“Homophobia?” Archbishop Chaput nails it
Submitted by Ginny
This is the best concise summation I have read of how belief in traditional marriage ends up being labeled as homophobia.
The problem, as law scholar Gerard Bradley points out, is that critics of religious faith tend to reduce all of these moral convictions to an expression of subjective beliefs. And if they’re purely subjective beliefs, then—so the critics argue—they can’t be rationally defended. And because they’re rationally indefensible, they should be treated as a form of prejudice. In effect, two thousand years of moral experience, moral reasoning, and religious conviction become a species of bias. And arguing against same-sex “marriage” thus amounts to religiously blessed homophobia.
There’s more, though. When religious belief is redefined downward to a kind of private bias, then the religious identity of institutional ministries has no public value—other than the utility of getting credulous people to do good things. So exempting Catholic adoption agencies, for example, from placing children with gay couples becomes a concession to private prejudice. And concessions to private prejudice feed bigotry and hurt the public. Or so the reasoning goes. This is how moral teaching and religious belief end up being branded as hate speech.
From a longer piece:
Our First Right: Religious Liberty
by Charles J. Chaput
March 25th, 2013
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