yes, thank you.
Personally, I think that the answer to questions about gay sex and gay marriage are NOT sociological or psychological but moral. I hate to sound like one of the fundamentalist sunday school teachers from my youth, but God said it, I believe it. I think that when Catholics allow the gay agenda to set the parameters of the discussion, and move it outside of the realm of Morals, holiness, chastity, and outside of the Catechism, then we are giving up too much.
This is quite an interesting thread! Although certain posters are quite contradictory when it comes to being catholic. Or is it they just want to ‘seem’ to be Catholic. Michelleds raised an issue which caught my eye. She raises the issue of whether morality has a sociological aspect to it.I certainly agree with michelleds when she says “God said it”. Gee, he even wrote it down on some stones and then later got others to write it down too!
However, what many seem to miss is that history has also ‘said it’ and to that extent the issues of homosexuality and gay ‘marriage’ are sociological issues
and moral issues both. If we examine what morality actually is, we must indeed can arrive at sociolgical reasons for our moral deliberations. That may have a very secular ring to it, but morality pertains to the temporal world as much as it does to the sacred, because, after all, morality dictates how men live and behave towards one another. Morality regulates our behaviour on earth as much as it does to reward us in our relationship with God.
The question is “how does gay marriage harm society?” The question presupposes that there is harm involved in granting the concept of “marriage” to same sex people. If that were not the case, then there would be no point to the question. Having read through this thread (and a lot of others), the arguments in favour of gay ‘marriage’ are very few and basically boil down to one major point, which is the granting of so called ‘equal rights’ to certain individuals. However, the argument in favour of this point falls down simply because equating the marriage of two people of the same sex with marriage between two people of a different sex is the invention of something totally new, never before done in human history and it actually goes past the granting of equal rights to the point of granting special rights. The removal of a bar to same sex marriage will make a certain group of people more equal. If such special rights are granted, then there can be no limit to the rights of an individual. Societies cannot survive when this happens. History shows us. History shows us that the removal of limits to personal behaviour breaks the common morality of a society. This common morality is the glue which holds society together and the breaking of it means that society is nothing more than a grouping of people each of whom are chasing their own desires and ignoring the common good. There can no longer be a common good. The great British jurist
Lord Patrick Devlin wrote a book called
The Enforcement of Morals and in it he argued that ideas about the way citizens should behave are just as important as ideas about how a society should be structured. He wrote -
“…without shared ideas on politics, morals, and ethics no society can exist…Societies disintegrate from within more frequently than they are broken up by external pressures. There is disintegration when no common morality is observed and history shows that the loosening of moral bonds is often the first stage of disintegration, so that society is justified in taking the same steps to preserve its moral code as it does to preserve its government and other essential institutions.”
Devlin was of the opinion that to preserve itself, a society had a right to enforce its moral code. He posed the question of whether it mattered if a man went home from work and every night got himself blind drunk. His answer was “no”. He then asked does it matter if half the population went home and got drunk every night, would it harm society. The answer is an obvious “yes”. He was illustrating the point that there needs to be limits on how people behave, or society will indeed fragment and fracture. Devlin was of the opinion that historical research shows that when societies loosen their moral boundaries, they disintegrate. he gave examples and drew on the research efforts of others.
In the 1960s Devlin took part in a very famous debate with an equally famous Professor of Legal Philosophy and a Utilitarian by the name of H.L.A.Hart. Devlin argued that morals have a public aspect and therefore the public has a right to enforce a common morality. hart, on the other hand, pushed the decidely Utilitarian argument that minorities should be protected from the desires and demands of majorities. At the time, observers thought Hare had won the debate. Time and experience, however, are proving Devlin to have been correct.
**Cont.d **
