O
OraLabora
Guest
When SSM was legalized in Canada I wrote to my MP and the PM, against it.
That train has clearly left the station in my country, so I won’t waste much time on the issue. I am Catholic and there is no such thing as SSM in the Church and I think that is a holy and good thing. It ain’t going to happen in my lifetime in the Church. Outside the Church… well I can’t force Catholic morality on non-Catholics.
The abortion train has already left the station in Canada as well. These battles cannot be fought by imposing our moral world view on non-Catholics. These battles can only be fought in the arena of evangelization, one soul at a time.
I am not per se against same-sex couples enjoying legal benefits similar to marriage. It would be unfair for example for a long-term homosexual couple to not be able to transfer pension rights upon death of a partner, potentially leaving the survivor destitute. On the other hand I would also like to see that privilege extended to non-sexual dependent relationships. The example closest to home for me was my late mother. When my father died in 1971 (I was 12 at the time), our economic straights were fairly dire, we only had a small life insurance policy to live on, and my mother was in ill health, had only a grade 10 education, and unemployable. My father was not wealthy so there was no inheritance. So we moved in with my spinster aunt (my mother’s sister) to make ends meet. My aunt had a decent job with a pension. As it turns out, my mother died in 2001, my aunt a year later in 2002. They had lived together for much longer than my mother had been married, 30 years vs. 16 years of marriage.
It was far more probable that my aunt would die first as she was 9 years older than my mother. That’s not what happened, but if she did die first, my mother would not have been entitled to a survivor’s pension, and would have been left fairly destitute (except of course for the fact that as her son I would not have allowed that to happen, but I digress).
My mother and aunt, for all intents and purposes formed a normal, loving couple except in one dimension: their relationship was sibling-to-sibling, and was non-sexual. There is no reason why a sexual relationship has to be a prerequisite for legal rights to exist between two people.