“The government is not obliged to embrace Church teaching,” Wichmann said. “But the insistence that Catholic organizations discard that teaching undermines our mission and severely narrows opportunities for public ministry.”

Agreed…but I don’t think the government is as asking the church to discard it’s teaching, rather, that since there is a common point of contention, both sides should cease doing business with each other at the tax payers expense.  Religions can, should and must defend their freedom and their beliefs vigorously, but those beliefs should not be funded by tax payers who may not share those beliefs

The catholic belief on ssm is no more or less true than someones belief that it ok. We have ssm in canada amd the sky has not fallin.

I hear there’s a suit being brought against a chain of grocery stores too. There’s a vegan who wants her job back as a supermarket check-out clerk. She just wants to follow her conscience and refuse to scan any meat products for customers. If customers want to buy meat they can always go to the next check-out line. Unless they want to buy pork, and the Muslim is on duty. Then they can go to the next line, as long as they’re not trying to buy a Cosmopolitan and the feminist is working there that day. Then they’ll have to go to the next line, as long as they’re not buying a can of cream of chicken soup and the Orthodox Jewish clerk is on duty. Then they’ll have to go to the next line, unless they’ve got a six pack of beer and the Baptist clerk is working. Then they’ll have to go to the last line, where the atheist is working. Unless they’re trying to buy a religiously themed greeting card.

If the vegan’s suit succeeds, the Catholic truck driver is going to refuse to deliver boxes of condoms and contraceptive pills for the pharmacy.

@cowalker: if you mean to imply that secularism is absurd, point taken. Or that ‘religious freedom’ is absurd, point taken. Only one religious viewpoint can prevail, or none can, although it takes time for this finally to work out, in the West’s case, about five hundred years now since Henry VIII struck the Church and argued for ‘freedom.’ There are those of us who would have a Catholic state again, including the ‘third way’ economics that could prevail if only we let protestantism and unregulated capitalism/imperialism go. In that world, profits do not rule and are only part of the picture, ownership is broadly distributed by regulation and deliberately kept small, commerce and production are self-managed by cross-class teams from owners to workers, health care is provided non-profit, that is, owned by cooperatives and staffed by the free and loving labor donated by religious orders(as it always was before the Reformation privatized it), and life is respected from conception to death, one of the features that a much more limited democracy may not violate however much it wishes to. Such a state is sustainable. Our circus is not, as you are pointing out. @Randy: Canada is _not_ doing fine! And its ills stem directly from its disrespect for the role of the precious individual person from birth to death, and the failure to totally support the kind of fertile sexuality that results in the conception of precious individual persons. You’ve killed your markets just as we here in the US have, you’re suffering from the multi-cultural chaos you put in place of your own free-born children just as we are suffering from it. Take off the blinders.

Homosexual sex is sinful as is sex out side of marriage (fact). The notion of ssm defiles God’s plan for marriage (opinion). While I am personally opposed to ssm, it is also my beleirf that the Catholic Church and other christian churches would be much better served by putting as much effort into supporting married couples through education and enrichment programs that would serve to advance the understanding of the magnificnet graces available to those who strive to live God’s plan for their marriage(opinion). The batlle will ultimately be one in homes not in courts and only when the Church lends a more pastoral hand to so many couples who struggle in their Sacrament(opinion).

Janet Baker on Monday, Oct 3, 2011 11:08 AM (EDT):
“@cowalker: if you mean to imply that secularism is absurd, point taken. Or that ‘religious freedom’ is absurd, point taken. Only one religious viewpoint can prevail, or none can . . . .”

Well, actually the conscientious objections of the vegan and the feminist aren’t founded on religious belief. In the Catholic state you propose, would an employer be forced by law to employ people who refused to perform some of the legal duties required by their jobs based on their consciences? Perhaps such things could be managed internally by arriving at unique solutions within each cross-class team.

