Faster than you can say, "CA Supreme Court overturns ban on gay marriage," his Extreme Slippery Slopeheadedness, Pope Benedict, had an announcement to make. Barely taking the time to translate it from the Latin, in that oddly high voice, the pope restated the Church's position that only unions between a man and a woman are moral.
In his text, the pope did not mention the CA ruling. He just happened to be addressing family groups in Europe. What are the chances? The CA ruling and the papal announcement -- it was a news cycle secular miracle!
In another holy coinky-dink, the same day the Pope condemned gay marriage, another story broke. The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, in an interview with the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, titled "The extraterrestrial is my brother", announced that faith in God did not contradict faith in alien life. As usual, no word on extraterrestrial sisters.
Funes said that one of the themes near and dear to the The Widow Ratzinger's papacy is the relationship between faith and reason. The Big Bang Theory is the most reasonable theory of the creation of the universe and yet it does not contradict God -- he probably was the guy who pushed down the handle on the explosive box.
Funes is director of the Vatican Observatory which in addition to top-notch research, also has a meteorite collection that is one of the best in the world. Hence that old line, "Hey young fella, want to come up and see my meteorite collection?"
The Church is still smarting from their shoddy treatment of Galileo four hundred years ago. It was no picnic for Galileo either. As an independent astronomer, Galileo had brazenly declared that the sun, not the earth, not even the Vatican, is the center of the universe. Funes said that mistakes were made.
The Catholic Church treats homosexuals as an alien life form, a bivalve of being and doing. You can be gay but you just can't do anything about it. Even though we are alien, we can't catch a break. Despite the recent announcement, queers have not been upgraded to the Church's gay brother or sister status.
The Pope and his faithful boy pals would reason that if Alf were gay, the church would love him, but not if he married Mork. That would be immoral. Alf could marry Mindy. That would be cross-species and a little gross, but definitely still moral.
The Pope still has work to do in his Faith and Science Project. If they want to get faith and science back together, it stands to reason that they could start by fusing gay being and doing back together.