What infuriates me, is that instead of serving soup kitchens, helping undocumented immigrants, or helping to organize unions, the Church is attacking gay and lesbians couples’ civil rights. Like, get a life. Or better yet, turn some of your pedophile priests into the civil authorities. Your confessions, dogma, and cannon law is not a separate and higher form of law than that of the people.

Every time I hear the Church blame pedophilia on homosexuality, I really have to wonder about all the opposite sex pedophile priests out there, and how an adult abusing a child without their consent has anything to do with what consenting adults do.

Notice how the Church doesn’t have a single non-faith based argument against gay and lesbian civil rights. It’s a good thing that our government is based on the will of the people, and not on superstition and the beliefs of long dead civilizations.

Thank you for your bravery in defending marriage – God calls us to be faithful, even we aren’t successful. My heart is really hurting that so many people, especially Catholics, believe the lie that marriage is just about ‘two people who love each other.’ Marriage is so much more than that, and now we see how contraception has ruined our vision. I am fighting with you and praying for the re-strengthening of the family.

There is a long body of evidence suggesting that polygamy as such doesn’t have a significant positive effect on fertility, since the sorts of women who enter polygamous unions differ from the sorts of women who don’t. See Somalia in the 1980s for one example.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2722909

It might even have a _negative_ effect. Don’t forget that many men, too, don’t get married in a polygamous culture: if there are equal numbers of men and women, and the sex ratio remains constant while some men monopolize the population of women, how will all men get married?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/feb/27/mormon-polygamists-fruit-fly

“[S]cientists have now uncovered an odd fact about 19th-century Mormons: the more women in a household, the lower the average birthrate. In other words, the more sister-wives a Mormon woman had, the fewer children she was likely to produce.

“Although it is great in terms of numbers of children for successful males to have harems, the data show that, for every new woman added to a male’s household, the number of children that each wife produced goes down by one,” said biologist Dr Michael Wade, of Indiana University.

The result is intriguing, because this is the first time scientists have observed humans being affected by what is known as the Bateman gradient, a phenomenon that gets its name from the geneticist who first observed it in fruit flies. The more sexual partners the male fruit fly had, the lower was the fecundity of each of those partners, the 20th-century geneticist Angus Bateman noted.”

“Where would society be 150 years from today if every single person in the world immediately embraced the gay lifestyle today. Men with Men and Women with Women.”

Where would society be 150 years from today if every single person in the world immediately embraced RC clerical lifestyles, men becoming celibate priests and brothers and the like and women becoming nuns? There’d be a non-trivial likelihood of extinction, too. Does it follow that the Roman Catholic Church must be shut down or something?

Legal “marriage” is a set of over 1000 civil rights and responsibilities which originate from the state. They cover every aspect of life: housing, employment, taxes, inheritance, adoption, immigration, insurance, hospital and prison visitation and on and on. In my experience not many people have taken the time to review this list and learn how, and especially to what extent, the current legal and civil discrimination affects gay people. If for nothing other than the sake of fairness I think people owe it to their consciences to at least know what the current policy is doing to couples and entire families. The irony of the terms “family values” and “defense of marriage” quickly becomes apparent.

The word marriage has separate civil and religious meanings, and the two appear to conflict only because of sloppy terminology. As a civil institution the right of the state is limited to issuing civil union licenses, not “marriage licenses”. Meanwhile no religion has the right to dictate restrictions or terms for civil union rights. In America our rights are granted according to our constitutions and civil laws, regardless of religious recognition or approval, occasionally exclusive even of majority support from the American people. E.g. when minorities were formally integrated into our armed services in 1948 polls indicated 80% of the public (and 85% of servicemen) were against it. Within just 40 years Colin Powell was Chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff and even the concept of discriminating based on race in our armed services was considered ridiculous.

Are you making the claim that marriage is a “civil right”? Please demonstrate how A. one has the “right” to get married and B. how that “right” originates from the state.

The RCC will need to accept and adapt to one of these two options, because anything in between them is legally indefensible, at least in our country. Withholding Communion and refusing donations isn’t going to change that fact, or change the position it puts our Catholic politicians in. You’d think the RCC would be intelligent and non-reactionary enough to understand this.

The Church does that all the time. The moral laws demands that sex be unitive and procreative. As an unmarried man, it is not okay for me to have sex with my fiancee. Even as a married man, when I have sex it must be open to life and for the good of my spouse. The moral law makes strict demands on everyone, not just individuals with homosexual inclinations.

If this were indeed, true, there would thousands of headless prelates taking a moral stand on the priestly abuse of minors. instead of thousands of Catholic adults broken into pieces by abuse. There are no such headless prelates. The hypocrisy of the church is astounding.

Christ himself said nothing about homosexuality. The church, following its persecution of Galileo, continues to fight science; at some future, the persecution of gay Catholics will be another historical stain the Church will have to admit.

Unfortunately claiming something doesn’t make it so. As a Californian, thanks primarily to funding by the LDS and RCC, my own constitution has been reforged into a weapon to deny me over 1300 civil rights, as well as the fundamental human right to marriage.

What I don’t understand is, the Church has an easy out on this issue. Last I checked the RCC sacrament is not and never has been “marriage”. The sacrament is called Holy Matrimony. So offer this as a separate service (only opposite-sex couples invited), and our First Amendment will protect your right to run these services however you wish.

In my view the current RCC position on homosexuality is not only anti-gay, it’s emotionally dishonest. Tell a heterosexual man that it’s ok to be attracted to women but not to actually have sex with them. What’s astonishing is that so many heterosexuals sincerely believe this makes any more sense to gay people than it does to them. Gay bashing comes in different flavors and this kind of emotional bashing is among the worst imo.