Can it really be just a coincidence that Pope Francis releases his first “encyclical” reiterating the Church’s timeless teaching about marriage the same week Justice Anthony Kennedy released what I called his “fatwa” against opponents of gay marriage?
I called Justice Kennedy’s opinion a fatwa for two reasons: first, he refused to engage any rational argument; he simply dismissed our whole marriage tradition out of hand, without discussion. Second, he declared half the American people simply “enemies of the human race,” as Justice Scalia put it, for our commitment to the idea that marriage is the union of husband and wife. He made a Constitutional religion out of gay marriage, whole cloth, without any textual support at all.
Make no mistake this Supreme Court decision striking down DOMA is the Roe v. Wade of marriage—just with a slight delay in the full implementation.
The question now is: will we submit, or will we retain in our own eyes our inherent dignity as freeborn citizens of a great nation? Here’s how I put it in interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez on NRO:
“Will we concede the legitimacy of Kennedy’s fatwa against us, or will we respond with a sustained opposition — legal, political, cultural, and of the moral imagination?
I don’t believe in inevitability, I believe in human freedom and our power to shape the future. So it depends on us. But certainly I believe, as I wrote in the Los Angeles Times, that the questions raised by marriage — deeply rooted in our conception of who we are as men and women, the meaning of sexuality and gender — cannot be put to rest by the power of five lawyers on however high a court.
The cultural struggle I predicted in “Banned in Boston” is clearly playing out. Will they succeed in persuading us to accept the second-class status Kennedy lays out for us?
Not me, what about you?"
For more on this issue, including more commentary from Maggie, see the following resources:
- Encyclical Letter “Lumen Fidei”, June 29, 2013
- Windsor v. United States, Justice Samuel Alito Dissent
- “Family Advocates Say Marriage Ruling Ignores Children” National Catholic Register, June 27, 2013
- “Moral Issues Can’t Simply Be Ruled Invalid” L.A. Times, June 27, 2103
- Interview “The Roe of Marriage” National Review Online, July 3, 2013
I agree with Ms. Gallagher: same-sex marriage is not inevitable. But it will be if there is not a sustained, reasoned, and passionate attack against it. I believe conservatives have had the wrong mindset in the marriage debate. Instead of defending traditional marriage we should be attacking the legal acceptance of same-sex marriage. In a defensive posture, you circle the wagons and try to take whatever is thrown at you. Military history teaches that defensive postures never won a war. But in an attack posture, you actively seek out and dismantle targets that threaten your security. I am not promoting physical violence in any way: all of humanity is created in the image of God and deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for this reason. But I am advocating a legal attack, not a legal defense, against views that threaten the security that a Christian ethic offers society.
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