Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.
(source: Catechism of the Catholic Church – The sixth commandment)
I’ve said this in other ways at other times, but it bears saying again: To help people, including making laws that govern society justly and mitigate the harms we do to each other, it is always necessary to avoid bigotry–self-serving, lawless unreason that treats others merely as objects of contempt or threats. This is true regardless of the “others” involved.
And it is equally necessary to deal with people according to truth, to the conformity of our understanding and language to reality, to the proportioning of our projects and ambitions to what is actually possible. When we do not do so, we do harm.
This is, for example, a reason not to hate and fear “Muslims” indiscriminately. It is vital to discriminate between people who may, for reasons including devotion to false religion, do violent harm to others, and those who may be harmless (or in harm’s way) for reasons that may include their religion, whether we deem it true or false. And therefore it is necessary that we never let our abstractions occlude simply human features of each situation, like indications of violent tendencies or affiliations, evidence of abuse, or other factors.
Each person deserves to be treated as someone with human dignity, that is, someone created in imago dei so as to be capable of entering into friendship with God: someone with a “rational soul,” someone whose consequential choices, insofar as they express right relationship to God and other people, really do make each human creature the “kind of person” he or she becomes (a unique kind always analogous in kind to God and other people).
And that treatment most definitely does involve compassion for the suffering each person undergoes, both because of conditions no one can choose–like a skin color subject to cultural bigotry, or a nationality at war with another, or poverty in a nation that treats affluent consumerism as a social norm, or ignorance on account of miseducation–and because of choices whose consequences far outweigh what any human can calculate in advance.
People need to be treated with care, and helped to become open to the grace that will “heal and perfect nature” in each of us and in the whole world.
But precisely because none of us can fully calculate in advance the cost of the most consequential decisions we make, the ones that form our future in ways that may have lifelong or, barring that most merciful intervention of God that we pray for daily, eternal consequences, it is absolutely necessary that we treat each other according to each one’s human dignity by recognizing the real gravity of our choices. It is necessary that we treat each other as subjects as well as objects of concern, and therefore that we require others to heed what is known about the consequences of each person’s actions.
When a man allows his objectifying gaze to linger on a woman, or another man, in a way that arouses a desire he does not wish to reason against–a condition that most of us have fallen prey to at one time or another–then such a person needs to be warned against his next action, both on account of the evil inherent in the previous one (taking a person as an object of consumption) and on account of the grave consequences of the next one.
And when those consequences are not apparent within that person’s life, it will be necessary to appeal to history, to cultural knowledge, even to direct revelation (which abounds) in order to make that clear.
For example, with regard to efforts to enforce recognition of fake marriages (attempted marriages among persons incapable of marriage) on all people, the information we need to show compassion without harming others has already been given to us, if we have ears to hear:
Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, tradition has always declared that “homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.” They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.
The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God’s will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord’s Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.
Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.
Sexuality is ordered to the conjugal love of man and woman. In marriage the physical intimacy of the spouses becomes a sign and pledge of spiritual communion. Marriage bonds between baptized persons are sanctified by the sacrament.
“Sexuality, by means of which man and woman give themselves to one another through the acts which are proper and exclusive to spouses, is not something simply biological, but concerns the innermost being of the human person as such. It is realized in a truly human way only if it is an integral part of the love by which a man and woman commit themselves totally to one another until death.”
(source: Catechism of the Catholic Church)
as well as
Faced with the fact of homosexual unions, civil authorities adopt different positions. At times they simply tolerate the phenomenon; at other times they advocate legal recognition of such unions, under the pretext of avoiding, with regard to certain rights, discrimination against persons who live with someone of the same sex. In other cases, they favour giving homosexual unions legal equivalence to marriage properly so-called, along with the legal possibility of adopting children.
Where the government’s policy is de facto tolerance and there is no explicit legal recognition of homosexual unions, it is necessary to distinguish carefully the various aspects of the problem. Moral conscience requires that, in every occasion, Christians give witness to the whole moral truth, which is contradicted both by approval of homosexual acts and unjust discrimination against homosexual persons. Therefore, discreet and prudent actions can be effective; these might involve: unmasking the way in which such tolerance might be exploited or used in the service of ideology; stating clearly the immoral nature of these unions; reminding the government of the need to contain the phenomenon within certain limits so as to safeguard public morality and, above all, to avoid exposing young people to erroneous ideas about sexuality and marriage that would deprive them of their necessary defences and contribute to the spread of the phenomenon. Those who would move from tolerance to the legitimization of specific rights for cohabiting homosexual persons need to be reminded that the approval or legalization of evil is something far different from the toleration of evil.
In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.
(source: Considerations Regarding Proposals…)
It is not possible to bypass this responsibility. It is not possible to keep this responsibility from taking legal form, indefinitely.
And it is not permissible to allow the lawless language of antirealist legislation to replace our knowledge of the law. It is harmful to those we seek to help, to ourselves and our neighbors; and it exposes us all to the lawless violence of the regime unhinged from reason. Unhinged from reality.
Rather than this, we must necessarily choose resistance.
We must know what our victory looks like.