Are you sure that you read Aquinas??. To Aquinas, the very point of secular government was to make manifest the Natural Law. A State only had the authority to enact laws that had their foundation in Natural Law. Any other law was, by definition, an unjust law.
We see that again in Romans 13. The purpose of government was to reward the good and to punish that which is evil. But the State has no claim to the very definition of what acts are evil and which are good. That is province of the Church as the infallible guide to Faith and Morals, and Christ, Aquinas and Augustine were all very clear on that!!
The article
at this link may assist your understanding of a truly traditional Catholic (as opposed to traditional Protestant) point ov view. I say Protestant because your position may lean more towards Protestantism than traditional Catholicism on this topic.
The Catholic view on the role of the State…
*Let’s grant that public acts of homosexual sex are wrong. Does it follow that the state ought to forbid them?
It doesn’t follow automatically — at least, not for a Catholic. The Catholic view has never been that it is the duty or role of the state to forbid acts because they are wrong.
In fact, it’s easy to find counter-examples. Take prostitution, for instance:
Augustine was clear that prostitution was gravely wrong, but he argued against banning it.
Aquinas agreed. He wrote at great length on the inherent evil and harmful consequences of prostitution before asserting that, nevertheless, it should not be illegal.
For Aquinas, the primary purpose of civil law is not to reform people or to lead them to behave morally; that is a matter for the grace of God. Civil law can only have indirect, supporting role here. The primary purpose of civil law is to preserve social order and the common good. Things should be prohibited only if the common good requires it.
Now, in Aquinas’ view, prostitution was very damaging to the community. But he shared the prevailing opinion of his time that, sinful and harmful as it was, prostitution provided a necessary outlet for the sexual energy of men who lacked the social or financial standing to become betrothed, and the moral fibre to practice chastity. There was a large class of young or poor men who, if they could not visit prostitutes, would tend to engage in more disruptive and harmful wrongs — rapes, seductions, debauches, threats to family, property and social relationships. The common good therefore required the state to accommodate prostitution.
Augustine’s reasoning was slightly different. Laws, he felt, will not be respected or enforced unless they enjoy at least the assent, if not the active support, of a critical mass of the community (which, he considered, a ban on prostitution would not). It is damaging to society and to the rule of law to make laws which are not going to be respected or enforced. Therefore they should not be made.
So, although their reasoning was different, Augustine and Aquinas both agreed that showing that a particular act was wrong is not, in itself, a justification for outlawing it.
The views of Luther and Calvin…
It was the Protestants, notably Luther and Calvin who argued that the state has a duty to criminalise prostitution (and indeed adultery). The community should be Christian, they felt, and the state, as an emanation of the community, should also be Christian.
They were fully aware that laws attempting to legislate personal morality could not always be enforced, but they did not see this as an objection. Luther in particular argued that, if prostitution and adultery, when criminalised, went on anyway, but underground — well, at least the state would not be complicit. This was better than the state appearing to condone immorality.
For Luther, in other words, unworkability or unenforceability was not an objection. It was important that the law should say the right, Christian thing, even if that did not result in the right, Christian thing being done.
The Netherlands is an interesting country…
This state of affairs continued until after the Second World War, since when two things have happened.
First, Catholics came to outnumber Protestants (and still do, although both are now outnumbered by people of no religion).
Secondly, the Dutch abandoned social conservatism for social liberalism, at least so far as legislation is concerned.
It would be too simple to say that the first change led to the second. History is usually more complex. But I do not think it is a coincidence that the eclipse of Calvinism has been accompanied by the disappearance of a Calvinist attitude to the legislation of morality.
Common good versus personal morality…
That is why, today, the discussion about the legality of cruising in the Vondelpark proceeds with little or no reference to the intrinsic morality of casual sex. Various social surveys show that most Netherlanders do in fact disapprove strongly of casual sex, but they don’t see that it is the role of the state to forbid it. Thus the discussion about cruising in the Vondelpark proceeds along other lines.
Does cruising injure or harm other users of the park? The answer, obviously, is yes; they don’t like it, and feel excluded by it.
Can we avoid that harm by criminalising cruising? No. That’s been tried; it hasn’t worked.
Is there any good, then, served by criminalising cruising? Not enough good, it seems, to justify criminalising it.
It may be ironic, but this debate seem to me to proceed along classically Catholic lines, focussing on the common good and largely ignoring the issue of personal morality. *
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