Catholic Ping - let me know if you want on/off this list
Posted on 12/01/2003 6:07:08 AM PST by NYer
In a strongly worded letter to be read at Mass this weekend, the bishops also said the Supreme Judicial Court's mid-May deadline for the Legislature to rewrite marriage laws to provide benefits for gay couples is too rushed.
The bishops, among the leading opponents of the ruling, urged parishioners "to contact the governor and their state legislators to urge them to find a way to give our citizens more time to deal with this issue."
Boston Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley and Bishops Thomas Dupre, Daniel P. Reilly and George Coleman also complained that the state high court ruling promotes "divisions in society by villainizing as bigotry the legitimate defense of thousands of years of tradition.
"Marriage is a gift of God ... it is not just one lifestyle among many," the bishops wrote in the letter, which was published in the Boston Archdiocese's newspaper, The Pilot.
Gary Buseck, executive director of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, said the letter's language disappointed him.
"I don't think the court villainizes anyone. The Roman Catholic Church is being very clever to try to cast themselves as the victim here," Buseck said.
David Wilson, one of the plaintiffs in the case that led to the ruling, said the bishops are confusing civil and religious marriage. The court ruling will not require any religion to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies.
State Rep. Philip Travis, who supports amending the state constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, said the May deadline won't change unless the court re-enters the case. The earliest such an amendment could go to voters is November 2006.
A spokeswoman for Gov. Mitt Romney, who also supports the proposed amendment, declined comment on Saturday.
Catholic Ping - let me know if you want on/off this list
The homosexuals have absolutely no idea how seriously ill they are. They're in gross denial. They'll never get it until they're on their death bed being eaten away from some vile homosexual disease, and some still won't get it even then.
They think they're normal, and the other 99% of the world is ill. I want to shake them and tell them to wake up! There's no way an entire country should change anything simply to please a few with an twisted type sex fetish.
There are all kinds of sexually dysfunctional people in the world. Should a shoe fetishist marry a shoe? A gay pedophile marry a toddler? A man a beast? Where does it end?
An excellent point!
Faithful Citizenship: A Catholic Call to Political Responsibility
They're working on holding politicians who claim to be catholic accountable. If they're pro-sodomy, pro-death, etc. , the church is threatening to toss them out. So far, it's talk. Doing it is another story. I'd like to see it happen.
This is the trojan-horse argument that has some otherwise conservative commentators backing this nonsense. It appears to offer them honorable ground from which they can pretend to be supporting both sides at once.
The problem is, of course, that there is no such thing as a "civil marriage", and more than there is such a thing as a "religious marriage." There is simply marriage. Period. Either one is married or one is not.
The fact that one person's marriage was performed by a judge and another's by a priest is not an important distinction. When your five year old child is forming their impressions about what constitutes a family, they're not going to go around asking about judges and priests. They're going to ask about mommies and daddies. Confuse such a basic issue of family for the children, and you'll likely end up with a breakdown of the family unit when those children grow up.
That's how the institution of marriage is passed down from one generation to the next, and that's why people monkeying around with it for their own gratification is so damaging. They're chipping away at a social norm that is the basis of Western society.
Those who advocate homosexual marriage on this forum do so out of ignorance of what the experts say. That is, environment is the major factor in determining homosexuality. The fact that environment is the major factor in determining homosexuality is strengthened by the fact that thousands have left the homosexual lifestyle.
It makes no sense to base rights on a behavior that results in severe health hazards, hazards that are contagious through the exchange of bodily fluids such as blood, and hazards that are deadly. Hazards that will not change with homosexual marriage because AIDS targets homosexual behavior.
Do supporters of homosexual marriage hate homosexuals to the point that they want to kill them off by encouraging a contagious and deadly lifestyle? I would hope not.
Apparently those who apppose the homosexual lifestyle are the only true friends homosexuals have.
Why would that be a problem?
My priest blew it off. I'll have to have a word with him. I'd like to change parishes, but my daughters have a lot of friends here.
The sides are being drawn, more clearly than ever.
It makes a big difference whether a marriage is recognized by the state. As was pointed out on another thread, marriage is a special kind of social partnership that has the official sanction of the government. Social partnerships that do not have the official sanction of the government are nothing more than friendships or acquaintanceships.
To the extent that people subscribe to moral views that place high value on the mother-father family and encourage spousal fidelity, there is little need for government intervention. But what happens when prevailing moral view denigrates the mother-father family and encourages infidelity, abortion, and transient couplings that leave children bereft of a stable male-female complementary family structure? Ought not the state seek to implement laws wisely and narrowly designed to reward and enhance the mother-father partnership and preserve the family from encroachment and attack?
"11. The Catholic Church teaches that respect for homosexual persons cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behaviour or to legal recognition of homosexual unions. The common good requires that laws recognize, promote and protect marriage as the basis of the family, the primary unit of society. Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behaviour, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity. The Church cannot fail to defend these values, for the good of men and women and for the good of society itself."
CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING PROPOSALS TO GIVE LEGAL RECOGNITION TO UNIONS BETWEEN HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS
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You should find the following statement more specific and direct.
IV. POSITIONS OF CATHOLIC POLITICIANS
WITH REGARD TO LEGISLATION IN FAVOUR
OF HOMOSEXUAL UNIONS
10. If it is true that all Catholics are obliged to oppose the legal recognition of homosexual unions, Catholic politicians are obliged to do so in a particular way, in keeping with their responsibility as politicians. Faced with legislative proposals in favour of homosexual unions, Catholic politicians are to take account of the following ethical indications.
When legislation in favour of the recognition of homosexual unions is proposed for the first time in a legislative assembly, the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral.
When legislation in favour of the recognition of homosexual unions is already in force, the Catholic politician must oppose it in the ways that are possible for him and make his opposition known; it is his duty to witness to the truth. If it is not possible to repeal such a law completely, the Catholic politician, recalling the indications contained in the Encyclical Letter Evangelium vitae, “could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality”, on condition that his “absolute personal opposition” to such laws was clear and well known and that the danger of scandal was avoided(18) This does not mean that a more restrictive law in this area could be considered just or even acceptable; rather, it is a question of the legitimate and dutiful attempt to obtain at least the partial repeal of an unjust law when its total abrogation is not possible at the moment.
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