Why don’t you just go ahead and tell them they are sinners who are going to hell like others on this site would do. That is something I have had to get used to from people that claim to be Catholic who are suppose to point out all the sins of those around them…
You don’t have to get used to it, but I doubt many of those people care how you feel or would want anything to do with you anyway. You can refer to them anyway you want and I am sure they will respond anyway they want. Your not going to change their minds and it doesn’t sound like you want to be civil, so I would limit the amount of people you know and stick around people like yourself.
You do not get it, whatsoever. This is not about my feelings and this is not about condemning someone. It is not even about changing their minds. It is about words as fundamental as man, woman, husband, and wife retaining their particular meanings.
Consider what C.S. Lewis had to say about the word “Christian”:
*Far deeper objections may be felt–and have been expressed–against my use of the word Christian to mean one who accepts the common doctrines of Christianity. People ask: “Who are you, to lay down who is, and who is not a Christian?” or “May not many a man who cannot believe these doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of Christ, than some who do?” Now this objection is in one sense very right, very charitable, very spiritual, very sensitive. It has every amiable quality except that of being useful. We simply cannot, without disaster, use language as these objectors want us to use it. I will try to make this clear by the history of another, and very much less important, word.
The word gentleman originally meant something recognizable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone “a gentleman” you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not “a gentleman” you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there now is in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said-so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully-“Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John? They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man “a gentleman” in this new, refined sense becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is a “gentleman” simply becomes a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object. (A “nice” meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose*.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.
Yet this is what I hear, all of the time:
Who are you, to lay down who is, and who is not married? If I don’t agree that two people of the same sex can marry, then I am a controlling bigot who wants to send everyone to hell! If I don’t agree that it is quite possible for a husband to have a husband or a wife to have a wife–
no, no, that if a man takes a man instead of a woman, it is exactly the same thing, with no distinction to be made between them!!–I am either a Neanderthal or a Pharisee because I do not agree that it is even possible for two people of the same sex to marry.
I guess that attitude is what I’m going to have to live with, if I won’t bow down to this, which is to say if I won’t capitulate to the attitude that two men or two women can have exactly the same thing as a man and a woman. If I do not deny the unique nature of the marital bond or also refuse to call a marriage a marriage when it is a bad marriage, then I deserve to be shunned by polite society.
If I do not give in, I will give insult and be deemed worthy of insult, even by fellow Catholics, and that is the way it is. There is not much to be done except lay low. It is currently defined in my state that marriage can only exist between a man and woman, and we are already there.
Oh, well. Thank you all for clearing that up for me.
