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HOMOSEXUALITY-SEMINAR Feb-24-2006 (570 words) xxxi
Participants at Rome seminar warn gay marriage poses risk to children
By John Thavis
Catholic News Service
ROME (CNS) -- Gay marriage and gay adoption would undermine society's traditional configuration and pose risks to the children raised by same-sex couples, warned participants at a Rome seminar.
Participants at the Feb. 20-24 seminar, offered for course credit by the Pontifical Lateran University, studied the topic: "The Homosexual Question: Psychology, Rights and the Truth of Love."
In a public conference Feb. 23, professors teaching the seminar spoke at length about the threats posed by the gay rights movement and said current legislative proposals around the world could have far-reaching effects on how society is structured.
French Msgr. Tony Anatrella, a psychoanalyst and consultant to the Pontifical Council for the Family, said gay couples were unable to give children the model of sexual difference that any child needs to develop his or her own sexual identity.
He referred to one recent study, which he said showed that 40 percent of children raised by homosexuals became homosexuals themselves -- an assertion that was greeted by laughter from some members of the audience.
Msgr. Anatrella said there were other psychological "collateral effects" of being raised by a same-sex couple that show up only in adulthood, including anxiety over sexual differentiation. When it comes time for these young people to form their own families, they suffer because they have not learned to accept the sexual difference between two adults, he said.
Their sense of procreation is "falsified because it mixes the imaginary and the real in the sexual confusion of unisexuality," he said.
"And among the young people who have lived this experience, within three or four generations this will bring some psychotic pathologies. I'm not saying these children will become psychotic, but they will experience an alteration of the sense of reality," he said.
"We could reach the point where we have violence, and what I call 'civilized delirious behavior,'" he said.
David S. Crawford, a professor at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, said that while arguments for legal recognition of gay marriage are often made in the name of tolerance, such a change would impact the rights of all members of society and lead to a form of "compulsory homosexuality."
When for legal and cultural purposes the person is considered fundamentally asexual, than "all relations -- including the man-woman relationship -- are therefore fundamentally homosexual. They all become in this sense essentially, or at least for legal and social purposes, gay," he said.
He said the Catholic vision of sexual difference and the "gay vision of alternate orientations" are incompatible, not only in terms of private morality but as visions of the meaning and structure of society itself.
The Catholic vision would allocate rights and benefits on the basis of an anthropological understanding of sexual difference as fundamental, he said. But in the gay vision, sexual difference is demoted to a subpersonal or biological level in favor of "privately determined orientations of desire," he said.
The Catholic vision would center society's vision of the future on the child as the natural fruit of love between a man and a woman, whereas the gay vision would see the child as "a lifestyle choice," he said.
Crawford said "gay rights" was an ideological and political movement "intent on gaining a reconfiguration of society on the basis of a gay anthropology."
END
Copyright (c) 2006 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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