“According to Catholic thought” is where the argument falls over. You have to back this up with something. According to my thought, marriage should only be between white people. I’m going to set up adoption agencies that only give children to white people. Is that reasonable? The onus is on the Catholic church to provide reasonable justifications for their exclusions of gay couples that doesn’t simply amount to ‘we just want to’ (which to everybody else sounds a lot like ‘we don’t like gay people’). It is entirely unreasonable to expect society to adapt its rules on the basis of your unjustified beliefs. Discrimination against somebody on the basis of their sexuality is simply wrong, and you can’t get around it by invoking deities, or saying ‘go somewhere else if you don’t like it’. If people can’t provide logical reasons for their behaviour, *especially* when it’s something as important as finding good homes for children, they have no business being involved in that area in the first place, no matter how genuine their beliefs might be.

That’s not quite true. The Catholic argument stems from Aristotle’s Natural Law, which basically states that everything has a purpose and that it is wrong to contravene that purpose. To phrase it more positively, personal fulfilment can only be reached if you live in accordance with your purpose – or vocation, as Catholics call it.

In Catholic eyes, marriage is a vocation – a calling. It’s not a career choice and having children is not a ‘right’. It’s a gift, and children certainly can’t be covered by a ‘provision of goods and services’ act. According to Catholic thought, marriage is sanctified by the mutual complementarity of man and woman, including the privilege of sharing in God’s work of procreation. It can’t be said that marriage is a natural part of a gay person’s fulfilment. This doesn’t make gay Catholics inferior or mean that they can’t be personally fulfilled – only a culture where lonely hearts columns, blind date services, and even professional matchmaking agencies abound could see it in that way.

If you enrol your child in a religious Catholic school, presumably you expect to play by Catholic rules to some extent. You know that the students will inevitably be holding May processions in honour of Mary and attending a weekly Mass. If you don’t want that, don’t send your chidren to a Catholic school. And if you don’t agree with the Church this issue, don’t go to one of the country’s twelve Catholic adoption agencies. Go to one of the one hundred and seventy-six other organisations that are in operation.

Regarding the issue of single parents, Catholic agencies hardly ever place children with lone carers. They do it only in very exceptional circumstances – usually if a child has been so severely sexually abused that he or she is unable to live in the same house as someone of the same gender as the abuser. When a child does go to a single parent, the agencies make sure that there is someone of the opposite sex who will be able to act as a positive role model. And their overall strategies seem to be working – only four per cent of children placed by Catholic agencies have to be rehomed, as opposed to ten per cent of children placed by local authorities. It is also a universally acknowledged fact that those twelve Catholic agencies have found good homes for a disproportionate number of disturbed or behaviourally challenged children. The loss of these agencies is going to hit hard.

IANAL, but I’m pretty sure that a lawyer’s job is to argue the law, right? And it’s perfectly reasonable to refuse to represent somebody who you think is guilty, right? So if the BNP client from the BNP had done nothing wrong, a civil liberties lawyer’s job is to represent him, surely? Same with abortion. If you can’t provide a good reason for your ‘personal convictions’, I don’t see why you should be allowed to skip out on your duties. If you can’t do the job, don’t do the job.

IE Is a catholic lawyer obliged accept a case for argue for abortion even though he has personal convinctions against it or for a civil liverties lawyer to represent a client from the BNP simply in name of anti-discrimination.

In all of these cases there is a lot of choice in the system

First of all, isn’t a single parent always going to find it harder to raise a child than a couple, regardless of gender or sexuality? Secondly, what happens if that parent meets someone? Do they have to give the child back if they start going out with someone?

I’m sure a passing Jesuit would be able to find the right sophistry to explain it.