Changing legal definition of marriage

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I’m not saying you can’t work to change the same-sex marriage law. But until that happens, we will be living with it. If you are in California, you’ve been living with it for a few years now.

I was trying to figure out why it would be important to go to the mall and see who is LGBT. Perhaps you are thinking of civil rights as applying to visibly identifiable minorities. I can only speak for myself, but that does not seem important. LGBT people are minorities whether we can see them or not.
 
Of course reality is reality, the problem is some realities cannot easily be defined as male or female and the Church does not yet seem to have a black and white answer on some things.
Just as lumberJack stated.

Do we decide gender on external morphology or dna when they contradict each other at birth? Some perfectly externally formed women are in fact males at dna level.
Should they be surgically made males externally?
Can they marry? As which gender?
 
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I did used to know a hermaphrodite who played organ for the local Catholic church and seemed to be somewhat religious. She (her choice of name/ pronoun) wasn’t trying to get married though, and I didn’t know her well enough to engage her in discussion of whether this would have been an issue had she wished to marry in the Church.
 
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BlackFriar said:
Do we decide gender on external morphology or dna when they contradict each other at birth?
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By gender, do you mean sex, or something different?

I would note that instances of unclear sex arise, but are quite rare. The sex of the vast majority of persons suffering a dysphoria or desire to “transition” is not in doubt.
 
We are talking at level of a principle, rarity has no bearing.
What is the principle for deciding whether they can marry.
And if so as a man or a woman?

Its a fairly clear problematic.
 
EWTN has this. It seems to presume that you can classify everybody as predominantly one gender or the other. I don’t think this is a new idea as I’ve read some similar statements in or relating to medieval canon law, to the extent medieval canon law discussed this issue at all, which it apparently didn’t very much.

http://www.ewtn.com/v/experts/showmessage.asp?number=361497

I am not sure if the determination is as simple as presented however.
 
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I am not sure how authoritative the article is but it seems to oscillate between two principles.
  1. Leave it to the medical experts to determine
  2. They should decide on gonadal identity in cases where true hermaphroditism does not exist.
In the above case gonadal identity is male (testes where ovaries are).
However we have perfect female morphology and there is no hope of procreative male function from my understanding. The surgery would have to be complete start from scratch as there is no male ambiguity to enhance in the first place.

I would think it is far from immoral to leave nature in place and identify the child as female. If the child was to be identified as male then surgery would be morally required and acceptable at any later stage in life.

Thats my take.
 
I think leaving what God created alone is by far the least complicated way to go about it, unless there is an actual medical reason to mess with it (such as, you can’t urinate, or there is an internal organ strangling another, etc.)
 
And shortly after Martin Luther King Day, a black woman wrote in an article in a Detroit newspaper that black people are still not free. A sexual minority should not change the definition of marriage through lobbying, the media or judicial fiat.
 
It’s very black and white. And radical feminists helped lay the groundwork regarding what marriage and family and gender means to them.

"I. THE QUESTION

"2. Recent years have seen new approaches to women’s issues. A first tendency is to emphasize strongly conditions of subordination in order to give rise to antagonism: women, in order to be themselves, must make themselves the adversaries of men. Faced with the abuse of power, the answer for women is to seek power. This process leads to opposition between men and women, in which the identity and role of one are emphasized to the disadvantage of the other, leading to harmful confusion regarding the human person, which has its most immediate and lethal effects in the structure of the family.

“A second tendency emerges in the wake of the first. In order to avoid the domination of one sex or the other, their differences tend to be denied, viewed as mere effects of historical and cultural conditioning. In this perspective, physical difference, termed sex, is minimized, while the purely cultural element, termed gender, is emphasized to the maximum and held to be primary. The obscuring of the difference or duality of the sexes has enormous consequences on a variety of levels. This theory of the human person, intended to promote prospects for equality of women through liberation from biological determinism, has in reality inspired ideologies which, for example, call into question the family, in its natural two-parent structure of mother and father, and make homosexuality and heterosexuality virtually equivalent, in a new model of polymorphous sexuality.”

Full document:

http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/c...con_cfaith_doc_20040731_collaboration_en.html
 
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BlackFriar said:
We are talking at level of a principle, rarity has no bearing.

What is the principle for deciding whether they can marry.

And if so as a man or a woman?

Its a fairly clear problematic.
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In respect of the tiny numbers where sex is unclear, I agree. We just need to avoid implying that there is a problem in a broader set of situations.
 
Agree. But surely there is nothing special about the word m-a-r-r-I-a-g-e itself. In other languages it is not spelt marriage. Secular society can change the meanings of word but it’ll never change the concept as you suggested. My original question was why fight the secular society on the conceptual front when we can can deploy a semantic strategy by just change or create a new word that has the original concept. Afterall, the Old Testament has no specific Hebrew word for marriage or “to marry”. It usually uses phrases such as “take x as wife” to mean marry. And the Hebrew word “take” is used in many other contexts which does not mean marry.
 
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I agree, in which case the child is to be considered female.

Would you deny this child’s right to choose male sexual reassignment surgery later in life to match his dna/testes and be named accordingly.
 
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I think said child, when he is an adult and is facing this situation, should discuss this with his pastor, spiritual director, etc. There may also be medical health considerations, as I mentioned. This is a very individual situation and I doubt there will be a one size fits all answer.
 
And should said well trained priest/advisor on objective grounds deny this adult person’s right to choose male sexual reassignment surgery to match his dna/testes and be named accordingly?

If you posit a discussion is possible with no clear objective outcome already predetermined then you are agreeing with me surely.

Obviously all the other prudential considerations apply - but why bother mentioning them if the objective choice is not there on moral grounds to start with.

Why be coy in explicitly affirming or denying the moral principle I have articulated?
 
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It seems to me the world is the one that’s wrong, not the Church.
 
A child? No. They are kids. Nobody needs the permission of Catholics to do anything.
 
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