Truth, hell! We can't handle the Fall.

Well, this is going to get ugly.

As if it weren't already, what with the PC and gay storm troops ready to blitzkrieg whomever has the temerity to point out that, in the case of homosexual unions, the parties (and the parts) don't fit.

Then again, it's been a hate crime to be a professing Catholic for a while now. And the Gaymacht ain't going to like what it reads in newspapers like The Sunday Times in Perth, Australia:

The Vatican's second-highest doctrinal official says homosexual marriage is evil, and abortion and euthanasia are "terrorism with a human face".

The attack by Archbishop Angelo Amato, secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was the latest in a string of speeches made by either Pope Benedict XVI or other Vatican officials as Italy considers giving more rights to gays.

In an address to chaplains, Archbishop Amato said newspapers and television bulletins often seemed like "a perverse film about evil".

He denounced "evils that remain almost invisible" because the media presented them as "expression of human progress".

He listed these as abortion clinics, which he called "slaughterhouses of human beings", euthanasia, and "parliaments of so-called civilised nations where laws contrary to the nature of the human being are being promulgated, such as the approval of marriage between people of the same sex ...".

Archbishop Amato spoke at a time when the Vatican and Italy's powerful Catholic church are at loggerheads over plans for a highly controversial law that would give unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples some form of legal recognition.

The church and Catholic politicians, even some in Prime Minister Romano Prodi's centre-left coalition, see the proposed law as a Trojan Horse and say it could lead to gay marriages.

Archbishop Amato, who is said to be very close to the Pope, criticised the media's coverage of ethical issues.

After denouncing "abominable terrorism" such as that carried out by suicide bombers, he condemned what he called "terrorism with a human face", and accused the media of manipulating language "to hide the tragic reality of the facts".

"For example, abortion is called 'voluntary interruption of pregnancy' and not the killing of a defenceless human being; an abortion clinic is given a harmless, even attractive, name: 'centre for reproductive health'; and euthanasia is blandly called 'death with dignity'," he said.

IT'S UNVARNISHED. It's blunt. It will give offense. It's also the truth, the honest exposition of what the Catholic Church has taught since they pulled Jesus Christ off the cross. And what Judaism taught before that for, oh, 4,000 years or so.

It's also what many in the American Church don't have the cojones to talk about much anymore.

You don't have to go far in American Catholicism to find serious dissent from plain Catholic doctrine, unchanged since . . . forever. Just go into the pews. Heck, go up to the pulpit.

And, most certainly, go to a meeting of a Catholic youth group.

IT IS A NORMAL CONDITION of adolescence and young adulthood to be absolutely certain of your own unappreciated genius and moral superiority. There has never been any generation quite so clever as one's own, and only the imposition of "fairness" lies between ourselves and the establishment of the New Jerusalem.

Thus, there can be no quibbling with something so naturally just and lovely as the nuptials of Adam and Steve (Yes, Jerry Falwell can be a jerk and a blowhard, but "Adam and Steve" belongs in the Bon Mot Hall of Fame) because God Made Them That Way (TM) and not letting them wed Just Isn't Fair (c) 1967, Down With The Man, LLC.

I heard the God Made Them That Way (TM) argument just this past Sunday. At a Catholic youth-group discussion on You Know What. Yes, God Made Them That Way (TM) and who are we to argue with God, right?

Well, except when God is speaking through Scripture . . . or Tradition . . . or Reason . . . or through Nature. Then we can argue with God, because who the hell does He think He is, telling loving homosexual couples that they can't Be Happy (c) 1,000,000,000 B.C., Beelzebub Publishing, Inc.

At the point of the inevitable God Made Them That Way (TM) moment, I turned to the youth minister -- we adults weren't allowed in on the discussion unless invited, which we generally weren't -- to vent.

"God forbid that we might have Catholic youth with opinions formed by the Catholic Catechism," I said. Sarcastically, of course, Because God Made Me That Way.

