CARDINAL KEITH O’Brien has severely criticised Government proposals to allow homosexual couples to adopt children, calling them “gravely immoral”.
The Cardinal, Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, said that “adopted children must not become guinea pigs in some distorted social experiment aimed at redefining marriage, subverting the family and threatening the good of society”.
Writing in the Sunday Times newspaper on September 4 he added: “Denying them the benefits of a mother and a father in a committed marriage will cause great harm to a weak and vulnerable minority we should strive to protect.” He made his intervention as the proposals by the Scottish Executive, the assembly that governs much of Scotland’s domestic affairs, near the end of their public consultation phase.
People have until October 31 to comment on the plans to allow gays and heterosexual cohabitees to adopt, providing such couples could demonstrate they were in stable and enduring relationships. In his article Cardinal O’Brien said there was no doubt that the adoption system was failing the 6,500 children in the care of the country’s local authorities.
The Cardinal asked married Catholic couples to “consider sharing the love and stability which I hope fills your homes with a child who has little or no experience of either”.
He then cited studies from Britain, Sweden, Norway and Spain which showed that heterosexual marriage was significantly more stable than cohabiting or same-sex relationships. One of the studies, said the Cardinal, also recorded a significant increase in low self-esteem, stress, confusion over sexual identity, increased mental illness, drug use, promiscuity, sexually transmitted infections and homosexual behaviour among children raised by same-sex couples.
“We ignore a wealth of global evidence and place innumerable children in peril if we forget certain immutable truths; children need a male and a female role model in a permanent relationship,” he wrote.