A Question of Law, Part Two

I’m spending a few days on the blog talking about marriage, sex, the Church’s teachings, and the whole difficult issue of same-sex marriage (ssm) and its civil recognition. My effort here is to establish a dialogue that is respectful and charitable, and to present the anti-ssm argument and the Church’s teachings on the moral meaning of human sexuality in a clear respectful manner.

Yesterday I presented a short and simple argument against the civil extension of marriage to same sex couples. It was essentially a soft libertarian argument, that the government can only extend its authority into the private lives of its citizens for a reason, and the more intrusive or significant the government’s intervention is, the more serious the reason is. Marriage only is a concern of the state because of that pesky reality of fertility, that opposite-sex couples routinely produce children, and that children’s interests need to be protected by at the very least encouraging men and women to commit to one another in marriage and family life and offering various incentives (tax breaks, etc.) for them if they do so.

I would say that that is strictly it. The government—the full coercive power of the modern bureaucratic state—has absolutely no business sticking its oar in on the personal domestic arrangements and emotional bonds of its citizens. And I must say I am truly surprised at how few people seem perturbed by that. Even if you have no moral objection whatsoever to homosexual intercourse, surely the notion that the state has some role in adjudicating the legitimacy and value of your personal life is troubling, isn’t it?

And if it is a question of promoting social acceptance of homosexuality, then I consider that a morally noxious project. There are many of us—millions of us, actually—who still consider homosexual intercourse to be a moral evil. This is grounded in a moral view of reality that has endured for three thousand years and that has produced the whole of Western Civilization,  To use the power of the state and all its resources to bully people into silence or enact various penalties upon them for dissenting from state-sanctioned ideology is simply wrong and smacks of fascism, the exalting of the power of the State to the exclusion of all other powers.

OK, objections. I said yesterday I would address the objections. What about infertile/elderly couples? The Church and the State have always married these. I would answer that sexual complementariness is nonetheless ordered towards pro-creation, even if incidental physical factors make it unlikely at best. 

Also, once the principle is established that marriage exists for the purpose of having a stable family structure surround the creation and nurturing of new human beings, and hence is a stable lasting bond between a man and a woman, I would prefer the government to wash its hands of the matter. Less government intrusion into personal arrangements—that’s my motto.

What about the same sex couples who have children, either by adoption or by a previous heterosexual relationship or by some kind of assisted technology? Well, I realize in a morally pluralistic society it is hard to frame an argument that same-sex couples should not be allowed to adopt. Personally, aside from my own moral convictions, I believe there is specific developmental value in a child having a mother and a father, but I realize that many people just don’t see that point.

It seems to me that it has always been the case that children, while normally raised by mother and father in a committed family structure, have always found themselves being raised in other circumstances due to various happenstances: generally the death of one or both parents or the incapacity of one or both parents to provide for them. This is hardly a new situation, and surely the long-standing civil law around adoption/wardship suffices to protect the interests of the child without state intrusion into our private lives?

What about the fact that there are lots of lousy parents out there, who may be married as all get out and are abusive and neglectful of their children? Well, yes. And the state already has a whole bureaucratic structure in place (imperfect as it may be) to address the issue of child abuse and neglect. But surely we don’t mean to suggest that because a small percentage of parents abuse their children, the whole norm of mother-father-baby is thereby negated and discarded?

The norm of life remains, and continues to remain, that man and woman come together in sexual union, and that is how a new human being comes into existence. The norm remains that this new human being is best served if mother and father are in a stable, committed relationship in which they provide and protect the nascent life of this small person. Same sex marriage, by declaring that there is no connection whatsoever between commitment and love and the creation and preservation of human life, weakens our social commitment to our most vulnerable members and reduces the whole reality of marriage to a matter of personal private affection, which is oddly overseen and maintained by the force of the bureaucratic state.

That’s all I have to say about the political and civil side of things. Tomorrow, God willing, I will write in a more spiritual and religious vein, about the vision of sexuality the Church provides, and our need to love and care for those for whom this vision comes with a heavy price. See you tomorrow.

