In Italy, the change of the Catholic "mood" indicates that the redefinition of marriage to include counternatural unions may be a matter of time - it was exactly in such a climate that abortion was approved in the country under a DC (Democrazia Cristiana) prime-minister who was a "daily mass-goer" (!) and as close as possible to Paul VI. Montinian Church, Montinian consequences. It would hardly have happened so after one single decade of Wojtyla, but then it was too late.
Anyway, in this fine article published in October, Mario Palmaro explains how Catholics in Italy may lose this battle (as Catholics in many other places have already lost it) if they follow the ten steps to the "homosexual marriage" precipice.
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With the laws on “homophobia” mankind is torn to pieces, a bit at a time, to the triumphant chorus of approval from the enemies of the Church.
Homophobia. The Italian Parliament is about to approve a law that will prosecute, with specific sanctions, behaviour that is part of this new conceptual categorization. But what does being a homophobe mean? In reality, no-one is able to define it with precision, because homophobia is an ideological invention. It is an idea from the Soviet penal-code, which will allow public ministers and judges to prosecute the most diverse behaviors, in the most grotesque victory of creative jurisprudence.
Homophobia as a category of the absurd
Homophobia presupposes that the world is made up of heterosexuals and homosexuals, along with other categories eventually definable, connected to the sexual sphere. But the concept of heterosexuality is already fake: in fact, when men and women have sexual relations, they are simply behaving like normal people. It is all the rest that is abnormal. Once the juridical category of homophobia is accepted, this statement will be impossible to make publically, without risking the prosecution of the law. The same can be said about a professor or teacher who teach their students that relationships between persons of the same sex are abnormal, or that having two fathers or two mothers is damaging to children. A penal denunciation will also hang like the Sword of Damocles over the head of any priest or catechist who defines homosexual acts as sins against nature, and therefore sins “that cry out to God for vengeance.”
Homophobia is a category of the absurd. If a person is attacked or insulted, the juridical order already provides sanctions applicable to everyone on the basic principle of equality. By inventing new penal laws in the case of a homosexual victim (or claims to be, since how can it be verified?) signifies inaugurating a potentially infinite proliferation of protected categories, reinforced by the penal code. You could hypothesize laws to punish severely “fat-phobia” in order to protect the obese from being mocked by colleagues and class-mates; or even “tobacco-phobia” to defend smokers against those who discriminate them for their smoking habits; or even “bald-phobia” to bring an end to the shameful discrimination of people who have hardly any hair. As you can see, there is no limit to this insane competition in the proliferation of civil rights.
Gender, Homo-marriage and Homosexual Adoptions
A nation that introduces the category of homophobia into its laws inevitably accepts the ideology of gender. What does this mean? According to the theory of gender, a person’s sex is not a fact that inexorably comes from nature i.e. one is born a man or a woman and tertium non datur – but each individual chooses, and not once and for all, whether they want to be a man or a woman with [total] disregard to their body and genetics. Homophobia certifies through jurisdiction, the destruction of natural sexual identity, transforming it into an individual and arbitrary choice. Being a man or woman will be like deciding whether to eat peach or cherry jam. Man literally “makes himself” which brings to fruition the devastating anthropological and social project initiated by the illuminist thinkers and revolutionaries like Rousseau. A project which is summed up in the total rebellion against God, and which culminates in rejecting the sexual constraints imposed by the body and its organs. It also makes a mockery of the Divine project for man “be fruitful and multiply.”
It must be made clear immediately that, once a law is passed on homophobia, whatever it is, the follow-up will automatically be a law on homosexual marriage. And consequently there will be the legalization of adoptions for homosexual couples and the access of the same to artificial insemination.
CATHOLICS: How to lose in ten steps
In short, the effects of this law on homophobia are apocalyptic. In Italy, a strong reaction from the Catholic world i.e. the Church, the Conference of Bishops, ecclesial associations and the main Catholic newspapers, would have been completely normal. Instead – they are all silent. The only Catholic entities that have not been, are: ‘Alleanza Cattolica’ who having been fighting non-stop with a a clear and very lucid manifesto of opposition; the ‘Nuova Bussola’ on-line, with an intense and tenacious campaign; the weekly ‘Tempi’, by supporting the campaign against the law, plus there are other sites or organized groups which are combative but small.
How can this lapse in neglecting the truth be explained? I would suggest three causes:
a. The habit of compromise: for years now the Catholic world has become used to pursuing the lesser evil instead of the good and the true: a law on bad homophobia rather than a worse one.
b. The existence of a homosexual lobby in the Catholic world which paralyzes it on this and other battles.
c. Fear of clashing with the world and of losing a political battle.
When all is said and done, this “surrender” explains how homosexuality, judged as a harmful abnormality by the greater part of public opinion until not so long ago, has become not only licit conduct but worthy of special juridical protection; making it become even more meritorious than the traditional man-woman relationship. It is clear that it is the work by the homosexual lobby and the favourable ground created by the mass-media which have contributed to this situation. Nonetheless, it needs to be added, that Catholicism, you might say, “has dug its own grave”, through ten earth-shatteringly erroneous moves:
1. Christianity’s judgment on homosexual conduct has been undoubtedly very severe for two thousand years: the first losing move consists in progressively softening this judgment of truth, which anyway does not take away the message of forgiveness and redemption for the sinner, as the same for every other sin.
2. Being silent about the fact that homosexual behaviour is a sin. Out of human respect and because of the complexity of the causes, it is deduced that this behavior cannot be substantially judged. If you notice, even the most rigorous Catholics feel the need to state beforehand “that they do not have anything against homosexuals”. On the other hand, when speaking about the ninth commandment, they would never say as a premise “I have nothing against adulterers.”
3. The subsequent step is to deny explicitly that it is about sin: there are those who are born like that and so nothing can be done to change things.
4. The term “against nature” is abolished from language use in sermons, conferences and books, liquidating also the idea of nature in the philosophical sense. What remains is merely the “nature” that you find in Piero Angela’s TV documentaries.
5. Every pretension at conserving a distinction in judgment with regard to the homosexual in the juridical order, is abandoned. For centuries, laws considered this phenomenon tolerable, or as totally irrelevant on a juridical level, but they always maintained an implicit negative valuation towards this condition, which can have problematic aspects of public relevance. For example, the possibility of the role as educator, or of being part of a community organized in a specific way, such as the military or a religious order. Specific and motivated distinctions that came from recognition of the pathological character of this condition, were recognized world-wide until 1973.
6. At this point the effect of “the lay state” spreads: since the law cannot give ethical judgment, everyone must be treated in the same way; ergo every emotional relationship is of the same moral and social value; therefore, the laws will treat homosexuals and heterosexuals, and eventual ulterior categories, in exactly the same way.
7. Now, at this point, the person who tries to say homosexuality goes against nature, and that they would not want a homosexual teacher, becomes an outlaw, first at the level of the mass-media (pilloried by TV and newspaper journalists) and then at the juridical level (laws on homophobia); and here, the Catholic world abandons to their fate, all those who run into the executioner’s axe which has been set up by the new “homo-cracy”, liquidating them as “imprudent” or “integralists.”
8. So then the law on “homosexual unions” is passed, and here the Catholic loser displays satisfaction because “they have not been defined as marriages”.
9. “Homosexual marriages” obviously then are passed and here the Catholic loser displays optimism, because “adoptions by homosexuals are not foreseen.”
10. Adoptions by homosexuals are passed and here the Catholic loser concludes, with satisfaction, that anyway “the idea of the family still exists.”
[Source: Il Timone October 2013 (n.126). Translation: Francesca Romana]