Another Catholic adoption agency puts bigotry before kids

Catholic Charities for Rockford, Illinois logo

It’s already been established that Catholic groups, even those devoted to the well-being of children, will generally (if not always) choose their bigoted faith over the kids in their care. Here’s just another case: Catholic Charities in Rockford, Illinois has announced that they are suspending all services in order to avoid complying with the new state civil unions law, essentially telling hundreds of kids and employees to go fuck themselves [my emphasis]:

Catholic Charities of Rockford announced Thursday that the agency will halt its state-funded foster care and adoption services Wednesday — the day civil unions take effect in Illinois.

The decision is the first of what could become a domino effect of Catholic Charities leaving the foster care and adoption business to avoid liability if state law requires them to place children with parents in civil unions — either gay or straight.

In Rockford, the decision could displace about 350 foster children served by Catholic Charities and put 58 employees out of work.

[…]

"While we understand leaving this work will be very painful for our client families, employees, volunteers, donors and prayerful supporters, we can no longer contract with the state of Illinois whose laws would force us to participate in activity offensive to the moral teachings of the church — teachings which compel us to do this work in the first place," said Frank Vonch, director of social services for the Diocese of Rockford, which includes Kane and McHenry counties.

Isn’t that just a beautiful piece of twisted reasoning right there? It’s the Church’s teachings of love and compassion that “compel” them to take care of needy children … unless that means placing them in the loving care of same-sex households, in which case, fuck that “compassion” shit. What’s the point of taking care of kids if that means not acting like bigoted zealots?

Religion and compassion are fundamentally dichotomous. If you care about something, especially about helping those in need, it’s because you have a natural, human sense of empathy. Only a belief in fundamentally prejudiced and uncompassionate rules, such as the ones imposed by antiquated and absurd theological teachings, can make people act all high and preachy when it comes to moral values, and then decide to arbitrarily drop all pretense of compassion for those in their charge the moment their irrational beliefs are challenged. If being forced to treat all people equally makes you want to abandon your supposedly compassionate endeavor, either you have some seriously screwed up priorities, or you were only pretending to care in the first place.

(via Joe. My. God.)