PRIMATES AREN’T HUMAN

That's a fine show of hypocrisy we had this week from His Grace the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, head of the Catholic church in England and Wales. Seeking to scupper the government’s legislation that is designed to render illegal discrimination against homosexuals in all social and business transactions, he wrote to every member of the Cabinet to suggest that, if adoption agencies are obliged by law to accept same-sex couples as adoptive parents, the Catholic church will cease to operate an adoption service. Happily, the Cabinet has shown some spirit in rebuking this attempt to interfere with its legislation.

This of course is the same prelate who, ten years ago, sat on his hands while a child-abusing priest in his Arundel and Brighton diocese – whom Murphy-O'Connor had systematically shielded from investigation by the law – was finally convicted of attacks on a dozen boys. The Cardinal argued at the time that paedophilia was “little understood”. More objective observers felt that it was perfectly well understood by its victims.

Down the centuries and all over the world, the Catholic church has provided a safe seat of power from which countless paedophiles have abused the children they affect to help, protect and guide. The present pontiff handled the issue for his predecessor and no doubt was responsible for John Paul II's complacent statement on abuse by priests, that “grave scandal is caused with the result that a dark shadow of suspicion is cast over all the other fine priests who perform their ministry with honesty and integrity and often with heroic self-sacrifice”, merely allowing a crumb of “concern for the victims”. Still today, priests fleeing from arrest on this charge are offered sanctuary in the Vatican, the abused children no succour at all.

If any evidence existed that children placed with adoptive parents of whatever sexual orientation were remotely in the kind of peril they routinely face at the hands of the Catholic church, the Cardinal might have a useful point to make. As it is, his masterful silence on the subject would become him rather better.

Seemingly gratuitously, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, weighed in to support the Catholic hierarchy’s stance. The reason for his unusually dogmatic stance is soon found. Next week, the Anglican bishops and archbishops gather in convocation. That the beanfeast takes place in Dar es Salaam will only reinforce the fact that the homophobic backlash in the Anglican church is being led by the African primates, gay sex having been tolerated even less among black communities through the ages than among whites, despite heterosexual sodomy being the preferred method of contraception among African if not West Indian men (this is why Aids is so epidemic on the African continent, unprotected anal penetration being the most perilous activity for those at risk of infection).

The African bishops are fully prepared to provoke a schism and to break up the Anglican episcopacy. They know that they have Williams on the ropes. He wants to be remembered neither as the Archbishop on whose watch the church broke up, nor as the prelate who went against his own inclusive instincts and excluded the gay community. Either stance will drive out thousands of adherents. It’s hard to see how the Church of England is anything other than done for, its only future in its native England as a harmless sect of home counties spinsters and bachelors making jam and singing ancient hymns round a domestic piano.

The matter of adoption by gay people has exposed many of the contradictions at the heart of the supernatural delusion. If the working philosophy of a movement such as a religion has discrimination at its heart – between, for instance, “good” and “evil”, “saved” and “damned”, “devout” and “profane”– it is impossible for that movement simultaneously to embrace everyone. Religion cannot be simultaneously inclusive and exclusive.

Any priest can confirm that Catholic adoption agencies will, without a moment’s hesitation, place a child with a heterosexual, atheist couple. In the most literal sense, then, its homophobia is more important to the Roman church than the very tenets on which it is founded. And yet that church has been the most systematic instrument of child abuse – mental, physical and sexual (hetero and homosexual) – in human history. It is truly a strange conundrum.

The more “liberal” traditions of the Church of England have led it to adopt the “hate the sin, love the sinner” approach, cautiously accepting gay people and even gay vicars on the dubious, barely-spoken understanding that they do not “practise” or rather, in practice, that they do not say that they practise. The Catholic church, redder in tooth and claw, formally denounces lesbians and gay men as “objectively disordered”. I can think of nothing more objectively disordered than entertaining a supernatural delusion. It’s not as if believers can’t help themselves: indulging this delusion is a conscious choice. Being gay is not. To dismiss being gay as disordered is like dismissing being deaf or tall or black or diabetic as disordered. No wonder that the naturally kindly Dr Williams finds himself in a high degree of discomfort. He has a great many disobliging allies alongside him in the battle to come.