It has been said before – the Catholic Church itself has said it – that it is the needs of the children have been largely ignored in the debate over the Church’s right, or not, to be exempted from new UK legislation which, it is claimed, would prevent Catholic adoption agencies from turning away same-sex applicants to adopt children. Following a House of Lords vote on 21 March ratifying the Equality Bill, the Communities minister Ruth Kelly (herself well known as a devout Catholic) said that the measures would deliver “dignity, respect and fairness for all”. By this, she was of course referring essentially to gay adults, including those wishing to adopt, not to any dignity, respect or fairness that might have accrued to child candidates for adoption as a result of the new law.
What follows here is a continuation of the discussion in my previous blog (dated 21 March) about whether the Church is acting correctly in its official opposition on principle to gay adoption. Here, I am examining the question in relation to the justice, or otherwise, of the Church’s moral condemnation of homosexuality, which is the ultimate reason for its opposition to same-sex adoption. Consequently, most of the ensuing discussion concentrates on these issues and is, to that extent, also focused on the adult aspects of adoption. Nonetheless, my main concern is to question whether, ultimately, the Church’s opposition to same-sex adoption could not also be seen as an injustice towards children.
It is indeed the needs of the children that should be to the forefront of the thinking and decisions in this matter. And yet the Church itself – perhaps partly as a tactic to try to win the exemption sought – has threatened to close down its adoption agencies if the Bill passes into law, which – failing an unprecedented last-minute refusal on the part of the Queen to give her consent – it now certainly will. Is this any way to treat the needy, hard-to-place children for whom Catholic agencies have been so successful in finding new parents and families? Those children will still be there after the Equality Bill becomes law. Is the Church really going to turn its back on them, in defiance of its founder’s call to his followers to let the little children come to him and to welcome the kingdom in the shape of a child? Who is going to ensure that true respect is paid to the dignity of those children and that they are treated fairly: with the justice that is of the kingdom?
That justice is expressed through right judgement. Hitherto, the Church has judged that gay couples are intrinsically unsuited to become parents through adoption. Is the Church always right in making this judgement? The Church’s position is based on an a priori and its established teaching: that because gay sex is ‘morally wrong’, gay sexual couples cannot on principle provide the basis for a family life in which children will be brought up to understand and practice sound morality and, one hopes, faith. In this way, the Church might be said to pre-judge the unsuitability of prospective gay parents before it has even taken a look at them.
In theory, this is no more than the consistent application of a universal moral principle. In practice, however, this pre-judgement is inseparable from prejudice: condemning and repudiating others, based on one’s preconceptions of them, before allowing oneself the opportunity to get to know them and respond to their common humanity. It does not matter if those preconceptions are sustained by a moral law that one accepts through faith as ultimately unquestionable if, at a human level, what is at work is a refusal to be open to people who do not share one’s beliefs, culture or lifestyle: a refusal to offer them love, as Christ commands, and not to judge them in case that judgement is also made against oneself.
Despite what has been generally said, the dispute between the Church and the British state over the new legislation centres more on this issue of prejudice than on that of discrimination. Or rather, because there is a perception that the Church is prejudiced against gays and lesbians, its unwillingness to accept applications for adoption from them is interpreted as discrimination based on prejudice against persons of a particular sexual orientation. Technically, of course, it is not discrimination of this sort: it is a rejection of gay adopters on the basis of character, personal values and ‘immoral’ behaviour. You could call this ‘moral discrimination’, i.e. a judicious, rather than prejudicial, differentiation between right and wrong ways of life. And yet, in practice, the distinction between condemning the sin but not the sinner is almost impossible to uphold in this instance. It really is as if because unrepentant sexually active gay persons are adjudged to be in a state of grave sin, they are also considered to be bad people in themselves: unsuited, at any rate, to be awarded custody of other people’s children. But which of us is without sin, even grave sin (or at least the capacity for it)? And does that make us unsuitable as parents?
