http://www.catholic.com/documents/gay-marriage
“Men need to be civilized, to be taught the joys of committed sex, and that lesson is taught by marriage to women, not by other men who need to learn it themselves.”
“There has never been an unlimited right to marry in this country. States have provided minimum age requirements and have insisted that both persons be unmarried, that one be male and one female, that they not be too closely related, and that adequate public notice and records be kept.”
“Marriage is not an unlimited right. It exists in a social context. Its success or failure has public health and financial impacts. Legalization of same-sex marriage would detach marriage from reality. It would deprive marriage not just of ‘bourgeois respectability,’ but of any objective meaning whatsoever.”
“Why should we care? Because the survival and prosperity of our society rests on the institution of marriage. As we have seen, healthy citizens are far more likely to be produced by intact marriages than by broken ones. Same-sex marriage would empty marriage of its meaning, make heterosexual marriages even more disposable, and undermine the health of our nation.”
FideCogitActio : "Omnis per gratiam" fidescogitactio @ gmail . com 
Hey man. Nice to see you blogging again – congrats on the child!
I actually am not a fan of this kind of defense of marriage. I agree with it, but I think it skirts the main issue. In this case, a main issue that no one seems to want to talk about. (Namely, “sodomy”.) Worse, it suggests the main objection is a practical one, leading to arguments about what is or is not a “healthy citizen”. (Keep in mind that it wasn’t too long ago that a *healthy citizen* was defined in such a way that an active homosexual couldn’t qualify.)
I can understand a lot of whats being said in this article, but it’s not doing a good job of saying it.
Thanks for your congratulations, man. I hope I can keep up with writing a bit better. Twitter has actually been an excellent stimulant and outlet for my many passing ideas for which blogging is too cumbersome on the fly.
As to your point, I agree, and it wasn’t so long ago the furor was all about the Vatican calling homosexual acts “intrinsically disordered”, a point which had berm too eaily papered over with talk of rights and equality. The CDF article I posted today contains that infamous phrase and was a splash of cold water in the face for me. The Church really doesn’t pull any punches about sodomy.
All the same, my patron saint is St. Francis de Sales, so I’m of a mind with one of his aphorisms about catching more flies with honey than vinegar. I also think there’s a crucial value in emphasizing the social dimension of ethics. A too narrow focus on butt sex would, apart from giving people an excuse to ignore you (à la the Rush-Fluke dustup), tends to reinforce the key confusion, namely that morality is private. Sodomy is a sin because it violates the nature of sex, but sex is only good because it ties into the larger natural law issues like the common good and human finality.
Truth be told, I’m kind of making up for lost time on this issue, since it’s been a backburner issue for me until lately. I’m basically cynical about public policy, so I resigned myself to seeing the law “go gay” given enough time. But now I’m feeling informed enough actually to comply with the CDF document’s injunction actively to resist campaigns for legislating SSM. What kicked it off was getting flamed by a pro-gay android in Twitter so I had to reason in my own words why I do in fact obey the Church’s teaching.
Anyhow…
I don’t mind the ‘lack of focus on butt sex’. But the fact is the issue is skirted around so entirely that people get the impression that the objection is to something like, “Two men holding hands and walking through the park.”
I’m cynical myself. Hell, I’ve argued in the past that Catholics should consider not only pulling out of state-orchestrated ‘marriage’, but actually shoving people down the slippery slope and advocate for the legalization of beast-man marriage, marrying yourself, marrying multiple people, two straight guys getting married because they’re good friends, etc. My thoughts are, if state-backed marriage has really rotted that much, it’s time to cease treating it as something to be revered altogether. Let’s stop pretending it’s anything other than a joke.