A Question of Law, Part One

I’m spending a few days on the blog talking about marriage, sex, the Church’s teachings, and the whole difficult issue of same-sex marriage (ssm) and its civil recognition. My effort here is to establish a dialogue that is respectful and charitable, and to present the anti-ssm argument and the Church’s teachings on the moral meaning of human sexuality in a clear respectful manner. A commenter yesterday asked (rather rudely) why I was bothering to do this. I am doing this because I wish to persuade my readers that I’m right, of course! Because I believe I (and my Church) are right, and I believe it is important for human happiness and flourishing to strive to be right in our heads about the crucial matters of life.

Today I want to provide an argument against the civil recognition of ssm.  Now, I fully realize that ssm has been the law of the land in Canada for over ten years now, and that it is the law of the land in twelve states of the USA, and realistically is likely to become the law of the land in many of the remaining ones over the next decade. Nor is there any reasonable chance for anything I just wrote to be changed, any time soon. I hold these laws to be bad and harmful, and that is why I am continuing to contest them.

As an aside, I have noticed a most strange attitude in some, that once the matter is ‘settled’ by the courts, the debate is supposed to end. Isn’t that an odd, quasi-fascist notion? A close relative of mine, who cast off the shackles of Roman Catholicism at an early age, told me in tones of utter finality that ‘the Ontario supreme court has declared that marriage includes gay people.’ And that was the end of the conversation. In old-school Catholicism there is the saying ‘Roma locuta est, causa finita est’ (Rome has spoken, the matter is closed.) Whatever one thinks of that saying, it is the height of absurdity to reject Rome in this equation and immediately substitute in the Supreme Court, or Parliament, or Congress, and think one has scored a major goal for liberty of thought and action.

Every court, every legislature in the world may establish ssm as the law of their land, or any other law, and I will maintain to my dying breath that any of us has a right to say ‘And that’s a bad law, and here’s why!’ So here’s why I believe ssm is a bad law.

As far as I can understand, the only reason the State has for sticking its nose into the marriage business is to encourage stability in pro-creative sexual relationships. There is an essential and irreducible difference between same-sex couple and opposite-sex couples that no one can deny, regardless of one’s moral beliefs about this difference.

Namely, a man and a woman can (and often do!) make a baby. Two men, two women, cannot make a baby. It is a social good that babies be made, as much as is possible in this messy old world of ours, in conditions that are conducive to their thriving. And there is no question that human babies are best served by being born into a stable family system where both parents have affective bonds to them and are bound in law (insofar as that is possible) and in custom (that quaint notion) to create a stable nurturing environment in which to raise their children.

That environment is called ‘the family.’ And I can see no other reason possible why the State and its coercive powers should enter the realm of human domestic arrangements to express its preferences. The only reason why the State should privilege certain benefits around taxation and access to social welfare systems to the family is to foster and encourage stability in sexual relations that are likely to produce children, as children born into stable social situations are more apt to grow into adults who are themselves stable and able to form that wonderful unit of a stable thriving society, the family.

Otherwise I would kindly ask the State to butt out of our personal lives. I find it alarming in the extreme that ssm advocates believe they are benefitted by having ‘society’, by which we now apparently mean ‘the government’, approve their relationships. I guess this is a sign of incipient mid-life libertarianism coming out, but I really do believe we are in big trouble when we seek government approval of human domestic relationships. I don’t much care if the Canadian government (or, for that matter, any of youse guys) ‘approves’ of my living in religious community with 200 men and women here in Madonna House, you know!

Now I realize there are a host of objections people raise. What about infertile couples, then? Or same sex couples who have children? Or abusive parents? Seeing my word count for this post, though, I think I had better stop with my basic argument; tomorrow I will address those objections, and then move on to more specifically religious arguments.

Until then, peace and blessings to you all. And let’s try to keep our comments polite and thoughtful, as most have so far.

A Question of Hatred

I’m spending a few days on the blog talking about marriage, sex, the Church’s teachings, and the whole difficult issue of same-sex marriage and its civil recognition. I believe we need to try to talk about these matters, and what we believe about these matters, with as much kindness, gentleness and love as we can muster. Too much of the ‘debate’ around all of this is driven by fear, anger, and resentment. Accusations of ‘hatred’ and ‘bigotry’ abound; a calm effort to understand and listen to one another is less common.

