You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

I’ve been a bit busy so just a quick one today: a piece of spectacular fuckwititude. It’s an article in the US’s oldest Catholic newspaper by Michael Pakaluk arguing why Catholic schools should not accept children of gay parents. Here’s a version I abridged, empasis mine:

The question arises of whether children in the custody of (one cannot say, “children of�) same-sex couples should be admitted to Catholic parochial schools[...]

There were three basic reasons [having a classmate with 2 dads didn't serve Pakaluk's son]. The first involves the inevitability of scandal. It was inevitable that either the teacher, or some parent, would deal with the two men in such a way as implicitly to teach my son, or other children in the class, that there is nothing wrong with same-sex relationships[...]

All of this is not even to touch upon the question of whether teachers and parents will distort how they talk about parents and family life, out of a misguided sense of “love.� [...] I saw this beginning to happen in my son’s school: not wishing to offend, teacher and parents would refer to the two men as the “parents� of that boy, even though only one was the father.

The second reason is that parents are rightly given access to a child’s classroom, and yet I could not trust the designs of the same-sex couple. A mother or father may volunteer to read to the class or chaperone for a class trip. If the homosexual parent does so, what guarantee would I have that he would not be an advocate for his lifestyle, implicitly if not explicitly? One would expect him to be: he says he takes “pride� in his life; the school, it seems, has implicitly endorsed his role; and so why wouldn’t he speak unabashedly about his lifestyle?

I saw this happening in my son’s school. The same-sex couple was interestingly activist in hosting pizza parties, sponsoring tables at fundraisers, and volunteering when parental help was needed. I found out only by accident that the pizza party–a “beginning of the school yearâ€? celebration, held as an afterschool event–was going to be held at the apartment of the same-sex couple. The school felt no obligation to inform the parents of this fact. [...]

The third reason is that it seemed a real danger that the boy being raised by the same-sex couple would bring to school something obscene or pornographic, or refer to such things in conversation, as they go along with the same-sex lifestyle, which–as not being related to procreation– is inherently eroticized and pornographic. He might expose other children to such things, as he might easily have encountered them in his household.[...]

Someone might wonder where the line should be drawn if children raised by same-sex couples are excluded from parochial schools. What about children raised by divorced, contracepting, or cohabiting couples?

Well–what would be the problem in requiring that if parents wish to enroll their children in a Catholic school, they must agree to abide by basic principles of morality?

I won’t bother retorting especially since Dan Savage has posted a great mockery of it already. Also there was a big backlash against Pakaluk’s column and he has now retracted his 3rd argument (about pornography), admitting it was wrong but that the others should stay.

There is so much bigoted nonsense out there that I’ve become desensitised. I can read an article like Pakaluk’s without blinking of flinching (maybe this desensitisation is bad for me in the long-run). But there was one thing that absolutely floored me: the author bio at the end of the article. Emphasis mine…

Michael Pakaluk is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, VA, where he teaches courses on ethics and the philosophy of marriage and the family. He formerly taught at Clark University, in Worcester, and has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University.

I wish there was still a blink tag I could use to make the red bit blink as well. Kill me now.