Does A Good Papacy Get Better With Age?

Just when we all thought Pope Francis I was going to pull the church, if a millimeter at a time, away from its homophobia, he tells a crowd this:

"Parenthood is based on the diversity of being, as indicated by the Bible, male and female. This is the 'first' and more fundamental difference, constitutive of the human being."

He added:

"Children mature seeing mom and dad's...receporicity and complementarity."

OK...We've heard this sort of thing before. But, being the good Jesuit that he is, he has to come up with a good, logical explanation:  A good marriage, he said, is "like fine wine, in which the husband and wife make the most of their gender differences."

Hmm...I know I'm no oenologist.  So perhaps I can be forgiven for not realizing that wine-making had anything to do with gender differences.  Could those tastes be a result of the interplay between female and male grapes?

He made these remarks in an address the day after Rome's Gay Pride Festival, and a few days after Italy's lower house of parliament passed a motion in support of same-sex civil unions, promising to take up the issue.