Gay Groups in the St. Patrick's Day Parade: Cardinal Dolan's Pastoral Choice

Linwood, you said: "And while it may be easy to assert chastity for these children of God, I think we all know the difficulty in that even for heterosexuals." So, yes, you did assert that chastity is too difficult. Hello. And the Church doesn't and didn't define marriage. God did. And he didn't create a "definition" like in a dictionary, but an actual thing with a particular nature and structure like a tree or the sun or the grass. Marriage is man and woman joined together forever. Jesus clarified what this nature is in his own words. It matters not what any worldly court decides. What you are rooting for is actually the government obliterating the institution of marriage on a social and legal level. The "marriage" that you're talking about can be absolutely any formulation of "companions" -- five men, three women, a man and two women, take your pick. Marriage can be anything, which means that it is nothing. So, enjoy your glorious future.

Sadly, you turn to insults when you cannot provide a response to critique of your argument. Yes, Michael, clearly -- clearly! -- I am a very, very unintelligent person. I haven't understood a thing you've said. I'll return to the kitchen now ... If I had time or permission to respond to all of your points in a 3000-word reply, certainly I would, but I don't. That is why I only deal with the nub. That nub is that you accept that human sexuality can be ethically divorced from procreation. This is the principle that undergirds your views on the Catholic teachings that you don't like and claim are too difficult and unfair. So simply cut to the chase and debate the merits of the real issue. I have never once claimed that I was a more "faithful" Catholic than anyone else. You keep imputing this sentiment to me for some reason. I am merely providing a defense of teachings of the magisterium and demonstrating why they are irrefutably correct. Human reason alone tells us this. Again, complaints of "exaggerated examples" are not in any way valid counter-points. Simple study of the structure of logical fallacies will tell you this (what you call "exaggerated examples" are what a logic professor would call "logical conclusions"). It would also tell you that your appeals to the majority -- i.e. "most people agree," etc. -- are equally fallacious, invalid and indefensible. I'll note also that I have not once made negative suggestions about your intelligence or capacity to understand. Nor did I ever claim that you were ignorant, misinformed, faithless and all the rest for your beliefs. It is you who makes these references. At times like these I ponder not what people say but why people say them.

Michael - you do repeat all your arguments each time (>600 words this time). But, they never get to the kernel of the moral or Natural Law point and your misuse of science is astounding. St. Augustine, in his City of God (Book IV Ch 15) noted that when man became disobedient to God, his flesh became disobedient to him. Our nature tends towards sin. Yet, science knows nothing of sin. It knows nothing of this disobedience.

Tim, Below is a short but solid description about the term "intrinsic disorder" taken from a recent doctoral dissertation by Polgar. This is only one reason why the Church has not been able to develop a convincing moral theory in support of its teachings on the homosexual orientation/inclination. "In the period after the document was published, at least three distinct interpretations of what the term ‘objectively disordered’ might mean appeared; moral, psychological, and philosophical interpretation. The document itself seems to exclude the moral and the psychological interpretations, because it states that “the particular inclination [...] is not a sin” and it tries to keep clear from scientific debates on the matter that are not in the competence of the authors of the document. This would leave the philosophical interpretation, which seem the only plausible one from the context in which the phrase appears. The authors of the document narrowed down the phenomenon of homosexual orientation to its genital component and, consequently saw it as a “tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil” or, plainly put, the homosexual sexual act. Hence, the argument seems to suggest, if this particular sexual orientation is nothing but a tendency toward an intrinsically evil object, then the tendency itself is objectively disordered, participating, as it were, in the disordered nature of its object. Such an interpretation of the phrase ‘objectively disordered’, was argued by Archbishop John Quinn, who emphasised that this ‘philosophical categorisation’ does not in any case apply to a homosexual person, but only to the homosexual orientation. He also suggested a number of analogies, like an inclination to rash judgement, cowardice or hypocrisy, in order to show that there is nothing particularly disputable in this kind of language and that the homosexual persons are not the only ones that have disordered inclinations. As convincing as this might sound at first glance, other commentators pointed out that the analogies offered by Quinn do not hold and, hence, do not justify this new categorisation. For instance, Joseph Selling reminds us that the inclination to rash judgement, cowardice or hypocrisy are “learned and accumulated by habit” which runs counter to what is generally presumed to be the case when it comes to homosexual orientation. It is also presumed, Selling continues, that homosexual orientation does not depend for its existence on homosexual sexual behaviour, while the other tendencies mentioned by Quinn do, since they are accumulated by habit. Hence, these two kinds of tendencies can hardly be understood as belonging to the same (philosophical) category. The bad analogies that Quinn offered are surely not yet a decisive argument against the philosophical interpretation of the meaning of the phrase ‘objectively disordered’. However, the fact that no one has been able to come up with a better analogy makes the philosophical interpretation highly suspicious, while other kinds of interpretations start to seem more convincing. In that sense, the reactions to the new phrase were hardly surprising because, as Selling points out, "the terminology used in the earlier document [the Declaration] implied the classical connection: disordered equals objectively immoral, so that any wilful acceptance of such a thing would entail culpability, albeit sometimes diminished. Since this document now referred to the ‘inclination’ itself as disordered, how could one avoid concluding that the inclination itself would constitute something objectively immoral?" Nevertheless, Selling rejects this ‘moral interpretation’ in the end, under the condition that the new terminology has evolved so much since the publication of the Letter that one can describe homosexual orientation as ‘objectively disordered’ “without any immediate association with sin or moral culpability”. On the other hand, Mark Jordan remains unconvinced by either the philosophical or the moral interpretation of the term ‘objectively disordered’. Although brief on this point, he believes that the psychological interpretation comes closest to what the authors of the document had in mind. In summary, although it might seem that too much ink is being spilled over a proper interpretation of just a single phrase, there is much at stake here. A superficial resolution of this problem would point toward the fact that the Letter was the first document of the teaching office that used the term ‘objectively disordered’ and that it is only natural that it will take some time until all its implications are worked out and the precise meaning of the term is established. To some extent that might be true, but the debate on it seems to point to a deeper problem as well. Let us again quote Crowley’s reading of the Letter here. For him, the document states that, [homosexual] inclination [...] is a more or less strong tendency toward an intrinsic evil. Like heterosexual persons, these people also suffer the postlapsarian state of premoral concupiscence, with the additional proviso that the tendency of their desire is self-indulgent and therefore already leans toward sin. Theirs is not only an objective disorder like a defect of nature, but, because of the vicious character of a ‘tendency’ or ‘inclination’, it is also a disorder that has moral implications, even before one has acted upon the tendency through sexual activity. A careful reading of this quotation, which seems to capture the essential elements of homosexual orientation as described by the Letter, shows a language/ethical terminology that goes far beyond the traditional language of previous Vatican documents on sexual ethics, even that of the Declaration. If this is true, then it is understandable why the previously mentioned debate on the proper interpretation of the term ‘objectively disordered’ has not been resolved. It has not and cannot be resolved at this point because the tension between the different interpretations (psychological, moral and philosophical) is present already in the document."