A Wasteland…
Mortal sin is always a harm to society! Homosexual sex is always a mortal sin.
Thank you for the statistical information. The 41% is only for first marriages, I’m wondering how repeat offenders impact the total percentage.
It is all very nice that the church conducts surveys, I never said that they didn’t. My point earlier was that the church donates money (and from what I’ve read, large amounts of it) to overturn gay legislation, but is then silent about divorce laws and certainly is not putting forth large sums of money to force the issue at a national level. This is partly what I meant above when I said that the church gives the appearance of picking and choosing what it is going to enforce. If marriage is under attack, why aren’t we and the church defending it with equal intensity and $$$ on all sides? That was my point before it got twisted to imply the I was pro gay marriage, didn’t know my church teaching, etc.
Actually I never said that the nephew grew up well because of his uncle, his upbringing, etc. I responded to someone’s statement that went something like “children raised in gay homes will turn out with problems” by telling about a young man that I knew and stating that what I was seeing did not jive with what people here were claiming. As someone later stated, the nephew could just as easily have become a successful adult by sheer perseverance or the grace of God. I made no claims one way or the other for why the boy was successful, merely that he was successful.
Better be careful, we aren’t allowed to acknowledge the exceptions or talk about them, people will accuse you of ignoring Catholic teaching and focusing too much on the exceptions so that Catholics will approve of gay marriage, it happened to me.
By “Eusebius,” I’m assuming you mean me. To clarify…once again…I never said this.
In the words of ArchBishop Dolan… “let us pray”. :knight1:Now that gay marriage is legal in NY, should we expect God to judge the US?
If so, how should we preprare for it?
Actually I never said that the nephew grew up well because of his uncle, his upbringing, etc. I responded to someone’s statement that went something like “children raised in gay homes will turn out with problems” by telling about a young man that I knew and stating that what I was seeing did not jive with what people here were claiming. As someone later stated, the nephew could just as easily have become a successful adult by sheer perseverance or the grace of God. I made no claims one way or the other for why the boy was successful, merely that he was successful.
You are right I meant you, not Eusebius of Caesarea!
At any rate, it would seem that a handful of posters read your meaning incorrectly, and the argument can be made that your intended meaning is lost in how/what you communicated. It is clear that you wish the focus to be, notwithstanding the OP, the failure of heterosexual marriages, not the wrong direction that the homosexual movement is taking our society and this country, regardless of exceptional stories associated with gay ‘parenting’ such as your neighbor’s nephew!
As to your cautionary remark, note that you took a direct reply I made to a question by Deo Volente, on which you misapply the exceptions we were talking about. In fact, gays even in committed relationships are mostly promiscuous, as you can see from the studies I linked in my post in a related thread. The studies do not say all gays are promiscuous, but many are.
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One look at at the first chapter of the Book of Romans should make my focus clear. Society is going the direction it is because God has given us over to it. Gay marriage is just one symptom of a long list of societal ills, but removing the symptom does not rid us of the root problem and I see the divorce rate and the lukewarm Catholic response to it as being one of the big problems. I’m sorry you don’t agree. Take a look at the prophets, when things go badly God requires a conversion and the people return to him. Returning holiness to marriage is part of that.
Scratching my head…this is why I just rely on the simple truths outlined in the catechism and not on a jumble of secular surveys, statistics and often twisted propaganda. In your last post you admitted that not all homosexuals are promiscuous and now you want to backpeddle and say “many are.” It shows that you can easily put a spin on this information and make it say whatever you want just by where you place the emphasis. I find it best not to judge people based on “many are” behavior, it leads to the slippery slope having to pull another trick out of the bag when some tells you that they are an ‘exception’ and don’t fit in with the statistical data. Better to just stick with the immutable truths of our faith.
There’s no point in going over what had been articulated by you and me upthread. To recap, we agree that traditional marriage needs to be preserved and I showed you that the issue is very much on the table with the programs of the Church, although it does not get much coverage. Catholic marriages (and divorced Catholics) are but a subset of a universe of civil marriages and divorces (it’s not near the 50% you cited for Catholics). The widening of gay ‘marriage’ is a serious issue deserving much attention as states and judges continue to pander to the homosexual agenda, against the wishes of the majority.
InSearch, I think you know by now that I’m a Christian who is a homosexual, in a 13 year monogamous, committed relationship with a wonderful Christian man who truly is a gift from God. It may sound disingenuous for me to say what I’m going to say, and I realize that, but I have to say it: when people say or write things that suggest the existence of a universal gay agenda, I’m a bit puzzled. I don’t know what that agenda is. I wasn’t at that meeting when they passed it around and voted on it. I suspect, in fact, that it doesn’t really exist. Advocacy orgs may have their individual agendas, but a vast gay conspiracy agenda? No. I don’t think so. Which is to say that I really don’t think that gay parenting has anything to do with inducting a new generation into “the gay lifestyle” in one way or another.
Close, but not quite. Honestly, I don’t believe masculine and feminine to be fixed, absolute values. They’re certainly not moral values. They’re culturally determined values, which is to say largely socially directed, part of the vocabulary of gendered behaviors which inform how we perform our “identities” to ourselves and to each other. So no, masculine girls, feminine boys, are not particularly concerning to me.
Maybe. But when it comes to adolescents, I think both gay parents and heterosexual parents are equally at sea.
I don’t resent Hansen, PhD’s arguments. I don’t know that there’s anything in them to resent. I object to passing off “common sense” as scientific fact. InSearch, I hate to say it, but “common sense” doesn’t really exist as an objective sort of reality in any way: it’s a mental scaffold on which an image of the world is hung that rarely ever corresponds to the reality of life as it’s lived. It’s a collection of mythologies about how we would like the world to be. That’s all. See Duncan Watts’ recent Everything Is Obvious, Once You Know the Answer.