Secular society, on the other hand, tends to assume that parenthood is a fundamental human right. The concept of human rights rests in part on the belief that all basic human needs are inherently good and should be allowed the freedom to be fulfilled, with the qualification that the exercise of that freedom should not encroach on the freedom and needs of other human beings. The wish to have children and carry out the role of a parent is considered as one such fundamental human need. How one describes that need is quite important, as will become clearer later in this discussion: whether you call it something like the ‘reproductive instinct’ or the ‘need to parent children’. In any case, support for the view that gay couples should enjoy the same adoption rights as straight couples is based on a concept of a ‘right to parenthood’ that is common to all human beings, whether gay or straight. This suggests another way to understand the accusations that Church adoption agencies are discriminating against gay couples by refusing to consider them as potential parents: this is seen as denying them a basic human right.
The Church’s view, of course, is that parenthood is not a right but a privilege or, more strictly, a calling. That calling is itself seen as inseparable from the vocation to marriage, defined as the sexual union of a man and a woman in the love and mystical Body of Christ. So the Church’s opposition to same-sex adoption rests on a logical reasoning to the effect that gay couples cannot have a genuine calling to have children, as their relationship and sexual conduct are of a type that is incompatible with the mystery of conjugal union and the biology of conception, processes which are intended by Christ to take place in unison within the state of matrimony. The existence of a vocation to marry also of course implies a right to marry and have children; but this right is dependent on the vocation and is therefore by definition reserved for straight persons.
On this basis, however, there ought also to be some straight people that the Church would not consider to be suitable or ‘legitimate’ parents: those not capable of sustaining a marriage and / or of giving their children the loving, secure family upbringing they need in order to become morally responsible and personally fulfilled individuals. But would the Church really be prepared to openly declare that such persons either did not have the right, or were not worthy of the right, to be parents? In the past, it could be said that the Church did act in this way by, for instance, stigmatising women who had children out of wedlock and ensuring that their children were taken away from them to be either adopted or brought up in the care of the Church itself. But this is not something that the Church today, at least in secularised and economically developed Western societies, is prepared to articulate openly; nor are such views probably regarded as acceptable any more by the majority of the Church’s members.
If the inability to sustain a marriage and bring up children in a stable family environment is no longer seen as disqualifying one from being a parent, even by the Church, then it is clear that the existence of a marriage has ceased to be a defining criterion for assessing whether a calling to parenthood might exist: the ultimate remaining deciding factor is the biological component of traditional marriage or, more accurately, its socio-biological component – heterosexual sex. It is indeed hard to see how the Church could maintain its insistence on marriage as a sign of a vocation to parenthood in an era when marriage break-downs have become so normal and belief in the Christian foundations of marriage has evaporated to such a large extent. If there is at least heterosexual desire and behaviour present on the part of parents and step-parents, then a theoretical link between a calling and right to parenthood, on the one hand, and a vocation to marriage, on the other, can be posited: it can be said that a core ‘will to marry’ (indissociable from heterosexuality per se) may be present in such couples or individuals. And it is to be hoped that in time, if those unmarried parents come into contact with the right influences (including that of the Church), they might be able to respond to God’s calling for them to marry and thereby ‘legitimise’ their parenthood, so long as it is permissible in Church and / or civil law for them to marry. Ultimately, the Church’s acceptance of unmarried straight parents at least preserves a link between parenthood and the normal biological processes through which parenthood was intended by God to come about – in a time when artificial-conception techniques, surrogacy, cloning and such like threaten even to tear down the last links between the origins of human life, and the love of a man and a woman.
But in a sense, this is wanting to have it both ways: ‘you don’t need to be married to be a suitable parent; but you do need to be straight (linked with an underlying predisposition towards marriage)’. In practice, as I have said, this boils down to identifying the ‘right to parenthood’ with heterosexuality alone. And this in turn is based on a similar but, in fact, more restrictive notion of what human rights rest upon, i.e. the ‘order of nature’. Whereas the secularist would say that the right to parenthood derives from the fact that all human beings – or at least, the great majority – experience the desire or need to become parents, irrespective of their sexual orientation; the Church’s view would appear to be that it is against the order of nature for gay persons to wish to become parents because, in their case, that urge is invested in a form of sexual desire and behaviour that is counter to the natural means that God has created (heterosexual desire and intercourse) for this urge to be realised.
