Britain's Gay Adoption Debate

Yesterday in Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair made final a decision requiring adoption agencies to give equal consideration to gay couples in placement of children. Catholic groups had sought an exception that would allow them to "opt out" of this provision of England's new Equality Law, set to take effect next year.

In the debate over whether Christian groups should get an exemption from the law, religious commentators are turning a familiar theme on its head: requiring tolerance from the devout, they argue, amounts to discrimination.

Piers Paul Reed, for instance, a popular English author and a prominent Catholic, has called it ironic that homosexuals, so often the victims of discrimination for what they feel in their hearts, would seek to force Christians to violate the deepest convictions of their souls.

The argument appears disingenuous to many. For all the passion religious conservatives put into opposing the rights of gays and lesbians in the name of scripture, surprisingly little is devoted to themes and practices that the Bible addresses with much greater frequency and clarity, such as the stricture against divorce, the duty to help the poor or the obligation to be good stewards of the Earth. Indeed, the selective use of religious doctrine to enforce discrimination is on full view in the current debate over gay adoption, best exhibited by the willingness of Catholic agencies to place children with divorced or even single people (many presumably having sex out of wedlock) while drawing the line at gays.

But the argument that gays and lesbians should sympathize with the situation of devout Christians as victims of discrimination signals a remarkable --if perhaps unwitting-- evolution in religious thought about homosexuality. The ironic, and quite promising, outcome is that social conservatives are now expressing parity between the feelings of Christians and the feelings of gays and lesbians.

What might come of this newfound sympathy? Religious faith and practice have properly enjoyed special status in Western culture as a protected sphere. When John Locke and Thomas Jefferson articulated their influential theories of political liberty during the Enlightenment, freedom of conscience was fundamental‹the only way to give any real meaning to the period's new understanding of the relationship between the state and the individual. In a free society, any effort to dictate the shape of the human heart is considered not only inhumane, but impossible --as meaningless as squaring a circle. What people believe or feel inside is regarded as a matter of individual conscience, and cannot be mandated by a tribe, a King or a state.

In this light, it is not hard to grasp the parallels between sexual orientation and religious faith that embattled Christians are now expressing. Religious individuals often speak of feeling a surge of emotion from deep within them, of hearing a calling from something outside of themselves, and of struggling to follow the dictates of their conscience in secular surroundings. Likewise, gays and lesbians frequently describe the undeniable force of their emotional attractions, the need to respect a commanding feeling that seems to come from something greater than individual whim, and the challenge of honoring their convictions despite social stigma.

The question, of course, is how civil society should proceed, given the often conflicting views of different groups. Locke and Jefferson answered this question by inventing liberalism, the political philosophy that still governs the world's most stable and successful nations. To tie people together in a world of myriad faiths, cultures and beliefs, they taught, the freedoms of the heart must be respected; but they must never be used to condone harmful behavior. Just because someone believes in baby-killing doesn't mean he should be allowed to kill babies. And this is precisely why the demand of the Catholic Church to be exempt from the Equality Act is dangerous: a civil society simply can't stand if each group is allowed to decide which laws to follow, even if based on longstanding cultural or religious traditions. This is a recipe at best for favoritism, at worst for anarchy.

Instead, laws must be based on a civic debate about their merits, about whether a given policy is good for society or bad. And while many who oppose gay rights insist that allowing gays to be parents is bad for children, the reality is that not a single reputable study shows any harm whatsoever to children living in same-sex households. One of the most respected studies that assessed the effects of gay parentage found that it "has no measurable effect on the quality of parent-child relationships or on children's mental health or social adjustment." This was also the conclusion reached by the American Psychological Association after an extensive review of the literature on gay families. Ditto the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

If Catholic opponents of gay parenting truly seek the understanding of the rest of society, it won't come from charging that it's discrimination for them to be required not to discriminate. As one member of British Parliament has put it, "if you bring in a law which says all people will be treated equally, then all people will be treated equally." Anything less is a threat to the common values that tie all of us, not just some of us, together.