Commentary
A pitch for tolerance
Cebu Daily News
First Posted 09:31:00 05/16/2008
Bishop Jose Oliveros, chair of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) Office on Bio-ethics, says that contrary to popular belief, the Catholic Church is not intolerant of gays, it is liberal with gays. The Church, he says, has come to terms with them. “We try to be compassionate and understand homosexuals and guide them towards the right path where they should not act out on their desires.”
Bishop Leonardo Medroso, CBCP Commissioner on Canon Law chair, has a rather clever way of proving it. “Marriage and sex, as the Church views it, are solely for reproduction. That’s the nature of marriage, opening up a couple to producing children. We cannot have that in a man-to-man or woman-to-woman relationship. Therefore, sex between persons of the same sex becomes unnatural and offends the Church.”
The argument is clever. It says nothing about whether being gay is aberrant or not. It merely says that all sex outside of marriage is a sin. And since gays may not marry (at least each other), then any sex by them is a sin.
The idea of a couple, married or not, having sex in order to procreate is hilarious. It conjures the image of them hard at it, enduring the ordeal, determined only like soldiers pinned down in trenches to persevere out of a sense of duty and finally to break through in one great rush. What a joyless act that is. Whatever happened to love? Whatever happened to ecstasy? Whatever happened to two people, straight or gay, bonded by feelings that cannot be expressed by words, needing to express themselves to each other by flinging themselves into each other’s arms and surrendering themselves into a consummation devoutly to be wished? Surely that is part of the magic of life.
That brings us to the argument that the Church is not proscribing against gays, it is merely proscribing against gays acting as gays, or that it is not demanding that gays do not get attracted to other gays, it is merely demanding that gays do not act on it. But gays do fall in love too, and what is unnatural is to compel them on the ground that it is perverse or that they cannot procreate to abort it, as many Filipinos do. There is nothing more natural than love in whatever form it takes.
What distinguished the Old Testament from the New Testament is that the New looks at the world more positively. Where the Old Testament called on fire and brimstone to befall those who failed to obey their ten “Thou shalt not’s,” the New Testament called on God’s grace to fall on those who obeyed his Son’s single commandment of “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” That seems like a pitch for tolerance and largeness of spirit.
If Jesus Christ frowned on anything, it was on prissiness and hypocrisy, preferring the company of fishers and a reformed prostitute to those that scorned them. It was so unnatural they nailed Him to the cross. — Conrado de Quiros, Inquirer
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