Catholic and Enjoying It!
If you hear a thing being accused of being too tall and too short, too red and too green, too bad in one way and too bad also in the opposite way, then you may be sure that it is very good. – GK. Chesterton, on ordinary heterosexual monogamous marriage and the family, among many other things.
The issue is not civil rights. The issue is “What is marriage”? If any pairing of anybody is “marriage” then marriage means anything, which means marriage means nothing. As reader Ian Bibby points out:
In addition to the inconsistency between the feminists and the gay rightists, the gay rightists are inconsistent with themselves.
On the one hand, they claim that marriage has no intrinsic definition or nature. They say that we, as a culture, can define marriage to be whatever we want it to be.
Then, on the other hand, they claim that all people everywhere have an intrinsic right to this thing that they’ve claimed has no intrinsic definition. It’s incoherent.
The focus of marriage (till heterosexuals murdered it with no fault divorce) was man and woman in committed self-donating love ordered toward mutual upbuilding and the nurture of children. The focus of marriage now is “Everyone must affirm me and my partner(s) in whatever it is we choose to do with our pelvises”. The move from self-donating love to narcissistic demand for recognition is not a healthy one. No-fault divorce began it. The legal fiction of gay “marriage” is just kicking the corpse. A civilization that does not privilege the family but instead privileges narcissism is going to die–by its own hand. Though enemies will helpfully finish any botched suicide attempt.
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