repent and turn from our wicked actions. Including the support for “marriage” between two homosexuals.

Are you saying the apostles weren’t married??? How did Peter get a mother-in-law?

The Church Fathers were celibate, and I’m assuming they embraced their celibacy as a gift from God. Paul urged everybody not to marry. Where would we be if we had followed their urging?

Don’t you agree that marriage is a good thing?
Don’t you agree that marriage helps spouses to be better and holier as a result of the mutual vulnerability and accountability of the relationship?
The sacramentality of marriage has nothing to do with sex. As a sacrament, marriage is a God-given means to grace, which even the Catechism names as the “good of spouses.”.
So you want to deny that grace to people on the basis of how they make love? When married heterosexuals make love in that same manner, is that a sin?
The lists of sexual sins in scripture always includes fornication, which is sex outside of marriage. So by denying the opportunity of marriage, you leave only two choices: celibacy (which the Church has always claimed is a divine gift, and fornication.
Those who would prohibit same-sex marriage are creating a situation that causes fornication and denies the “cure” for fornication.

 

[buffalo]

. If so, was she a perpetual virgin?

That is Catholic teaching.

 

[buffalo]

And as was brought up by a Supreme Court justice yesterday, neither does the state benefit in this way from the marriage of couples over 55 (her example). The procreation argument doesn’t work for this discussion.

How many over 55 are there? Were they divorced? What marriage are they on? The state still has an interest in marital and familial stability.

 

[buffalo]

No, I don’t make that claim. One distinction that the Church clings to is the difference between orientation and action upon that orientation. The urging of homosexuals to be celibate is a demonstrable change.
The data seems to point to sexual attraction existing on a continuum between entirely heterosexual to entirely homosexual.
That would accord with the testimony in the first video, suggesting that some homosexuals were “cured.” It would also answer why, as he testified, there was a large recidivism rate. He also testified that the successes came about in cases where the subjects were deeply troubled by their identity as a result of outside pressures.
Another interesting bit of data in my experience is drawn from cases where individuals seem to be living successful heterosexual lives in conventional marriages and then “discover” they are homosexual. I’m, frankly, not sure what to make of that change.

So over time orientation can change?

 

[buffalo]

The difference in our positions is, I think, based on what is sinful.
I would not encourage promiscuity of any kind gay or straight.
I would encourage mutual, loving, committed lives of people who wish to devote themselves to vulnerability and mutual accountability.
I’m guessing that your label of “sinful” for a same-sex marriage come from one or more of the following:
A. your imagining of two people of the same sex spending their lives having sex
B. your unquestioning acceptance of church teaching
C. your unsophisticated literal interpretation of about a half-dozen verses of scripture
D. your lack of acquaintence with any same sex couples

My work with same sex couples reveals two bits of information that have shaped my opinions:

1. These people have struggled against the tide of opinion all their lives and would rather not to have had to do that.
2. There is a deep goodness in the individuals and a goodness in their relationship that is greater than the sum of the two which leads me to see the presence of God in their relationship.
   For me, 1,2 trumps A,B,C,D

If two people choose to live together and love each other they can right now. How about brotherly love? Since they love each other they should be married?

1. It is of their own making. A chaste homosexual had no need to announce it to the world.
2. Then in God’s eyes being chaste and brotherly would serve God well.

You are making an emotional pastoral argument. Pastors though cannot let these emotions take over clear Church teaching. A pastor can lead them closer to God and still follow.

 

[buffalo]

I see Aquinas a a genius for his time, but I don’t base my life on his teaching. He had a cosmology that doesn’t work with current understanding of the world, and he is bound by Aristotelian logic that doesn’t translate well into contemporary thought processes.
His death-bed statement was prompted, I believe, by his realization that he had not faithfully followed the prior teaching of the Church in all his teaching. So perhaps on my death bed I’ll make a similar statement for a similar reason. In the meantime, like Thomas, I’ll ask the questions that might get Mother Church to think a little deeper.

Ahhh - modernism at work.

 

[buffalo]

I was adopted. That was a good thing for me. Certainly better than being raised in the foster system.
If we believe in grace, perhaps we can say that God is offering an alternative to the horrors of the foster child care system by providing additional couples willing to take children to be their own and to lavish their love and resources on them.
If that could be true, then what are we to make of the folks who would deny these couples the benefits of marriage for the sake of raising children?

This is a lowest common denominator argument. Because heteros have failed that makes homos OK?

 

[RevDon]

Uh, we do not know the totality of what Jesus said per John. St Paul does address it though. Now your argument has to discredit St Paul.

