The gay lobby should rejoice at the Pope’s argument that God makes us the way we are
I have been puzzling during the winter holidays over Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas message. You may remember that it was interpreted as an attack on homosexuality, provoking the usual outrage. Most people, it seems, saw the response. Few bothered to study the message itself.
I have done so. Not only (as Roman Catholic spokesmen protested at the time) does the Pope never in fact mention homosexuality, it is far from clear he meant his remarks to be interpreted in any such light. Study the remarks themselves, for they present a picture troubling in a quite different way from that suggested by spokesmen for gay and transgender organisations. The address seems to betray a Church mind confused about the implications for morality of rival scientific theories, and plumping in its confusion for the variant most dangerous to church teaching.
In order (I believe) to take a swipe at an idea the Vatican finds immediately irritating — that women could be priests — the Pope has sided with arguments in medical and social science which, properly understood, present real difficulties for traditional Church morality in the longer term. He has undermined the belief that people can change. He has sided with those who suspect that people can’t — or not as much as required. I think he is right. But he is sawing off a branch on which Catholic ethics sit.
The question under scrutiny is to what extent a higher animal, human or otherwise, is the product either of its inherited genes, or of its environment and upbringing. Essentially this is the old nature vs nurture debate.
The theory the Pope chose to attack this Christmas was what he rather obscurely called ‘gender theory’.
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