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QuasiCatholic
Guest
Mary and Joseph were never truly married?
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gianfranco
Guest
- It will increase the already downward tendency of society because it will further the idea that “anything goes in the name of love” and that tradition and history are to be thrown out the window, as it were.
- It will increase the prevalence of gay themes in public school, media, entertainment, and we have already seen how sexually-driven this all tends to be.
- Civil Unions WOULD have allowed for “less STDs, more financial stability, etc. etc.”. But gays were not content to stop at civil unions, because they want to remake history and remake biology in their own image. Modesty is lacking in their agenda.
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gianfranco
Guest
There is no “fear of the other”. Many of us know gay people, are friends with them, have them in our families, and love them. I do not believe gays are intrinsically evil or sinful, and I accept that they can engage in bonds of sexual love and caring.
You have got to get over this delusion that those against marriage “are on the wrong side of history”.
Just because someone started that mantra or meme does not make it true. It is gay marriage which is clearly on the wrong side of history. Civil Unions were the way to go, but there was a profound desire, on the part of some (not all) gay advocates to rewrite history. And like the pied piper, they have piped a tune and are leading the masses over the cliff. One day, future generations will look back at our era as one of folly and lunacy.
Q
QuasiCatholic
Guest
I think your first two points are silly, so I’m going to ignore them.
As for the third – a civil union is exactly the same as a marriage. All the same rights, responsibilities, etc. Arguing over what to call it is silly – from either side – but I tend to lean toward just calling it all marriage for the sake of simplicity.
The government has enough to worry about without printing two different sets of completely identical forms so that some say “marriage license” and some say “civil union license”
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JimG
Guest
Marriage requires the capacity for marital relations: a man and woman who are not incapable of marital relations. A marriage in which a husband and wife do not exercise the marital right is extremely rare. It is called a “Josephite” marriage precisely because of the example of Mary and Joseph. But they were a unique couple, she being the mother of the Second Person of the Trinity.
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gianfranco
Guest
No, the **civil unions **versus **marriage **is a far, far bigger issue, and you know it. “Marriage” is a smokescreen behind which something else lurks with many social and cultural ramifications.I think your first two points are silly, so I’m going to ignore them.
As for the third – a civil union is exactly the same as a marriage. All the same rights, responsibilities, etc. Arguing over what to call it is silly – from either side – but I tend to lean toward just calling it all marriage for the sake of simplicity.
The government has enough to worry about without printing two different sets of completely identical forms so that some say “marriage license” and some say “civil union license”
IIRC, Andrew Sullivan was the one who pushed the idea of “why civil unions are not enough”: And it had nothing to do with efficiency, and everything to do with the desire to rewrite the rules of life, history, and biology.
Sorry, I’m not buying it.
As for my first two points, they are essential and have been misunderstood or deliberately ignored by advocacy.
Q
QuasiCatholic
Guest
What they should really do, if they want to do civil unions, is split religious marriage and civil marriage entirely.
Religious ceremonies = marriage
All civil ceremonies and licensing in general = civil union
Would solve a world of problems.
Religious ceremonies = marriage
All civil ceremonies and licensing in general = civil union
Would solve a world of problems.
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JimG
Guest
The current pope, while Archbishop in Argentina has said that allowing adoption to same sex couples constitutes discrimination against children. They are purposely denied a mother and father, and placed in a abnormal family situation. It will not bring good to society.
The other things I mentioned have already led to a less stable society. Looke at rates of out of wedlock birth rates, female poverty, divorce, abortion. Those things came about as a result of the contraceptive sexual revolution, and led directly to gay marriage, which will make things worse, not better. I recommend a reading of Mary Eberstadt’s book “Adam and Eve After the Pill” for the sad statistics.
As for surrogacy, another immoral practice, here is what one son conceived by surrogacy had to say:
“I don’t care why my parents or my mother did this. It looks to me like I was bought and sold. You can dress it up with as many pretty words as you want. You can wrap it up in a silk freaking scarf. You can pretend these are not your children. You can say it is a gift or you donated your egg to the IM.
But the fact is that someone has contracted you to make a child, give up your parental rights and hand over your flesh and blood child. I don’t care if you think I am not your child, what about what I think! Maybe I know I am your child. When you exchange something for money it is called a commodity. Babies are not commodities. Babies are human beings. How do you think this makes us feel to know that there was money exchanged for us?"
Quoted in the Other Side of Surrogacy Blog
theothersideofsurrogacy.blogspot.com/
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gianfranco
Guest
BBM: Aptly stated.
I have often thought that an issue as pressing or even more pressing than gay marriage is the dramatic increase of the use of ART (Assisted Reproductive Technology) .
This would include sperm donors, egg donors, in vitro fertilization, and surrogacy. In many countries these assisting practices have been outlawed altogether, or regulated to exclude financial contracts, or reserved only for infertile married couples (and barred for singles, older persons, and gay couples).
Gay marriage would be disastrous in its consequences, as it would multiply greatly the use of such practices which are anything but ethical and which as of late have begun to be seen through by more and more decent and reflective people.
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gianfranco
Guest
But this is exactly the crux of it: No one wants civil unions,* least of all gay advocates. *
It does not have the same status or historical resonance as “marriage” does.
History is what it is all about: *Gay marriage is an attempt to insert something which changes all backward and forward. It is revolutionary, and goes beyond the scope of the practical. *Civil Unions might give them all the benefits. But it would not be the historical earthquake they are seeking…
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gianfranco
Guest
Thank you for posting this. I believe that surrogacy - as well as egg and sperm donation - is deeply immoral and even depraved .
These technologies are dressed up as “assistance” by the medical industry. More and more voices such as this son’s will be heard. and it will have a major impact on legislation against these unconstitutional reproductive venues in the future.