And that’s where I would like to start today. This whole question of hatred is very important in the controversy. The recent US Supreme Court decision specifically said that the only reason to be opposed to a civil recognition of same sex marriages was hatred against homosexual persons. That is quite an extraordinary statement, really. It has a nice way of ending any possible conversation before it can even start. No matter what argument is offered, what issues are raised, what philosophical or sociological or legal implications are brought up, the one response is ‘You’re a hater! Don’t be a hater!’

The truth is, it is next to impossible to really be in dialogue with someone who you are convinced hates you. When I see a truly vitriolic rant against the Catholic Church, I don’t actually have anything to say in response to it. Hatred is the end of a conversation, not the beginning. And so to have Justice Kennedy proclaim, in what is now part of the legal jurisprudence of the United States, that the only motivation to oppose same-sex marriage is hatred, is quite a statement.

Now, is it true? Does this logically hold? I wish to go on record here, in this most public forum of the internet, as saying two things. One, that I am adamantly opposed to same-sex marriage (henceforth, ssm) and intend to continue to express that opposition as long as I am allowed to do so in our free society. Second, that I have no hatred in my heart for any human being anywhere on God’s earth. I simply don’t. Even people who do things I consider to be extraordinarily evil—drug dealers, abortionists, torturers, child abusers—I more feel sorry for them than anything else.

I hate ideas that are false and that do tremendous damage to people. I hate ideologies that lock people into prisons of various sorts, and wither love and freedom in the human heart. I hate hatred, and the terrible damage people do to one another out of malice, greed, anger. But people? I can’t think of anyone I have any hatred for, not even certain people in my personal history who have done great harm to close family members. And I certainly have no hatred—not even remotely—for LGBTQ people, nor can I imagine why anyone would, honestly (I have a very poor imagination, perhaps).

So much for me. Big deal – I’m one guy with a laptop sitting up in the Canadian wilderness, who happens to be a Catholic priest. But what about the debate in general? Surely it is all just prejudice and malice against these people, right? What arguments have ever been made against same-sex marriage that have been rational and fact-based? Either it’s all just my lousy Catholic theology which has no place in a public debate, or it’s just gay-bashing hatred, right?

Well, what about the implications of ssm for marriage in general? Or its impact on children? Or its impact on religious freedom, which in both Canada and the United States is considered a core element of our free society? Now, it is quite possible that a ssm advocate might read those four articles and dispute them, and may even have good arguments to debunk them.

That is not the point here. The point in question is that it is asserted that no possible non-theological argument exists or ever could exist against ssm, (and that the theological arguments themselves essentially boil down to the Westboro Baptist Church’s slogan ‘God hates fags’ of which I will have more to say later), and so the only motivation to oppose it is rank and vile hatred against a class of people. But these four articles present all sorts of arguments that are not rooted in hatred. You may disagree with them, but surely you cannot deny that they exist, can you? 

To hold that anyone who has a position you disagree with cannot be motivated by anything but ill will seems to me to be a strange and somewhat narrow view of human life. It would be rather silly of me to declare that everyone who is not a Roman Catholic is seething with hatred for God and for the good, wouldn’t it? And yet my own Catholicism is wholly a matter of my love for God and for the good as I best understand these matters.

The quest for truth and for understanding is not served by name-calling (Haters! Perverts!) or by misrepresenting the arguments of one’s opponents. The quest for a civil, peaceful society that includes all people is not served by driving out or silencing everyone who differs from us, but rather to work to listen to all voices and see what they have to say.

Well, that’s quite enough (more than enough, says the peanut gallery!) for one day. Tomorrow I will give my own argument against the civil recognition of ssm, and then the religious understanding of sex and its place in the divine plan, and then we’ll see where we are. God bless you and talk to you tomorrow.

Preach the Gospel With Your Strife

This is our glory: the witness of our conscience. There are men who rashly judge, who slander, who whisper and murmur, who are eager to suspect what they do not see, and eager to spread abroad things they have not even a suspicion of. Against men of this sort, what defense is there save the witness of our own conscience?

