Is the dignity of the human person important?

Question

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

#2357: Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same s*x. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered. They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

How can Christian homosexuals accept themselves and their "condition" with any sense of their own personal dignity and value as long as they must see themselves and their actions as organically expressing the effects of sin in the world and as essentially in contradiction to the divine will for man?

Answer 1

"homosexual" was coined in 1869 so it can't be a sin etc

same-s*x stuff is not disordered, many animals are also into the same gender, also many LBG people are genuinely affectionate and sexually complimentary

How can people accept others when they are producing stuff like the bigotry expressed here?

Answer 2

The church has been wrong before and is wrong on this. Their objection to homosexuality was not always present. Scott Bidstrup writes:

"Homosexuality continued to be practiced openly and without much restraint up through the 11th century. Throughout the middle ages, not only did the open practice of homosexuality continue, but it flourished in the monasteries of the time. Many of the priests and abbots not only left us literature celebrating their g*y lovers, but some of the poetry they left us was baldy erotic. Consider this poem from Marbod, Bishop of Rennes (d. 1123 C.E.)

      The Unyielding Youth

      Horace composed an ode about a certain boy

      Whose face was so lovely he could easily have been a girl,

      Whose hair fell in waves against his ivory neck,

      Whose forehead was white as snow and his eyes black as pitch,

      Whose soft cheeks were full of delicious sweetness

      When they bloomed in the brightness of a blush of beauty,

      His nose was perfect, his lips flame red, lovely his teeth--

      An exterior formed in measure to match his mind.

"Of course, the good bishop was far from alone in his same-s*x attractions. We have literally thousands of poems from this period, many of them from other monastics, who celebrated their love for their g*y lovers.

"Among these monastics were St. Aelred, St. Anselm, St. Bernard and many others. Among these, the literature left us by St. Aelred offers the clearest and most detailed literature celebrating g*y love in this period.

"That homosexual s*x was condemned by Leviticus did not seem to matter to the clerics of this period. They considered the Levitical proscription to fall in the same category as the rest of the vast corpus of Levitical proscriptions: they were abolished, along with the requirement for animal sacrifice, by the atonement of Jesus.

"As for Paul's references in Romans, it was felt that Paul had simply been a bit overboard in this regard the same as he was in telling women to not speak in church and in his proffering advice to not marry.

"As in most times, most of the records we have of this period are from either the clerics, the most commonly literate or from the upper classes, for whom they labored. We therefore have a good picture of homosexuality from this period among the clerics and upper classes, but less so from the poor and working classes. We know, however, that it was as tolerated among them as among the upper classes, because of references like that of Hilderbert of Lavardin, who said of homosexuality, that "no walk of life escapes it.""

The dignity of human life is important. Nothing should force a person to hate themselves for what they are.

Answer 3

I really, really wish that people would stop acting like idiots and realize that homosexuality is no more "immoral" or wrong than heterosexuality. The only thing less than kosher about homosexuality is the fact that their sexual orientation takes them out of the gene pool, unless they artificially inseminate someone. They are essentially useless to procreation.

However, seeing as we're already over populated, this isn't necessarily a bad thing anyway.

Please, just because homosexuals are different than you, it doesn't mean they're bad people.