Gay Marriage: The Euthanasia Option

A couple of weeks ago, TIME ran a piece in which it was suggested that the “solution” to the gay pretend-marriage debate is to simply “end marriage”.

The logic here has one element I can see buying, alloyed with a huge lie that only a fool could agree to. The one element I could buy is that there is a case for simply disentangling the state from the question of marriage altogether. Just as we don’t have the state adjudicating a valid baptism, so (it is argued) we don’t need to have the state adjudicate what a marriage is. I’m not saying I *do* buy this argument, only that I can respect it. It is not prima facie preposterous.

(That said, I am extremely skeptical that the state really has no interest in protecting and preserving the foundation stone of the entire civil order, the family. Not all marriage is sacramental and the state emphatically has an interest in guarding the family from harm if the state itself wishes to survive. So, in a *sane* society–as distinct from ours–I think it self-evident that the state has an obligation to preserve and protect marriage and the family that springs from it. Indeed, as I have argued before, one very useful way of understanding Catholic social teaching (including teaching concerning the role of the State) is that it is ordered toward the good of the family: first, the natural family, and supremely the spiritual family. So though there may be a certain sort of prima facie libertarian appeal to the notion of getting the State out of the business of “regulating marriage” as it is called, I think that ultimately there has to be a place for the state to protect the family.)

The trouble, of course, is that we are living in a radically diseased society that is exhibiting pathologies never before seen in its implacable hostility to the Christian (or even natural) conception of the family. At present, these pathologies are manifesting themselves in the vast societal campaign to pretend that same sex unions are the same thing as “marriage”. The entire campaign is ordered, from beginning to end, not to attain new “civil rights”, but to force people who know perfectly well that gay “marriage” is a pretense to shut up, knuckle under, and accord such a pretense the same dignity as real marriage. This will never happen among those who actually know what marriage is, which is why this campaign can only result in persecution against those who will not bend the knee to the lie.

Nonetheless, a lie it remains and even those who advocate gay “marriage” know it to be so. And they will continue to know it even after all their aims are achieved in the civil sphere. Which is why they will have to either go after the Church for refusing to acknowledge gay “marriage” or else do as the TIME piece suggests and attempt the opposite of legitimating gay “marriage”–namely, nullifying real marriage. What cannot be allowed to stand, however, is the clear recognition that there is such a thing as real marriage (whether natural or sacramental) and that gay “marriage” is not and never will be real marriage. So some sort of force, probably brutal, will need to be applied to scream down this obvious fact.