Below The Beltway

I wrote a few weeks ago about the case of an eight year-old boy in Massachusetts who was asked to leave a Catholic school in Massachusetts because his parents are lesbians.

This week, a columnist in the newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese tries to defend that position based on his own son’s experience of being in a classroom with another boy who has two fathers:

There were three basic reasons. The first involves the inevitability of scandal. It was inevitable that either the teacher, or some parent, would deal with the two men in such a way as implicitly to teach my son, or other children in the class, that there is nothing wrong with same-sex relationships. But this is scandal: that is, leading a “little one” astray in some serious matter by the example you set.

Yes, how dare your son learn how to treat people like human beings.

The second reason is that parents are rightly given access to a child’s classroom, and yet I could not trust the designs of the same-sex couple. A mother or father may volunteer to read to the class or chaperone for a class trip. If the homosexual parent does so, what guarantee would I have that he would not be an advocate for his lifestyle, implicitly if not explicitly? One would expect him to be: he says he takes “pride” in his life; the school, it seems, has implicitly endorsed his role; and so why wouldn’t he speak unabashedly about his lifestyle?

This is the same “they might turn my son gay” idiocy that we’ve seen for decades. There’s no merit to it, and it’s based in little more than ignorance, bigotry, and the refusal to treat a fellow human being as a human being, but its the final “reason” that is really the most classically stupid:

The third reason is that it seemed a real danger that the boy being raised by the same-sex couple would bring to school something obscene or pornographic, or refer to such things in conversation, as they go along with the same-sex lifestyle, which–as not being related to procreation– is inherently eroticized and pornographic. He might expose other children to such things, as he might easily have encountered them in his household.

There really are no words to describe the idiocy of this one. But, you know, in a Church and a diocese that was one rife with scandal and pedophile priests I hardly think that the gay parents of the kid in first grade are really what you need to be worrying about.

As I said last month, the Church has the right to do whatever it chooses. It’s just unfortunate that there are persons like this columnist still mired in fear and bigotry.

H/T: Andrew Sullivan