I guess I cannot equate it with revoking people’s rights. But then again we aren’t talking about revoking rights in any case. No rights are being revoked, they simply aren’t being granted. But then again the Catholic church really has very little to do with gay rights in America as those are generally being voted down by referendum, and Catholics are not the majority population in very many American states.
The Catholic Church is a bete noir. It’s not really singling out homosexuals, it’s not in control of policy, and no one is revoking rights of homosexuals as homosexuals have never had these rights.
Not true. Marriage rights were granted to gay couples in California and Maine. The Catholic church (and related organizations) actively - and successfully - campaigned to have those rights revoked or nullified.
The Catholic Church (and related organizations) what does that mean? Is that something vaguely like, “Christian groups”? I take your meaning, but in the end in both cases it was the voters in the states of California and Maine that ‘revoked’ the right.
I agree, and I don’t necessarily think it’s exclusive of what I wrote. Given higher promiscuity rates and shorter committed relationship lengths for homosexuals as a whole, it’s not unreasonable to argue that homosexuals, as a group, are less vested in their relationships. (aggregation of citeshere)
I don’t quite understand how opposing the tax exempt status on churches makes my observation on the doctrine of “love the sin, hate the sinner,” silly. They seem to be wholly unrelated, as near as I can tell.
Well, here’s the thing. People lie. A lot. And they lie to themselves at least as often as they lie to other people. If I judged every man by how they talk about themselves, I would have to conclude that the human race is made up almost entirely of saints and paragons. But, often, there is a disparity between someone’s actions and words. In such cases, should I not value their actions above their words?
Sure, it’s possible. But I don’t think you’ve understood the thrust of my objection to this particular phrase. My objection is not to the philosophy, it’s to the idea that a good enough philosophy excuses the infliction of harm on other people. If someone truly loves me, then they do not need to have an excuse for harming me, because they will not have inflicted the harm in the first place. I submit that the Christians who truly do practice the doctrine of loving the sinner, but hating the sin, will never need to utter that phrase, because their actions alone will demonstrate their love. They will not need to explain why their actions are so drastically at odds with their words.
No, actions are quite important, but Christianity is a philosophical ideal.
It doesn’t excuse the infliction of harm on other people. And the phrase is usually uttered when people are discussing whether or not that particular act is moral, so yes, it does need to be said. What actions are you referring to? Disagreeing that homosexuality and heterosexuality are two sides of the same coin? Voting against marriage as part of the standard legal social compact of society? I don’t see people actively harming you, I just see them opposing your sense of what your legal rights should be. They do not stop you from living with your significant other, they just oppose legitimizing it. As Democracy is asking for their opinion, they offer it and that influences policy. Simple as that.
And it was the Catholic church, among others, that let the drive to get the question on the ballot in the first place, and they were among the loudest voices urging people to vote those rights away.
The Ratzinger quote clearly states that there isn’t anything wrong with homosexuality per se. It’s the sex, and you know that. It’s the same damnation of premarital sex, promiscuous sex, adultery, etc. It’s all the same sin.
Saying that it’s wrong to condemn homosexuality because they can’t help it is like saying it’s wrong to condemn married men because they can’t help but be attracted to other men’s wives (or single women). It’s 1) obvious, and 2) a strawman. No Catholic that follows doctrine would condemn a person for being gay any more than that married man who’s eye wanders. It’s the act of having a relationship with that forbidden person that makes it sinful. I really can’t grasp why that’s so hard for people to understand.
How is that different than the way we treat any mentally or physically disabled person? We don’t condemn the wheelchair-bound, do we?
Not true at all. There are at least 3 Catholic churches I know of that organize trips to visit the imprisoned. Surely you don’t think they approve of crime, do you?
There’s no false equivalence here. From the point of view of the church, both are bad ways to have sex. It doesn’t matter if you think homosexuality is harmful because obviously they disagree.
