Posted on 09/04/2011 6:59:14 AM PDT by Publius804
The Catholic church has no “recognized legal right” to a contract with the state, a judge said in ruling that Illinois officials can legally cancel contracts with Catholic Charities over the church agency’s refusal to place adoptive children with same-sex couples.
A lawyer for the church, however, said he will seek a stay of the ruling, arguing that Circuit Judge John Schmidt, in his Aug. 18 ruling, did not address the heart of the church’s argument that Catholic Charities comes under exercise of religion protections.
The state moved to cancel the contracts after an Illinois law permitting civil unions went into effect in June. Catholic Charities, following church teaching that homosexual unions are sinful, refuses to place children with same-sex couples. The agency currently provides 20 percent of the adoptions and foster care services statewide and receives a reported $30 million a year from the state for providing the services.
Attorney Peter Breen, executive director and legal counsel for the Thomas More Society, which is representing the dioceses of Joliet, Peoria and Springfield in the dispute, said the judge’s short order, delivered the day following a hearing on the issue, “did not meet the merits of our claim that Catholic Charities is protected under the law” regarding exercise of religion.
He said within the next two weeks lawyers for the church would seek a stay of the judge’s ruling until all appeals have been made. A stay would prevent children from being placed under state auspices. Breen said the state has told the church it would not start removing children from the church’s auspices immediately, but that “we don’t have a lot of time.”
(Excerpt) Read more at ncronline.org ...
It's not too late actually.
I cannot be convinced it is ever in the “best interest” to have a child placed in the home of a “gay” couple.
I think the church is losing the argument, because, in effect, the judge is right, that the State has no obligation to provide *money* to the church.
Bottom line, in *that* State, the church is effectively out of the adoption business. No matter what arguments the church makes, it can be, and will be, overruled by the State. They will win the battle.
However, there is an alternative. Illinois borders six other States, all of which are far friendlier to the Catholic church. This means that the church can hit Illinois with a two-pronged counterattack.
1) Set up adoption centers just across the border in other States, so that a woman or parents in Illinois who want to put their child up for adoption, and parents who want to adopt can do so easily. Then they can all return to Illinois with their adoptions complete and legal.
These other States should have no objection, because the cost to them is minimal. Adoptive parents can immediately request State aid to help them raise their child, if they wish to do so, and Illinois would be obliged to pay.
2) Sponsor a major advertising campaign in Illinois for both mother or parents who want to put their child up for adoption, and for potential adoptive parents. And this can be somewhat harsh, because its emphasis is that the State is putting children with “anyone who is willing to take them”, but the church will only put them with “a good mother and father”. Show respectable, well to do couples, white, black and Hispanic, holding their newly adopted children and smiling, lovingly.
(Personally, I would also put up “editorial pamphlets”, not directly affiliated with the church, showing the State of Illinois giving children to seedy looking men, selling the children, for example, “by the pound”, like meat, in a back alley. “Load ‘em in the back of my ‘Free Candy’ van!”)
The juxtaposition is a little murky now, because all the clerical offenders of 1960's-'80's Abuse Era were not homosexuals (though most were), and all of the would-be gay child adopters are not abusers (all we can say for sure is that these particular couples do not recognize the sanctity of natural sex and natural marriage.)
Wait a bit, and we will see the Catholic Church criticized, penalized, and finally persecuted for "failing to recognize and affirm" "sex-positive" practices between children and the gay adults they're forced to live with.
Others throughout Northern Illinois receive treatment from the Mayo Clinic OVER THE BORDER in other states.
If you have to have a consultation prior to surgery that will be done in Indiana,not Illinois!
There's no reason at all the RCC cannot handle all it's adoption activities in Indiana ~ but they're likely not to get the same degree of state funding they do in Illinois ~ but they'll let 'em stay Catholic.
They even coddle the Amish in Indiana, and if you do that they will come ~ by the thousands. So be careful on those straight as an arrow highways over there ~ you might hit a buggy.
An important twist to this is that Illinois is one of the ICAMA agreement States, which is most of them. It is an agreement to normalize payments for parents with adoptive children who move from one ICAMA State to another.
So if a mother in Illinois wants to give up her child for adoption (it would be a smashing idea for the church to provide her with transport across the border), she would cross the border with her child, even unborn, to say, Indiana. Once there, the church would be ready to receive the child and notify the Indiana government and the prospective parents in Illinois, who would officially adopt the child in Indiana, before returning to Illinois.
Then, using the ICAMA agreement, Indiana would notify Illinois of the transfer, so Illinois could begin payments, if needed, to the new family.
The one sticking point to this would be if the government of Illinois went into a “full child-snatching mode”, taking away such children with their CPS, and refusing to recognize the Indiana adoption.
And this would cause a heck of a lawsuit. But Illinois is so bound and determined to give children to homosexuals that I would not put it past them. The State has truly become a heart of darkness.
The Catholic Reporter, formerly the official newspaper of the Kansas City - St. Joseph, was begun by my predecessor under a policy of editorial freedom. That policy of editorial freedom [I] endorsed on my appointment as bishop of Kansas City - St. Joseph. When the National Catholic Reporter was launched, that original policy of editorial freedom was announced as basic to the new publication.
snip
NOW, AS a last resort, I am forced as bishop to issue a condemnation of the National Catholic Reporter for its disregard and denial of the most sacred values of our Catholic faith. Within recent months the National Catholic Reporter has expressed itself in belittling the basic truths expressed in the Creed of Pope Paul VI; it has made itself a platform for the airing of heretical views on the Church and its divinely constituted structure, as taught by the First and Second Vatican Councils. Vehemently to be reprobated was the airing in recent editions of an attack on the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the virgin birth of Christ, by one of its contributors.
Finally, it has given lengthy space to a blasphemous and heretical attack on the Vicar of Christ. It is difficult to see how well instructed writers who deliberately deny and ridicule dogmas of our Catholic faith can possibly escape the guilt of the crime defined in Canon 1325 on heresy, and how they can escape the penalties of automatic excommunication entailed thereby.In fairness to our Catholic people, I hereby issue an official condemnation of the National Catholic Reporter. Furthermore, I send this communication to my brother bishops, and make known to the priests, religious and laity of the nation my views on the poisonous character of this publication.
That condemnation has never been lifted.
Something to keep in mind when reading any content from the National Catholic Fishwrap.
There is a very real risk these days to raising children in Illinois. Retaining custody of your own has always been a problem there.
I wonder if Illinois will go the way of Sweden in that respect
But take Douglas in the Lincoln Douglas debates ~ Douglas was not only a professional midget but his niece's recipe book is gluten free ~ in a time when that wasn't anything anyone outside of Sweden had figured out!
The Scandinavian Belt starts at Springfield ~ goes North in a wide swath, takes in NE Iowa and SW Wisconsin then sweeps on into Minnesota and out onto the Dakotas.
Illinois child custody laws are an abrupt change for someone used to the more family friendly laws further East ~ like Indiana, Kentucky, Virginia, the Souf' etc.
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