Quodlibet
Really Bad Guys
What one rarely sees in reports of teachers in Catholic schools who publicly flaunt their homosexuality and expect to retain their positions, thus de-Catholicizing the schools—or, upon losing their jobs because someone had the courage to fire them, bring lawsuits based on the implication that they hold the high moral ground—is the charge that, knowing full well the Church’s teaching on homosexuality, they claim a right to break an agreement they made with the schools to live and teach in accordance with Catholic doctrine. This is like a soldier claiming a moral right to sabotage his own army. These people need to be loudly accused of gross immorality quite apart from homosexuality: they are liars and covenant-breakers, and (to address a concern of our mad culture) people who would “force their opinions on others.” I am thinking specifically here of recent cases involving Catholic high schools, but the comment would apply to any Christian institution. I choose the Catholics as my example because their Church’s official teaching on homosexuality is so clearly and unequivocally expressed in the Catechism and elsewhere that any claim by a person functioning at the level of a teacher in a Catholic school that the standards of life to which he was being held were ambiguous and permeable would be absurd.
S. M. Hutchens is a Touchstone senior editor.
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31.6—November/December 2018
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