Why? Because marriage is a fundamental right and gender discrimination is wrong. And cruelty against homosexuals, who have been persecuted throughout history, is wrong. Because the state cannot legislate morality. Because churches should understand that legislating morality is not effective, but rather, preaching the Gospel is.
The tide is irreversible and marriage equality is inevitable.
The funny thing is, it hasn’t made a difference in our lives!
**
So is the Catholic Church ready to give up yet? ** Or does it want to be known as the church that hatefully opposed gay rights until it died away into irrelevance, into the ash heap of history?
There is so much wrong with your series of polemical posts that it is difficult to know where to begin taking apart and sorting through what can only be called 'piled deeper and higher," as if by burying anyone who holds views in any way distinct from yours they will simply be intimidated into submission by the monumental size of your contribution.
In dissecting this ‘mound,’ perhaps it would be a start to look at only two of your ‘points’ more closely.
- Regarding your last comment that the Church has “hatefully” opposed gay rights. Can you supply any evidence that the opposition has been at all hateful? Simply being opposed to some perspective on a key moral issue is not sufficient to qualify a person or group as hateful. This question, to be answered at all meaningfully, is tied to conceptions of ‘good’ and what constitutes human well-being.
The fact that liberal activists (and perhaps you yourself) differ from the Church on what well-being entails does not, by itself, mean the Church is being “hateful” by voicing an alternative viewpoint. In fact, resorting to calling opposing viewpoints “hateful,” is sufficient to make me wonder whether you have anything meaningful to add to the debate since your advance strategy seems merely to shut down and shut up anyone who disagrees with you.
- On the point that allowing gay marriage “has not made a difference in our lives,” it seems that you have missed the point entirely. The move to permit gay marriage is symptomatic of a larger issue. The issue concerns what might best be depicted as an “unmooring” from an ancient and, up until the past two hundred years, assumed conception of the Tao or “good.” Up until very recently, it was understood in the deeper regions of the human psyche and by virtually all religions and peoples that the guiding principle underlying the universe was ‘good order’ and that all interactions naturally tended towards teleological end goods. There is a kind of natural ordering to the universe that generally brings about ‘the good,’ or, at least, that there is an inherent order to things that make them tend towards good ends.
In the past 200 years, and Nietzsche was one of the first to put the phenomenon into a descriptive summary, human beings, by the sheer overwhelming power of technology and will have reconfigured that understanding and have made human will itself the originating principle of change. In other words, we have taken upon ourselves the authority and ‘right’ to determine our own nature and the nature of the good. The idea of determining your own sexual orientation is simply a foray into as yet unperturbed waters regarding what human beings can “get away with” regarding defining the nature of reality. It is in ‘overthrowing’ all the vestiges of ‘nature’ and shackles of natural law that human beings will at last be free to determine our own destiny - at least that is the overarching principle behind the MYTH of the supremacy of human will.
What is interesting is that you have bought into this myth entirely. To the point, in fact, that you claim the Church will be rendered to the trash heap of history if it opposes what can only be called this adolescent ‘quest.’ Obviously you don’t know history, nor do you understand the nature of the Tao.
Human beings do not have the power, nor the authority, nor the wisdom to determine the nature of humanity. We are in for a very rough ride if we continue down this road of ‘self-determination.’ The past 100 years have been the bloodiest and most insane in history. Only a simpleton. would stand here and proclaim a time when we butcher our own offspring by the millions and audaciously proclaim the right of individuals to treat the act by which new life is brought into existence as nothing worthy of special attention or protection.
Your question, ought better to be phrased as, “What MORE harm can it do?” but I doubt that any further harm will even register on your harm detection meter seeing as you have entirely missed the outcome thus far.
We are in a moral mess, one in which only more sex, more drugs, more alcohol and more toys ( and in increasing larger doses ) will serve to shelter us from the empty delirium of our current state.
