I read an essay this morning from Focus-on-the-Family (FoF) concerning the effect a marriage between ‘Adam and Steve’ will have on society. The essay comments on Catholic Charities pulling out of adoption and foster care placement in Massachusetts because state law forbids state-sanctioned organizations from discriminating against a list of people groups, and same-sex orientation is on the list.
Because Catholic Charities will no longer provide such services as a result of their determination that homosexuals are ‘intrinsically disordered’ and cannot provide a good environment for raising children, FoF says that this is a perfect example of the damage same-sex marriage and anti-discrimination laws covering homosexuals will have on society. It is a broad accusation. I think it is more spin than anything, and I don’t agree.
Here is an excerpt from the essay:
This March, then, unexpectedly, a mere two years after the introduction of gay marriage in America, a number of latent concerns about the impact of this innovation on religious freedom ceased to be theoretical. How could Adam and Steve’s marriage possibly hurt anyone else? When religious-right leaders prophesy negative consequences from gay marriage, they are often seen as overwrought. The First Amendment, we are told, will protect religious groups from persecution for their views about marriage.
So who is right? Is the fate of Catholic Charities of Boston an aberration or a sign of things to come?”
You can read the entire essay here.
Realize, the Massachusetts courts or legislature did not forbid Catholic Charities from functioning in the state; they simply said that discrimination will not be tolerated among those entities that the state oversees.
Are the politicized Religious-Right organizations, like FoF, willing to be consistent in the application of their beliefs and with the ‘stuff’ they use to justify their beliefs? From my experience and observation, no they will not.
I agree, with reservations, with Lieutenant Gov. Kerry Healey, Republican candidate for governor in the coming fall elections, who said, “I believe that any institution that wants to provide services that are regulated by the state has to abide by the laws of the state, and our antidiscrimination laws are some of our most important.†(Quoted in Focus on the Family Citizen, from the Boston Globe, March 2)
The solution in a democratic society, of course, is to petition the state for relief, which Catholic Charities has done. The state has not acted as of yet, but Catholic Charities realizes it must live within a democratic system and if it cannot support or function under the laws of the state then it must cease operations. They are willing to pay the price under this system of governance and laws. I actually do respect Catholic Charities’ decision – they are taking a principled stand regardless of whether I agree with it or not. I absolutely do not accept FoF’s spin on the situation. It is a shame all the way around, but the fault does not rest with homosexuals, as FoF claims.
FoF and other culture-war religious organizations say that they, as religious institutions, are protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution so that they do not have to obey amendments or laws – national or state – that conflict with their beliefs. In this insistence, because they have a theoretical belief or biblical interpretive structure that claims homosexuals to be ‘intrinsically disordered,’ sinful and naturally dangerous to children, they claim the right to disobey laws and constitutions without consequence. So, on the pretext of religious freedom they claim the right to discriminate against homosexual families. (Of course, they would demand that homosexuals cannot have ‘families’ to begin with.)
Will they be consistent on the pretext of religious freedom, then, to demand that the Christian Identity Movement or the World Church of the Creator (the white supremacist group), have the same constitutional right to discriminate against Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians or anyone who is not a white “Arian?” No, they will not. If they did, then what effect would non-discrimination laws have at all?
They claim that such a question is inappropriate because being homosexual is of a whole different order than an ethnic or racial identity. Homosexuality is purely and only a choice of behavior – heterosexual people who engage in same-gender sex acts. It is not the same as an unchangeable characteristic like ethnicity or race, they demand. The evidence is mounting against such a belief and homosexuals know it to be untrue of them selves, but it does not matter. The Religious Right groups are not interested in what reliable, verifiable, or appropriate-to-the-question studies show to be objectively true when the results differ from their already determined subjective ‘truth,’ or what personal experience witnesses to. They also readily misuse studies to attempt to prove their point – the Spitzer study is an example where they claim Spitzer’s study proves that a homosexual orientation can be change into a heterosexual one. (Go here for a decent overview of the Spitzer controversy.)
This leads to my next question concerning consistency – the use, interpretation, and application of ‘studies’ and the assertion of ‘facts.’
Are groups like FoF willing to be consistent in the use of a set of criteria to judge the reliability, verifiability, or appropriateness of any particular study that is claimed to address the question at hand? No, they are not. They reject out-of-hand any study that does not presumably support their already determined positions. They will not be consistent in reviewing studies that may disagree with their conclusions.
These are generalizations, of course, and I do believe that there are people who can have a principled stand on these issues, but groups like FoF tend not to. And, there are liberal groups that tend to do the very same thing concerning their own issues and presuppositions. All of this, however, only harms the claims of Christ’s Church as it attempts to engage the prevailing culture. If it is too easy to disprove the claims of Christians by generally accepted sources, how can the Church have any credibility when it does attempt to appropriately speak to the culture on important issues?
