Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty: Catholic Charities Driven Out of Adoption Ministry in Massachusetts

Update: Here is an excellent essay on this issue written by constitutional law scholar, Dean John Garvey.

Here is an excerpt from the Boston Globe's coverage of this issue:

In a stunning turn of events, Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley and leaders of Catholic Charities of Boston announced yesterday that the agency will end its adoption work, deciding to abandon its founding mission, rather than comply with state law requiring that gays be allowed to adopt children.

The Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, president of Catholic Charities of Boston, and Jeffrey Kaneb, chairman of the board, said that after much reflection and analysis, they could not reconcile church teaching that placement of children in gay homes is ''immoral" with Massachusetts law prohibiting discrimination against gays.

''This is a difficult and sad day for Catholic Charities," Hehir said. ''We have been doing adoptions for more than 100 years."

Catholic Charities of Boston began in 1903 as an adoption agency primarily serving Catholic children left by parents who died or abandoned them.

Officials in government, social services, and gay-rights groups expressed disappointment about the decision. Catholic Charities is widely respected among adoption providers and has handled more adoptions of foster children than any other private agency in the state.

Here is a related article from the Globe. The Church is opposed to facilitating adoptions by homosexual couples because it believes this harms the child. Here is the Church's position:

But a conflict between the Catholic bishops of Massachusetts and Beacon Hill has been evolving for several decades, as state policy makers have adopted an increasingly expansive view of gay rights, starting with a nondiscrimination measure in 1989 and culminating in 2004, when Massachusetts became the only state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage.

At the same time, the Vatican, often guided by the theologian who is now Pope Benedict XVI, became increasingly alarmed at the growing tolerance of homosexuality in the West, and in 2003 Benedict issued a doctrinal statement opposing same-sex unions and declaring that ''allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development."

I admire the Archdiocese for obeying God rather than Caesar. Even though many children will suffer as a result of losing this service, perhaps in the long run government will learn that religious liberty is at least as important as sexual autonomy. Religious organizations perform many important charitable services, and, if they are run out of states with draconian gay rights policies, those states (and the most vulnerable persons in those states) will suffer a great loss.

What do y'all think? Should gay rights laws be subject to a religious liberty exemption? Or are gay rights more important than religious liberty?