**I mean who does evil and does it because they know that it’s a free ticket to hell. **
Mafiosi have a ritual in which they burn a small image of a saint in the palms of their hands as a symbol of their rejection of Christ’s commandment to love one another. When they kill and murder, they know full well that what they are doing is against the will of God; yet, they do it anyway.
The child-rapist who agonizes over his perversion in his room for hours but then decides to walk out the door and make his way down to the playground. That guy knows what he is doing is wrong.
The leather-boy queer who goes into “the stocks” to be anonymously sodomized at the “Lords of Leather” Mardi Gras Ball knows that what he is doing is perverted and wrong. In fact, if you ever talk to a guy like that (my step-brother was like that before he died of complications due to AIDS), what you will find is a desperate alienation, coupled with a lingering sadness and anxiety.
THAT desperate alienation and lingering sadness and anxiety IS WHAT THE STATE OF SIN IS! Divorced from the fountain of all hope and creation, lost in a torment of your own making: when you die in that state, your torment echoes throughout eternity; hence, Hell.
**So people who do wicked things and know its wrong but do it anyways are free from going to hell just because they don’t think they are going to hell. **
The key phrase that you use here is “and know it’s wrong.”
There are many gay people who struggle with their sexual identity and come to the conclusion that, despite everything they have heard, seen, read or otherwise indulged in order to know Truth, their homosexuality is (in their honest and heartfelt view) the only “natural” and “rightly ordered” sexual orientation that fits them. When these people examine their conscience, it tells them that they are right in their homosexuality.
We are all subject, first and foremost (even in the view of the Church), to our own conscience. So, whereas from the orthodox (I loathe to use the term “objective”) point of view, these people are in a state of sin, their subjective experience may not lead them to perceive themselves as cut off from Divine Grace.
If a person does not FEEL cut off from Divine Grace, then who are you to tell them that they SHOULD feel cut off from Divine Grace? Is it not preferable (more charitable, more merciful, more compassionate) to pray that that person truly finds comfort rather than imposing your own judgements on them? Again, who are you to judge? Are you without sin? If not, then why are you carrying around a huge sack of stones for gay people?
What seperates the Church of Rome from the vast majority of the Protestant sects is that the Church understands that the first and only rule is love. Love is more important than righteousness. Love is more important than right-thinking or right-practice. Love is more important than the command to instruct or to spread the Gospel because if you don’t have that whole love thing down, then generally your take on the Gospel is going to be limited if not blatently in error.
You do not have to validate homosexuality, morally, in order to accept homosexuals as just as close to the heart of Christ as anyone else and thus, deserving of your unequivocal and selfless love as per Christ’s admonition to “Love others as I have loved you.”
Merry Christmas!