This isn’t a matter of Catholic teaching. This is the natural moral law that everyone knows—two men cannot marry nor can two women. That is not marriage in any society, for a very simple reason—neither situation can produce children. It is deliberately sterile and does not serve the future interests of the human race. The Catholic Church is simply defending a fact of life.

Anucreation, to charge that the Church is doing nothing to support real marriage is absurd. Have you not heard of Marriage Encounter, Engaged Encounter or Retrouvaille?

homosexuality is sin. mother church is under attack form radical pervert homos , godless trash. all homos are perverts.

@Thomas.  This is not in any way a natural moral law.  You might try reading the Bible sometime: monogamous relationships aren’t exactly the ones front and center.

And sin is a fiction.  There is only human behavior.

Father john does not reflect a Christian view of charity in truth to paraphrase a phrase from a recent papal encyclical. Yes we must call sin sin and yet it is wise to do so with fear and trembling lest in a “spirit of Pride’ I fall into some sin as bad or worse than that I am speaking against, and just to bring to mind Jesus comments to the scribes and pharisees should be enough!

What has happened in Illinois may happen nation wide concerning Catholic Charities due to the movements towards civil unions with same sex couples.  Here are the videos I and my son made on this federally related issue. First, the Flashy two minute video (son made) that explains goals of Pete Stark’s (D-CA) HR 1681 “Every Child Deserves a Family act” 2011 - closure of Catholic Charities adoption and foster care across the United States of America, currently with 70 co-sponsors:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvscfsqiX8Y

And here is the 18 minute video that delves deeper into concepts of HR 1681:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAFfNMbVW7s

@Rilke’s Granddaughter: We’re not talking about monogamy, are we? Don’t confuse the issues. We’re talking about two men or two women trying to act as if they are one man and one woman. There is not a single example of it in the Bible. The only place in the Bible where homosexuality was prevalent was in Sodom and we know what happened there.

If you want a biblical reason, it is obvious: God created us to be like Him, and He commanded us to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the Earth and subdue it.” Homosexual relationships cannot do that, any more than contraceptive relationships can do it. So they are against the natural moral law, the law that God wrote into every human heart, whether you want to acknowledge that it’s there or not.

And sin is a fiction? So it’s OK for someone to track down your personal information, steal your identity, buy things online with your credit card and set up new credit card accounts with your Social Security number? Hey, that’s not sin—it’s “only human behavior”! And if it’s “only human behavior”, what right do you or anyone else have to judge it as being wrong?

Yes, there was the required plea for charity toward those nasty homosexuals.  I sincerely thank you, Mr. Gravlin, for reminding everyone that the greatest possible temptation to sin is pride, and that some comments might be sinful outgrowths of the sin of pride.

In the meantime, more people have been made aware of the complex nature of human sexuality! Hooray!

We must continue to speak out against the homosexual sins because of the way they not only want to be allowed to be left alone to commit those sins but they want to force not just tolerance but also approval from the rest of us. And the SSA crowd wants to persecute and to call intolerant any of us who call what God calls sin to be sin.
And I spoke about pride too as any of us who try to speak for the truth will be persecuted and Satan will try to make us fall if at all possible and as scripture says and I, a poor sinner have learned and have confessed that, Pride does go before a fall. So it is a good spiritual exercise for me to periodically recall how many times I, apart from God’s mercy deserved hell for my past sins so that I can more fully learn to rely on His grace and his mercy in my life lest I fall.

A lot of you are mentioning that homosexualality is wrong because they cannot create life…what about hetrosexual couples who also cannot create life? Do you think they should not be allowed to be married either?

Lucy, there is nothing wrong with heterosexual couples who, because of some natural, biological reason cannot have children. The real difference between homosexuals copulating and infertile heterosexuals having intimate relations is that the latter at least have the potential to have children. The homosexuals don’t even have that. Two men can’t make a baby anymore than can two women. One man and one woman, however, have at least the potential to be able to do so.