Jennifer Roback Morse, who is a senior fellow in economics at the Acton Institute and the author of Love and Economics: It Takes a Family to Raise a Village, offers a good summary of the serious harm to social order the ongoing attacks on marriage are causing.
The underlying pattern is unmistakable. Legalizing same-sex “marriage” has brought in its wake state regulation of other parts of society. The problem is sometimes presented as an issue of religious freedom, and so, in part, it is. But the issue runs deeper than religious freedom.
McGill University professor Douglas Farrow argues in his book A Nation of Bastards that redefining marriage allows the government to colonize all of civil society.
If same-sex couples can marry each other, they should be allowed to adopt. Anyone who says otherwise is acting against the policy of the state. If same-sex couples can have civil unions, then denying them the use of any facility they want for their ceremony amounts to unlawful discrimination. When the state says that same sex couples are equivalent to opposite-sex couples, school curriculum will inevitably have to support this claim.
Marriage between men and women is a pre-political, naturally emerging social institution. Men and women come together to create children, independently of any government. The duty of caring for those children exists even without a government or any political order.
Marriage protects children as well as the interests of each parent in their common project of raising those children.
Because marriage is an organic part of civil society, it is robust enough to sustain itself, with minimal assistance from the state.
By contrast, same-sex “marriage” is completely a creation of the state.
Same-sex couples cannot have children. Someone must give them a child or at least half the genetic material to create a child. The state must detach the parental rights of the opposite-sex parent and then attach those rights to the second parent of the same-sex couple.
The state must create parentage for the same-sex couple. For the opposite-sex couple, the state merely recognizes parentage.
Read the entire article on the National Catholic Register site.
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Articles and Book Excerpts:
• The Challenge of Marriage Preparation | Dr. Janet E. Smith
• Focus Groups and Marriage: A Match Made for
Heartache | Mary Beth Bonacci
• Entering Marriage with Eyes Wide Open
| Edward Peters
• Human Sexuality and the Catholic Church
| Donald P. Asci | Introduction to The Conjugal Act as a Personal Act
• Authentic Freedom and the Homosexual Person | Dr. Mark Lowery
• Who Is Married?
| Edward Peters
• Marriage and
the Family in Casti Connubii and Humanae Vitae | Reverend
Michael Hull, S.T.D.
• Male and Female
He Created Them | Cardinal Estevez
• The Truth About Conscience | John F.
Kippley | An excerpt from Sex and the Marriage Covenant
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