Posted on 03/06/2008 5:04:30 PM PST by tcg
Marriage is ontologically between a man and a woman, ordered toward the loving union of the spouses, open to life through the conjugal act in procreation. It also forms the foundation of family.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholic.org ...
The effort was strategically prepared and is clearly intended to challenge the California Sate law precluding them from obtaining marriage licenses. The Court now must decide within three months whether the California law somehow violates that State’s Constitution.The argument involves the "Equal protection" Clause of the California Constitution.
The State Challenges are a prelude to the real goal, the strategic plan to use the United States Supreme Court to redefine Marriage and then force society to recognize this new meaning under the threat of the police power of the State.
Those who support marriage as a lifelong committed relationship between one man and one woman are being pilloried in many of the press reports. Those who support marriage - as marriage – are being brushed with all the disparaging terms thrown at people who insist that there is any such a thing as objective truth in an age of moral relativism.
As a convinced and committed Catholic Christian, I know that there are immense social implications to living the truth as revealed in the Natural Law. This is an age deluded by the siren song of moral relativism.
I have fought for decades in the noble fight to restore the fundamental human right to life for all men and women from conception to natural death. I was often labeled a “conservative” because of my absolute insistence that the womb is the first home of the whole human race and that every child has a right to life and a freedom to be born.
Yet, I insist that I am not a “conservative”.
I openly opposed the initial incursion into Iraq, insisting that it could not be justified under the classical “just war” analysis.
I have long opposed capital punishment - as no longer necessary to protect society. I have raised deep concerns about the insistence that we build walls to prevent people from following their hopes for freedom on our Nations borders.
However, I long ago gave up any hope that either major political party had a place for me. I am pro-life, pro-marriage and family, pro-freedom, pro-peace and pro-poor. I am neither liberal -nor conservative, neither right nor left.
I also strongly support the Federal Marriage Amendment. The Supreme Court case in California is one more example of why.
This is only one more effort by homosexual activists to expand the legal definition of marriage to include homosexual partners. In fact, the Justices are being used as a part of an orchestrated legal move to prepare the case for the United States Supreme Court.
It is a clear example of why this Amendment is so important.
Marriage matters. It serves the common good.
Monogamous Marriage, and the family founded upon it, is the first society, the first school, the first economy, the first hospital, the first church and the foundation of a just social order.
The oxymoron, “gay marriage”, once used by only the fringe elements of the extreme homosexualist movement, has quickly become an acceptable expression. So has that other oxymoron, “same sex marriage”. Both are even being used by those who defend true marriage, thinking they are simply being sensitive.
Huge mistake.
These terms are a part of a verbal strategy. Their use is now commonplace in the media, - “conservative”, “liberal” and “mainstream” - as it reports on efforts to defend and promote true marriage.
In an Orwellian spin, those who support marriage as marriage are now being called “narrow minded” and accused of trying to push our “values” or, even worse, “religion” on others.
And, in one more brilliant feat of rhetorical skill, the new cultural revolutionaries have once again flipped a major social debate.
Notice how the effort to redefine marriage is being framed by the activists in the Human Rights campaign and among other well funded and very competent homosexual activist groups. The new rallying cry is the “right to marry”.
Just as the proponents of legal abortion on demand so skillfully stole the word “choice” and captured it as a slogan behind which to hide the infamy of abortion and feticide, the architects of the new social order are now decreeing that the ‘right to marry” is somehow being denied to homosexual partners.
These efforts, led by the homosexualist movement, to force legal recognition for homosexual relationships on all of society has gained great momentum through a sophisticated, intelligent and well funded and multi-faceted effort. The goal is nothing short of the total re-ordering of civil society in a new cultural revolution.
Proponents have a clear verbal, social, legal, cultural and political strategy.
On the legal front they are led by the “Human Rights Campaign”, a well funded public interest legal group dedicated to convincing the public that there is some kind of “civil” or “human right” to engage in homosexual sexual practices.
Make no mistake, they have very able lawyers.
The “Human Rights Campaign” has succeeded in reframing this entire issue by now framing the debate in the public square. They speak of “the freedom to marry”, as though the efforts to protect authentic marriage as marriage is to somehow deny homosexual practitioners from “freedom” or to refuse them a “right” to marry.
This was a smart and calculated move.
