MARRIAGE is both a personal and public institution for the good of society. It pre-dates all religious and state laws as a law of nature.
It requires one man and one woman to live together for mutual support, to have marital relations only with each other and jointly raise any children of their union.
Even couples unable to have children give witness by their marital acts to the inherent life-giving orientation to procreation which exists in a marriage.
However some today through misguided sympathies, seek to redefine marriage by including same-sex unions which really work to undermine marriage, because it would then become no longer the institution founded in the natural order for procreation, but as something primarily centred on the desires and emotions of adults.
The misguided good intentions of many are based on the philosophical misconception about the nature of equality.
Equality can never be an absolute value, but only a derivative and relative value.
After all, a man cannot be a mother nor a woman a father, so they can never be absolutely equal, but only relatively equal because they are biologically different.
So in marriage they are different and not absolutely, but relatively equal.
This is why same-sex unions are not being excluded from marriage, they simply cannot be marriage by definition. This is not discrimination.
To succumb to the clamour of a minority, for the sake of peace, or because it seems “inevitable” that we equate same-sex union with marriage would be appeasement which will destroy the very nature, meaning and purpose of marriage and which will be bitterly regretted.
Marriage, the home, children, and the family life this generates, are the foundation and basic building blocks of society.
Already marriage and family life are under attack by many pressures today – social, economic, political – that to formally institutionalise the desires of a tiny minority for same-sex unions to be called “marriage” will further destroy the basics of society which is true marriage.
FR BERNARD McGRATH
Bendigo, Vic
