I am sure the headlines and the context will be totally lost over the next few days. VOX NOVA has the details.
Update- Translated from an Italian Paperl'Occidentale at the Ratzinger Forum
Anyone who says the Church is intolerant can only do so in bad faith
by Stefano Fontana Translated from December 3, 2008
The position taken by the Catholic Church to the proposed 'decriminalization of homosexuality' presented by French president Nicolas Sarkozy cannot surprise anyone except those who are acting in bad faith. The reason is very simple: the proposal not only means 'decriminalization' but the inclusion of homosexuals among the categories to be protected against hate crimes on the same level as racism and religious intolerance.
The Sarkozy proposal, in other words, identifies homosexuality with homosexuals - the act with the person - indicating that one cannot be against homosexuality without being against homosexuals, i.e., whoever is against homosexuality is also against homosexuals. But the Church position is also that of anyone who simply uses reason.
One can maintain that homosexuality is a disorder, as Benedict XVI and the Church have called it, but affirm at the same time that homosexuals have the same dignity as every other person and deserve the same respect. Homosexuality is not the only human disorder, of which each of us possess a number and tolerate quite a few. Nor is it the most serious of disorders. But it is a disorder and it is a duty for everyone not to transform a disorder into normalcy.
Homosexuality is not to be promoted or taught as an indifferent sexual choice, and the homosexual couple cannot be equiparated juridically to the traditional family, and should not be allowed to adopt children. All this does not contradict asking respect for homosexuals, and from the Christian point of view, for loving them as brothers. [As Christ loved prostitutes and other sinners.]
Yesterday, the Holy See also stated it will not sign the Untied Nations convention on the rights of disabled persons. Again, it is not that the Church opposes rights for disabled persons. Obviously not. But the fact is that the convention also establishes the mother's right to 'reproductive health' in case the fetus is disabled or malformed.
In practice, this 'right' opens the door to eugenetic abortion, which the Church cannot accept. Conventions and laws have many aspects. Since the Church maintains that one cannot do good through bad means, even if some aspects of law are shared - such as depenalizing homosexuality - others are so strongly negative that the Church cannot accept them and must alert the faithful against present and future dangers resulting from such negative aspects.
We Europeans, among others, have a long experience in this respect, The European Parliament has tried many times to force its member states to extend juridical recognition to gay couples, directly equiparating homophobia with racism, intolerance and even Zionism. Thus, the probability that the Sarkozy proposal, if approved, becomes a tool to stigmatize the states that do not recognize gay marriage as intolerant and in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is ominously close.
To compare Iran, which imprisons homosexuals, and Italy, which is against the juridical recognition of gay marriages, is a rash logical leap which the Sarkozy proposal would nonetheless promote. It still is not clear to most what the Church cannot accept equivalence of homosexuality with heterosexuality. The fundamental reason is that the origin of human society is a male and female couple, not two asexual or indifferently sexed individuals
. The social meaning of sexuality has been forgotten and privatized by individualistic morality which is widely publicized in the consumer society - two phenomena which are complementary. But the Church cannot forget this basic principle. Two individuals who are indifferently sexed - homosexual or trans-sexual - do not complete each other in complementary diversity and are not open to the reception of natural life.
In such a set-up, sexuality is individualized and 'technified'. The Church maintains that if welcoming life - in the form of sexual differentiation and complementarity, and the possibility of two individuals generating life - is not a choice made from the very beginning, then it cannot be reconstituted afterwards. Society would be a heap of individuals thrown together but not a community. When it is said, sometimes as rhetoric, that the family is the basic cell of society, it means exactly that. A homosexual couple which cannot generate life cannot be this cell, because life would not continue.
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