The Catholic church in Boston is in trouble again.
The Boston archdiocese of the Roman Catholic church has gotten itself into trouble again. The current troubles revolve around children, the church and sexuality. Unlike previous years, however, this imbroglio is not about clergy sexual abuse.
Boston’s ABC affiliate carries this story about Michael Pakaluk’s column of June 4. The column argues against allowing the child of a same-sex couple admission to a parochial school. The reasons given are all patently absurd: the child would be more likely to bring pornography to school, since same-sex relationships are inherently more eroticized than heterosexual relationships; the same-sex parents of a child should not be called “parents” unless there is a biological relationship; etc.
I wonder if Pakaluk would object to adoptive heterosexual “parents” bearing that title. They have no biological relationship to the child in their care either. If procreation is the bulwark against purely eroticized relationships between adults, does that hold for the biologically infertile? Logically speaking, the adopted child of a biologically infertile couple should be barred admission from the same school on the same grounds as a child of a same-sex couple.
To deal with the 800 pound gorilla you may have noticed over in the corner of the room, I’ll add the following statements. The Catholic church in Boston has no legitimate moral standing to discuss sexual morality. I lived in Boston while the horrors of the abuse scandal were coming at long last to light. I read the reports in the Boston Globe that would later become the book “Betrayal”. I attended Mass with my Catholic wife at the one church she could bear to enter in the entire archdiocese.
Not only are Pakaluk’s arguments laughable from the standpoint of reason, but they are hate-filled stereotypes akin to blackface performances and the unedited cut of Disney’s “Song of the South”. That this was written by a faithful Catholic is disappointing but unfortunately not surprising, given the pulpit-level view of sexuality prevalent in that church. That it was published in the official newspaper of the archdiocese at the epicenter of the greatest moral failing of Christianity since its relative silence in the Holocaust is infuriating, hypocritical and nearly unforgivable.