I understand the approach very well. I practiced public interest law for years. They simply recast the effort and redefined the word. Now, it is the proponents of true marriage who are on the defensive. In short, some of our difficulties are of our own doing.
I understand public interest law because, as a practicing Catholic, I helped to establish and lead the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a predominantly evangelical public interest legal group, for seven years.
This was long before many of my fellow Catholics either knew that the battle for marriage had been engaged, or accepted the idea that Christians could come together, in an authentic ecumenical effort, to engage the cultural struggle.
In addition, well intended “orthodox” (by which I mean classically faithful) Christians and Jews, in trying to defend marriage, have sadly used expressions such as “traditional marriage”, thinking they were helping the effort to defend true marriage. In fact, they were playing into another very skillful rhetorical move. They might as well walk around with a huge bull’s eye on.
The expression has become fuel for the homosexual activist war machine which is intent on redefining “marriage” to include those who engage in homosexual sex with one another for a protracted period of time. The proponents of equal status for homosexual paramours with authentically married heterosexual couples can now simply ask the question “whose tradition”?
They also argue that we Christians are trying to force our “religious” views on the Nation. They follow this by painting the effort to defend authentic marriage as a “religious” bigotry.
Philosophers speak of ontology as the science or philosophy of being, the essence of a thing. For example, a rock is a rock and not a cabbage; a man is a man and a woman is a woman.
Marriage is ontologically between a man and a woman, ordered toward the loving union of the spouses, open to life through the conjugal act in procreation. It also forms the foundation of family.
There can be no such thing as “marriage” between two same sex people engaging in sexual acts, even if they engage in such acts only with one another and for a protracted period of time. This is true no matter what a Court or legislature may try to impose to the contrary.
The late great C. S. Lewis coined the phrase, “verbicide” in his Book entitled “Studies in Words”. The term referred to the murder of a word. In the past, when I wrote concerning the fundamental human rights issue of our age, the right to life, I referred to the current assault against words as “verbal engineering” and maintained that it is always the first step in social, legal, political, and cultural engineering.
We must never forget the power of words. Remember, it was by using the word “choice” to describe the killing of a child in the womb that advocates of legalized abortion (child killing) paved the way for abortion on demand, once universally opposed, and opened the door for it to be heralded as a “right” in America - and throughout the West.
The same revolutionary trajectory is now at work in the move to redefine marriage.
Monogamous Marriage between a man and a woman is the first cell of civil society. Monogamous two parent marriages form the healthiest framework for the rearing of children. This fact was once widely accepted by the overwhelming majority of sane people.
Marriage between a man and a woman was never seen as simply a “religious” idea but a human understanding, a natural institution. Monogamous heterosexual marriages and in tact families formed the basis of civil society. Even those who broke their marriage vows and divorced did not call for scrapping the institution.
Marriage and the institution of family were viewed as promoting the common good of society. Stable marriage between a man and a woman was seen as a “good” that promoted human flourishing. Marriage was viewed as a “good” of persons which promoted and protected the “common good” of the society as a whole by forming the foundation of family, the first society.
Let me be clear. To defend marriage- as what it is and not what cultural revolutionaries seek to redefine it to be - must never be used to justify discrimination against those with homosexual tendencies, desires - or even those who choose to live in homosexual relations.
However, genuine tolerance does not mean the re-ordering of civil society to accommodate these “alternative” lifestyles and the use of the police power of the State to enforce them.
There is a difference between freedom liberty and libertinism.
Yet, that is what the “Human Rights Campaign” seeks to do with their carefully orchestrated legal campaign.
In order to help us to comprehend what is occurring let me borrow a Property Rights Analogy. It does not even come close in terms of the magnitude of the danger we now face because persons and their flourishing are so much more vitally important than the ownership of property. However, it may help to unmask the tactics being used.
We still accept a uniform definition of “private property.” We defend the private ownership of property as a “right”. It forms a basis for our social, economic and political order.
Let’s say that next year; a group among us had decided that “private property” should mean that our land also belongs to the neighbors on adjoining land. Why? Because they decided that approach was better and they changed the definition, first among themselves, and then they had decided to enforce that private opinion upon the broader society.
Next, they insisted that the law recognize their new definition by giving it an equivalent status to the “traditional” notion of private property. Well, we can see where this is headed.
