Exempting the Church

In a triumph of outdated and intolerant dogma over practical effectiveness, the Boston Archdiocese’s Catholic Charities adoption agency decided to halt its services after its contract expires later this year. The decision, triggered by the Church’s disagreement with the Massachusetts state law allowing gays and lesbians to adopt children, prompted Mass. Governor Mitt Romney to publicly push for an exception to the law in the interests of religious freedom. While we agree with Romney that an exception should be made for the licensing of Catholic Charities, our support for the exemption rests solely our practical concern for these marginalized children.

The Church’s adoption agency, Catholic Charities, is currently licensed and partially-funded by the state for its services, which deal primarily with children who have severe emotional and physical needs. It has placed over 720 children in homes over the past two decades, with only a mere handful of them going to gay and lesbian couples.

The Church’s dogmatic position on homosexuality, however, has forced it to grapple with Mass. law, which both requires anti-discriminatory policy in adoption and, more recently, permits same-sex marriage. According to Boston Archbishop Sean O’Malley, in the choice between its faith and state law, the Church feels obligated to “withdraw from the work of adoptions, in order to exercise the religious freedom that was the prompting for having begun adoptions many years ago.”

While the Church’s consideration of its dogma is understandable, we fear the interests of the orphaned children are being sacrificed by a stubborn and unyielding Church tradition. It is in this vein that we agree with Romney’s decision to seek an exception, and license Catholic Charities to continue its adoption services despite its policy toward gays. It should not, however, receive any public funding. To suggest that state funding should be given to an agency that discriminates against homosexuals in the name of religious freedom would be to sanction the very discriminatory policy that the state law seeks to eradicate. Rather, we feel that Massachusetts should only confer the license for adoption services to the Church, but divorce public money from the Charities’ activities.

While our consideration of this licensing issue has focused around the practical empirical impact on children, Governor Romney, like Archbishop O’Malley, has framed this issue around freedom of religion. Within an hour of the Church’s decision not to renew its contract, he announced his decision to endorse a bill allowing for religious organizations to seek an exception to the law. Though we agree ultimately with Romney’s proposed legislation, we disagree with his rationale: this law does not in any way offend religious freedoms; namely, it does not single out religious institutions in its insistence on equal treatment of gay and lesbian couples. The law here implicates the Catholic Church only because its discriminatory anti-gay policy is enshrined in its canonical law. We urge the Church to reconsider its treatment of gays and lesbians. It is high time that the Church liberalizes its stance on homosexuality and recognizes the outdated nature of its position.

While the broader issues of homosexuality and the religious freedoms occupy much discourse about the Church’s decision, we must remember that the paramount issue in this whole debacle is the interests of the children whom the charity helps. In this case, the empirical facts are too compelling to ignore. It would be simply unjust to condemn these many children to the instability of foster homes because of a clash of values between the Church and state with, though vital, fewer tangible effects.