As traditional family supporters feared, the English Catholic Church's longstanding policy of tacit support for the homosexual movement backfired against efforts to stop the Sexual Orientation Regulations legislation in the House of Lords on Wednesday.In late January, while the Catholic Church in Britain was making headlines objecting to the Sexual Orientation Regulations on behalf of Catholic adoption agencies, Archbishop Vincent Gerard Nichols of Birmingham let it slip in an interview with the BBC that British Catholic agencies had been adopting children to homosexual singles for years.
The only objection, he said, was to placing children with gay couples. Catholic adoption agencies also place children with unmarried but cohabiting heterosexual couples, despite clear and even more accepted precepts against such arrangements.
Cormac Cardinal Murphy O'Connor, head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, said that he had no objections to allowing Catholic adoption agencies to refer homosexual applicants to agencies that would place children with homosexual couples.
The Cardinal insisted that the primary interest for the Catholic agencies was the "well-being of the child, whose needs must always be put first."
Little more was heard in the press until the debate in the House of Lords Wednesday when two of the Peers ripped the Catholic Church for hypocrisy.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland asked, "If a Catholic organisation says, 'Our principles do not allow us to place a child with a homosexual couple, but we are prepared to send it somewhere else for someone else to do it', where is the underlying principle?"
"Why will that organisation not do it but allow someone else to if it believes that that child will not have an appropriate home?"
Lord Waheed Alli, Britain's first openly gay peer, said, "He [Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor] remarked that the Catholic adoption agencies were prepared to allow adoption to single gay men and lesbians but not prepared to adopt to gay couples."
He said, "That cannot be a principled position; it is irrational, ill thought-through and highly prejudicial."
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