Daniel Avila is the self-described “marriage guy” for the Catholic bishops. More formally, he is the policy advisor for marriage and family to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage. He thinks people are gay because Satan was messing around with them while they were in their mothers’ wombs. God, he says, has nothing to do with it.
Therefore, whenever natural causes disturb otherwise typical biological development, leading to the personally unchosen beginnings of same-sex attraction, the ultimate responsibility, on a theological level, is and should be imputed to the evil one, not God.
Writing in The Pilot, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, Avila cites one scientist’s theory that homosexual orientation is the result of fluctuations in maternal hormones. To that thesis, he adds a gigantic leap: the devil must be doing it.
In other words, the scientific evidence of how same-sex attraction most likely may be created provides a credible basis for a spiritual explanation that indicts the devil. Any time natural disasters occur, we as people of faith look back to Scripture’s account of those angels who rebelled and fell from grace. In their anger against God, these malcontents prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. They continue to do all they can to mar, distort and destroy God’s handiwork.
Avila gave no hint of his satanic origin theory of homosexuality when he spoke at the Values Voter Summit in October, though it (and the reference to natural disasters) does sound like the kind of thing one would hear from anti-gay conservative evangelicals. At the Values Voter Summit, Avila urged people not to accept that marriage equality is inevitable. He claimed that anti-equality forces in Massachusetts are building political strength toward repeal of marriage equality, a notion rejected out of hand by equality advocates familiar with the state.
