Catholic Church in Adoption Rumpus

[mirrorshard]

There's two things I really don't get about this business. First, the Church are claiming that complying with anti-discrimination regulations (binding on organizations accepting government money) and placing children with gay couples is against their principles.

If you'll excuse my language - bollocks it is. Their religious principles, even the bad, wrong, counterproductive ones that say homosexuality is a sin (and if I recall correctly, that's from Leviticus. The same book of the Torah Bible that prohibits the wearing of mixed fibres, advocates the death penalty for witches and women taken in adultery, and lays down the Jewish dietary laws) have nothing whatsoever to say about accepting government funding. With the option of going it alone freely available, suggesting that their religious principles are being compromised is complete nonsense.

Secondly, the Church are claiming that if they don't get an exemption, they'll have to scream and scream until they're sick close their four adoption agencies, which between them place 200 children a year. "Oh, no," they say. "It's not a matter of sulking at all. We'll just have to close for lack of funding if we can't accept the conditions attached to your dirty dirty government money."

If you'll excuse my language - bollocks they will. This is, let me remind you, the Catholic Church we're talking about. The same millennia-old incomprehensibly rich organisation that spent most of its existence running a substantial fraction of the globe. The same guys who, for a long time, more or less defined civilised Western society... we used to call it 'Christendom' for a reason.

And they're telling us they can't afford to run four adoption agencies, in the faith-based charitable sector, with all the cheap labour costs that that implies? My heart goes out to them, really it does.

Whoever's using the World's Smallest Violin, please pass it back, the Catholic Church needs YOU.

Comments

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

There's converse view: it is discriminatory and possibly illegal to exclude non-catholics from the ranks of the clergy - but if you compelled the Church to do so that would be a severe attack on religious freedom. Think it through: can you compel a church or a religious individual to act against their professed beliefs?

I believe that the answer is 'yes', under extreme circumstances in which those beliefs, or actions arising from them, are damaging to society to such an extent that repression is the only course of action that will preserve order, racial harmony, and the ability of society to maintain the freedoms of the majority. Pursuing a nebulous 'greater good' and abstract principles of individual choice doesn't cut it.

The point at issue is that those adoption agency exists to place Catholic children in Catholic households, where they will be brought up in the Catholic faith by adults whose professed beliefs, behaviour and lifestyle are in keeping with Catholic doctrine. Imposing a legal duty on the agency to place the child in any other household is, in the view of the Church, a legal compulsion to remove the child from the community of believers and raise the child outside the Catholic faith.

That's very, very close to an act of the state requiring a Catholic to renounce the creed in public.

I believe that the adoption agencies should be free to place a child identified as Catholic in a Catholic household. I am not so sure that they should receive public funding in doing so, when their actions discriminate against other groups in a way that is contrary to public policy. That's the grey area here - funding and access to the resources of the state - not the issue of how and by whom the church believes children should be raised in the faith.

Actually, I beliece that it is immoral to indoctrinate anyone in the delusions of religion until they are mentally an adult and can formulate their own opinions. But as raising children in the faith is a core activity of religions, imposing that view on others would constitute a war of oppression against sizeable minorities in the population.

In expanding the principles of equality, and extending one set of freedoms, we've run up against another set of freedoms - and, if the underlying principle of anti-discrimination in society is not the achievemnt of perfection, but the pursuit of a 'greatest good for the greatest number' process that preserves harmony in society, then this particular spat with the church may represent an overall lessening of our freedoms and a illiberal misuse of the State's authority. So we have to let the adoption agencies and the church do as they please, more or less, and take care that the usual anti-clerical agitators don't see the issue as some kind of bandwagon.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Funding isnt' the issue. They'd be breaking the law even if they didn't accept state funding.

--
Interesting article in today's Independent on the difficulty of finding head teachers these days. Apparently the faith schools find it hardest to recruit, with the Catholic faith schools really struggling.

Many of the people who work for the Catholic adoption agencies might actually disagree with the Cardinal's statements. If forced to discriminate openly, I wonder how many staff will drift away? Never mind the disproportionate number of lesbians I meet who are social workers of some kind.