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EasterJoy
Guest
No, that would not solve a world of problems, not unless you think it would “solve a world of problems” to just let everything be legal, letting those who think something is bad for society as a whole just lump it and letting those who do not think it is fitting to give status where it is out of place be forced to give it, anyway.
Society has a legitimate reason to encourage natural marriage. It is not just Christians who have a reason to encourage sacramental marriage, but all persons of good will who understand human nature who have a legitimate reason to encourage human marriage in its true form, whether the couples marrying are Christian or not.
This “just make secular marriage into something else, some kind of nebulous contract” is a way of a) denying the value of natural marriage and its unique value to human civilization and b) marginalizing even sacramental marriage as some quaint hold-over notion, belonging not to humanity as a whole but to a backward sect that has no business contributing their sensibilities to society as a whole.
If civil society finally gives in to the persistent attempt to pretend that homosexual couples have relationships that are exactly the same in their nature as the relationships of heterosexual couples, as if giving into this bald-faced lie achieved some sort of justice, then the goods of marriage will be buried to the point of unrecognizability. This is by no means the first assault on natural marriage brought on by changes in secular law, but it is by no means a harmless one, either.
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DAML72
Guest
Why gay marriage? Why not ‘no-fault’ divorce? In my opinion, attacking civil same-sex unions without talking about no-fault divorce is hypocritical. Heck, if we want all people to conform to Catholicism, then we should do away with all civil divorce.
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EasterJoy
Guest
“Conform to Catholicism”? Do you really think the Catholic Church is the only entity that sees no-fault divorce for the disaster that it is? There are a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with Christianity for thinking no-fault divorce was a bad idea.
If a business contract had a no-fault escape clause such that one party to the contract could walk out on the other for no reason other than they didn’t want to be a party to the contract any more, including the truth that they had found a new partner they thought would be more advantageous to them personally, what kind of contract would that be?
As for the charge of hypocrisy, how are you managing in your quest to take on all the evils and follies of the world simultaneously?
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EasterJoy
Guest
The idea that people who are in relationships of mutual care might have legal structures to help their households is one that the Archbishop of Portland here in Oregon said the Church could get behind. The homosexual activists in our state most unequivocally did not want any form of civil union in which a sexual relationship was not a component. They wanted their sexual relationships to be treated as the same as heterosexuals, but at the very least as more worthy of societal support than adult mutual care relationships not predicated on sex.
When I heard that, then I knew this whole “people who love each other ought to be able to care for each other” bit was a smokescreen, and a rather cynical one at that. There were plenty of people who wanted to be able to care for each other that these “activists for love” did not want on their bandwagon, because helping other people to love and care for each other would have set back their quest to have their sexual relationships normalized and celebrated. Yet they criticize religious people for “forcing their views on others.” It’s too rich.
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gianfranco
Guest
This is the very crux of it. Well stated.
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gianfranco
Guest
Most people who are against the gay marriage agenda also are against no-fault divorce, assisted reproduction, etc., because they are all aspects of the same wave of cultural decline. Conversely, people who are for no-fault divorce, etc. usually also support gay marriage for the same reasons. Both trends appear at the same historical time and owe their origins to similar causes.
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Peebo
Guest
Well…according to an article I was reading in Our Sunday Visitor…59% of American Catholics support same sex marriage…the least support 23% was among white Evangelical Protestants…maybe we Catholics need to be more pro active in evangelizing fellow Catholics as to what the church teaches on homosexuality and “gay” marriage before we who oppose it get accused of being a bigoted minority within the Catholic Church…those who are against the Catholic Church will look for anyway they can to show it as being “out of touch” with reality.
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gianfranco
Guest
If support for gay marriage is that high within the American Catholic Church, it reveals that people are probably not very serious about Catholic teachings - or at least they are confused about them.
With regard to what someone had said about no-fault divorce, it is true that gay marriage is only symptom, consequence and incident of a much larger shift in the culture, which has been growing apace for decades. This is why people who are socially liberal regarding divorce, abortions assisted reproduction, pornography, etc. will almost surely be pro-gay marriage, while those who see all of these as symptoms of decay will be contra gay marriage, because they see it as one more step downward and one more false ideology.
I read an article by a lesbian who argued that civil unions could never be enough and that marriage for gays was the only way to go. She pointed out that if your partner is in an accident and you show up at the hospital and say you are in a civil union, there will be a lengthy process of going through your legal papers, but if you simply say, “My wife was in an accident.” they will let you right in. Now, whether or not any of this is true I cannot say, but I can say that it is obvious that “gay marriage legal in all 50 states” would for gay people provide a psychological balm insofar as they would finally feel their sexual relating had been given the stamp of “normalcy” and made as American as apple pie.
With regard to what someone had said about no-fault divorce, it is true that gay marriage is only symptom, consequence and incident of a much larger shift in the culture, which has been growing apace for decades. This is why people who are socially liberal regarding divorce, abortions assisted reproduction, pornography, etc. will almost surely be pro-gay marriage, while those who see all of these as symptoms of decay will be contra gay marriage, because they see it as one more step downward and one more false ideology.
I read an article by a lesbian who argued that civil unions could never be enough and that marriage for gays was the only way to go. She pointed out that if your partner is in an accident and you show up at the hospital and say you are in a civil union, there will be a lengthy process of going through your legal papers, but if you simply say, “My wife was in an accident.” they will let you right in. Now, whether or not any of this is true I cannot say, but I can say that it is obvious that “gay marriage legal in all 50 states” would for gay people provide a psychological balm insofar as they would finally feel their sexual relating had been given the stamp of “normalcy” and made as American as apple pie.
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Peebo
Guest
Or it shows that Catholics are not as committed to the truth of Gods word as our fellow Evangelical Protestants,why not
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