Rev. J. Donald Monan, SJ recently took time out from his busy schedule of being chancellor at Boston College to weigh in on the debate over same-sex marriages. Upholding the company argument, Monan feels that the Supreme Judicial Court was misguided when it concluded that measures excluding same-sex marriages were unconstitutional. People are funny; they never cease to amaze me. For some reason, in all of man's history, in all of America's history, people have tried over and over again to keep certain things theirs and theirs alone. The vote only belongs to men, they argued, women should stay in the private sphere. Civil rights only belong to white people, they continued, blacks simply don't deserve them. We love excluding people, don't we ... makes us feel good about ourselves. Only I get to vote, only I get to drink from this water fountain, only I get to join in marriage with the one I love ... not you, you're a woman, too emotional to vote, you're black, too inferior to deserve rights, you're gay, marriage is for heterosexuals only.
Why? Because of some arcane Biblical law that judged "Sodomites" to be less than people? That's a very enlightened though. Homosexuals can't marry, according to those that support Monan and his cohorts, because marriage is a sacred institution set forth by God to include two people able to procreate. Okay, marriage is sacred, just go ask Britney Spears. Perhaps nothing best expresses Monan's misguided, sad opinion than the title to his article in the Boston Globe, "'Equal' does not mean 'same.'" When I first read the title, after logging on to BCInfo, I almost couldn't believe it. Here's a man, the Chancellor of BC, an institution of higher learning, using the same argument used during the segregation days of the South. Schools, bathrooms, park benches, buses - exclude blacks from any, as long as they have a "separate but equal" alternative. Monan's exact words were, "the difference between same- and opposite-sex relationships merits them significantly different roles in human life without either being relegated to a second-class example of the other." Flash back 50 years, and I can hear a Father Monan arguing that relegating blacks to the back of the bus, keeping them in their own schools, is because blacks and whites are "significantly different" and keeping them separated does not mean that blacks are "relegated to a second-class example of the other." We see how that turned out. Excluding people and keeping the faade of equality is a farce. We exclude those from things in order to feel superior, feel better than those who aren't allowed to participate.
Spring Break
sandyminsk
sandyminsk
posted 2/19/04 @ 10:42 AM EST
Perhaps Fr. Monan should be reminded that until the church has come clean and made full restitution for more than 50 years of child abuse and the brazen cover-ups that followed, the Church is really in no position to preach on the issue of homosexuality or marriage. (Continued…)