U.S. Catholic Bishops Plan to Attack Gay Marriage with November Statement

by Michael Jones · 2009-10-13 08:57:00 UTC
Topics:

Catholic Church

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is planning a major statement on marriage in November, preparing to issue new language about how the church views same-sex marriage. Unfortunately, the new language is more of the same from the U.S. bishops -- hateful, tired, and representative of a theology that views people who are LGBT as less than.

The statement, "Marriage: Love and Live in the Divine Plan," (PDF) not only blasts gay marriage, but also tackles contraception and cohabitation. The statement calls all of them intrinsically evil.

But the harshest words are reserved for marriage equality, which the U.S. bishops see as one of the most troubling developments in contemporary society. They dedicate 42 lines of text to the issue.

"[Same-sex marriage] harms both the intrinsic dignity of every human person and the common good of society," the U.S. bishops write. "The legal recognition of same-sex unions poses a multifaceted threat to the very fabric of society, striking at the source from which society and culture come and which they are meant to serve."

They go on to write that LGBT people should live a life dedicated to chastity, and that male-female complementarity reigns superior to basic equal rights.

With this statement, the U.S. bishops just might have made the Catholic Church the most anti-LGBT religious institution in the country. Say what you want about the craziness of Focus on the Family, or the wingnuttiness of the Family Research Council, or the anti-gay dollars from the official Mormon Church. But this statement will be signed on by more than 300 U.S. Catholic Bishops, covering the entire country.

And it's yet another example of how the official Catholic Church is moving to the far end of the radical right spectrum.

Fortunate Families, a Catholic organization made up of parents who love and affirm their LGBT children, issued a newsletter last month with an article by David Boies (PDF), one of the lawyers leading efforts to challenge bans on gay marriage in federal courts. Boies wrote, "Countries as Catholic as Spain, as different as Sweden and South Africa, and as near as Canada have embraced gay and lesbian marriage without any noticeable effect -- except the increase in human happiness and social stability that comes from permitting people to marry for love."

Too bad the U.S. Catholic Church isn't listening to groups like Fortunate Families, or to this Catholic mother in Maine, or to this retired Catholic Bishop in Detroit when it comes to the matter of loving LGBT people.

(Photo courtesy of Creative Commons license on Flickr.)

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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