An Open Letter to Congressman Paul Ryan

Ryan: Position on homosexual adoptions has changed for the worse.

Dear Congressman Paul Ryan,

In the days following the Republican Party’s defeat last November,

many good Americans took solace in the notion that, with a large cohort of patriotic and well educated young leaders coming up through its ranks, the GOP remained advantageously equipped to secure the Senate and House of Representatives in 2014, and to provide a 2016 presidential candidate to lead America in binding up the economic and social wounds visited upon the nation by eight years of the Democratic Party’s culture of death.

Your recent endorsement of adoption of children by couples in homosexual relationships is a shock to those among us who had entertained such hopes. It reveals a deep and fundamental lack of understanding of the principles upon which the Founding Fathers established our republic. It also betrays a blindness to the dangers facing the United States of America from the powerful lobby that has set out to “fundamentally transform” our nation. America is at a tipping point, and you have rested your hand on the wrong side of the balance. As a former vice-presidential candidate, your comments on homosexual adoption at the April 30 Town Hall Meeting in Janesville, Wisconsin speak loudly to the nation about the state of the Republican Party and its leadership, and you should act quickly to retract them.

Here is why.

First of all, from the standpoint of first principles, which you should understand on the basis of your training not only as a Roman Catholic, but also as a statesman, it is never legitimate to tolerate a lesser moral evil to prevent a greater one. This is at bottom what your proposal to place parentless children into the households of couples with non-normative same-sex attraction  amounts to. As Pope Paul VI put it very clearly in Humanae Vitae (On Human Life): “ “although it is true that it is at times lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater… it is never lawful, even for the greatest of reasons, to do evil that good may come of it… even though the intention is to promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of a society in general” (emphasis added) (Humanae Vitae, no. 14).  That is, what is intrinsically evil cannot be the direct object of the will.

It is intrinsically evil to place children into homosexual households because it is unjust for the children, and it is unjust for the following reasons.

 There are some things which no government may legislate, or pronounce from the judicial bench, and no political leader or group of leaders may decide from executive office. Nor, in legitimate democracy, may these things be subject to change by a vote.  These things are the unalienable rights of man under natural law, as so beautifully expressed in our nation’s founding documents.

For example, whether some classes of people should live or die is not the proper subject of deliberation by any court of justice. After World War II, as civilization united in promising “Never Again,” the Tribunal at Nuremberg made this principal of law abundantly clear as it condemned the justices of Hitler’s People’s Court for "judicial murder" and other atrocities.

Likewise, referenda on whether unalienable rights are to be preserved or eliminated are not only morally illicit, but are profoundly anti-democratic. It should be firmly locked in our thinking that no human being has any jurisdiction assigned by democracy to vote on issues concerning the inalienable rights of man, such as which classes of human beings shall live and who shall die. The right to life is not something that is in our jurisdiction as citizens, legislators, judges, or leaders, to deny to any member of the human species, regardless of race, color, religion, gender, size, or stage of development.

Unalienable rights are beyond the legitimate jurisdiction of voters. Courts lose legitimacy when they claim jurisdiction on these issues. Legislators harm and even destroy national institutions of deliberation such as state assemblies and the U.S. Congress when they illicitly take upon themselves the power to legislate against the natural rights of man.

Considering the policy of the legislating to pronounce that it is lawful to place children into homes headed by individuals with non-normative same-sex attractions, therefore, involves the question: Is it morally licit for the state to make this decision for the child, that is, does the policy violate the fundamental rights of the child under natural law?

The answer is that it is a violation of the rights of the child for the state to place any child in a household consisting of individuals with the non-normative sexual orientation of same-sex attraction. Individuals with non-normative same-sex attraction cannot provide children with a household in which there is a father and a mother.  The need for two parents, one of each gender, is an absolute need of the child under natural law, one which is unwritten but one which, in justice, cannot be ignored. Therefore, it is a violation of the fundamental rights of the child to be placed by the state into such households. Children have an ius (debt in justice) from us all: a mother and a father.

America already faces a crisis of family breakdown, one which the political class has, foolishly, largely ignored. The statistics on the moral, social, and economic consequences of fathers and mothers abandoning the home are staggering. The family is breaking up and we are reaping the bitter fruit of these breakdowns in society. To now legislate for the institutionalized denial of a father and mother from birth, is to enshrine in law, that which from the outset is prejudicial and gravely disadvantageous to children.

To deny a father and a mother to some children by law, would be to institutionalize a situation, which in fact we should be more vigorously trying to correct in our society. That it happens today is something we regard as one of the leading causes of poverty and many related problems. For our legal system to positively make this situation into an institution is to deliver an unjust verdict on the fate of many children, from the get go.

Not to foresee the consequences of denying a child a father and mother is obtuse. It is not a question of having two adults in a family; it is a question of having a father (male) and a mother (female). To not see the difference is to deny that gender per se exists, since the implicit claim is that gender makes no difference.

Indeed, good nuns can raise children, but as even Mother Teresa always stated, their love and care cannot replace the father and the mother. Why would you normalize in law, something that so hinders child development in our society--namely the absence of a father and a mother? Nothing in our empirical data or experience should lead anyone to believe that this absence will be a good for the child. To set in law the possibility for this to be the fate of a child from birth is clearly a violation of justice against that child.

For the former vice presidential candidate of the Republican Party to carelessly endorse such an injustice is a sad witness to the degraded state of our understanding of the principles on which our nation was founded. This carelessness does further damage to our governing institutions, and weakens our republic.

Our current trajectory to deny the child his right to a father and a mother should come as no surprise. For more than 40 years, America has denied the child in the womb his right to protection against bodily harm (caused by abortion), owed to him as a scientifically verifiable member of the human species. The same legal system that has condoned the killing of nearly 60 million American babies—some in conditions recently revealed to be as  barbaric as the Nazi death camps—now contemplates denying those that are allowed to be born a father and a mother. Having eliminated the first fundamental right, through abortion, in positive law, our legislators, courts, and voters continue down that path, logically consistent and undeterred.

Where are the American leaders who will stand up to these horrific injustices? Congressman Ryan, are you one of them? Will you retract your endorsement of adoptions of children by homosexuals?