The stumbling block for many is gay love, that it is somehow "unnatural."

[IndianaGreen]

Our kind of loving

Mark Vernon

Being gay is about your love life. Gay men and women aren't people who perform certain acts; they are people who love in certain ways. The L-word is never mentioned by those who condemn homosexuality. I suspect that they don't talk about homosexuality as a form of loving because if they did, their arguments would fall away. For what is life without love? No life. And that is, in effect, the no-life they are asking gay men and women to lead. To declare love as a whole section of humanity experiences it as simply deviant (or worse) is about as fundamental an attack on a human being as there can be.

The paradox is that you'd think that Christian leaders, above all others, would realise that. After all, it is they who declare that God is love: "God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them." (1 John 4:16.) They may excuse their opinions by saying they are challenging the sin not the sinner, or the practice not the orientation, or by some other such sophistical formula. But the truth is that writing off all gay love makes about as much sense as writing off all heterosexual love.

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It's not entirely clear what the pope actually said this time: some of the reporting of his comments seems rather overblown. That's the Christmas silly season for you. However, it's pretty clear he thinks homosexuality nothing less than a calamitous disaster for the human race. It is as if homosexuality were as infectious as the common cold. Soon everyone will be sneezing. What kind of fantasies about homosexuality does that imply?

It's also pretty clear that he thinks homosexuality unnatural. He paints a monochrome picture of the relationships between man and woman. Man looks like this; woman looks like that. Together they should look like the Joseph, Mary and Jesus on a million sentimental Christmas cards – putting to one side the fact that they weren't married and he was illegitimate. But if the pope won't take a lead from the Bible, in which I don't think there is a single example of a stable nuclear family, he might actually turn to nature and read about our evolutionary cousins, the bonobos. The primatologist Frans de Waal describes their loving in moving tones in his book Our Inner Ape.

"The French kiss is the bonobo's most recognizable, humanlike erotic act. Whenever I show an undergraduate class a film of my bonobos, the students get very quiet. They will watch all sorts of sexual intercourse, but invariably the deepest impression is made by a video clip of two juvenile males tongue-kissing."

If only De Waal could show that clip in the Vatican. I'd love to be a fly on the wall.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/23/pope-benedict-xvi-gayrights