What happens when you put the clerics in charge of family

Rescued!

The marriage discrimination initiative is about, at its core, what is a family? If you ask John Nienstedt (archbishop in the Twin Cities), or the pseudo-clerics like Bradlee Dean, Tom Pritchard, Katherine Kersten, or Maggie Gallagher, they will tell you that it's a mommy and a daddy and kids.

We need to think long and hard about putting these moral ciphers in charge of the defintion; these are the same kind of people who produced this:

Up to 300,000 Spanish babies were stolen from their parents and sold for adoption over a period of five decades, a new investigation reveals.

The children were trafficked by a secret network of doctors, nurses, priests and nuns in a widespread practice that began during General Franco’s dictatorship and continued until the early Nineties.

Hundreds of families who had babies taken from Spanish hospitals are now battling for an official government investigation into the scandal. 

Several mothers say they were told their first-born children had died during or soon after they gave birth.

My God, who would do such a thing, and why?

But the women, often young and unmarried, were told they could not see the body of the infant or attend their burial.

In reality, the babies were sold to childless couples whose devout beliefs and financial security meant that they were seen as more appropriate parents. [emphasis added]

 It was a neat little machine, run by the Catholic church, that accounted for an estimated 15% of all adoptions in Spain between 1960 and 1989. The charade was nothing if not thorough:

Many mothers who gave birth [at the San Ramon clinic] claim that when they asked to see their child after being told it had died, they were shown a baby’s corpse that appeared to be freezing cold.

The BBC programme shows photographs taken in the Eighties of a dead baby kept in a freezer, allegedly to show grieving mothers.

And there is this:

In some cases, babies’ graves have been exhumed, revealing bones that belong to adults or animals. Some of the graves contained nothing at all.

But, John and Bradlee and Tom and Katherine and Maggie might say, look on the bright side; at least the kids had a mommy and daddy! I mean, that's the important thing, right?