Cardinal O’Brien
It’s assumed that because I am a Catholic I’m against gay marriage. I’m not against gay marriage. My reasons are biblical, practical and personal.
Let’s start with biblical. There is, so far as I know, no specific forbidding of gay marriage in the Old Testament. Gay marriage was not, I imagine, something anybody thought about. On the other hand, the Old Testament is very clear about homosexual behaviour: ‘’Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination’ (Leviticus:18:22). Pretty unequivocal. But women wearing men’s clothes is also an abomination (Deuteronomy 22:5). Don’t be silly, I hear people argue. Sex is entirely different and the language about clothes must be taken in context.
For Catholics, ‘context’ is decided by the magisterium of the church, those wise men who do the heavy intellectual lifting, their accumulated wisdom guided by the Holy Ghost.
A ‘great wrong’ is a mighty claim. It should be rebutted with a ‘great right’. Yet it’s not much of a ‘right’ to say that there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with homosexuality because the gospels don’t mention it and St Paul’s strictures – if that is indeed what they are – are often misinterpreted in translation. I don’t think Jesus mentions cannibalism but we’re pretty sure he’d be against it. We need to look deeper than omission. We need to find something solid, something that encourages us to think. If the bible is our guide, Luke 12 may be just the ticket. ‘Ye hypocrites,’ Luke reports Jesus as saying, ‘ye can discern the face of the sky and of the earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time?’.
‘This time’ is a rich phrase. To me, it means enlightenment, the moving on of man’s understanding of himself and his behaviour. ‘This time’ is our time, as it was the apostles’ in theirs, and in our time, we have come to understand homosexuality not as a threat but as a natural condition. My children accept it without surprise. Their children will accept it without remark. Heresy for a Catholic to say, but what if the church has got the times wrong? What if they need to think again?
It would not be a first. The Catholic Church has always condemned abortion, ie the deliberate destruction of the unborn human, but it has not always believed that the moment of conception and the beginning of personhood were the same. St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas both believed, after Aristotle, that the soul entered the body after a number of days. The church fathers changed their opinion as the study of biology developed. Changing was not considered a problem. Indeed, at the Second Vatican Council, when a number of traditional practices were abandoned overnight, one waggish bishop is supposed to have rebuffed criticism by extolling the virtues of a church able to move seamlessly from one state of certainty into another.
Practically speaking, the gay marriage Rubicon was passed the day gay couples were allowed to adopt or use surrogates. Many, including me, felt uneasy about this, arguing that a child, particularly a vulnerable child, would flourish best with a father and mother. It’s too early to say whether this is true or not. Anecdotal evidence suggests it makes little difference. What does make a difference is family cohesion, so having allowed gay couples to adopt or create their own family, it’s wise of the state to give such couples the means to bind their family together. Civil partnerships do this, with the couple making promises. Yet for many gay couples, promises notwithstanding, a civil partnership is a bit of paper. Marriage, on the other hand, is a sacrament and, as such, provides spiritual glue that’s hard to peel off. For the sake of children, then, gay marriage is the correct and logical consequence of surrogacy and gay adoption.
I don’t discount the practical difficulties involved, of which a definition of consummation will be one. In addition, I believe that, in the end, legislation will trump the churches’ discriminatory freedom: there will be no opt-out. This will have undesirable consequences. In the short term, the churches will become shriller and more defensive. There will be reprisals from nutters. The Holy Ghost may have some long-term work on his hands.
On a personal note, I have not entered into this controversy unadvisedly or lightly, but soberly and in the fear if not of God, then of my dead ancestors. Labelled by Lord Burleigh, treasurer to Elizabeth I, creatures of ‘more than usual perversity’, my family remained Catholics throughout the Reformation, and suffered for it. Yet I cannot support a church which believes that gay marriage will undermine the future of humanity, as Pope Benedict has claimed. If he means the human race, this is clearly nonsense. The human race is rather more robust than he supposes.
We’ve survived supersonic travel, the pill and only last month, the Mayan end of the world. If he means the human characteristics of love and kindness, equal nonsense. A good marriage, as the bible tells us, is based on love: blessing it; reinforcing it; seeing it through bad times, and in this respect, gay marriage is no different from heterosexual marriage. The difference, of course, is that Christian marriage has traditionally been for the ‘procreation of children’. But since gay adoption and surrogacy mean that procreation isn’t quite what it used to be, and since the church can do nothing about that, the Christian course of action might be to make the best of things.
I do not claim to have ‘discerned the times’ correctly. But if you disagree, are you quite sure you’ve discerned them any better?
Katie Grant is an author, a freelance journalist, a part-time lecturer and a broadcaster