If we lived according to St. Paul, then no one would marry. St. Paul didn’t have anything to say about relationships between two adults of the same sex who committed themselves to each other. He did urge this kind of self-giving for all Christians, however.

Much of the teaching of Paul has been mis-translated and mis-applied. See an earlier post in which I address translation. Paul’s world did not have the revulsion that our world seems to have toward same-sex relationships. There is virtually no literature-- Christian or secular-- from that period that says very much about it, and nobody from that time seems fixated or shocked by images of same-sex sex. Paul is deeply concerned when people worship idols, and this was done in some cults by means of temple sex, both heterosexual and homosexua. As I have posted earlier, in some cults, this was seen in a way similar to our understanding of sacrament. Paul objected strongly to that, and avoidance of that was included as one of the conditions for Gentiles becoming Christian resulting from the conference in Jerusalem.

As a Jew, Paul’s notion of the purpose of marriage would have been deeply influenced by the need for procreation that has always been a front-burner issue for Israel. Even the Catholic Church has backed off on that as the primary purpose of marriage.

 

[buffalo]

And not gay sex techniques.

If bridled means within marriage, yes.

I would gladly teach my people HOW to read the Bible and use it as a guide for the decisions of their lives. It’s clear to me that you have no idea of what was being condemned in Sodom.

Do you want me to read all of St. Paul, or do you have specific passages in mind?
If you are referring to the so-called “clobber” passages, be sure you understand the context, meaning and application Paul had in mind before you try to use them to denigrate someone else.

Coming next - the hospitality agenda.

 

[buffalo]

If we lived according to St. Paul, then no one would marry. St. Paul didn’t have anything to say about relationships between two adults of the same sex who committed themselves to each other. He did urge this kind of self-giving for all Christians, however.

Much of the teaching of Paul has been mis-translated and mis-applied. See an earlier post in which I address translation. Paul’s world did not have the revulsion that our world seems to have toward same-sex relationships. There is virtually no literature-- Christian or secular-- from that period that says very much about it, and nobody from that time seems fixated or shocked by images of same-sex sex. Paul is deeply concerned when people worship idols, and this was done in some cults by means of temple sex, both heterosexual and homosexua. As I have posted earlier, in some cults, this was seen in a way similar to our understanding of sacrament. Paul objected strongly to that, and avoidance of that was included as one of the conditions for Gentiles becoming Christian resulting from the conference in Jerusalem.

As a Jew, Paul’s notion of the purpose of marriage would have been deeply influenced by the need for procreation that has always been a front-burner issue for Israel. Even the Catholic Church has backed off on that as the primary purpose of marriage.

What???

Judaism’s Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism Rejected Homosexuality

Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later carried forward by Christianity.

This revolution consisted of forcing the sexual genie into the marital bottle. It ensured that sex no longer dominated society, heightened male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and began the arduous task of elevating the status of women.

It is probably impossible for us, who live thousands of years after Judaism began this process, to perceive the extent to which undisciplined sex can dominate man’s life and the life of society. Throughout the ancient world, and up to the recent past in many parts of the world, sexuality infused virtually all of society.

Human sexuality, especially male sexuality, is polymorphous, or utterly wild (far more so than animal sexuality). Men have had sex with women and with men; with little girls and young boys; with a single partner and in large groups; with total strangers and immediate family members; and with a variety of domesticated animals. They have achieved orgasm with inanimate objects such as leather, shoes, and other pieces of clothing, through urinating and defecating on each other (interested readers can see a photograph of the former at select art museums exhibiting the works of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe); by dressing in women’s garments; by watching other human beings being tortured; by fondling children of either sex; by listening to a woman’s disembodied voice (e.g., “phone sex”); and, of course, by looking at pictures of bodies or parts of bodies. There is little, animate or inanimate, that has not excited some men to orgasm. Of course, not all of these practices have been condoned by societies — parent-child incest and seducing another’s man’s wife have rarely been countenanced — but many have, and all illustrate what the unchanneled, or in Freudian terms, the “un-sublimated,” sex drive can lead to.

more…

 

[RevDon]

This is a lowest common denominator argument. Because heteros have failed that makes homos OK?

I take great offense to your characterization of this! Same-sex couple have made wonderful parents.

 

[Mgray82]

I take great offense to your characterization of this! Same-sex couple have made wonderful parents.

What do we say of the child of a male same sex couple who wants a mother?

 

[buffalo]

I take great offense to your characterization of this! Same-sex couple have made wonderful parents.

How does one measure this?

Have you read the accounts of their children?