Vatican has taken step back in stance toward gays

BOSTON — Somewhere along the way, the dividing line over gay issues picked up and moved. It's no longer between red and blue states, or left and right wings, but between nature and nurture. Or to be more precise, between those who believe that homosexuality is a choice and those who believe that homosexuality is innate.

Remember the moment in the 2004 debate when CBS's Bob Schieffer asked Bush and Kerry whether they thought homosexuality was a choice? The president answered, "I don't know," and the senator replied, "We're all God's children."

Well, it turns out that the more you believe homosexuality is innate, the more accepting you are of gay rights. A full 79 percent of people who think human beings are born with a sexual orientation support gay rights, including civil unions or marriage equality. But only 22 percent of those who believe homosexuality is a choice agree.

The same line can be found in the religious world between those who regard homosexuality as a (bad) choice and those who see it as (biological) trait. The most conservative Protestant churches that talk about the homosexual "lifestyle" prohibit gay ministers. Religious liberals who see sexual orientation as an inborn trait are more open to gays in the pulpit.

All and all, Americans seem reluctant to condemn people for who they simply are.

What then do we make of the Catholic Church's banning — and perhaps purging — of gay priests? On Tuesday the much leaked and much awaited document from the Vatican said the church "cannot admit to the seminary or to Holy Orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called gay culture."

What was painful to many Catholics was the obvious scapegoating of gays for the church sexual abuse scandal. But there was something less obvious.

Thirty years ago the Catholic Church accepted the view that some were definitively gay. Church teachings said "they do not choose their homosexual condition." Nevertheless, the new document doesn't just ban gays who "practice" homosexuality, breaking the vows of celibacy. It bans all those with homosexual "tendencies."

In the strange new backsliding language of the Vatican, homosexuality is a "tendency." The church doesn't define tendency, nor does it say whether such a tendency is biological. Voluntary or not, it marks a man permanently. As Matt Foreman, a gay activist raised Catholic, says, "Doesn't matter what you do or believe or practice. If you are gay there is no making that better in the eyes of the church."