There’s a big fight in Massachusetts over gay adoption. The Catholic bishops refuse to allow gay couples to adopt in their social services, even stable, legally married gay couples. They say it violates their religious doctrines, and, under the current hierarchy, they’re sadly right. The twist is that the 42 member board of Catholic Charities, dominated by lay Catholics who, like so many others, are appalled by the bigotry of the current hierarchy, unanimously want to continue placing some troubled kids, otherwise with no stable homes, in gay households. That alone tells you about the widening gulf between lay American Catholics and the current Vatican.
The numbers involved are also tiny: some 13 kids over twenty years given a new start in a loving home headed by homosexuals, compared to 720 placed in heterosexual homes. My sympathies lie with the board and the children and their gay adoptive parents. The Catholic Church, alas, is not a democracy; its hostility toward gay people is intrinsic to the current hierarchy’s Magisterium; and, in my view, that has to determine policy. The state should not be telling religious groups how to conduct their own affairs, even if the policy is dictated from Rome and unanimously repudiated by locals. It would be particularly tragic if the church was forced to abandon its entire adoption services because of its intransigence on a tiny minority. There are several possible remedies, and if Romney is smart, he will maneuver to endear himself as much as possible with the anti-gay forces that control the GOP. The response of others should not be to coerce religious groups to abandon bigotry, but merely to expose it, hold it up for inspection, and reveal its non-existent arguments.
The whole affair, of course, is deeply saddening, a case where fundamentalism trumps charity, where distant authoritarianism over-rules local judgment, where bigotry hurts kids. But freedom is indivisible. And it should be upheld for bigots as well as those who see gay people as human beings with as much to give to the next generation as anyone else.
The Dish 