Trade Your Baby for a PS3

Oh, those wacky heterosexuals! FOX News reports on a revealing gag:

Yesterday on KDWB-FM’s morning radio show, host Dave Ryan asked his listeners if they would be willing to give up their baby for 24 hours in exchange for the new PS3. To his shock the radio station was flooded with calls from listeners willing to make the trade!

Ryan says the question was meant as a gag, and couldn’t believe so many people were “lined up to turn their kids over to strangers!”

Some callers played along with the joke but about three quarters of the listeners calling in were dead serious about offering up their children.

Good thing that gays can’t adopt. God knows, traditional straight families are the only way to keep our children safe! (Link found at Musing Minds.)

Repression and the Male Sex Drive

*Christopher has written a very thoughtful post on the nature of male sexuality (of both the gay and straight varieties) and the need for elucidating first principles that lead to healthy integration, rather than self-destructive and compulsive “acting out.” I’m not sure I agree with all of his conclusions, but I think he has hit the problem in the bull’s eye. Whether or not one comes to quite the same conclusions, I think *Christopher points us all on the right track in terms of where the solutions lie.

Interesting St. Sebastian Site

I came across this blog dedicated to our patron saint, Sebastian. Lots of neat information.

His Secret

The guy at This Gay Christian’s Blog has a funny snippet from AlterBoyz the Musical, about identities that not everyone approves of:

“I look into your eyes, and I see the pain you hold inside,

Aren’t you tired of the lies you tell so you can hide?

(What if my friends don’t accept me?) I know…

(What if my parents reject me?) I know!

But you won’t truly be you, until you can saaayy…

I,

am,

a Catholic! ….

It reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s famous quip, “My position is curious: I am not a Catholic: I am simply a violent Papist.” Of course, he eventually went on to become a Catholic, to boot.

Gay Adoptions and the Catholic Church

Here’s an interesting article in The Tablet on a Catholic adoption agency sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. On the one hand, Catholic adoption agencies have seen that sometimes it’s in the best interest of a child to place him or her with a gay couple and have quietly been doing so for some time now. On the other hand, the Vatican has reasserted that the ideal is for a child to be placed with a man and woman in a traditional marriage, and that gay partnerships are so far from that ideal that Catholics (and, a fortiori, Catholic agencies) ought to oppose gay adoption. Adding to the dilemma is the insistence of certain governments that an agency either does not discriminate regarding sexual orientation, or gets out of the adoption business altogether.

The Boston Archdiocese’s pullout has gotten the most notice. But the Archdiocese of San Francisco makes for an interesting contrast. There, the letter of the law is being followed, with the Archdiocese no longer placing any children for adoption since it can no longer place with homosexual couples, but the Church is nevertheless “loaning” employees to do basically the same work with another non-profit group that does occasionally place children with gays and lesbians.

It seems logical to me that children would do best in a loving, Catholic family with a Mom and Dad and other siblings. But sometimes that sort of family is not available for a particular child, particularly if the child has special needs. Surely it’s better to place a kid with a loving, responsible same-sex couple than to let him be tossed around from foster home to foster home until he turns 18.

Certainly, what matters most is the welfare of the child, and not the wishes of the would-be parents. But there are no data to support the notion that kids of gay couples turn out any better or worse than kids of straight couples, all else being equal. So, even if one agrees with the Vatican that the best thing would be to place the kids with a man and wife, sometimes the best available option is to place them with homosexuals. Really, if I were a Catholic adoption agent, I would be more worried about the religion of the prospective parents than about their sexual orientation.

Delicious Links

Off to the right, among the little web widgets, you will see an assortment of links in a box titled Del.Icio.Us Links. Clicking that will take you to a growing del.icio.us page of interesting links grouped according to category. Many of them may be of interest to readers of Dear Aloysius.