Now, it is possible and, on one level, logical to hold the view that gay sex acts are unnatural and, by that token, morally wrong. But is it necessary to conclude that, because a person has a predisposition to expressing him- or herself homosexually, their wish to become a parent is also unnatural and wrong? It is logical to reach this conclusion only if one believes that such persons’ wish to become parents is an expression of what I have termed their ‘reproductive instinct’, which they in turn are seen to be acting out in their sexual behaviour and relationships, i.e. that they might wish to father or mother children naturally – biologically – through their sex lives. In other words, the judgement that the wish of gay people to be parents is unnatural rests on an assumption that this wish is directly expressed in their sex lives and is indissociable from their attraction to persons of the same sex.
This assumption involves a reduction of sexuality to reproduction (i.e. that it is the same as, or at least always expresses, the reproductive instinct) and an assimilation of gender to anatomical sex. By this, I mean that this view of sexual relations assumes that descriptions of sexual desire and activity as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ are always unambiguous and absolute: that gay sex always reflects the absolute presence of an underlying desire and personality that one can characterise without ambiguity as ‘homosexual’ and therefore as the diametric opposite of ‘heterosexual’; ‘disordered’ as opposed to ‘ordered’. In order to set up this opposition, it is necessary to assimilate anatomical sex (the possession of the male or female reproductive organs) with psycho-social gender (the possession of a male / masculine or female / feminine gender identity or personality). In other words, on this view, gay sex always involves a man (or a woman, of course) whose gender identity and body are both male (female) being attracted to other men (women) whose identity and body are also perceived by them as male (female).
But does sexuality of any sort – gay or straight – work in this unambiguous way? All people arguably have personalities made up of varying combinations of masculine and feminine characteristics, or what they or society identify as masculine or feminine traits. Equally, men and women – straight as well as gay – are attracted in differing degrees to gender characteristics in other people that are associated with their own sex or gender as much as with the ‘opposite sex’. So it is psychologically accurate, at least, to say that most (perhaps all) heterosexual desire and personalities exhibit aspects of attraction to the same sex or gender, and vice-versa: all homosexuality exhibits characteristics one might normally think of as heterosexual, if one extends the definition of sexual orientation to include the idea of ‘gender orientation’ – attraction to the same or other gender alongside, and combined with, attraction to the other or same sex; and that in almost any combination.
Put more simply and conventionally, sexuality and gender are rarely a straightforward matter of either / or: either gay or straight; either feminine or masculine. On the contrary, they are a continuum. If one accepts this proposition, one implication is that it is no longer possible to uphold the view that ‘homosexual’ desire / activity, and the instinct to reproduce / wish to be a parent that is supposedly indissociable from this homosexuality, are completely unnatural and wrong: in diametrical opposition to heterosexual conduct and procreativity that are fully natural and – when potentially or actually expressed in marriage – morally justified.
What is involved here is not so much a moral validation of active homosexuality but rather a refutation that it is possible to maintain rigid categorial and ontological distinctions between homosexuality and heterosexuality. This is only really a problem, in relation to the Church’s teachings, if it is regarded as an absolute truth that sexual desire and behaviour, the reproductive instinct, and the wish to become parents are all, as it were, co-terminous: that the presence of any of these terms and of the realities they denote always implies the presence of both other terms and realities. Because then – if one accepts the idea of a gender / sexuality continuum as described above – where there is gay desire and behaviour, there would also be (inseparable from that) some element of straight desire and behaviour; and hence, bound up with homosexual activity, there would also be a reproductive instinct and a wish to become a parent that is not just like that of straight persons (analogous to it) but is that of (is the same as that of) straight persons. And, conversely, straight persons’ sexual activity, reproductive instinct and wish to parent could be seen as being really in part homosexual: the expression of a ‘same-sex’ / ‘same-gender’ attraction and union alongside, or bound up with, ‘other-sex’ / ‘other-gender’ desire – the mystery of that complementarity between the same and the other perhaps being best captured in the very conjugal idea of union between male and female, between the self and the other (self).