Not that my expectations are high, you understand. I am the guy who is always prepared to helpfully direct, when met with blank stares when asking Catholic teen-agers to turn to Matthew, "It's the first part of the last third of the Bible."

It was at some point after this that it all hit me . . . again, being that I have this thought every now and again: We just don't understand the reality of The Fall. At all. Particularly today's kids.

We affluent Westerners, amid all our wealth and all our distractions, Just Don't Get It. At all. Amid almost daily horrors and sordid suburban minidramas and broken families -- and Seung-Hui Cho -- we still fail to understand the consequences of Adam and Eve's disobedience.

We look at ourselves in The Fall's fun house mirror, see a warped and distorted image of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, then think we've gazed upon the Beatific Vision in full.

We are good. Evil is quaint. What is truth? Gays can marry. What the hell.

Almost 6,000 years of human experience, taboo and divine revelation? Worthless amid the wonderful insight and wisdom that is ours since, oh . . . 1967. We don't need no stinkin' Savior . . . Do what thou wilt. It's all good.

OF COURSE, every good postmodernist thinker has a perfectly fine answer for the Nature argument against gay marriage. Also for the Church's argument that the purpose of marriage is twofold --unitive and procreative -- and that a husband and wife, coming together to create new life out of marital love, is the closest human beings can come to modeling the Holy Trinity . . . We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.

And that fine answer is to smugly plunge a knife into the heart of infertile heterosexual couples -- faithful husbands and wives -- who have played by God's rules, followed their physical and metaphysical natures and still rolled snake eyes in this post-Fall "vail of tears." Yes, in the name of the Great God Fairness, if gays and lesbians cannot live in wedded bliss, neither then should I live as such with my dear wife of nearly 24 years. Because, physically, our marital union is just as fruitless as those of gays and lesbians.

See, my wife and I understand a bit about The Fall and, too, about the brutal unfairness of life. We had trouble conceiving, and then she got cancer.

And that was that.

Meanwhile, some folks -- including not an insubstantial number of professed Catholics -- openly defend the murder of defenseless children in utero as "choice." We Americans see choice as good, as did God when He gave Adam and Eve free will.

And look what they did with it:

1
Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals that the LORD God had made. The serpent asked the woman, "Did God really tell you not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?"
2
The woman answered the serpent: "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden;
3
it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, 'You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.'"
4
But the serpent said to the woman: "You certainly will not die!
5
No, God knows well that the moment you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad."
6
The woman saw that the tree was good for food, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Genesis 3:1-6

SEE, I don't think what made God furious was the mere fact of Adam's and Eve's disobedience. What I think made God furious was the why of their disobedience -- "'your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods . . . .'"

Do you think the real sin here -- the Original Sin -- was more one of pride or one of avarice? Me, I think it could go either way. Perhaps a draw.

Whatever the case, it is indisputable that our postmodern society treats traditionally capital sins like lust, pride and avarice as ersatz virtues, encouraging hallmarks of worldly sophistication. And we tut-tut those hoary old men in the Vatican as they prattle on about the "evil" of homosexual marriage and "slaughterhouses of human beings."

"We," of course, being the West's cynical sophisticates and the young people who drink their Kool-Aid, thinking it a fitting substitute for the living water of Christ.

"We," in the name of the Autonomous Self, the Almighty Choice and the Inconsequential Orgasm seek perfection out of perversity and "fairness" out of pridefulness, achieving only the further perfection of our fallen iniquity.

"We" could care less about the utter unfairness of people throwing away their children before they're born -- or neglecting them after they're born -- while others can't have the children they desperately wanted to love and raise. In America, adoption is damned long odds when you're exterminating millions of fetuses a year, and not many of us can afford to trek to China, now, can we?

AND "WE" DON'T USUALLY have to suffer the unthinking cruelties of teen-agers' defense of sanctified sodomy, nor have "we" seen the look in my wife's eyes, the one she gets when I know she's thinking about the children she will never have.