"I am not sure who would want to hang out with people who have a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil."

Catholics believe that all people do--it's what we call "concupiscence."

...there are deep, real, and consequential differences...

...the real consequences of which the church has not heretofore been able to demonstrate.

If the Catholic schools and the Catholic hospitals lose their tax exempt status, it will be because of what they do that violates the law, not because the government enforces its laws.

If so, they will likely have to close or sell the schools and sell the hospitals. Tant pis.

Catholic schools crossed that Rubicon years ago, when they couldn't recruit enough nuns or enough Catholic teachers and couldn't enroll enough Catholic students to stay open.

It’s like dealing with an almost invincible blindness.

It's like not everybody interprets reality the same way you do.

Other people really, truly see the same facts you see and really, truly interpret them differently than you. That doesn't make them wrong nor blind.

Nature just needs enough individuals to procreate, not for every individual to procreate.

The husband did not ask for an abortion. A miscarriage was already in process when she came to the hospital. It was inevitable. He asked the hospital to complete the inevitable miscarriage.

Not completing the miscarriage caused the infection that killed her, and there was no way to treat the infection or save Savita's life without removing the doomed fetus.

Kevin, the partial miscarriage is what was causing the infection. There was no possible way to treat the massive infection without completing the miscarriage that was already in process when she came into the hospital.

Her death had everything to do with not having the doomed pregnancy terminated until the heartbeat was gone.

Not 'nothing'. Not 'little'. Everything.

--What you take as an inability to answer is a reluctance to answer. ---

If you haven't noticed by now, I don't really go for the whole "I have some font of wisdom I just can't show it to you but trust me its there" type deals. Sorry.. no faith.

What can I say to someone whose avatar is a snarling wolf?

-Fetch? Sit? Down Boy, Snausage, Walkies....

You're really hung up on appearances aren't you?

No, but conversely there is movement afoot to deny non-ministerial workers of Catholic institutions full access to employer-provided, health insurance benefits in the US. There is also a movement to remove things like birth control from any government mandated plan but that's been proving more difficult to push. Both of these topics might be more interesting discussions.

Hmm... I've got bee hives full of individual bees that do not sexually propagate. There is this thing in evolutionary theory called kin selection and it's not clear that the levels of homosexuals in the human population are at all detrimental to the species.