Gay People CAN be in LOVE.

Warning: This video contains the F-Bomb. If you are offended by that word, please do not watch this video!

Dear Pope Paul VI,

Here’s what you had to say about “conjugal love”. Conjugal love technically being defined as:

Conjugal Love (also known as companionate love) =

Belonging to marriage; suitable or appropriate to the marriage state or to married persons; matrimonial; connubial.

8. Conjugal love reveals its true nature and nobility when it is considered in its supreme origin, God, who is love [6], "the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named" [7].

Marriage is not, then, the effect of chance or the product of evolution of unconscious natural forces; it is the wise institution of the Creator to realize in mankind His design of love. By means of the reciprocal personal gift of self, proper and exclusive to them, husband and wife tend towards the communication of their beings in view of mutual personal perfection, to collaborate with God in the generation and education of new lives.

For baptized persons, moreover, marriage invests the dignity of a sacramental sign of grace, inasmuch as it represents the union of Christ and of the Church.

Let’s break this down.

Basically, what Pauly is saying here is that commitment to another person is only possible if those people believe in God, because he is the root of all families.

This means that marriage is not serendipity-based (sorry to those hopeless romantics out there), but rather we are designed to love a specific person by means of complete commitment and the ability to bear children.

Finally, marriage is a symbol of dignity if one is married under the union of God and through a religious affiliation.

Here’s how I feel about all of this.

I support gay marriage; I support transgender, gay, lesbian, adoption, artificial insemination, and every other form of modern family structure. Let’s just get that out there. And here is why Mr. Paul VI has his opinions and priorities confused:

1. Politics. Paul states that marriage is a sign of dignity when represented within the Church between one man and one woman. Last time I checked, politically marriage was a legal representation and was not deemed official until filed under a legal document. Politically, church and state are not to combine. Politically, a transgendered person can mean a female soul within a male anatomical shell. A person who was born with both sets of sexual anatomy. A person who is is undergoing a sex change to complete the body to match the soul. These are the politics often overlooked when judging who can legally be “one man” and “one woman”. This proves why church, state, and operating room remain separate spheres and should remain separate; neither has the power, knowledge, or background to lay claims on the other.Therefore, there is zero legal reason why a woman and a man are the combination deemed acceptable in marriage. Here lies contradiction numero uno.

2. Social. Socially, gay marriage gets this reputation of going against “natural forces.” This image brings me back to our Avatar section; one dragon for each Na’vi. This is the image I get when I hear that there is “one person made for each human.” I find it interesting that the Pope claims that God creates a partner to bond with us and form perfection, but people are formed gay within the womb.The argument of socialization often turns to “how men and women are ‘turned gay’.” However, according to an article in New York Times, “Our own research has shown that male sexual orientation is substantially genetic. Over the last two years, we have studied the rates of homosexuality in identical and non-identical twin brothers of gay men, as well as adoptive brothers of gay men. Fifty-two percent of the identical twin brothers were gay, as against 22 percent of non-identical twins and 11 percent of the adoptive, genetically unrelated brothers.”* This research was discovered in the 1990’s, and undoubtedly been more biologically grounded since then. This proves that biologically, people are born gay; therefore, why would God make homosexuality a natural force and not approve of the unconscious natural force it follow in social spheres?

3. Consequences of...dundundun...children being raised by gay parents. Finally, sacrament of holy commitment and bearing of children. Please. The Catholic Church does not identify gay marriage because the couple cannot physically create life. They can support it though. There are tons of options for obtaining a child, and shouldn't we be focusing more on how it is raised than which vagina it came out of? In a modern society like the one we exist in, child bearing cannot be a factor of love or success; it is a matter of environment and economics. If a child is raised in a loving, socioeconomically comfortable environment, they are more likely to succeed. There is nothing within this idea that says that if children grow up in a household containing one woman and one man, they are more likely to succeed. There are hundreds of thousands of children put up for adoption each year by parents who could not handle or did not even want the gift they were given. Is this considered more holy? Children are abused by straight parents, and often more than not are forced to deal with a messy form of divorce; this brings me to divorce in straight couples. Let’s take a look at how "centuries shows, not only that fidelity (and til death do you part) is according to the nature of marriage, but also that it is a source of profound and lasting happiness" (Paragraph 9):

1. Kim Kardashian.

2. Tiger Woods.

3. Billy Bob Thornton (married and divorced FIVE times!).

4. Elizabeth Taylor.

Concluding, Paul, let’s take a few moments to look at a quote found in Beyond the Realm of Reason by Robin L. Brown : “’There is virtually no area of human activity or environmental concern that they have not arrogated as their own to plan, supervise, regulate and control.’” Control is inevitable, war is inevitable, and non-religious will always fight religious. But to go along with this, I say that while war and control will happen, so will human’s nature. Gay people have been surviving on this earth since the bible itself was penned. They have begun to fight against the environment they have been placed in, and hope to someday assimilate into the same category as “people.” While you define conjugal love as love between a man and woman, I urge you to look outside your holy realm and into the reality of the lives of others. After all, someday gay people could suppress the rights of wealthy white Catholics…then what?

Sincerely,

Emily Thoreson

*http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/scotts/bulgarians/nature-nurture/bailey-pillard.html