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| Thomas Couture Romans of the Decadence (1847) Musée d'Orsay |
[W]e can also see how incongruous is the demand to accord “marital” status to unions between persons of the same sex. It is opposed, first of all, by the objective impossibility of making the partnership fruitful through the transmission of life according to the plan inscribed by God in the very structure of the human being. Another obstacle is the absence of the conditions for that interpersonal complementarity between male and female willed by the Creator at both the physical-biological and the eminently psychological levels. It is only in the union of two sexually different persons that the individual can achieve perfection in a synthesis of unity and mutual psychophysical completion. From this perspective, love is not an end in itself and cannot be reduced to the corporal joining of two beings, but is a deep interpersonal relationship which reaches its culmination in total mutual self-giving and in cooperation with God the Creator, the ultimate source of every new human life.
As you know, these deviations from the natural law inscribed by God in the nature of the person seek their justification in the freedom that is a prerogative of the human being. This justification, in fact, is self-serving. Every believer knows that freedom, as Dante said, is “the greatest gift that God in his bounty made in creation, the most conformed to his goodness” (Par. 5:19-21), but it is a gift that must be correctly understood if it is not to become a stumbling-block for human dignity. To conceive of freedom as the moral or even juridical licence to break the law is to distort its true nature. Freedom consists in the human being’s possibility of conforming responsibly, that is by personal choice, to the divine will expressed in the law, and in this way to become more and more like his Creator (cf. Gn 1:26).
I have already written in the Encyclical Veritatis splendor: “Man is certainly free, inasmuch as he can understand and accept God’s commands. And he possesses an extremely far-reaching freedom, since he can eat ‘of every tree of the garden.’ But his freedom is not unlimited: it must halt before the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’, for it is called to accept the moral law given by God. In fact, human freedom finds its authentic and complete fulfilment precisely in the acceptance of that law. God, who alone is good, knows perfectly what is good for man, and by virtue of his very love proposes this good to man in the commandments” (no. 35).
Unfortunately, the daily news amply confirms the miserable fruits that these aberrations from the divine-natural law ultimately produce. It seems as if the situation which the Apostle Paul describes in the Letter to the Romans is being repeated in our day: “Since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct” (Rom 1:28).
John Paul II
January 21, 1999
Today, the various forms of the erosion of marriage, such as free unions and "trial marriage", and even pseudo-marriages between people of the same sex, are instead an expression of anarchic freedom that are wrongly made to pass as true human liberation. This pseudo-freedom is based on a trivialization of the body, which inevitably entails the trivialization of the person. Its premise is that the human being can do to himself or herself whatever he or she likes: thus, the body becomes a secondary thing that can be manipulated, from the human point of view, and used as one likes. Licentiousness, which passes for the discovery of the body and its value, is actually a dualism that makes the body despicable, placing it, so to speak, outside the person's authentic being and dignity.
The truth about marriage and the family, deeply rooted in the truth about the human being, has been actuated in the history of salvation, at whose heart lie the words: "God loves his people". The biblical revelation, in fact, is first and foremost the expression of a history of love, the history of God's Covenant with humankind.
Consequently, God could take the history of love and of the union of a man and a woman in the covenant of marriage as a symbol of salvation history. The inexpressible fact, the mystery of God's love for men and women, receives its linguistic form from the vocabulary of marriage and the family, both positive and negative: indeed, God's drawing close to his people is presented in the language of spousal love, whereas Israel's infidelity, its idolatry, is designated as adultery and prostitution.
Benedict XVI
June 6,2005
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Thursday, in Colombia:
Colombia has taken a major step recognizing the rights of same-sex couples after the country's Constitutional Court allowed a lesbian couple to adopt a child born to one of its members.
Ana Leiderman gave birth to two children via artificial insemination. Her longtime partner Veronica Botero however doesn't have any custodial or legal rights over the children, now ages 4 and 6. The couple petitioned for full legal rights after the first child was born.
The decision comes on the heels of a number of favorable gay-friendly rulings in Colombia and other parts of Latin America. (Source)
Friday, in Italy:
The Court for Minors of Rome has recognized the adoption of a girl who lives with a same sex couple composed of two freelance professioals. The girl is the biological child of just one of the two partners. It is the first such case in Italy. (Source)
