So, once again, the CHURCH decides what meets their criteria for "natural law." They decide what is "natural" and "healthy" for humans, and make their determination into a "law!"
Sorry, If you are looking at the standing of most Churches toward homosexual relationship to determine that homosexuality goes against "natural law," THAT is circular reasoning!
Natural law philosophy predates Christ by several centuries. So does the natural law prohibition on homosexuality; Aristotle compared it to eating dirt.
And its not as if its a difficult philosophy to grasp or one that's open to competing interpretations. It simply asserts that every human faculty serves some end, and that goodness consists in acting toward that end while sin consists in acting contrary to it.
The human sexual faculty serves the purpose of procreation.
Homosexual sex is necessarily nonprocreative.
Therefore, it is contrary to natural law ("disordered" is the term the Church would use) to have homosexual sex.
I think
you're the one using circular reasoning. You've decided, a priori, that the Church began with a condemnation of homosexuals and then adopted natural law philosophy to rationalize it (even though natural law is concerned with a lot of things, not merely sexual morality). You believe this because you dislike the Church; and you dislike the Church because you think it's outdated; and you think it's outdated because it doesn't share your irrational admiration of homosexuals.
In fact, the Church's teachings in all things (sexual morality included) follow logically from natural law philosophy; there is literally not one of its teachings that diverges from it. That's why none of its teachings are separable, and to deny one on some basis is literally to deny them all. And
that's why communion is denied to those who do not accept the sum of the Church's teachings -- that's what communion is, after all;
communion with the Church, and with Christ, who established it.
It astounds me that you have the gall to accuse literally millennia's worth of philosophers from whom this tradition derives of simple-mindedness. No offense, but your own argument for homosexuality isn't exactly sophisticated; it's mostly irrational, anecdotal emoting about your personal experiences with homosexuals. I suppose it's the Church's fault you were poorly catechized (there's a lot of that going around these days), but I'd hope you could at least have a little humility when speaking of some of the giants of the Western philosophical tradition, like Aristotle or Aquinas.
