Calling bollocks

Controversy is brewing over a ban on gay-straight alliances in the Halton Catholic District School Board. Along with Nazi groups and others in conflict with Catholic doctrine, GSAs are out because school authorities do not want to encourage kids to identify based on their sexual orientation. "I've never been to a GSA," one trustee told Xtra, "...They force people to be labelled as gay." If she had ever been to a GSA meeting, or you know, read its name in print, she would know that their mandate is to provide a safe space where students can congregate without being called upon to identify which part of the initialism they fall on, but we must assume in charity that the good Catholic woman was simply too flustered once "Gay" was on the brain to read the "straight alliance" bit for comprehension. Her characterization of GSAs as "sex clubs" further confirms the hunch that the bogey man the trustee imagines herself to be arguing against bears little resemblance the hapless group of kids back in reality who her policies are victimizing. Personally, I recall large numbers of Tim Horton's cookies consumed over fairly benign after-school conversation some of us might never have otherwise had the ability to do, and the occasional field trip into the city to hear a speaker. "Why can't heterosexual students have a club?" Xtra's source asks. But as every child learns on Mothers' and Fathers' Day and every white person come February, the answer to that question is inevitable: those would be every club in the student handbook.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church takes pains to preface and qualify its opposition to gay families with the proviso that "Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided." The trick, of course, is "unjust" - for subsequent actions make it clear that the Church's definition of "unjust" is sufficiently restrictive as to be meaningless. Apart from GSAs, developments the Church has fought as unacceptable waterings down of family teaching are:

*laws that guarantee the same rights to housing and employment as enjoyed by heterosexuals, so that a gay tenant could not be denied a lease on the basis of their sexual orientation - even if he is fully compliant with the Church's teaching on the expression of the same! Here the bishop argued that such laws could give credence to morality of homosexual relationships. Like the Halton boards, this case belied the Catechism's claim to be content with upholding the Church's understanding of marriage - rather, it is necessary to avoid any action that the faithful might misinterpret as in any way attributing humanity to gay people. Only life as single, homeless, unemployed drifters befits our wretched estate. It's hardly as if anyone is going to be under any illusions about the RC doctrine, so literally pulling the front doormat out from under our feet is above and beyond the call of "apostolic authority" and skirting petty-vindictive territory.

*the placement of children with adoptive parents of the same gender, so that a child unable to find a home can be bounced from one foster home to another throughout adolescence until they graduate to juvenile detention, but will at least be spared the affront to their dignity of being given to loving parents whose junk didn't match.

*the burial by Catholic families of their gay members. In this case, the bishop interfered with the parish priest's duty to minister to the family in its time of - hardly within the ambit of a bishop's power of "Godly admonition" - because the man in question owned a gay dance club. This case too is purely vindictive and groundless even assuming the RC model of moral theology. The funeral was denied because the man's business contradicted Catholic teaching, which apparently His Excellency has extended (by what authority?) to cover dancing, and allowing it to proceed would run the risk of the sin of "scandal." Treating the creation of scandal itself as a sin is a dangerous game. One confessional manual I read advised against allowing non-communicants to approach the altar for a blessing lest the good but clearly rather dim faithful wonder whether he received.

Now, our grandmothers and anyone whose common sense hasn't been eliminated by years of canon law training would know that the obvious answer to that is "Eyes on your own page!" If the laic is indeed so dimwitted as to be unable to imagine a non-nefarious explanation for what he witnesses, it is nevertheless none of his beeswax and the sin of scandal is commissioned by his making it so. Indeed, in some circumstances non-Catholics, even "open" (!) ones, are permitted not only to approach but to receive (e.g. in France). Does recourse to this legitimate canonical provision become sinful because a backseat canonist may second-guess whether the priest availed himself of it correctly? Likewise, the pastoral propriety of a given Christian burial cannot be subjected to a vote of clucking tongues in the CWL. Besides all of which, you would think such a grievous sinner would need the Church's navigational assistance more than ever at such a critical soteriological moment as death. And when you consider the importance of funerals not just to the departed soul but to the family, the whole enterprise becomes even sillier. To bury someone is not to endorse his "lifestyle" but to offer the prayers which are due for all the departed, and bereavement is not a time to be hijacked by the curia to make a polemical point which Martians would have to be deaf not to have gotten by this point.

So the Roman Catholic position on homosexuality is in no way an attack on the dignity of the gay person himself, unless your idea of dignity includes things like a roof over your head. And this is not purely an academic point, for it goes straight to the credibility of the Church's claim that it is "catholic" - open to all people. If the gay person who assiduously observes the RCC's marital discipline is still not worthy of food or shelter, then it's clear that the Church does not merely subject gay relationships to the same disciplinary considerations as other irregular relationships, but in fact does precisely what it claims not to: demonize homosexuals as such, regardless of their moral valour. And then, when gay teens started dropping like flies those few awful weeks last fall, numerous Christians insisted to me that Christianity was not to blame as it had always limited its condemnation to the sin and not the sinner. I assume these people, however, consider eating and sleeping in a bed to be basic rights rather than sins, so unless they imagine that gays have some special perverted way of eating, it is clear that their desire to limit the rhetoric on the record takes considerable liberties with the history.