Profound Wisdom from the Foolable Fifth Column

The NCR Editorial on the CC/gay adoption conundrum

The predictable manure:

There is much in the Catholic air these days about homosexuality. Pope Benedict XVI, as then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, has provided much of the content, from the assertion that gays are “objectively disordered” to the 2003 document issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which Ratzinger then headed, that called gay parenting “gravely immoral” and said permitting gay couples to adopt “would actually mean doing violence to these children.”

He has certainly emboldened the troops. Listening to people like Dr. John Haas, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia, one might conclude humans know all there is to know about sexuality and sexual orientation.

In an interview in The Pilot, a publication of the Boston archdiocese, Haas was asked if a Christian in good conscience could disagree with the teachings of the church on this issue. “No,” he answered. “It is a misunderstanding of what conscience is. Conscience conforms to reality and the moral law. It doesn’t make the moral law and determine what reality is or is not.”

In a recent conference on homosexuality at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, French Msgr. Tony Anatrella, a psychoanalyst and consultant to the Pontifical Council for the Family, said without qualification that gay couples were unable to model the sexual difference essential to any child in developing his or her own sexual identity. He asserted that 40 percent of children raised by homosexuals became homosexuals themselves. It wasn’t clear in the Catholic News Service report where he got that number, though the story did report that the assertion was greeted with chuckles in the audience.

In his analysis, children of gay parents could experience such an altered reality that “we could reach the point where we have violence, and what I call ‘civilized delirious behavior.’ ”

Oh, there was more. David S. Crawford of the John Paul II Institute in Washington, holds that tolerance of homosexuality and affording gays rights would lead to a society-wide form of “compulsory homosexuality” in which all relations would be “fundamentally homosexual. … They all become in this sense, essentially, or at least for legal and social purposes, gay.”

There was no indication in the story that an actual homosexual person was part of the conference or consulted about all of these rather bizarre conclusions that would stem from their very existence.

All of this, of course, does little to enlighten, though it does do much to enrich the antihomosexual atmosphere around issues such as gay adoption in Boston.

Thank God we Fools can turn to the Spiritually-guaranteed infallible opinion of the Foolable NCR Editorial Board. How else could we hope to conform our lives to the truth in these confusing times? It's not as if the Roman Catholic Church hasn't already presented her clear teaching on the immorality of homosexual activity and the inappropriateness of "gay couples" adopting children.

The best part of this laugher has to be when the editors openly demonstrate Mark Shea's cycle of all trends secular:

But what’s the harm in consulting the data, in talking to those involved in tracking such adoptions and their outcomes before pronouncing so absolutely on all the imagined deleterious effects of gay adoptions?

In other words, what could it hurt?

After all, it's only children's lives we're talking about. Everyone knows that adoption isn't for them.

It's for the adults.

How Foolish of us to believe smoke could indicate fire. How crude of us to trust the Church rather than the enlightened Foolable collective conscience that clearly knows better than Christ.

Let me stop laughing and catch my breath. The NCR Editorial Board has no problem trying out "gay couples" adopting. Will they admit there's a problem if and when problems emerge? Great! Then they can finish Mark Shea's cycle. They can ask: "How were we supposed to know?"