First published August 13, 2003, in the Chicago Free Press.
Just as its Boston archdiocese was offering $55 million to hundreds of sexual abuse victims, the irony-impaired Vatican issued "Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons" containing the amusing objection that allowing gay couples to adopt children "would actually mean doing violence to those children."
The interesting thing is not so much what the Vatican said but that it felt a need to issue a statement at all. It must puzzle the Vatican that its anti-gay views, long accepted and dutifully enforced by society, are now inexplicably being ignored.
Realizing that it was no longer possible to simply declare its opinion, the Vatican tried to offer arguments. But that may have been a mistake. The argument are not nearly up to the task demanded of them. On the contrary, the arguments are vague, slippery, feeble, circular or false.
Here is the core argument: Marriage is only for heterosexuals because heterosexuals cause babies and marriage is for causing babies because that is what happens when heterosexuals have sex. Did you get that? Read it again. The rest of the "arguments" are even worse. Viz.:
"No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman." If that is a factual claim, what is it based on? But, in fact, the "certainty" itself is a social "ideology" now losing its grip on a previously pliant population. Even popes cannot transmute mere traditions, no matter how widespread, into necessary truths.
"Marriage was established by the creator ... as confirmed by Revelation contained in the biblical accounts of creation." But nowhere in Genesis is there any report that Adam and Eve were ever married. Their progeny (and others) "knew" or "took" wives, but again no report of any marriages.
How about this reason? Heterosexual marriage is based on "the complementarity of the sexes" who "tend toward the communion of their persons," who "mutually perfect each other ... in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives"?
Pause to notice how this relegates celibate priests to irremediable imperfection since they cannot be "mutually perfected." And it seems odd for celibates, of all people, to instruct the rest of us about the relations of the sexes. How would they know?
But it is not even clear what the "complementarity of the sexes" and "communion of their persons" means. That heterosexuality causes babies does not prove the sexes are complementary. Daily experience remind us that the sexes have different needs, wants, priorities, life-rhythms, even different sexual arousal patterns. Most heterosexual couples say it takes work to keep a marriage together.
The Vatican often claims that heterosexual sex is "unitive" and here refers to the Bible's odd notion that man and woman "become one flesh." To be sure, man penetrates woman, but that does not mean man and woman are "united" or "become one flesh." We now understand biology better than the Biblical authors:
The sperm cell carrying a man's DNA has to travel a significant distance from the man after being emitted before it can merge with an egg. If I send you an e-mail message, you get the information, but that does not mean your computer "united" with my computer. So heterosexuality is no more "unitive" for the participants than homosexuality.
Homosexual acts "do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity," the Vatican says. But of course they do. We almost always choose someone whose difference from ourselves makes them admirable, exciting or interesting in some way, so "affective complementarity" applies just as well to gay marriage.
As for gay sexual complementarity, that is subject to mutual accommodation rather than the strictures of biology and is accomplished either by diverse preferences or reciprocity. Sadly, full sexual reciprocity is an option not available to heterosexuals and that fact impairs their ability to have as communicative and empathetic relationships as gays.
Finally, "the absence of sexual complementarity in these unions ... is not conducive to (adopted children's) full human development," and therefore constitutes "doing violence to these children." The Vatican says "experience has shown" this, but cites no evidence. In fact there is scant scientific support for its claim, and some to the contrary.
But the Vatican claim overreaches. It means that single parents should not raise children either. But if one father or mother is tolerable, then two fathers or mothers would be pretty good too--in fact, better, since any two parents will have different personalities and perspectives for the children to experience.
But the real reason the Vatican opposes gay marriage is that its goal is to press governments to "contain the phenomenon" (the Vatican cannot utter "homosexual sex") to avoid "exposing young people to erroneous ideas about sexuality" that would "contribute to the spread of the phenomenon."
Legalized gay marriage could lead celibate gays to act on their desires, lead closeted gays to "come out," and lead society to cease its disapproval of homosexual sex, which would undermine the Vatican's effort to "contain" it and reduce its occurrence. Why does the Vatican disapprove of gay sex? Its arguments for that are no better.