Oct 17, 2003  |  By: daniel a. helminiak  | COMMENTS     

AS A LIFELONG Catholic, a gay man, a former priest, and a theologian and psychology professor, I am appalled at the Vatican’s recent statement on gay marriage. So much is wrong with it! Too often in the church, all rationality goes out the window when the topic of homosexuality comes up.

Of course, the Vatican has company. The mostly Protestant religious right is screeching loudly and raising big bucks over gay marriage.

The Supreme Court decision granting legitimacy to gay relationships and the Episcopal Church’s approval of an openly gay bishop have sent shock waves through sex-negative America. Members of the U.S. Congress are considering a constitutional amendment to limit marriage to “one man and one woman.”

At least the Vatican argument against marriage is consistent. The major premise could stand as an equation: sex = procreation = marriage. Accept that, and the rest follows.

But who buys the major premise? Some 90 percent of practicing-Catholic couples use contraceptives in good conscience, despite condemnation from the Vatican. Jews and Protestants always did.

People are not barnyard animals for whom producing offspring is the function of copulation. Sex between humans is first and foremost a matter of emotional and spiritual bonding. So the Vatican argument from supposed “natural moral law” falls apart.

THE VATICAN’S APPEAL to the Bible is also faulty. As I show in my book “What the Bible Really Says About Homosexuality,” in its original intent the Bible had no concern about hetero- versus homosexuality. The distinction was completely foreign.

Sex took many forms. Leviticus 18:22 forbade only penetrative male-male sex — and for reasons of Jewish purity, not because of the nature of sex. Rejecting Jewish purity rules, the New Testament was completely indifferent to same-sex behaviors.

The medieval universities in Christian Europe regularly debated the value of straight versus gay sex, as scholar John Boswell showed in his book “Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.” So the condemnation of homosexuality is simply not “universally accepted by Catholic tradition,” as the Vatican would have its followers believe.

Then how does the Vatican claim that homosexual relationships are “a serious depravity,” “intrinsically disordered,” and a “deterrent to the common good”? It makes no convincing moral arguments. Such idealism about the good of society is also embarrassingly mistaken.

The Vatican is wrong, again, about the children in lesbian and gay families. Its claims are simply malicious propaganda —that living in gay families “creates obstacles in the normal development of children” and even does “violence” to them. By now researchers have been able to track kids raised by gay parents through their late teen years, and they are at least as healthy as any other kids, period.

BUT ON ONE point, the Vatican is right. Allowing gay marriage would mean “the redefinition of marriage” and “changes to the entire organization of society.” But would such change be “contrary to the common good”? Only if we botch the transition.

When marriage universally meant the rearing of children, there was good reason to grant heterosexual coupling a privileged status. But no longer.

How are two childless heterosexuals living together any different from two loving men or two committed women? The Vatican raised an important consideration: child-rearing.

Our society is indeed in the process of redefining marriage. Let’s do the job well. We do need two categories of bonded couples: not straight and gay, but one for childless couples and one for couples with children.

Couples, or singles, raising children merit special support. All society is indebted to them.

Couples without children also contribute to the stability of society, so they also deserve some other kind of legal status. Call them “marriages” or “unions” or “families” or “couples” or whatever. The child factor is pivotal.

Despite its gross misrepresentations and blinding hysteria, the Vatican’s recent pronouncements on marriage might make a positive contribution — to remind us that childrearing (but not sexual orientation) is crucial in the classification of sexual coupling.