David Norris has been reading with regret and astonishment the recent declaration issued by the Vatican regarding proposals to give legal recognition to homosexual unions.
The issues raised in the recent Vatican declaration on the legal status of gays touch the most basic concerns of human beings, such as the right to security in employment and housing. It is ironic that a major Christian church should regard it as in the tradition of the Gospels to organise at an international political level to inhibit development of these rights for fellow citizens who happen to be homosexual.
An Anglican of Southern unionist background, I was one of the founder members of the Southern Ireland Civil Rights Association at the end of the 1960s, a group which fought to secure precisely these rights for Roman Catholics in the North of Ireland. And so it is a matter of regret and astonishment to me that the largest of the world's Christian denominations believes it tolerable to foster and promote discrimination against gay people in these very areas.
The document's full title is Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons, and it should be read carefully by everyone to appreciate its strident, intemperate language and lack of either argument or evidence to support its tendentious case.
Particularly controversial is the use of words such as "evil", "deviant" and "disordered" to describe the sexual expression of loving relationships between people of the same sex. Weak on substance, strong on authoritative tone, the ethos of the document seems to be the old one of "Roma Locuta est; causa finita est" - Rome has spoken, the matter is closed.
The document's introduction argues that while homosexuality is "a troubling moral and social phenomenon, even in those countries where it does not present significant legal issues" (in less diplomatic language, those countries where individual gays are persecuted and hounded, sometimes to their deaths), even greater concern is caused in those countries which do seek to grant civil and human rights to gay citizens.
The equanimity with which the denial of basic fundamental rights to gay people is contemplated is chilling. And the final sentence makes it clear the message is directed not just at the Roman Catholic constituents of the Vatican but "to all persons committed to promoting and defending the common good of society", moving the document out of a pastoral and theological context and clearly into a legal and political one.
Section One, "The Nature of Marriage and its Inalienable Characteristics", opens with the smug and bullying statement that the church's position on sexuality merely "reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason".
This is akin to saying that something is "obvious" and therefore requires no argumentation. It is no encouragement to honest dialogue for one party at the outset to state: "We are right and always were and always will be. The only way forward for us is for you to abandon your reasoned position and submit to our greater authority and wisdom."
Yet our knowledge of human sexuality has advanced to the point where the simplistic black-and-white views of Cardinal Ratzinger require to be supported by empirical evidence if they are to be accepted.
And there is something surreal about a document from persons who have taken solemn vows never to engage in sexual activity on the nature of that experience in a language that, to anyone who has engaged in sex, owes little to their lived experience.
I doubt if too many people on a Saturday night imagine what they are doing is "mutually perfecting each other, in order to co-operate with God in the appropriation and upbringing of new human lives". If this is indeed, as paragraph three states, "the voice of nature", its accents are unlikely to be listened to by the general populace.
Moreover, insistence in the same paragraph on the old message "Be fruitful and multiply" has surely been more than adequately acted upon already by those in heterosexual unions.
The population of the planet has more than doubled since I did my Leaving in 1962. A frightening thought when one considers the once-fertile but now exhausted land of countries like China and India.
It is difficult to accept the statement "In the Creator's plan fruitfulness belongs to the very nature of marriage". Surely the fact that most gay people do not create the enormous families with which the Vatican appears particularly comfortable means they are doing the planet a favour, rather than being unholy and "against the natural moral law" because they "close the sexual act to the gift of life".
The second main section, "Positions on the Problem of Homosexual Unions", is short, but here the manipulation of language is manifest. Avoidance of discrimination against gay people is described as "a pretext" and therefore not legitimate. Thus the undermining of the self-esteem of a substantial section of the community and the denial of any right to civil recognition are simply once more given as facts and not something to be argued.
The third section is a mixture of assertion and invective. Ethical considerations are presented as (1) from the "Order of Right Reason", (2) from the "Biological and Anthropological Order", (3) from the "Social Order" and (4) from the "Legal Order".
Yet its first sub-section does not appear to employ reason at all, merely making assertions along the lines of the following: "Laws in favour of homosexual unions are contrary to right reason because they confer legal guarantees analogous to those guaranteed to marriage, to unions between persons of the same sex".
This is simply the old medieval circular argument. A matter is contrary to right reason because I say it is contrary to right reason. There can be no challenge to my authority.
Similarly, giving legal recognition to what is admitted as a "de-facto reality" it is said "would result in changes to the entire organisation of society contrary to the common good". No proof is offered and, in fact, all the sociological evidence points to the contrary. However, at least the implied acceptance that the church is refusing to face "de-facto reality" is refreshing.
The paragraph concludes baldly that legal recognition of homosexual unions would "cause a devaluation of the institution of marriage". I have more respect for the marriages of my friends than to imagine that granting civil and human rights to people like me would undermine their happiness.
The next sub-section, "From the Biological and Anthropological Order", makes clear that the Vatican sees marriage as the human equivalent of animal husbandry with children as the "product". Homosexual relations are defective because they lack this capacity to produce such an end-product.
It is surely demeaning to human relations that there is no reference here to sexual passion as the language of love, comfort and assurance between two adults, merely an emphasis on reproduction.
Even more worrying, however, is the statement "Sexual relations are human when and insofar as they express and promote the mutual assistance of the sexes in marriage and are open to the transmission of new life". In other words sexual expression is permissible only between man and woman within marriage and only where there is the possibility of conception.
If they are only human in this context, clearly the intimate behaviour of gay people is, if not human, then subhuman or antihuman. This is dangerously close to Nazi ideology.
There is also a breathtaking moral blindness in the statement that allowing children to be adopted by gay people, whether or not they are their biological parents, "would actually mean doing violence to these children".
How one of the leaders of a church that has presided over the systematic violation of children by its own members and has operated to harbour, protect and conceal perpetrators of real and tangible violence against children can make such statements beggars belief.
In the sub-section "From the Social Order", discrimination in the denial of social and legal status to domestic partnerships outside marriage is not unjust, we are told. In fact "justice requires it". Is this 2003 or 1984?
"There are good reasons for holding that such unions are harmful to the proper development of human society, especially if their impact on society were to increase," the document asserts. Not surprisingly Cardinal Ratzinger is very coy about specifying those "good reasons".
"From the Legal Order" asserts that homosexual unions "do not need specific attention from the legal standpoint since they do not exercise this function (procreation) for the common good."
Are we then to take it that infertile couples or those unfortunate women who had their wombs removed by Dr Neary, post-menopausal women or those who practise artificial contraception do not need legal protection?
The section concludes with the completely false statement that gay people "can always make use of provisions of law to protect their rights in matters of common interest".
The recent legal history of this State is replete with instances where gay people have sought to exert and establish rights to inheritance, for example, of a joint tenancy, and have been denied these by the highest courts in the land.
Sub-section four, "Positions of Catholic Politicians with Regard to Legislation in Favour of Homosexual Union", purports to direct Roman Catholic politicians to use their parliamentary office to oppose any such legislation.
Is this being done by the Vatican in its role as a state? The Minister for Foreign Affairs should require clarification. If it is it calls for a reprimand to be delivered to the Papal Nuncio for what in any other circumstances would constitute the most gross interference in the internal politics of a friendly state.
And the conclusion of the document merely rehearses the abusive language and lack of argument contained in the main body of the article.
The Vatican document reads like one of Mr Duffy's Bile Beans from A Painful Case with its comically artificial constriction of human relations: "Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse. Friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse."
David Norris represents Trinity College Dublin in the Seanad