As I have said, these conceptual difficulties arise only if one regards active homosexuality as necessarily expressing a (by definition, distorted) urge to procreate on the part of persons engaged in it. This is another example of the contradictions one can get caught up in if one has a concept of gay sex that is essentially analogous to the Catholic concept of the purpose of straight sex as realised in marriage: that it is inherently both unitive and procreative (see the discussion on this in my last blog, dated 21 March 2007). At the same time as this analogy is posited by the Church in the very terms in which the phenomena of homosexuality are described (‘union’, ‘procreation’, ‘nature / natural’), its validity is denied. One consequence of this is that there is in fact no formal doctrinal language in which the distinctive lived experience of homosexuality can properly be described, because that experience is simply framed from the outset as the antithesis of meaning and truth: ‘improper’, invalid, disordered, meaningless, without purpose, loveless, divisive (as opposed to unitive), destructive (as opposed to procreative) – dead.
Apart from anything else, the refusal to accept that there is any analogy or overlap between heterosexuality and homosexuality completely ignores the experience of bisexual persons. In order to maintain the rigid separation between heterosexuality and homosexuality, bisexuality would have to be described (if it were described at all) as a form of split personality. A psychologically more accurate way to view bisexuals would be as persons in whom the distinctions between gay and straight (and, to a variable degree, between masculine and feminine) break down more than they do for persons whose sexuality lies more towards the gay or straight end of the spectrum.
The necessity to uphold a rigid ontological distinction between straight and gay exists, as I have indicated, in order to make a clear moral distinction between active heterosexuality and active homosexuality viewed as an inherent expression of the reproductive instinct and / or the wish to be a parent: the one is ‘natural’ and capable of being validated, realised and justified in marriage; the other is unnatural, and is therefore incapable of being realised, redeemed and elevated to the level of a true union in and with Christ through the sacrament of marriage – grave sin. But if one accepts the view I have advanced that the distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality is in fact quite loose and fluid, then it makes much more sense to configure the relationship between the various desires and actions involved in a different way. OK, describe gay desire and activity as unnatural (and thereby wrong) if you wish. But surely, the root of what is ‘wrong’ about homosexuality, on this view, is the very dissociation between the gay individual’s or couple’s sex life and any wish they might have to reproduce and / or become parents; not the fact, as implicitly posited in the Church’s teaching, that those persons’ urge to procreate is indissociable from their sexual activity.
So it would be more accurate to describe the situation as one where gay persons do indeed have a reproductive instinct; but instead of this being channelled into sexual relationships and activities which present a strong chance of realising this drive to procreate (marriage or just heterosexual sex), the chosen gay sexual activities and partners are not ones that will enable this instinct to be fulfilled. So you could say that gay sex and relationships, to a significant if unquantifiable degree, precisely do not express the reproductive instinct of the persons involved. But, because of this, the wish of such persons to exercise the role of a parent does not just evaporate and can take expression instead in a desire to become a parent through non-natural means, such as adoption: ‘unnatural’, indeed, but in quite a different sense than that which is intended by the Church.
