Children’s lives should be put before dogma
Posted by Patrick Clibbens on January 25th, 2007
I don’t see why Catholic adoption agencies should be allowed to deny their services to homosexuals because they view them as sinners. Does this mean they currently also refuse to house children with cohabiting couples? There are many things the Catholic Church view as sinful which many heterosexual married couples will guiltlessly do on a daily basis - the use of contraception, for instance; there is no moral audit for these sins, because it does not preclude their ability to provide the child with a loving home. Why is homosexuality so uniquely bad that children can’t be raised by gay people?
More important than any of this, the Catholic Church has its priorities wrong yet again. Perhaps it is only a tactic to try to secure an exemption, but if the Catholic adoption agencies do close rather than allow the possibility that they might have to house children with homosexuals, it is vulnerable children who will be most harmed. These bodies perform a considerable role, dealing with only 4% of all cases, but one third of those seen as difficult to place, according to the BBC. Children’s lives should be put before their dogma or convenience: something the Church still has not learned. When I was at primary school, this man was my parish priest. Thankfully, I was more fortunate than his former pupils. Whose interests do they really have at heart?
Your point is valid except it falls under an even more dogmatic auspice than that held by Christian agencies. (The Church of England has joined the Catholilc Church on this hence I use the broader term.) Your post runs under the assumption that EVERYBODY must agree that children have the right to be adopted by gay couples and if they don’t, like the church, they should be forced into accepting it. I don’t see the Church forcing you to except their stance on gay adoption. To believe that children have a right to a mother and father is no crime and certainly should not be stamped out from those sectors of society which encourage it, ie, The Church. Instead of forcing your liberal view on everybody else why can’t you except as a liberal that different private institutions may have a right to their own opinions, particulary when adoption agencies are non-governmental.
The broader question is whether the state has the right to interfere with religious teaching and practice. This issue surfaces again and again over for example whether religious symbols such as the cross or the niqab can be worn at work, or whether people should be allowed to have their children educated at religious schools.
Will:’to believe that children have a right to a mother and father is no crime’ - certainly it isn’t! However, I would argue that to believe that children have a right to two loving parents is no crime either, and by diminishing the potential pool of adoptive parents then some children will be missing out. If you look at the research (see Susan Golombok for instance) then you will see that children raised by lesbian parents (there aren’t enough gay male couples raising children to be able to constitute a big enough sample to study) do equally as well as children raised by heterosexual couples, and better than children raised by single parents (and are no more likely to grow up gay). This is an instance of institutional homophobia, which is illegal under the Human Rights Act and should indeed be legislated on.
So does this mean that other services can discriminate? Like, say, a shop that refuses to serve disabled people because of their ‘beliefs’? Or a bus company that wants to run an apartheid on its services?
Basically, it all comes down to the fact that Christians hold the incredibly immature belief that homosexual relations are icky and are a sin, because ‘God’ said so in the Old Testament. It has nothing to do with the welfare of the child - let’s not kid ourselves that it does.
Perhaps Will is right, why shouldn’t we allow the two view points of view to co-exist? Allow private religious organisations to exclude gay couples as they see fit; gay people can still adopt through other channels, and religious organisations don’t have to change their views. Is the state being overly interfering once again? No, is the answer.
Will seems to have missed a key implication in this view; if we exempt Christian adoption agencies how can we then pressure other private religious organisations with far more uncompromising views to conform to the liberal views of society? This is about a service/organisation operating in the public domain. It is not their values that are being challenged, but their manifestation in public. Should we allow Christians adoption agencies to exclude gay couples on the grounds of religion, what is to stop, for example, extreme Muslim organisations excluding ‘infidels’ on the same basis?
Christian adoption agencies are not run by religious fanatics, they are trying to perform a truly benign function, within which they qualify their actions on the basis of their religious views. It may seem heavy handed to force them to conform to ‘liberal’ social values. But discrimination is an issue in society today for which we need legislation, and there simply has to be one rule for all. This is why the Attorney General has said that there simply no legal possibility of an exemption - and why the government is forcing the adoption agencies to change. And rightly so.