Same Sex Marriage Is An Attack On Freedom

[From article]
That the majority of the American people continue to vote for marriage is a moving testimony to the power the truth exerts, relentlessly but not inevitably, over ideology. To willfully blind ourselves to these enduring sexual truths is a form of self-mutilation to which the human soul only uneasily accedes.
Combining the goods of liberalism (respect for pluralism, diversity, maximum opportunities and social respect across deep moral divides) with the great task of any human civilization in sustaining a marriage culture is hard and would require original and thoughtful moral and social work.
But it begins with the immense project of rejecting the lies on which sexual liberalism is based.

http://townhall.com/columnists/maggiegallagher/2012/06/07/debating_samesex_marriage

Debating Same-Sex Marriage
Maggie Gallagher
TownHall.com
June 7, 2012

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[From article]
"The third-century Roman jurist, Modestinus, captured the common understanding of marriage with the following definition: "Marriage is the union of a man and a woman, a consortium for the whole of life involving the communication of divine and human rights." This union and these rights exist, not merely for their own sake, but also and especially for the sake of the inter-generational concerns of progeny and property; with a view, that is, to the conditions necessary for the founding and flourishing of the family. The rights involved are divine as well as human because marriage is generative, and hence pre- as well as pro-political; because what is founded through marriage is, in the twentieth-century language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "the natural and fundamental group unit of society."
The same elements that found expression in Modestinus perdured and prospered in the Augustinian understanding of marriage as an institution entailing, not one, but three interwoven goods: proles, fides, et sacramentum-procreation or fruitfulness, loyalty or faithfulness, and bonding or sacred union. That societies shaped by this understanding took the unusual step of making marriage monogamous testifies to the seriousness with which each of these goods was regarded, precisely in its service to the others. It was by developing them in their mutuality, moreover, that heterosexual monogamy (to use the language of its detractors) created the conditions for the new and deeper respect for women and for children that until recently has characterized the West.
But marriage for some time has been under feminist attack for its putative institutionalization, in the name of divine rights, of oppressive patriarchal tendencies. This attack-coordinated, as it now is, with a Rawlsian assault on religious or comprehensive doctrines in the public sphere-has helped create a very different set of conditions, the conditions necessary for the advent of same-sex marriage. And same-sex marriage, by eliminating the first good (proles), has begun to unravel the whole fabric of marriage, setting up something else in its place: an institution not intrinsically connected to the family, or at all events not connected to the natural family. The divine and human rights belonging to marriage are thus beginning to disappear,
[. . .]
In attacking "heterosexual monogamy," same-sex marriage does away with the very institution-the only institution we have-that exists precisely in order to support the natural family and to affirm its independence from the state. In doing so, it effectively makes every citizen a ward of the state, by turning his or her most fundamental human connections into legal constructs at the state's gift and disposal.
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The document dispenses, as does same-sex marriage legislation, with the binary logic of male and female that has hitherto governed human society.
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The same-sex marriage issue and the abortion issue are joined hip and groin by contraception, and cannot be separated.
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our society can never really be post-Christian. It can only lapse into a sub-pagan parody of its Christian heritage, which is just what we are witnessing with same-sex marriage.
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It is a society that no longer knows what love is, and that no longer believes that humans may hope for very much."

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=25-01-024-f

WHY FIGHT SAME-SEX MARRIAGE?
Is There Really That Much at Stake?
Touchstone Mag
by Douglas Farrow

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[From article]
"For centuries - indeed, for millennia - they argue, marriage has been understood as a conjugal relation between men and women linked to the natural bearing of children. Thus there is something monstrous about the state even claiming to have the power by law to change the definition of a natural and cultural reality which has historically preceded the existence of the state itself.
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neither the United Nations nor the European Union regard homosexual marriage as a human right;
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Homosexuality has always existed in human societies and sometimes has been tolerated or even made into an essential phase of cultural development - as with the Baruya or in ancient Athens.
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many archaeologists are now concluding - from the evidence of burial practices by both Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon human beings - that religion is older even than spoken language.
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Increasingly, children resulting from anonymous artificial insemination are rightly demanding to know who their natural parents are - for they know that, in part, we indeed are our biology. But on the other hand, this request is in principle intolerable for donors who gave their sperm or wombs on the understanding that this was an anonymous donation for public benefit -- like blood donation properly precluding any personal involvement.

http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/03/13/3452229.htm

GAY MARRIAGE AND THE FUTURE OF HUMAN SEXUALITY
John MilbankABC RELIGION AND ETHICS
13 MAR 2012
ABC.NET.AU