Neither does gay marriage, since it’s not a right.
I agree. We should thus tax the poor and middle class more so that the rich don’t have to keep carrying their share of the cost of government.
Gays aren’t a political group? Seriously?
As can be expected, the liberal once again tries to frame abortion as if it had anything to do with religion and not, I dunno, keeping babies alive.
Kinda like marriage.
Puh-lease. No demographic voted against SSM more than black people. Statistically, black people aren’t catholics- they’re protestant. If you want to point to a hate group, point there.
Yes, and without that legitimacy, gay couples are left without the protections that married heterosexual couples get and take for granted, and that does cause actual harm. And let’s not forget that the Catholic church also vigorously opposes extending those rights to gay couples under any circumstances, not only as part the rights and privileges of marriage.
Would you find it so easy to dismiss if any other group - Jews, handicapped people, Pentecostals, etc. - were targeted?
Right. But it’s not a philosophical idea I practice, and as such, it’s philosophies are largely irrelevant to me, except insofar as attempts to put the philosophy into practice affect my life.
That’s not my experience with the phrase at all. The vast, vast majority of the times I hear that phrase, it is in defense of an action that is damaging to the rights of homosexuals. I’ve never, to my immediate recall, heard it used to discuss something in the abstract. Instead, I hear it used as a reason to argue that gays should not be allowed to marry, or adopt, or have custody of their own children, or be protected from workplace or housing discrimination.
I don’t think it’s possible to restrict someone’s legal rights without harming them to some extent. Sometimes, that harm is necessary for a greater good. I don’t see the greater good in restricting anyone’s right to marriage - and I think I can do a pretty good job of shooting down any proposed arguments to the contrary. But that’s a whole different debate.
No, it doesn’t stop that. But it does stop me from collecting my partner’s social security benefits. It stops me from being able to file my taxes jointly with my partner. In some states, it stops me from being able to visit my partner in the hospital. It stops me from being able to make next of kin decisions for my partner. It stops me from being able to inherit from my partner in the absence of a will. It makes it harder for me and my partner to adopt (as preference, rightly enough, tends to go to married couples.) Similarly, it makes it harder for me to win custody of my biological children.
All of those are examples of harm directly caused by opposition to gay marriage. In some states, those harms are mitigated to some extent by the existence of civil unions, but nowhere in the US is there not some level of harm to gay couples caused by the lack of a federal-level recognition of gay marriage. And, to the extent of my knowledge, the official position of the Catholic Church is against any state recognition of homosexual unions, not simply marriage, so they are actively opposed to any sort of remedy for the aforementioned harms.
And, while it’s arguably the most picayune form of harm, telling someone that the most important emotional bond in their life is an abomination in the eyes of God is flat-out insulting, no matter how much you hedge it with excuses about loving the sinner and not the sin. I don’t care how central a belief is to your religion, saying that to someone is *always *a dick move, no exceptions.
I have been hearing it my whole life, and gay marriage has only been an issue that has entered my consciousness as a political controversy within the last decade.
I tend to agree with you. But I don’t think that everything can be reduced to ‘bigotry’ as an explanation.
Right.
Hmm, I haven’t heard anything about opposition to civil unions.
Right. I guess the way I see it is that life is filled with groups that are at odds with one another ideologically. To categorize any lifestyle opposition as being a ‘hate group’, seems to me to be well, self-serving. Sure, from your perspective I can see how you might see it that way, but hating homosexuals isn’t a core tenet of Catholicism.
What’s absurd about it? They’re both natural aspects of human sexuality. I’d wager that without the teachings of the Church on it you’d have seen a lot more open homosexuals. As it stands now and in the past, the Church encourages them to keep quite about it and live a lie, entering into loveless marriages or forsaking sexual contact altogether. That’s what’s absurd, that we should tolerate the intolerance of others.
Yes, but that doesn’t exactly excuse the Catholic stance, does it? You can be homosexual as long as you never act on it. Er, great. Then you get into the repression and self-hating above.
