All seems quiet on the same-sex marriage (SSM) front. The gloating and I-told-you-so moments have all but disappeared, and we wonder what’s up next. But surely, the global and cosmic forces pushing for a new world order will not stop with Ireland.
A tweet from The Guardian gives a clue: “Tony Abbott says no to referendum on same-sex marriage despite Irish vote.” The British newspaper’s flawless logic seems to be that since Ireland’s referendum has approved SSM, Australia’s prime minister is now morally obliged to hold one Down Under. No one can fail to notice the blatant presumption and shameless pressure.
As in the secular world, both the presumption and pressure are going on even in the Church. Some days ago, the National Catholic Reporter (NCR), an American newspaper, published an editorial titled “Ireland vote for same-sex marriage a watershed moment for church teaching.” In effect, it suggested that it was high time the Church changed its traditional teaching on marriage or risk losing a “generation of Catholics by imposing on them a teaching they have clearly rejected.”
In that belief-cum-threat some Catholic priests and theologians support the NCR. These declare that for the Church to continue to be relevant, it must abandon its teachings on homosexual acts as something contrary to the nature of sexual complementarity. According to some of them, “empirical studies challenge magisterial claims that homosexual acts, by definition, are detrimental to the human person and human relationships.” Meanwhile, they say, the Church’s teachings are “contradicted by experience and scientific analysis.”
The hope of the “progressive left” is that Pope Francis would bring the Church to a new progressive dawn “in which it says nothing about sex to try and win back people’s trust.” Indeed, there is something almost pathetic about their hope and faith that the Vicar of Christ might one day go against Christ’s own teachings.
What is to be the rational response to all this presumption and pressure?
Well, exactly like what Abbott did in Australia. In a triumph for sanity, Abbot, despite having just recovered from political unpopularity, mustered enough guts to resist both the presumption and the pressure. That his decision was informed by his faith (as it should) is not a hidden fact. But the really sane thing about that decision was his focus on the right priorities. More urgent things had to be done by his government, and putting up a tried-and-tested pillar of society in a possible exchange for a wobbly stick of a social experiment is clearly not one of them.
Like Abbott, then, reasonable people can push back against the presumption and pressure of the so-called “harbingers of social progress” simply by allowing both their faith and reason to inform their day-to-day decisions at work, in family life, and in social issues.
We also need to keep the faith that Pope Francis, like all the holy popes before him, is neither progressive nor conservative. As I suggested in a previous article, he’s “simply the Pope taking to heart the Petrine ministry to which he was called.” One sees this clearly if one reads and studies carefully the Pope’s whole catechesis on the family which began in December 2014 and ended last May.
The supporters of SSM both outside and within the Catholic Church have chosen to read other messages in the Pope’s statements, replacing his head with theirs, and forcing their ideas into his mouth. But with enough reflection on the Pope’s words in the light of everything he has said from the beginning of his papacy until now, one realizes that all the insinuations of a Church-churning Francis are products of a desperate hope borne from sheer willfulness.
Lastly, every person who believes in the immutable nature of marriage and the family must confront the real culture war going on, and then engage it on a more personally-committed level with the ways available to persons of goodwill. Like what?
The more obvious is the intellectual approach: affirming the truth of marriage and the family in the public square; arguing from empirical science, philosophy, theology, common sense, etc.
However, one needs to realize that most defenders of SSM are not so for intellectual reasons. Above all, homosexuals and heterosexuals active in the SSM front are there for very personal, often emotional, reasons. One supports SSM because he or she has been lacking the human affection they think can be gained by SSM. Another supports SSM as an act of solidarity with an emotionally-scarred homosexual son or daughter. And so on.
So, one who wants to help preserve marriage and the family must also engage the affective reasons of those who are pushing to change their definition.
We’re not talking about palliative solutions, but more lasting ones that can assure homosexuals and their supporters of an affectively promising future that’s more authentic than the illusory promise of SSM. We’re talking of solutions genuine and long-lasting enough to inspire homosexuals to fully change their mind and become SSM’s counterwitness. This is a crucial area on which seminars, discussions, research, and action plans should focus.
This holistic approach, following Pope Francis’ lead, is both more constructive and faithful to the truth. It seems a more promising, albeit more challenging, approach to save marriage and the family from the predictable results of SSM’s next grand assault.
Robert Z. Cortes is a PhD student in social institutional communication at the Pontifical University of Santa Croce, Rome. He has a master’s degree in educational leadership from Columbia University, New York.