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I'm OK with the Church's Doctrine on Marriage

7
goddamnedfrank3/14/2013 7:45:58 pm PDT
I’m ok with its doctrine on sex and marriage. After all, your faith is your choice.

This is incredibly simplistic though, because people are also raised in faiths that they never chose. When those people are gay they’re presented with a real, psychically damaging assessment of who they are. Homosexual acts, unlike premarital sex are considered an abomination, an entirely elevated level of sin, and as John Paul II so helpfully clarified, “It is clear that penitents living in a habitual state of serious sin and who do not intend to change their situation cannot validly receive absolution.” So gays raised in the faith are basically bombarded with the notion that unless they can somehow stop being who they are, and genuinely intend to never again act on the biological urges they were born with, they cannot be forgiven and are thus condemned to hell. This is in addition to the stress and damage they incur from their family and society over the doctrine.

Contrast this to heterosexuals who’ve engaged in premarital sex, they always have an out, they can simply get married. They don’t even have to get married to the person they slept with before marriage. They are allowed to experiment and then eventually later form a permanent loving bond that is officially sanctioned.

In short, even without any attempts to legislate it, the teaching is in no way victimless. The people who perpetuate the doctrine, or “belief,” usually never really choose to either, in as much as the faith has been passed down generation after generation through centuries of what is essentially brainwashing. It harms not only gays, terribly, but their friends and families, destroying an untold number of relationships, individual lives and egos.

The doctrine is, in and of itself, abjectly evil.