A recent article in the Atlantic features “a totally ordinary Catholic family,” one composed of two Lesbian ex-nuns and their adopted daughter. They’re campaigning to be accepted in the Roman Catholic Church.
The piece makes abundantly clear a fundamental tenet of the LGBT lobby as regards Christianity: it’s not enough to love the sinner; you must also love the sin.
The article shows that despite Catholics’ universal openness to gay people in the Church, just welcoming the person without embracing their lifestyle choices—whatever specific behavior they may entail—will never be enough. Nothing less than a full celebration of gay sex as good, moral, healthy and compatible with Christian morality will suffice.
The essay focuses on the lives of Annmarie and Claire Fore, two former Franciscan religious sisters who are now civilly married with an adopted daughter named Gabriela. The piece describes the couple as a “devout” gay family, despite the fact that they are “openly defiant” of Church teaching regarding marriage and human sexuality. They do not simply want to be accepted: they want to be accepted on their own terms and with their own doctrine.
After all, the couple didn’t choose to get married, the essay suggests. They were born that way, so God must want it, no matter what the Church says. The two women were just being true to their nature.
The funny thing is, the modern secular mindset seems to believe in unrestrained, free choice for everything except sexual orientation. You can choose to abort your child, you can choose to commit suicide, you can choose your gender, you can choose your race or ethnicity, but you have nothing to say about your sexual orientation.
“Neither of us even knew that we were lesbians,” Annmarie said.
Notice that she doesn’t say “choose.” She discovered an immutable fact. She woke up one day to find that she was a lesbian and there was nothing she could do about it. It was hidden deep in her genes, and once she found out she really had no choice. She had to embrace her foreordained identity as a lesbian.
Why the couple so desperately wants Church approval for their lifestyle remains a mystery. In point of fact, they have already founded their own church with their own doctrines, their own scriptures and their own sacraments.
Annmarie said that a sacrament is “an outward sign of God’s presence,” and she believes that her marriage is an outward sign of God’s presence. “So, yeah, it’s a sacrament,” she said. It doesn’t matter what the Church says. Or does it? Still, “I want that blessing of the Church,” Annmarie said.
But the LGBT lobby doesn’t want the endorsement of just want any church. They want the Catholic Church to accept gay sex and to put its seal of approval on homosexual relations. Never mind that the Unitarians or the Presbyterians or the Episcopalians will happily celebrate a gay wedding and tell you that God and his angels are thrilled that you are sleeping together. They want the Catholics.
Everyone knows that the Catholics don’t cave. Until 1930, every single Christian denomination condemned contraception as sinful. Now, only one church does: the Catholic Church. Jesus taught that anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery. Though virtually every Christian denomination has abandoned this teaching, the Catholic Church has stood firm.
So of course the LGBT lobby wants to force the Catholic Church to embrace gay sex. Why settle for a high score from China’s Dagong credit rating agency when you can aspire to a Triple-A rating from Standard & Poors?
In an op-ed last April, New York Times food critic and gay activist Frank Bruni wrote that the time had come for the Catholic Church to formally change its teaching on the morality of gay sex. If it won’t do so willingly, it should be forced to do so.
Bruni has also written that Christians who hold on to “ossified,” biblically-based beliefs regarding sexual morality have no place at America’s table and are deserving of no particular regard.
Bruni trashed all believing Christians as “bigots,” saying that Christians’ negative moral assessment of homosexual relations is “a choice” that “prioritizes scattered passages of ancient texts over all that has been learned since — as if time had stood still, as if the advances of science and knowledge meant nothing.”
Engaging in a bit of armchair theology, Bruni explained how the Bible can be interpreted to read that God is really fine with sodomy and that all that outmoded stuff against adultery, fornication, and “men lying with other men” is a antiquated remnant of a worldview that went out with Freud.
More recently, a homosexual priest working undercover in the Vatican organized a media blitz in which he publicly outed himself as gay together with his Catalonian boyfriend, and released a “manifesto of liberation” demanding that the Catholic Church change its teaching on the morality of gay sex as well as its interpretation of the Bible as condemning sodomy.
There’s that Bible issue again.
Presbyterian scholar Dr. Robert Gagnon, the author of the most authoritative and exhaustive treatment to-date on the topic of the Bible and homosexual practice, noted that the Bible clearly teaches that “same-sex intercourse is intrinsically sinful.” Scripture, he wrote, regards the violation of the man-woman prerequisite for sexual relations as “the ultimate sacrilege against God’s design of male and female.”
So, yes Annmarie and Claire, God does love you. Jesus loves you. The Catholic Church loves you. But no, they don’t love what you are doing so please stop asking them to.
Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter @tdwilliamsrome