A Stitch in Haste

Thomas More would be pleased:

The Bishop of Nottingham Malcolm McMahon says his diocese will cut its ties with an adoption agency because it cannot accept the government's new laws on homosexual rights.

Bishop Malcolm McMahon said he and the trustees of the Catholic Children's Society adoption agency felt that they had been forced into the decision by the Sexual Orientation Regulations which bans discrimination against gays in the provision of goods and services. The law would compel the diocese in certain circumstances to place children in the care of same-sex couples.

"We have been coerced into this, I am not happy about it at all," Bishop McMahon said. "The regulations have coerced the children's society into going against the Church's teaching, and we don't wish to do that."

A Vatican directive issued in 2003 said it was morally wrong to place children in the care of same-sex couples.

As I have noted previously, the "Catholic" opposition to gay adoption is invariably imposed from on high -- from Church officials and not from the Catholic adoption professionals themselves. Vatican theocrats and their henchmen bishops in the dioceses not only turn a blind eye to the independent objective research that universally shows that gays as a group make as good parents as straights, but they even ignore their own employees working in and running the charities -- people whom, one would think, the Church has no basis to mistrust when it comes to the best interests of children (unlike, say, the Church's own child-rapist priests here in the U.S.).

Incidentally, this particular Catholic adoption agency -- one of 13 in the U.K. -- will not close but will simply merge with its Anglican counterpart. The Church has hinted that this will be the preferred approach rather than to shut the remaining agencies down. While this is obviously good news for the children, it suggests a touch of hypocrisy on the Church's part: Isn't gay adoption arranged by Anglicans just as abominable as gay adoption arranged by Catholics? Isn't the Church conspiring in the commission of an egregious sin by turning its facilities over to heretics and their sodomite clientele?

In reality, this merely confirms that the people actually running these agencies in fact have little or no problem with gay adoption -- Catholic, Anglican or otherwise. They're not the ones quitting over this, the Catholic priests are. That speaks volumes.

(Via Religion Clause.)