Yes, but it is the procreative aspect of marriage that makes homosexual companionship, however comforting it might be to a gay couple, nothing like marriage. It, further, shows that far from being a caprice of sexual deviance between two consenting adults, the gay "marriage" fosters a truly criminal environment into which adopted children will be plunged:
Every child has the right to know where he comes from, who is his father and who is his mother
I have not read Venner till his tragic death, -- so his geste had the intended effect on me anyway, -- but it is becoming clearer with everything of his that I read, that him mindset is pagan. Here is the sacrifice of self on the altar that belongs to Christ alone but is to him a testament of the genius of the French, the longing for "ancestral religion", the allusions to the Iliad, and, of course, the apparent inability to place his act in the context of sin that it is.
I believe that you have made my point for me. Marriage, properly understood, is a reflection of the relationship between Christ, the Bridegroom, and His bride, the Church. That is, ultimately, why it is utterly indispensable. Homosexual “marriage” can never, ever reflect that. It is, at its root, antichristian. The demand for the recognition of same-sex “marriage” has little or nothing to do with civil-rights, persoal fulfillment or any of the other arguments commonly advanced. It is all about either the acknowledgement of the absolute necessity of Christ as the sole mediator between God and man, the facilitator of “companionship” between God and man or the utter rejection of Christ as in any way important to or necessary for the survival of the church and, by extension, of humanity as a whole. It is, at its root, profoundly and implacably anti-christian.
Venner’s concerns, however superficially laudable, appear to be wholly earth-bound and only coincidently congruent with those of God’s people.
You are right, I think, annalex, that his attitude seemed to have been more classical/pagan than Christian in origin. It would seem that he never fully grasped or considered important the full Christological significance of marriage as an institution.