On gay adoption, I long for true compromise. I fear the Catholic Church wants a fight
MATTHEW PARRIS Minette Marrin, the columnist with whom I most often agree, put it best in the Sunday Telegraph last week. Couldn't we just have fudged this gay adoption/Catholic objection thing, she asked? She herself she said, supported the new anti-discrimination rules to which the Roman Catholic hierarchy is objecting; she thought their objections wrong-headed. But she wondered whether both sides might have found a classic British compromise, or — to be frank — a fudge.
It's what I've wondered from the start. Life (and career) finds roles for us all, and one part of my job description has become 'Tory gay'. Another is 'insistent non-believer'. I am therefore duty-bound to fight the gayrights comer in this ridiculous boxing match and, anyway, if there is to be a boxing match I am firmly on the anti-discriminationists' side, and certainly not going to offer comfort to a Church which (for all its protestations about 'loving the sinner, hating the sin', etc.) plainly hates and cannot accept homosexuality. But I think Marrin's question — do we have to have this fight at all? — is central.
So I shall propose a couple of perfectly workable fudges. We can then ask ourselves what the Roman Catholic Church's response to them is likely to be. On that basis we may perhaps get a better appreciation of who is picking this fight. Because I rather think it is the Roman Catholic Church.
Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, who (along with the Archbishops of Canterbury and York) is trying to position the Church as the victim of discrimination, has been making much of what (on the Today programme) he called his co-religionists' freedom to act according to their conscience' and the state's refusal to allow a 'public space' for the Catholic conscience.
By public space he also meant public money. Well, here is one way, to which I as a gay atheist would not object, we could find the public space and money for a Catholic to dissent. Why not invite every employee of a Catholic adoption agency to indicate whether or not he or she objected to handling applications from homosexual couples, and allocate inquiries accordingly? Encounters with would-be clients could be dealt with no less embarrassingly than by the present procedure — which is apparently to decline to take them on, but advise them of agencies which would be prepared to.
I must say that were I myself to hold the Roman Catholic belief that homosexuality is a disorder and that to place a child with a homosexual couple damages the child's interests, I would not think it right to refer applicants onward to agencies which can arrange this. Should a priest whose advice is sought by a parishioner contemplating an abortion — after reminding her that the Church considers this a sin — give her the address of an abortionist? The Church, however, has already conceded that a homosexual couple may be helped by Catholic agencies to adopt, but only by referring them to another agency. This is not without biblical authority: 'It needs must be' (Matthew xviii 7) 'that offences come, but woe unto those men through whom they come.' But having sold the pass and pleaded only for a Christian's right to keep his own hands clean, how important is the moral difference between referring an applicant to a different agency, and referring an applicant to a different person within the same agency?
In short, why not invite the Catholic Church, which is asking here for freedom of conscience, to extend the same freedom of conscience to its own employees? It would be a useful test of the Vatican's conversion to moral liberty. A little 'public space' within the Church itself for conscientious dissent on this or other issues (like contraception, divorce and abortion) could point in a valuable new direction.
Another possible compromise would chime helpfully with new Labour's commitment to 'specialist' schools. Why not have specialist adoption agencies? Putative clients could be advised that while a Catholic adoption agency could not, in law, refuse to entertain an application from a homosexual couple, it was unlikely for religious reasons to be well versed in the possibilities — so why not try an agency which was better equipped? In practice, this is surely what has been happening already: a gay couple seeking a child would be crazy to go anywhere near a Catholic agency, and I cannot imagine that many have done so. Certainly from now on they won't.
Which leads me to an answer to Minette Man-in's bewilderment that no fudge could be found. I think the Roman Catholic Church has actually been looking for a fight. If its real and only fear has been that employees of its adoption agencies would be forced, against their consciences, to help gay couples adopt, then such a fear could have been dispelled by means well short of a formal exemption from the law. My guess is that, emboldened and perhaps a little surprised by its victory over the Education Secretary on the issue of a 'quota' of non-Catholics in Catholic schools, the Church has thought to push the fight a little further into heathen territory — and seen the 'gay adoption' controversy as one where they might find a measure of public support for what they hold to be their doctrine, and some of us consider their bigotry.
This question of public support is key to understanding the Church's strategy. Just as validly (and with more practical consequence), they could have claimed it an issue of conscience not to place children with (say) non-Catholic couples, or couples where one or both was a divorcee, or with whose attitude to sex outside marriage was permissive; but in none of these cases would the Church have won public support. So they have picked on homosexuals in hopes of a small but signal victory against a minority whom some of the public still do not quite trust with children.
I would not call this brave. It is, however, cunning. And the timing — during the final months at No. 10 Downing Street of the last semi-Catholic family we are likely to have for the foreseeable future — is surely worth noting. As a prime suspect in this row, Ruth Kelly has been much fingered by anti-discrimination protagonists, but I believe the Blairs have been the real stirrers, and that the Roman Catholic Church would not have entered the fray had they not felt confident of sympathy from the Prime Minister.
Religion matters. It should matter. It makes large claims. Because behind the scenes it informs conscience, it informs political decision-making too. I have argued in this column before that, just as those who have a financial interest in a political decision are considered bound to declare it, so those whose religious affiliation informs (even dictates) their view on policy should declare this in quite a formal way. Columnists, broadcasters, politicians, schoolteachers, scientists, doctors, police officers, civil servants — anyone in a position of public influence — whose Church, if declared, might reasonably be thought to have a bearing on positions they take, should inform and when appropriate remind us of the affiliation. It is for the public, not the public servant, to decide whether to discount it. Alastair Campbell's assertion that Downing Street did not do God was an aspiration, not a promise.
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