Queer stuff is one thing i don't stop talking about.

[hermionesviolin]

Recent Andrew Sullivan includes discussions on various issues of Catholicism: "Divorce is a grave offense against the natural law.", impotence not infertility is a bar to Catholic marriage (legalistics which make no sense and which will now have to get worked into the eventual revision of my paper), in 1866 the Vatican said "Slavery itself... is not at all contrary to the natural and divine law" and Aquinas, the prime author of the Church's doctrines on same-sex love, followed Aristotle in defending slavery as "natural", (also, Rick Santorum is a horrible horrible man, but then we knew that), and Eastern Orthodoxy seems much saner on divorce -- will they follow the obvious parallels to same-sex marriage?

I finally read the full Vatican statement on same-sex marriage ("Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons"). I have so many issues with it i'm not even going to begin. I found the context for the "doing violence to children" quote and it isn't any less horrid in context.

As experience has shown, the absence of sexual complementarity in these unions creates obstacles in the normal development of children who would be placed in the care of such persons. They would be deprived of the experience of either fatherhood or motherhood. Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development. This is gravely immoral and in open contradiction to the principle, recognized also in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that the best interests of the child, as the weaker and more vulnerable party, are to be the paramount consideration in every case.

I had to track down the "Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons" (also a highly problematic document) to find where the Vatican calls homosexuality "evil":

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

And lastly, amusement begging for iconning.

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edit:

Something i didn't catch on my first reading of this was the following:

Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil.

That definitely makes more explicit where the reactions of "the Church is saying my loving relationship is evil" are coming from.