Let me clarify my point, then. What I’m saying is that our political opinions have no MORE value than the political opinions of those who are not Catholic, even if there are fewer of them. The atheist down the block has the exact same rights I do, and if I want him to respect and fight for my rights, I’m going to respect and fight for his.
I also believe that you can tell a lot about a majority by the way it treats a minority. You don’t convert anyone by force or rule of law. You convert people by appealing to their hearts and their intellect.
Except, of course, that the law is designed to “convert” actions, not beliefs, and it does so in a thousand ways. Interestingly, for many in any society, the citizenry often identifies legality with morality. This tends to “shape” the moral sense of a society. To the extent that the libertarianism of both liberals and “libertarians” in this society affects the laws, it also shapes the moral sense.
Why, for instance, do people in this society consider their homes sacrosanct from many forms of government intrustion, and consider it “immoral” for them to be considered otherwise? It’s precisely because Anglo-Saxon law has long declared it so. At the same time, it is precisely because the Church so long promoted the idea of the sanctity of the family and its relative inviolability that Anglo-Saxon law developed in the way it did.
There is a tendency in any society to “spend its patrimony”. We in the west find ourselves so blessed by rights and privileges that we think we can “spend” them profigately without adverse consequences. And so, institutions and rules that formed much of the underpinning of the complex of rights and privileges we enjoy seem to be “suplus”, rather like the million dollar bank account of the feckless heir. Because the latter’s bank account seems to be “surplus”, the thoughtless are always tempted to “spend” it. It works until, of course, it’s gone.
Similarly, we all tout the benefits of marriage and family; the stable home life that nurtures children. Very few actually say those things are worthless. And yet, because we can point to its benefits and successes, we think we have a “surplus” of benefits and can squander it by demeaning it by extending the concept to personal relationships that have a sexual component, as if that’s really the core meaning and benefit of marriage.
We have done a great deal of that already with “no fault divorce”, with widespread affirmation of heterosexual relationships outside marriage. We minimize the meaning and then are surprised that marriage goes on the decline in favor of chaotic relationships that do not serve the beneficial purposes we nevertheless ascribe to stable marriage.
Catholic moral teachings have been very significantly undermined in recent decades, among Catholics as among others. In approaching issues like homosexual “marriage”, we have to ask ourselves whether moral relativism really serves society well or whether it is destructive to the well being of others. In further downgrading marriage to mean “a personal relationship with a sexual component”, and nothing more, we need to ask ourselves whether we are serving what we all consider the societal good of stable, child-rearing marriages, or whether we are being destructive of it for the sake of the mental satisfaction of a tiny minority that has no factual claim to the institution itself or to the contribution we all acknowledge that institution makes to society.
But regardless of whether we think it somehow serves society to call homosexual unions “marriage”, we still have our own moral imperatives which have a prior claim on our consciences and on our actions. And in no way are we, as Catholics, obliged to support something we know full well to be a moral evil, simply because others do.