What can be seen as destructive, disordered and immoral about gay sex is this very splitting of the divinely intended unity between, on the one hand, the sexual expression of the love that two persons have for one another and, on the other, the divinely intended fulfilment of that love in the creation of new life (children) that is ‘of one flesh with’ the two persons that have joined themselves together in love. But if gay sexual desire and activity can be condemned – if they are seen as what manifests and actualises this disjunction and deviation from God’s purpose – must the mutual love of two persons of the same sex, and their wish for that love to be fulfilled in parenthood by means such as adoption, thereby also be inherently damnable? Surely, one condemns such love, or denies its validity or existence, at one’s peril, since love is the outpouring of the Spirit, and to condemn the Spirit is the gravest form of blasphemy. Indeed, it is the wish that some gay couples have for their love to find a more complete expression in parenthood that could in fact be said to reveal the quasi-conjugal and the spiritual character of that love; even if that wish – because of the ‘sin’ of homosexual sex – cannot be realised in the flesh through the union of matrimony and the procreation of children of one’s own. This love, and the associated wish for parenthood, can be seen as truly spiritual in character because – like marriage – it reflects the very mystery of the Trinity: the Spirit as the gift and union of love between the Father and the Son (the husband and wife, the lover and the loved) from which all life proceeds, and in which all life is held.
So it could be said that what is sinful about active homosexuality – if one accepts the proposition that it is ‘sinful’ at all – is that it takes something that God has given us (ultimately, in order to share in his own love, life and work of creation / redemption) and diverts it away from that divine purpose. The lived out effects of this fundamental orientation of the will away from God’s purpose can indeed be disastrous, in that sexual pleasure and self-expression can then appear to be goals in themselves, without any inherent reference to love, the divine and the creation of new life. And this can lead the individual to turn their back on God, and define their sexuality and their goals in life in opposition to God, or to any notion of a calling to serve God and dedicate one’s life to him. But equally, this rejection of God and of faith is also often a reaction to the judgement of Christians that homosexual desire and relationships do indeed place the gay individual in opposition to a Christian way of life and to any possibility of living out a Christian calling – other than a calling which simply denies that sexuality: a vocation to celibacy or an expectation that gay persons could be ‘healed’ and ‘converted’ to heterosexuality.
Far more just and Christian, it seems to me, to take the view that the fact of a person’s being homosexual, or bisexual, opens up the possibility of distinctive ways to witness to, and live out, the love of God – based on the experience of the continuing love and compassion of Christ despite (indeed, in some ways, because of) their sexual sins. And one of the ways in which gay and lesbian persons could be especially suited to witnessing to God’s love is through adoption. This is because it is the sadness (as well as the sin) of homosexuality that a gay couple’s sexually expressed love cannot result in their having children of their own. But if one has followed my arguments up to now, loving gay couples still have a natural (God-given) wish to have and love children as parents, even if not as the natural (biological) progenitors.
If gay persons’ wish to become parents can indeed be prompted by the love of Christ acting through their hearts, whether those persons acknowledge Christ or not (and ultimately, the Church would say that it is its role to determine whether this ‘vocation’ exists), then is the Church really exercising right judgement in automatically excluding the idea that adoption by gay couples could in some – perhaps many – cases be precisely in the best needs of certain children?
I began this article by stating that it is the needs of the children that should be considered as paramount; but I have ended up discussing at length issues of right judgement and justice towards gay persons and couples in this area. But the two questions are not distinct: if an injustice is being committed towards gay couples by automatically ruling them out as adoptive parents, this means that love that would have been given to those children by those prospective parents can no longer be given. And it is not only those adoptive parents’ love that is prevented from being expressed but also God’s loving purpose in calling those gay couples (prompting them in their hearts) to transcend the potential for self-centredness and godlessness inherent in their sexuality; and to realise a form of love that is in its fundamentals (its likeness to divine love) analogous to the love that the real (biological) parents would normally have been expected to give to those children.
If the Church is thus standing in the way of letting children come towards a love that is of God’s kingdom, is it not failing in its redemptive mission? This is not just a mission to let children know they are loved, thus giving them the freedom, perhaps only later in life, to be open to the even greater love of Christ; it is also a mission to engage openly and lovingly with gay persons, and to let them experience the saving truth that they are loved unconditionally by Christ even though they sin. What better lived example of the unconditional love of Christ could there be for gay persons than the unconditional love of a child? Is the Church serving the kingdom by preventing gay couples from encountering that kingdom – indeed, encountering Christ – in the open, loving hearts of children?
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