Wednesday 3 March 2010

Catholic Care

This Leeds-based charity, the work of which with difficult-to-place children (among others, child and adult) is absolutely vital, has held out against the Sexual Orientation Regulations supported by all three parties, and is before the High Court today to argue its case.

No one has been given more cause than the Catholic Church in the West, and especially the English-speaking West, to know the reality of infiltration by a subculture and political movement, neither yet forty years old, founded out of and defined by the sexual abuse of male adolescents by grown men. For such is in fact the foundation of the historically and anthropologically illiterate, scientifically baseless theory that an inclination towards homosexual acts is somehow any basis for individual or collective identity. Acts are homosexual (or heterosexual), and between consenting adults in private they are no business of the criminal law. But persons are not. No one before the 1970s suggested that they were, and patterns of behaviour across great swathes of the earth continue to disprove that ridiculous assertion.

Not that there is any point trying to explain any of this to the Today programme, which banged on about "discrimination against gay people" as distinct from "heterosexuals". There are three categories of sexual act: homosexual acts, between persons of the same sex; heterosexual acts, between persons of opposites sexes and other than the marital; and the marital act, sexual intercourse between husband and wife. As always where the Church and these matters are concerned, this is not about opposition to homosexuality. This is about support for marriage. Catholic Care cannot place children with those who engage in non-marital sexual acts, of which homosexual acts are not the only, nor anything like the most common, category. That is the point.

As for the decision of the House of Lords to "allow" churches to hold civil partnership ceremonies, it is already perfectly easy to find a church which will conduct such a blessing. After all, civil partnerships already do not need to be consummated. There has never been any such need. So what have they to do with homosexuality, really? Yet the legislation fails to provide for unmarried close relatives. That is proof, as if proof were needed, that the point of this measure is to privilege homosexuality on the specious basis that it is an identity comparable to ethnicity or class, or even to the sex that is written into every cell of the body.

The legislation must be amended immediately to allow unmarried relatives, whether of the same or of opposite sexes, to register their partnerships. Then there would be no problem. If it had said that at the time of its enactment, then there would never have been anything more than a few newspaper stories about how same-sex couples were "planning to make use of a new law to protect elderly unmarried relatives living together from inheritance tax when one of them dies".

So why wasn't it set up like that?

See above, I'm afraid.

5 comments:

  1. Spot on. We used to talk about "a homosexual" or words to that effect in the 1950s, but only in the same sense as "a big eater" or "a rich man" or whatever. Less than the second one, if anything. Class was an identity but this was not. You are right that to define it as one is absurd and extremely recent.

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  2. Thank God, someone talking sense at last.

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  3. Exactly. This is why attempts to liken the homosexual rights movement to the black Civil Rights movement in America, for example, are so ridiculous and so galling to so many African-Americans.

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  4. This has nothing to do with close relatives and is entirely an opportunity for you to push the anti-gay agenda. God forbid that us Gayers get any rights that the rest are not afforded.

    Tell me, did you complain so heartily about the treatment of cohabiting, related couples for purposes of IHT Before Civil Partnerships were enacted? Surely, if it is inappropriate for them to be treated like that now, then it was then? No? I am surprised.

    This has nothing to do with the treatment of related, co-habitating couples and everything to do with the fact you can't stand the fact that Gay people who commit to be life-long partners, who want nothing more than to be afforded the same protection of their legal rights under law as married people, have now received such protection - and a good thing it is too.

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  5. "Tell me, did you complain so heartily about the treatment of cohabiting, related couples for purposes of IHT Before Civil Partnerships were enacted?"

    Yes. But that was pre-blogging.

    The present situation is a nose-rubbing expression of where the wealth and the power now lie, namely in the hands of a political movement based on ridiculous falsehood and organised child abuse, wholly unaccountable, vicuously intolerant (they can get almost anyone sacked, and they do), and founded several years after our own humane and necessary decriminalisation of male homosexual acts between consenting adults in private.

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