Matt Walsh's Comments on Same-Sex Adoption to Carlson Give Insight into Crisis in the Church

From tolerance, to acceptance to celebration

Catholic political conservative commentator Matt Walsh recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast to talk about a host of societal topics. Chief among them was a discussion on the proliferation of “gay adoption” and the decline in public morals that has coincided, or caused, the rise in non-traditional — which is to say immoral — romantic lifestyles.

Walsh made the excellent observation that years ago the conversation surrounding the adoption of children by two men living in a romantic relationship centred on the notion that there were children without homes, languishing in crowded foster care programs, who needed help. The narrative went, “How can you deny these poor children a stable home environment?”

Walsh correctly asserted in the interview that putting children in such a home was not a good thing, even if there were hypothetically children who needed out of a bad foster care situation. While he didn’t go into the details as to why such an assertion is false, and said it more in passing as part of a larger conversation, I can buttress his statements.

For one, there are oodles of normal couples with fertility issues who would love to adopt a child. In fact, even many who have not experienced fertility issues would be willing to adopt children, especially if they would like more children but are getting on in years. Also, the foster care system is vast, and there are certainly problems with it, nonetheless, there are many good people and better homes that children can be sent to before resorting to placing children in abnormal homes.

Also, it is an uncomfortable fact for many that homosexual relationships, with both men and women, are uncharacteristically disordered morally, aside from the disorder at the heart of it. Higher rates of drug use, physical abuse, etc., are common. I won’t spend time here citing the facts that prove this at length, but if you are interested, a quick AI search about the topic is revealing. I asked Grok (X’s AI) for articles and studies proving the point, and they were endless.

In any event, Walsh was correct, for many reasons, about why this sort of adoption is hardly a solution. I would like to expand on something he said about how the narrative has gone from, “Kids need homes” to, “Gay couples have the right to have children.” In effect, the narrative has gone from, letting the poor kids have a home with two dads or moms, to a promotion of surrogacy and IVF, which are both gravely immoral.

Tolerance, Acceptance, Celebration

Walsh explained that this shift in narrative is a case of, tolerance, leading to acceptance, then celebration. He is absolutely correct in this; during the proverbial “back in the day” time, same-sex relationships were something that we were told we should just tolerate, and that it was bigoted to not “live and let live.” While there is a partial truth in this, in that there are plenty of things that people do that we simply have to ignore for a variety of reasons, it is not the case that tolerance in this sense was merely tolerance.

Technically speaking, tolerance is when you put up with and try to ignore something because it is something you find wrong or repugnant. An example would be sitting beside a smelly person on the subway because there is nothing you can do about someone else’s bathing habits. However, the notion that one should tolerate grave sin is not so simple. At the very least, the tolerance must be such that the thing remains private because as soon as it is tolerated as a public phenomenon, we move from tolerance to acceptance.

Once we move from tolerance to acceptance, we no longer have grounds to reject what we formerly merely tolerated, and legal protections and other such measures will swiftly follow.

This is exactly what has happened regarding the rainbow issue in society.

Furthermore, once acceptance is accomplished, the thing that is accepted is seen as a social or moral good on par with anything else normative in society and therefore must be celebrated. For example, no one has a problem with Father’s Day because fathers are normative, and so is fatherhood, so we celebrate it.

While one may find a so-called Pride Parade distasteful, once the parade's ethos has been accepted, we have no way of rejecting it as intolerable. Again, this is what we have seen.

Also, those who fail to accept what was formerly merely tolerated are necessarily seen as bigots who reject progress and should not be tolerated. No tolerance for the intolerant is how it goes.

This sort of development or process explains the whole “virtue signalling” culture, wherein you must celebrate or demonstrate your allegiance to the new progressive thing, or you are a bad person.

In any event, I am sure you all know this; what does this have to do with the Church?

Tolerance of Heresy and Sacrilege