It’s not, what’s hard is why we should consider that sinful or pay any heed to an organisation that calls it such. It causes no harm whatsoever, same-sex relationships are a source of joy for many, a joy which the Catholic Church teaches is against the law of God. All they’re doing is piling on the guilt for no reason (which they also do with heterosexual sex and condemning you for thoughtcrime - even when married, lust at other women can be a natural reaction. So yes, I think that teaching is wrong too).
Because this is equating homosexuality with some kind of physical disability, which it is not. Going back to the topic, you can clearly see how calling someone’s entire life ‘disordered’ based on nothing isn’t going to fly with that person, especially when no evidence is brought forth to support the assertion.
If sex is always bad, why does the Catholic church allow sex inside of marriage? It’s because the church recognizes that not everyone can live a celibate life. But homosexuals are not granted an option on the subject. They can live in celibacy, or they can live in sin. Unlike heterosexuals, they are allowed no middle ground.
No, we don’t. We also don’t forbid them from marrying, or raising children. We don’t tell them that the only reason they’re disabled is because they haven’t tried hard enough to overcome their disability. We don’t hold them morally responsible for being disabled.
Of course not. But like I said, I don’t object to the philosophical underpinnings of “love the sinner.” I object to its specific implementation as regards to the debate around gay rights. Someone going to a prison to minister to the inmates there does not need to explain that they care about the inmates - it’s already manifest in their actions. The only time I ever hear someone use this particular phrase is when nothing in their actions is recogizable as loving, so they need to justify why they’re acting in a hateful manner without copping to actually being hateful.
If someone were advocating for harsher prison conditions, less food, poor facilities, less medical care, laxer enforcement of prisoner violence, and so forth, but kept talking about how much they really loved prisoners, would you take them at face value?
The difference is, the harmful effects of pedophilia are actually measurable. When the Church can point to my soul and show me the precise spot where having sex with dudes is eroding it, then we can have a meaningful comparison of homosexuality and pedophilia.
Are you also against any punishments for crimes? Any disciplining of children? What about treatment facilities for substance abusers? All of those are examples of causing ‘harm’ to others that we ostensibly love.
Funny that that is the only thing you could find - immediately following that sentence are ten estimates, analyses, and survey results, each of which is footnoted.
There have been lawsuits filed by gay people to force dating services to include options for gay people, whether or not they want to. There are demands that homeschooling be outlawed and children forced to attend public schools so that they’ll be taught a pro-gay perspective. There are hate speech laws that lead to people being arrested for homophobic comments. There’s a ruckus in Washington, D.C. right now about the city council trying to force same-sex marriage on Catholic groups. And just try telling what you said to Andrew Sullivan, the gay Catholic blogger who has received all kinds of death threats from the far left because of what he’s said about homosexuality.
Yes, well, anyone who advocates any law is attempting to force someone to do something. Those who advocate a public option for health care are advocating the use of force. Those who advocate a carbon cap-and-trade system are advocating the use of force. Those who advocate for a federal bailout of the banking industry are advocating a use of force. Yet for some reason the people who do these things don’t get labeled “hate groups”; it’s only the Catholic Church that becomes a hate group when it advocates for a law. Why the double standard?
I’ve never heard outside the context of gay rights. But then, outside of gay rights, I don’t have much call to engage in debates about Christian ethics.
So far as I can tell, this represents current Catholic dogma. The first section deals with gay marriage, but the rest mostly refers to “homosexual unions” and seems pretty opposed to the concept in any form. However, I admit I only skimmed it, and may have gotten the wrong impression.
Sorry, I should have made it clear from the beginning that I don’t think the Catholic Church is a hate group, and characterizing it as such is ridiculous. I do think that some of their policies are hateful, but I recognize that those positions are a small part of the overall mission of the church, and are controversial even among Catholics.