Regardless Of What The Pope Says, Same Sex-Marriage Will Soon Be Real
by Belinda Dronkers-Laureta on May 11th, 2016

Keeping Families Together

The Asian And Pacific Islander Family Pride Blog

December 28, 2012

Regardless Of What The Pope Says, Same Sex-Marriage Will Soon Be Real

By BELINDA AND JOHN DRONKERS-LAURETA

First this.

We believe in love. We believe in same sex marriage. We do not believe same sex marriage results in the end of the world.

Now this is what the pope said to the Vatican bureaucracy on the Friday before Christmas.

He said: gay marriage destroys the “essence of human nature.”

Also:

People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.

And, citing France’s chief rabbi, he also said:

A new philosophy of sexuality has taken hold, whereby sex and gender are “no longer a given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society.”

Question: How Can A Leader Of Millions Be So Wrong?

In the matter of same sex marriage, the pope has lost his audience. Eleven countries allow same sex marriage and eight have pending legislation to do so. The Dutch Secretary of State severely criticized the pope’s comments and gay rights groups have called the pope dangerously out of touch.

But the pope is not dumb and even if he is not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, he is surrounded by advisors, all those cardinals and bishops and monks, who help him grapple with important issues. How then, we must ask ourselves, is it possible for a collective Vatican intelligence to voice attitudes as offensively homophobic as that Christmas speech?

Answer: He Is Preserving Dogma

It must be difficult to be a pope. His is the task to safeguard a set of principles laid down as incontrovertibly true by authorities from the past and, in some instances, the distant past. His whole life is dedicated to learn, understand, refine, and teach that dogma. Read again the citations above and note the obstinate adherence to assumptions shown to be false. Sexuality may be an element of nature, but society does not choose it for us, and doctors cannot tell it from birth.

There must be this realization in the Vatican: if they allow the thread of modern sexuality to be pulled any further, it will eventually unravel their entire intellectual edifice. Maybe, he has a brain trust working overtime to reconcile recent scientific findings with ancient dogma. Probably not, more likely the pope struggles with the idea how much to allow changing social realities to change fundamental principles of the Church he all his life has accepted as true but now maybe are not.

Somewhere the Vatican lost sight that logic does not apply to what they do, what they do is called a belief system, not a logic puzzle. And unconditional love is the rock on which this belief system rests. We wish the wise men in the Vatican would get it.

Belinda and John Dronkers-Laureta are board members of Asian & Pacific Islander Family Pride www.apifamilypride.org

 

 

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