Grace and Caffeine

Peter would surely not have denied baptism to any one who asked for it. However, I’m quite confident he would have denied baptism to any one who said, “I would like to be baptized. By this I mean I would like to get a spray tan and become an expert at sodoku.” Why? Because the issue here isn’t whether or not to give the man baptism, the issue is that what the man wants isn’t baptism at all.

In the same way, the reason the Church doesn’t grant gay marriages is not because gays are somehow worse sinners than others and therefore not eligible. The reason is simply that they don’t want marriage at all, for marriage is a covenant between man and woman. This is made very starkly and stunningly clear, not in the Old Testament — which you seem remarkably able to ignore — but in the New:

“But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife…” (Mark 10:6).

Because God create male and female, a man seeks union with a wife. So to ask for a gay marriage — at least to a man living during the time of Peter — would have been like asking for a spray-tan baptism.

— Marc Barnes, BadCatholic

So much grace and so much gratitude!