By Terry Vanderheyden
EDINBURGH, May 18, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – An overwhelming majority of those involved in a consultation on adoption by same-sex couples in Scotland are opposed to the move – 89% according to Scotland’s Catholic prelate, Cardinal Keith O’Brien. Despite the opposition, lawmakers there plan to go ahead with the measure anyway.
That decision has prompted the Cardinal to threaten to opt out of the consultation process. “What is the point of all this consultation process continuing if it is going to be ignored?” he said in an interview with Vatican Radio.
“We know that children should be brought up in a stable society with one man and one woman,” Cardinal O’Brien emphasized. “When two gay people are living together, it is in no way like a marriage at all; it is a distorted experiment – a proving of gay unions in the first place; it’s further distorted by allowing a gay couple to adopt a child.”
“I cannot see how children can not be affected by being brought up in such a union,” O’Brien added. “No matter how good the two males or two females are at housekeeping or whatever else, the children growing up are bound to know that daddy is going to bed with another man or mommy is going to bed with another woman – it’s just not normal” compared to “what other children will be observing in their own homes. Consequently, I have described it as a distorted social experiment. In that redefining what we have always understood as marriage down through the centuries – this is a distortion.”