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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

by Monsignor James C. Brunner

Faith Points

Adam and Steve?

Canada has ratified same-sex unions as valid. Vermont says they are as good as married. Massachusetts may soon side with Canada . Why should anyone care about same-sex marriage? What does Adam and Steve’s marriage have to do with Adam and Eve’s?

 What is a marriage anyhow? Is it, as some would have it, just a grouping of persons who love one another?

 Perhaps the question can be answered by asking another. Is property important? Of course it is. I need property for my shelter, nutrition, my life, and my freedom. I must have shelter and food or I will die. Furthermore if I have these under my control I am free to dispose of myself as I see fit. If you have the only available housing and food I can have access to it only on conditions that you set. I am in effect your servant, even your slave. With things I need under my control I am under no constraint to do your will. If I do it, I do it freely. As human beings we are free on the inside because we have free wills that are not bound to act in certain ways as are animals. We are free on the outside because we own and therefore control whatever sustains our physical lives.

 Private property is so essential that we make laws to protect it. Laws forbid theft, the unjust taking of property. Laws forbid me to destroy or damage your property. These laws are negative ways of saying that private property is an important right worthy of protection. Laws oblige me to comply with contracts that I have made to exchange my goods for others that I need or desire. The prospect of acquiring more property is an incentive for me to become an entrepreneur and start a business that produces more property and services and thus promote the economy.

 Just as property is not an invention of government although government is necessary for protecting ownership and fostering commerce, marriage is not an invention of government but also needs legal protection. Marriage has in all cultures, in all religions, and for all of history been defined as a union of a man and a woman entered into for the purpose of producing offspring. Marriage was considered the ideal place to bring forth children and to bring them up under the guidance of a mother and a father.

 The US has had a decades-long experiment in single-parent families and the results are by any objective standard miserable. Unions not consisting of biological parents and their children do not lead to a flowering of freedom but to civic and social breakdown. These families lag in average income, wealth accumulation, education and school performance, health expectations, job attainment and impulse control particularly anger and sex. They soar in such negative measures as child abuse and especially fatal child abuse, expulsion from school, welfare dependence, early infant death, drug abuse, early sex experimentation, and suicide. It would be good to recognize that the experiment has been unsuccessful and call it off.

 Since a mother and father are so essential to children’s well-being governments have made laws to strengthen and protect marriage. There used to be laws against divorce but unfortunately these have been abandoned with the result that nearly half the marriages in the US end in divorce thus creating more single-parent families. There used to be laws against adultery which undermines marriages. There are still laws against prostitution but it is questionable how long they can stand in view of the recent Supreme Court decision that private sexual activity is a constitutional right. These negative laws were a way of protecting the institution that gave children a father and a mother to rear them. There are laws protecting the custodial rights of parents and enforcing parental responsibility for support of offspring. The purpose of remaining laws on marriage is to protect this institution which society requires for its continuation. Societies need babies and babies need committed mothers and fathers.

 What would happen if private property were re-defined? Suppose a society would decide that there should be no individual ownership of productive goods and that all property belongs to the government. All persons would receive goods for their needs and be expected to contribute to these goods according to their abilities. This experiment occurred and it was known as Communism. We know what happened. Citizens became literally the slaves of the state since it controlled all the goods necessary for their survival. It also reduced incentives that fire entrepreneurship and led to a kind of equality in poverty and misery except for the governing class.

 Now we are being asked to redefine marriage. It should no longer be considered the domain of a man and a woman who remain together for raising their children. It should be any sort of union of two or more loving persons of one sex or of both. We are being asked to redefine marriage so that it would include homosexual unions. What harm would there be in that? There would be a complete decoupling of marriage from children because homosexual unions of themselves cannot produce any. It would be saying that it is not essential for children to have mothers and fathers. It would be asserting that raising children without mothers and fathers is not an unfortunate development but a good to be promoted. It would be saying that the sexual preferences of elders trump the need of children for fathers and mothers. Just as Communism tore the heart out of private ownership laws, ratifying homosexual unions would tear the heart out of marriage which has an essential orientation to children and their being reared by a mother and a father.

 How did we get to the point of being asked or required to recognize homosexual marriages? A lot of the blame goes to Christians. The bible in condemning all forms of sexual expression except that exercised in marriage teaches clearly that sex is for marriage and that marriage has an essential orientation to procreation. But children can be a burden and couples resorted to contraception. Justification of contraception logically entails the proposition that purely recreational sex is morally permissible. Were that not so we would have to condemn contraception because its very purpose is to enable purely recreational sex. If purely recreational sex is morally defensible there is no principled way of condemning fornication, adultery, sadomasochism, homosexuality, or bestiality. All these are recreational sex. So Christian couples opened the doors to homosexual marriages when they severed the link of sex to children and tried to justify contraception. Are there Christian couples who resent having homosexual unions regarded as a normal and acceptable lifestyle thrust upon their children? Well, you assisted in bringing it about by your approval of purely recreational sex. It is at least inconsistent if not hypocritical to demand such sex for yourselves and not allow it to others. Gay activists are living your principles. All sex that is not open to children and their rearing is evil. Once you allow separation of sex from child-bearing and child-rearing you cannot logically condemn any consensual sex as evil.

 (Printed September, 2003)