My brothers, we do not seek, nor should we seek, our own glory even among those whose approval we desire. What we should seek is their salvation, so that if we walk as we should they will not go astray in following us. They should imitate us if we are imitators of Christ; and if we are not, they should still imitate him… And so we seek no advantage for ourselves when we aim to please men. We want to take our joy in men—and we rejoice when they take pleasure in what is good, not because this exalts us, but because it benefits them…

And so my brothers, our concern should be not only to live as we ought, but also to do so in the sight of men; not only to have a good conscience but also, so far as we can in our weakness, to do nothing which might lead our weak brother into thinking evil of us. Otherwise, as we feed on the good pasture and drink the pure water, we may trample on God’s meadow, and weaker sheep will have to feed on trampled grass and drink from troubled waters.

St. Augustine, Office of Readings, Tuesday, 13^th Week of Ordinary Time

Reflection – I have been pondering a great deal this past week the challenges of proclaiming the Gospel in a hostile and contentious environment. I guess having this little social media apostolate is bound to raise the question. The first paragraph of this sermon from St. Augustine is a fairly good description of an awful lot of what flies around on the Internet these days, don’t you think? Rash judgment, slander (not in the strict legal definition, mind you), leaping to unfounded conclusions, impugning of base motivations to opponents, eagerness to spread abroad every bad report and suggestion of impropriety among them—if everything that fell under that description was removed from the Internet, the whole thing could probably fit on my laptop!

So, for example, in the current recharged debate about same-sex marriage, accusations and counter-accusations fly freely. ‘You’re all hate-filled bigots! You want gay people to die!’ ‘You’re all anti-Christian zealots! It’s all a plot to destroy the Catholic Church’ ‘You’re haters!’ ‘You’re persecutors! ‘Boo!’ ‘Hiss!’

And so it goes. I won’t dignify the above with the word ‘debate’. This is not a debate, but a mud-slinging match. There is no effort to understand, to meet the other, to hear the other, to find that necessary common ground without which conversation is impossible. I don’t mean to suggest that there has been no effort whatsoever at rational ordered argument on this matter, just that the ‘conversation’ has overwhelmingly tended to degrade into a shouting match of slogans and postures.

And so we have this wonderful exhortation from St. Augustine, who himself lived in a pretty darned contentious environment, and who had his own opponents galore, right at his doorstep in Hippo. North Africa was a hotbed of the Donatist schism, which was deep and very emotional in the 4^th and 5^th centuries, touching as it did upon the proper way to preserve the Church’s integrity in view of public sinners and apostates, and in particular in view of the Christians who had cracked under persecution and torture in the age of the martyrs.

The Catholic position was that our integrity lay in the path of mercy and compassion for sinners; the Donatist position was one of rigid exclusion of those who didn’t make the cut. The Catholic position also was that Christ remained faithful to his Church and acted in his sacraments regardless of our merits or failures; the Donatists held that Christ would only be faithful if we were faithful.

It was emotional and divisive and very painful in that time period. I personally am so very glad to be a Catholic, and not a Donatist! But meanwhile, here we are in 2013 trying to find a way to present the Gospel call to purity and sexual integrity in an atmosphere of intense anger and (frankly) a concerted effort to get us to just shut up about the whole thing. And meanwhile we have our own sins, our own struggles, our own far from perfect charity and purity to contend with.

Augustine calls us here to a great spiritual and emotional maturity. We are to have no concern, really, but to love our brothers and sisters and to seek their salvation. We are to not care, really, if they hate us and hurl abuse and invectives at us. We are to be very humble about our own failings and strive to be really good in our lives, both because that’s how we should be, but also for their sake, to not have our own lack of love and harshness be a stumbling block for anyone else.

And so, I think I’m going to depart from my usual blog format this week. I want to just write, for a few days, about this whole painful contentious issue, to express clearly what I understand to be the Catholic position (which is my own), and to try, at least, to bring it under the mantle of love and compassion (which I believe it genuinely is). I realize, doing this, that I will probably fail, and will probably hurt some feelings - it seems that strife is unavoidable in this particular task of preaching the Gospel. But we have to try to talk to one another about this, not simply scream at one another. So these next few days will be my effort at talking, and I would like to listen, too, to anyone else’s views on the subject. God bless.