Danish Weddings for All

Right now God's hearing a lot of different prayers by a lot of different people on two very different sides.

I'm trying my best to stay informed without getting my news from super-biased, emotional sources but honestly I haven't looked very hard to find things from the pro gay marriage camp. I'd like to read some such articles if anyone has a suggestion, but if the argument comes down to "it's a right" and "let's not hurt any one's feelings" then I'm not interested. If they have good logic for why it is a right then that I am interested in. I will still disagree (marriage isn't a right whether you're gay or straight) but I am very interested in understanding the other side.

I really liked this article The Red Herring of Marriage Equality by Steven Smith (h/t Brandon Vogt) and especially this point:
But in that normative sense, equality is wholly uncontroversial—and entirely useless. Everyone favors equality: Everyone thinks that like cases should be treated alike. Nobody argues, “These groups are alike in all relevant respects, but they should be treated differently.” So when people disagree about legal or political issues, they aren’t arguing for and against equality. Instead, they are disagreeing about whether two cases, or two classes of people, actually are alike for the purposes of whatever is being discussed.
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Consider an example. We would treat blind people differently either by denying them the right to vote or by denying them drivers’ licenses. But we would treat them unequally only in the first case, not in the second. That is because an ability to see is not a relevant qualification for voting, but it is a relevant qualification for driving. We know this, though, not by applying the idea of “equality,” but rather by thinking about the nature of voting and of driving.

I also liked what Meg said at Held By His Pierced Hands:
 I don’t think there are a lot of people sporting pink equals signs who are trying to destroy the moral underpinnings of our society or corrupt children. And I haven’t met many who support traditional marriage because of hatred and fear.

Abigail just about took the words out of my mouth in her post What Marriage Means to Me:
Here are the pre-conditions for a holy marriage in the Roman Catholic Church

--one man and one woman
--faithful for life
--open to life
--and if you are baptized in Christ, you need to get married in a Christian Church
--and you need to be "free to marry" (i.e. no previous marriages, or a valid Catholic annulment)

Right now there are a lot of heterosexual unions that people called "marriages" that don't count as sacramental marriages within the Roman Catholic Church. If you're in a "open relationship" where it's okay to have affairs as long as you tell your spouse, that's not marriage. If you get married and intend never to have kids together, that's not marriage. If you are two Catholics and you elope in Las Vegas. That's not marriage.

Divorce is bad in the Catholic church. We live in a culture of 'no-fault' divorce.
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Heterosexual couples have really screwed up the Institution of Marriage.

Heterosexual couples divorce freely. We use contraception and have abortions. We suffer from domestic violence abuse and drug addictions. We've also got the clean addictions like "workaholism" that are just as destructive to family life, even though they are socially sanctioned.

So the sins against marriage are easy to see and are all over the place.

Mary also made some excellent points over at Let Love Be Sincere but one of my favorite things she said was this:
You see, a couple of years ago there was this story in the newspaper.  It was about a church down south that refused to marry an interracial couple.  People FREAKED THE FREAK out.  I am one member of an interracial couple and I DIDN’T freak the freak out.  In fact, I thought, awesome, at least I know what church not to go to.  Unfortunately, a lot of people thought the church should face consequences, be forced to shut down, etc… Here’s the thing.  In our country, we allow for a variety of thought, and if a church doesn’t think a black man and a white woman should be married, well that makes me shake my head.  BUT, I don’t think our government should force the issue.  I don’t think our government needs to be involved in how marriage is defined in churches.

I've also been watching what's going on in France. The New York Times has an article about hundreds of thousands of people turning out to protest a proposed bill to legalize gay marriage there.  While they mention all the religious people who have turned up to protest they don't discuss the fact that  many homosexuals in France are also protesting this bill. How many? I don't know - it's hard to find a good answer to that since I can't seem to find a neutral report on that matter.

Then I saw the following conversation on Twitter about news from Denmark that all Lutheran churches must now allow  homosexual couples to marry because of a newly passed law.

Sometimes I just wish the government would remove spouses and marriage from the equation. Keep marriage in the Church and have the government rely on something that's not Sacramental. It's not the most well-formed opinion and it's not even a consistent thought, but I do think about it.

The Roman Catholic Church will never, ever witness the wedding of a same sex couple. It will not rent its churches or halls out to same sex couples for weddings and receptions. Same for marriages of people who are divorced or who are going to have an open marriage or who will use a form of contraception to never have kids*. This is not because we're a bunch of hateful bigots but because we would see it as a lie, a sham, going against what marriage really actually is. And so I wonder if what Elizabeth Scalia says will actually happen - if we will be driven underground. If it does happen I do not look forward to it, but I do think it might be just the kind of suffering and separating of the chaff and wheat that we need.


*Sadly I am well aware of priests who have gone against Church teaching and witnessed same sex weddings and weddings of people who have previous, not annulled marriages. I am also aware of heterosexual couples who have lied to priests about things like contraception and affairs so they could get married in a pretty church. Obviously, that is not how things are supposed to be.