Homosexual Interests Trump the Poor’s

“The Catholic Church does incalculable good, providing immeasurable comfort — material as well as spiritual — to so many,” explains Frank Bruni in his New York Times column on same-sex marriage.

But it contradicts and undercuts that mission when it fails to recognize what more and more parishioners do: that gay people deserve the same dignity as everyone else, certainly not what happened to the Montana couple. If Francis and his successors don’t get this right, all his other bits of progress and pretty words will be for naught.

There you have it: the interests of some homosexuals who want to be married — a minority of a small percentage of the population — trumps the needs of the poor for whom Francis speaks so constantly and insistently. That homosexual people have been the most privileged group in western moral liberalism’s discourse has been clear for some time, but rarely said so directly.

For years, critics of the Church’s teaching on marriage have noted that Jesus said a lot more about poverty than he did about sex, and that was a fair point. Much conservative thinking was unbalanced. But the same criticism could be made in return. And when following Francis Catholics and other Christians begin to redress the balance, moral liberalism remains unbalanced.