You simply cannot have two distinctly different things being called the same thing. One has to yield to the other.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, speaking on behalf of the “Magisterium” (teaching office) of the Catholic Church, released a definitive document in 2003 concerning the defense of marriage.
It unequivocally addressed growing efforts in some Western nations to redefine the word marriage and thereby eliminate the institution of the family.
In it they said:
“The Church's teaching on marriage and on the complementarity of the sexes, reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason and recognized as such by all the major cultures of the world.
Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose.
No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman, who by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons.
In this way, they mutually perfect each other, in order to cooperate with God in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives.”
True marriage is the most fundamental of all human social institutions. It is a relationship defined by nature itself and protected by the natural law that binds all men and women. It finds its foundation in the order of creation.
Civil institutions do not create marriage nor confer upon anyone a “right” to marry. That includes Supreme Courts.
The institutions of government should, when acting properly, defend marriage against those who would redefine it. As a Catholic, I am seriously embarrassed by some of my fellow Catholics in public life who errantly lead the efforts to grant legal equivalency between homosexual paramours and married couples.
They should be ashamed of themselves! They are wrong in their policy position. They are also being unfaithful to the teaching of their Church. Government has long regulated marriage for the common good.
For example, the ban on polygamy and age requirements were enforced in order to ensure that there was a mature decision at the basis of the Marriage contract.
Heterosexual marriage, procreation, and the nurturing of children form the foundation for the family, and the family forms the foundation of civil society.
In “redefining” marriage, renegade Justices and their complicit public officials imperil the stability of our society and strike a blow against the common good. To confine marriage to heterosexual couples is not discriminatory against homosexual couples because they cannot bring into existence what marriage intends by its very definition.
To “confer” the legal benefits that have been conferred in the past to stable married couples and families to homosexual paramours is very bad public policy. Sadly, those who claim that this is simply a matter of “tolerance” are often the most intolerant.
They insist on forcing their brave new world on the rest of us. Notice how intolerant they are of those who, though respecting the dignity of every person, including homosexuals, also insist that marriage is what it is.
No-one knows for sure how the Supreme Court of California will rule on the case presented to it. However, one thing is certain.
With the ruling slated for June, this issue will be smack dab in the middle of the fall Presidential campaign in America.
It could well be an issue in the pres. campaign.
If the Court rules that the current marriage laws are constitutional, then the status quo will hold for now. If the Court overturns the marriage law in Calif, then that will be two states for the gay activists in trying to force this change through the courts.
For Calif. to have homosexual marriage, it will impact other states more than Mass. has. Mass. has a law that out of state people can’t get married there if the marriage wouldn’t be legal in their home state. But Calif. doesn’t have such a law. If the Calif. court votes to allow homosexual marriage, then presumeably all those marriages in San Francisco four years ago will be legal. People came from over 30 states to go to S.F. for a same sex wedding. If the Calif. court goes this route, it will trigger more lawsuits in up to 30 different states.
Stay tuned.
I'm no legal beagle, so I don't understand how the Court could retroactively legalize an action that was illegal at the time. I don't see why other states would have to recognize the decision of the state Court either.
Other states would not immediately recognize Calif. same sex marriage if the court ruled that way. However, those people will go back to their home states and file lawsuits in those states to try to force other states to recognize same sex marriage from other states. And eventually they want to go to federal court and challenge the Defense of Marriage Act.
But didn't one state court, (and I want to say New York), decide against a similar lawsuit brought by a lesbian couple that was married in Massachusetts?
Well, it doesn't really matter, because we all know what the agenda is, sad to say.
I’ll probably get roasted again for saying it, but this is just one more reason decent people should abandon Kalifornia to the liberals...
Just a little something to reinforce my point...
Strong patriotic Americans will not leave California (no matter how cute you misspell it) but will stay and fight.
And they will fight to protect you as you hide behind whatever is available.
The only point you are making is reinforcing your own propensity to run from danger and let others fight to keep you safe.If it hits Arkansas, I'll move my family back to Texas.I won't have to worry about it there...
134 posted on 03/06/2008 11:01:56 AM PST by Originalist (Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged. - RWR)
To: OriginalistCut and run works for Murtha too.
They will, have no fear. But it will cost you dearly.
Now, stop posting your hyperbole to me. (You don't like hyperbole, remember?)
I think though that California’s supreme court justices can be removed through retention elections. Its been done before and may have to be done again!
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