It surprizes me that someone would see Hansen’s credibility as deriving precisely from the fact that she opposes herself to the organization that sets the standards in her profession. I wouldn’t consult an English dictionary that boasted that it was written by people who opposed the English language and preferred pre-verbal grunting. And I must admit to being generally unsympathetic to the various-medical-societies-and-groups-have-succumbed-to-the-gay-agenda conspiracy view; that has little to do with being pro-gay and more to do with the larger question of “who is more likely to actually know what they’re talking about?”
I don’t believe that any homosexual couple that wants to adopt should be allowed to simply because they want to. The ability to adopt a child is not a right. I’ve written about this before. If the couple is qualified, great. If they’re not, no adoption. If there is, in any particular couple’s case, the suspicion that a child is likely to be harmed, no adoption. But that judgment should be made based on the couple themselves, not on statistics. The various risks to children indicated in some of ACPed’s literature on the subject are based on assertions made from general studies of general gay relationships (not necessarily partnerships). A young African American man is 7 times more likely to be in prison than a young Caucasian man. Does that mean that placing a child with a young African American family will result in a sevenfold likelihood that that child will be exposed to some sort of criminal behavior? Nonsense! But that’s precisely ACPed’s reasoning regarding gay couples.
Why not fight divorce laws and leave gay ‘marriage’ legalization alone? It’s a question that homosexual apologists like to throw in the mix. Divorce laws go back a very long time in history. It is OT, as I mentioned. But you keep bringing it up so I will make a final attempt to address it. It is my analysis and I expect I will be corrected where, when I state any error. If my analysis does not suffice, I recommend that you open another thread, so this thread does not get derailed and you can engage a full discussion on it. Or better yet, since you are not the first one to bring it up on this forum, read old CAF threads, like this one.
The previous post (#270) is in reply to yours, as you may gather. I was going to correct it but my time to edit expired.
But that’s precisely the funny thing, Charlemagne–there’s nothing to defy: “common sense” is the ghost of reason. Nothing more.
I don’t know where you get this, Charlemagne. I don’t repudiate Catholicism. I don’t even repudiate the Roman Catholic Church. I disagree with some of the RCC’s teachings regarding sexuality (in this context), for the most part because they do not correspond to my lived experience. I cannot, therefore, in good conscience assent to them. That’s one of the reasons why I’m not a Roman Catholic. Nonetheless, I love, respect, and admire the RCC. Otherwise I wouldn’t be interested in being here and chatting with new friends like you!
I’m grateful for it!
No, I did not know that as I did not come across any post of yours that indicated as much about your personal life. But your posts are pure homosexual apologetics, from revisionist interpretation of scripture to claims on language, words and meanings. It seems the latest concept being debunked by you and the gay faction is common sense.
You are being disingenuous. The thing is you may not come across as militant, but your gayspeak reflects unity of position with your noisy demanding homosexual brothers.
I think there are a lot of homosexual apologists who could make some very good cases against the “purity” of my discourse. But, again, I wasn’t at the meeting where the “gay agenda” memo was passed around. They may have been. I wasn’t. (Moreover, I’m not interested in it–a “gay” agenda that’s divorced from a “human” agenda seems counter-intuitive to me.)
I wrote it over a week ago, actually–I just didn’t have a chance to finish and post it. But regardless. I don’t feel *validated. *I feel like a citizen. There’s a difference.
I’m well aware of the Roman position–one with which I clearly disagree. I maintain that, if homosexually is, in fact, intrinsically or objectively disordered, it should be impossible for any good to be observed in a homosexual relationship. We know a tree by its fruit. And I contend, based on experience, not conjecture, that virtue is possible in a homosexual relationship by God’s grace. This is the core of my disagreement with the Roman understanding of homosexuality: it asks me to deny what I know to be good and true and, in fact, beautiful. And I can’t do that.
Fair enough. I thought you might believe this and I don’t fault you for doing so.
On some points, I’m sure I do agree with my noisier homosexual brethren. On other points, I would be anathema to them. The simple fact that I’m a Christian would perplex many of them to no end. I’m fine with that.
You may be surprised at what I have or have not had to change. You’re assuming a lot here.
You may say it, and I respect your difficulty. It has occassionally been the case here on these boards that, when people know that I’m a homosexual, they suddenly think everything I’ve written has been written with a clearly subversive intent, that it is impossible for me to be sincere, that everything I’ve expressed must somehow bear a special taint of corruption. I must say that’s annoying, but ultimately unsurprising. So to discover that you now doubt that I can be truly conscious of my sin, and am therefore incapable of contrition–it’s sad, but…what can I do?
I don’t think I’ve ever heard this argument from the pro-gay side and did not realize my comments were following in those footsteps. No wonder people here were jumping to conclusions over things I have said.
Well, I keep bringing it up because other people keep making an issue out what they think I have said and I’m responding. I’m willing to let it drop, but people need to stop misrepresenting what I’ve said.
Catholics could certainly support pro-marriage/anti-divorce candidates (if we could find any), make the issue more visible at the national level and be more vocal. I don’t understand your comments that these efforts would be ridiculous.
I never said this and it does not accurately reflect my beliefs.
The other day I was happy to read an editorial that suggests the divorce rate has fallen to it’s lowest level since the 1950s, this in spite of gay issues being more on the forefront than they ever have. It doesn’t mean I’m pro-gay marriage, just happy that it looks like the divorce trend might be headed in the opposite direction.