Catholic Bishop Whines Marriage Equality Is Selfish and Won't Someone Please Think of the Children?

By Kaili Joy Gray
Daily Kos
February 4, 2013

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/04/1184533/-Catholic-bishop-whines-marriage-equality-is-selfish-and-won-t-someone-please-think-of-the-children

If there's one thing Catholic bishops should probably not talk about, it's what is and isn't good for children. You know, considering how the Catholic Church is crawling with pedophiles who raped and abused children over many decades and yet were protected by the Church leadership. But never mind all that.

Since the Catholic Church is not known for learning its lessons quickly—didn't they just get around to forgiving Galileo?—here's Bishop Francis Malooly of Wilmington, Delaware to explain why children are precious and therefore gay marriage is bad. The letter is "a teaching document intended to reiterate the Church's teaching on marriage and is part of the U.S. Bishops' pastoral strategy to advance a movement for life, marriage and religious liberty." In other words, this is part of the Church leadership's coordinated strategy to hate gay people—for freedom:

From the beginning of the Bible the Church learns the meaning of marriage and human sexuality. God created both.

Well, let's just stop right there, shall we? God created marriage and human sexuality—but somehow the gays just snuck through into existence on their own, did they? Good lord, these arguments are so tedious. Let's go below the fold for more, shall we?

At the very least every human culture recognizes that the sexual instincts and sexual appetites of human beings need to be channeled and that children who result from sexual relationships between men and women need to be cared for and nurtured.

You know a terrific way to care for and nurture children? Not raping them. But again, I digress.

Still, the truth about marriage is not undone by human sin and human folly. It remains what it is – a gift of God to men and women, the ultimate expression of love between husband and wife, for the survival and the blessing of the entire human race.

Yes, God created the gift of marriage as an ultimate expression of love—which is why the Bible is filled with stories of marriage as a business transaction between men, as has been the actual custom and purpose of marriage through most of human history, until relatively recently, when Hallmark invented romance. Except never mind, because what's romance got to do with anything?

As Christians we need to remember that the meaning of marriage is not determined by romantic love. While romance is part of the relationship between husband and wife, the foundation of any marriage is the gift of total self to another promised in the solemn vows on the wedding day and lived day by day, year by year.

So, marriage is the ultimate expression of love, which is dandy, but screw that romance stuff. Wait, huh?

Marriage is constituted by the vows that couples take and sexual activity appropriate to the generation of children. Those vows include a promise to love one other.

So it is about love after all? Oh, this all so confusing.

We live in a society in which these good purposes of marriage are not well understood.

Especially not by Catholic bishops, obviously.

We live in a society that has driven wedges between sex, marriage, and procreation – a society that has separated what God has joined together. We live in a society that has increasingly embraced the notion that marriage is about adult life-style choices.

Ugh. Adult life-style choices are so icky. Like the choice this Catholic priest sometimes makes to handcuff himself while "wearing an orange jumpsuit and a leather bondage-type mask with a bar in his mouth." What? It's just a thing he "does this from time to time" that his flock has been assured is merely "self-bondage" that is "non-sexual in nature."

But anyway, back to how lifestyle choices are for sinners and children are precious:

Many have forgotten that children are its most precious fruit and an essential part of its meaning. Children contribute "very substantially to the welfare of their parents" in the words of the Second Vatican Council. In a world that tends to see children as an economic burden or a life-style choice, the Council reminds us of the joy and humanizing challenge that children bring to adults.

Yeah. We know all about what the Catholic Church thinks of children and the joy they bring to adults. So maybe, just maybe, the the Church should stay away from talking about that—at least until stories about how Church's widespread conspiracy to protect priests who rape children don't appear in the news every five minutes. Just a thought. You know, for the kids.