questions of perspective

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Nov 01, 2010

Two of today’s CWN headline news stories deserve a bit of comment:

• In London, a court is being asked whether a Christian couple was rightly barred from serving as foster parents because the couple said that they would not tell children that homosexuality is acceptable. How quickly the ground has shifted in this debate! Just a few years ago, the question was whether homosexual couples should be allowed to take in foster children. Now that question is resolved, in favor of the gay couples, and the question is whether those who oppose homosexuality will be excluded. Following their decisions that homosexuality could be considered acceptable, the courts have moved at record speed to rule that homosexual acts must be considered acceptable. How much longer will it be before Christianity, insofar as it teaches that homosexual acts are harmful to those who perform them, will become “the love that dare not speak its name?”
• In Rome, a group of sex-abuse victims was denied permission for a demonstration in St. Peter’s Square. That part of the story—the part featured in most of the secular media headlines—was unremarkable; everyone is denied permission to hold demonstrations in St. Peter’s Square. What is remarkable, really, is that two of the demonstration’s organizers had the opportunity to sit down for a talk with the Pope’s spokesman. (And one of those organizers had previously met with the Pontiff himself.) How many demonstrators in Washington have been invited in to speak with the White House press secretary? The real story line here is that the Vatican offered so much access to the abuse victims—which is probably just about 180° different from the treatment this story received in your local newspaper.