The church and homosexuality: Catholic charities' board members resign over gay adoption policy.

EIGHT MEMBERS OF THE board of Catholic Charities of Boston have decided to resign rather than support the Catholic social service agency's policy of prohibiting gay couples from adopting children. Seven signed a statement saying that the decision "threatens the very essence of our Christian mission." They continued, "We cannot participate in an effort to pursue legal permission to discriminate against Massachusetts citizens who want to play their part in building strong families." After their announcement, Catholic Charities said that it would stop providing any adoption services.

Archbishop Sean P. O'Malley and Rev. J. Bryan Hehir, president of Catholic Charities, have called for Catholic agencies to be exempt from the state's antidiscrimination laws, which prohibit discrimination against gays, on religious freedom grounds. The governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, has said he may support a very narrow change in the law to allow the exemption, a move expected to face stiff opposition from gay rights groups.

Edward Saunders, the executive director of the Massachusetts Catholic Conference, has said that church teaching was unequivocal and that allowing gay couples to adopt "would actually mean doing violence to these children" and was "gravely immoral." Catholic Charities of Boston has placed 13 children with same-sex couples in the past 20 years--less than two percent of the total--and all of them were in a hard-to-place category, because of their age or special needs.