Scottish Catholic Adoption

Scotland is preparing to implement law which will ban discrimination against gay people in provision of goods or services. The Catholic church is upset because this will ban them from discriminating in the adoption services they provide on behalf of the government.

From the article:

The Catholic Church insist this would force them to close agencies as it would be against their religious beliefs to place a child in a gay household.

The use of the word "force" in this context is what I would call a lie. When a government forces someone to do something, it does so at gunpoint. Under no circumstances is the church being forced to close its adoption agencies; quite the contrary, it is being asked to please keep them open. The fact that the church does not wish to comply with the anti-discrimination law and consequently plans to close its agencies means that it is choosing to close the agencies.

John Deighan, parliamentary officer for the Catholic Church in Scotland, said members of the Bishop's Conference were so concerned they were seeking legal advice on their rights.

[some quotes deleted here for brevity]

"What we are looking at is are the UK government stepping over their competence by bringing into law regulations that do away with rights under the European Convention of Human Rights? We are not even being allowed to follow our consciences in saying we think married couples provide a better home."

What right is being violated? They're still allowed to believe as they like, and they may provide adoption services in compliance with the anti-discrimination law or choose not to place children with gay couples by choosing not to provide adoption services.

Further, it is my understanding that the church receives funding from the Scottish government, paid for with tax dollars, to provide adoption services. In other words, it isn't just providing adoption services out of the kindness of its heart, but rather, is doing so under contract for the government. It is not only the government's right, but in fact the government's duty to set standards for the provision of adoption services, for the benefit of the children involved. I can not see how the church has any right to receive tax dollars and place children for adoption; that would seem to be a privilege under any circumstances. If the church does not feel it can comply with the anti-discrimination law, it is right for them to choose to close their agencies.

Further, claiming that "We are not even being allowed to follow our consciences in saying we think married couples provide a better home" is, to be blunt, entirely false. They're entirely able under the law to continue saying that. They're just not going to continue to receive the privilege of being paid by the government and permitted to place children for adoption if they can't do so in the manner required by law.

Claims of bias in journalism

I'm frequently appalled by the articles of "Worldnetdaily", which claims to be a news compan and rather obviously targets a christian audience. Their February 24 article, "Dump the gay beat", exemplifies why they bother me.

Right off the bat the author, Joseph Farah, claims:

No matter where you turn today in the so-called "mainstream" media (you know, the part of the press losing all the readers and viewers), practically all you see is coverage of people with aberrant sexual practices.

Really? That's certainly news to me. I watch plenty of TV (cable, no less) and read a lot of news both online and in print, and I hardly ever learn anything about anyone's sexual practices from it. On the rare occasions that I do, it's generally either very mainstream vanilla heterosexuality, or it's presented as weird and abhorrent. I'd like to know where Mr. Farah lives that the mainstream media is confused with porn channels. But he continues:

It started slowly, innocently. Before we knew it, the journalism business had gone as fey as Broadway.

As it happens, I used to know a guy who worked on broadway. He was in a production of La Cage Aux Folles, a story in which most of the characters were gay men. It turned out that there were no gay men in the production at all. Not a one. My friend was bisexual... but he was actually playing one of the few straight men in the show. I guess Mr. Farah doesn't realize that Broadway, like everything else, is mostly full of straight people. No matter. He continues:

Today, no story that reflects negatively on homosexuality can or will be published, disseminated or broadcast because of this internal pressure lobby inside the "gay media complex."

Really? Then what does he think he's writing? It sure looks published to me, and it certainly doesn't look like a love letter to gay people.

While attempting to claim that news is biased toward gay people, he claims:

In case you missed it, the lead paragraph of Crary's AP story reported: "Adoptive parents invest more time and financial resources in their children than biological parents, according to a new national study challenging arguments that have been used to oppose same sex marriage and gay adoption." (Emphasis added.)

As I pointed out, the study did no such thing. In fact, the report specifically stated that "the number of these families in most nationally representative datasets is still too small to support statistical analysis. Our analyses focus on married male-female couples who adopt."

In other words, reporter Crary and his colleagues and editors at AP manufactured pro-homosexual fantasies in a study that had nothing to do with homosexuals.

Of course, this is flatly untrue. If you look at the quote from the original article, you'll see that Mr. Crary is claiming that the facts of the study contradicts arguments which have been used to oppose same sex marriage and gay adoption, not that the study itself mentions these arguments. It is a simple fact that many people have argued against marital rights and adoption rights for gay and lesbian couples by using claims that they will be poor parents, or indeed that heterosexual couples make better parents because they could have biological children. The study mentioned indicates that the ability to have biological children doesn't make better parents. This clearly contradicts the arguments against gay couples marrying or parenting.

So, Mr. Farah seems to either be unable to understand Mr. Crary's article, or disingenuously chooses to deliberately misconstrue it.