Punishing the Child

As the Catholic Church finally realizes that protecting child molesters while threatening their victims into silence might not have been such a great idea, and that dismissing the resulting outrage as "petty gossip" is an even worse idea, they clearly still have a ways to go.

St. Paul Elementary School, a private Catholic K-8 school in Hingham, Massachusetts, is currently in the news because they first accepted and then rejected a boy to enter the school in the third grade. Why? It's not because he has disciplinary problems or because his academics aren't up to snuff. It's because his parents are both women, and the Church says homosexuality is a sin.

Yes, the Church is actually pushing away an eight-year-old boy because it doesn't like his moms. And I thought the whole notion of punishing children for the supposed sins of their parents went out sometime in the 19th century.

The school claims they rejected the boy because "teachers wouldn't be prepared to answer questions her son might have because the school's teachings about marriage conflict with what he sees in his family."

Well, that's the teachers' problem, isn't it? I mean, they're supposed to be able to answer kids' questions. That's sort of the whole purpose of going to school. If they can't or won't answer a student's questions, they should pick another profession.

Now, to be fair, St. Paul is a private school and as such can set whatever admission criteria it likes. But they need to be consistent. If they're going to reject children of gay parents, they'd better be ready to kick out any kids whose parents are divorced, use birth control, are unmarried, eat meat on Fridays, conceived their children via fertility treatments, or commit any other violation of Church canon. Of course, that would make their enrollment plummet from the current 250 to - oh, about six or seven.

But we all know that won't happen. The Church will save its punishments for the children of gay parents. After all, it's so much easier to go after kids with a particular kind of "wrong" parents than to reconsider the doctrine which turns those parents - and their children - into sinners in the first place.