Natural Law and Homosexuality

I was blogging on Facebook on gay marriage with a classmate from college today, who claimed that Catholic support for gay marriage comes from bad Cathechesis. This is my response.

In the 40s and 50s, everyone thought homosexuals were mentally ill. Turns out that this was wrong. After Vatican II, many in the church were moving quickly toward excepting gays and lesbians as being born that way until Cardinal Ratzinger called them disordered, likely at the behest of John Paul II.

Cathechesis is a bit hard when the Church can't seem to make up its mind. If you will look at your ethics book from Loras - Fagothy's Right and Reason - a good natural law tome - not something you would find in Paul Allen's class - you will note that the natural law argument on whether homosexual relations being licit comes down to whether you are a theist or not.

Without reference to authority (and the scriptural authority is week, so we are talking about curial fiat here), there are two possible natural law views on the subject. One is that homosexuals can licitly have monogamous sex in response to how they are created (even if there was a hormonal problem - as is suspected - such problems if they occur with regularity can be as attributable to God as the lack of melanin in white people) and the other is that sex is linked to procreation - although such a view is, at its heart, offensive to post-menopausal women - who are free to marry. Homosexuality is only disordered if you create your view of order from metaphore rather than how life actually occurs for people. We have had quite enough metaphor in defining Catholic sexuality. It is not helpful.