What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal
if...
Get Rid of that Worthless
Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues
Prior to Voting
|
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by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
Toppling Dominos
Standing dominos on end and toppling them fascinates many people. On one day more than 4 million were toppled in the Netherlands. The phenomenon is a good visual for philosophical principles. Once a principle is set in motion it begins a process much like the toppling dominos. If the line of dominos extends for miles it may not be possible to see where the path leads without walking to the end. Often people do not see the ultimate outcome of a principle or its rejection because they concentrate on what is immediately before them and do not explore the consequences flowing from the principle. .
This is certainly the case with the principles undergirding marriage. For millennia most societies have coupled sexual activity with children and marriage. The coupling is reasonable inasmuch as sexual activity over time normally results in the conception of children and, since children need parenting for many years following birth, marriage affords the children the benefit of being reared by their biological parents. Experience and research show that that is the best possible situation for children. That is why the family has been the foundational social block of all known societies.
The notion that marriage is for producing and rearing children resulted in other principles. Fornication or premarital sex was generally condemned because, although it produced children (probably more than the practitioners wanted) casual sex contacts did not necessarily involve a lifetime commitment of the parents to raise the children. Marriage brought on condemnation of adultery, sexual activity by a married person with someone other than his or her legitimate spouse, because adultery undermined marriage and produced single-parent families with their attendant social pathology.
It was understood that the sex act was joined to the production of children not in the sense that every sex act resulted in the conception of a child but since many of them did sex was to be avoided until there was a support system in place for the rearing of children. That is why sex acts were never regarded as merely pleasurable activity undertaken for mere gratification. Sex was a way of expressing love but its foundational purpose was the production of new members of the human race.
The sexual discipline in the Bible also presupposed that the purpose of sexual activity was children and not merely enjoyment of the participants because it condemns activities that are pleasurable but separated from children and marriage. The Bible condemns homosexuality in Lev. 18:22, adultery in Exod. 20:14, fornication, adultery, prostitution, and homosexuality in I Cor. 6:9-10.
If sex were a mere plaything as modern secularists maintain these prohibitions would make no sense because all of them are pleasurable. Secularists believe that the desire for sexual sensations is sufficient justification to engage in sexual acts. These acts may be accompanied by commitment between the participants but they believe that there is no reason that they must be.
Contraception practiced to avoid the burden of children broke the nexus between children and sex. Sex can have two basic purposes: procreation and recreation. In contraception procreation is avoided as far as possible and the purpose that remains is recreation. To justify contraception therefore one must adopt the principle that purely recreational sex is morally permissible. That undercuts completely the biblical discipline on sex because the new principle makes homosexuality, fornication, and adultery permissible since they are recreational. Once contraception is accepted there are no principled grounds for forbidding any sort of consensual sexual activity. Parents who contracept are not being consistent when they try to dissuade their teenage daughters from engaging in the same sort of recreational sex that they practice.
Contraception toppled another domino in leading to the acceptance of abortion. Abortion became necessary to make up for contraceptive failure.
The next domino to fall was a divorce of sex and marriage. If sex can be purely for enjoyment without a need to have the act open to children, then marriage was no longer a moral requirement for sex or for children. Hence we now have an increasing number of couples who cohabit without benefit of marriage.
The divorce of marriage and children and the approval of purely recreational sex are causing another domino to fall. Many would like to legalize same sex marriages and give them the same status as heterosexual marriages. Since children are not a necessary component of marriage and recreational sex is morally acceptable according to the new morality there are no principled grounds for not legalizing “marriages” of homosexuals. Heterosexual marriages used to be promoted because society needed babies and marriage was seen as essential for the continuation of the society. Now that marriages are divorced from parenthood they would seem to deserve no special protection and marriage should not be denied to same sex couples. Once gay marriages are legal presentation of homosexuality as normal will become a compulsory part of the education of students in public school.
The next step in the process, the next falling domino, is multipartner marriage which has already occurred, as many of these aberrations do, in Holland. A married couple presented themselves for a second marriage involving them and a female friend that they had met through a chat room. Both women in this new three-way marriage were bisexual. What gay marriage is to homosexuals, group marriage is to bisexuals.
We might call the triple Dutch marriage polygamy but it is better identified as polyamory, loving relationships among more than two people. Polyamory will be the next domino to fall. It will not just be a triad but will consist of any combination of partner-numbers and sexual orientation with no upper limit on the number of persons. Two bisexual men married to two women could merge the two marriages into a foursome. If ever gay marriage is legally accepted it will be difficult to withhold legal recognition of polyamory. Children born in these groupings will have a confusing assortment of parents and if the group splits determining visitation rights will be a nightmare. It matters little because all of these arrangements are not concerned about child welfare but are accommodations for the sexual proclivities of adults.
Perhaps the final domino in the series will be interspecies marriages.
As we stand aghast and wonder how society got to this point it is easy to understand the sequence. Contraception led to separation of children from sex and from marriage. It also furnished the rationale for abortion, which is looked upon as backup contraception. Since the possibility of children is no longer a necessary component for marriage and recreational sex is morally permissible, then there is no reason to deny marital rights to homosexuals. If the institution of marriage is flexible enough to accommodate homosexuals it should also extend to bisexuals, leading to group marriages of three or four or more persons in polyamory. If we want to explain what caused this last domino to fall we have to start at the beginning of the line of dominos: contraception.
Persons may think that contraception is an acceptable and necessary solution to their problem of undesirable offspring. It is really the start of a chain of events that will result in a radical redefinition of marriage. If persons who contracept do not like the current societal developments they have only themselves to blame. They were the ones who toppled the first domino.
(Printed April, 2006)
St. Mary's Church Pastor & Vicar
