Gay Marriage is Not a Private Affair

Catholics in the Public Square has some good links at The Implications of California's Supreme Court Decision on Same-Sex Marriage.

However one that pegs it is Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con and his post Gay marriage, family and civilization. He sort of pegs what one feels in your gut but has difficulty expressing in words. I think Catholics and Christians better wake up. Perhaps it is my time as a family Lawyer but if anyone thinks we can hide from this and go into a Catacomb stance is deceiving themselves. That is one reason why Pope Benedict has spoken on this topic not one but TWICE in one week. The Vatican is also opposed to CIVIL UNIONS.

There are reasons for this. I am amazed that very many good Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Jews thought they could compromise on that issue. Anyway there are trouble signs in society yes but this defeatism I am seeing in some quarters because of what four people decided on a State Court. This needs to be gotten over and fast.

Rod in his excellent piece states in part :
I think the most common, and superficially common-sensical, questions that comes up in discussions of this issue is, "How does Jill and Jane's marriage hurt Jack and Diane's?" The idea is that unless you can demonstrate that a gay marriage directly harms traditional marriage, there is no rational objection to gay marriage.

But this is a shallow way to look at it. We all share the same moral ecology. You may as well ask why it should have mattered to the people of Amherst, Mass., if some rich white people in Charleston, SC, owned slaves. Don't believe in slavery? Don't buy one. Similarly, why should it matter to the people of Manhattan if the people of Topeka wish to forbid a woman there to have an abortion? Or, conversely, why do the people of Topeka care if women in New York City choose to abort their unborn children? Don't believe in abortion? Don't have one.

Some issues are so morally consequential as to affect the moral ecology of an entire society. Along those lines, do the polygamous marriages at the FLDS compound in west Texas hurt your own marriage? It would be impossible to establish a direct correlation there, but I doubt most people would be willing to relax the state's ban on polygamy (the matter of underage brides is a separate question). Why don't we allow polygamous (plural) marriage? Would it keep people who wanted to live in monogamous marriages, gay or straight, from doing so? Of course it wouldn't. So why not polygamy? Let's hear the secular rationale for banning plural marriage. Please take care to explain why it's okay for the law to forbid consenting adults who want to live in plural marriages from doing so, but we have a constitutional imperative to allow same-sex couples to do this.

The fact is, we don't allow polygamy primarily because it deeply violates our tradition. To be sure, there are deeper reasons why we don't, having to do with the kind of social order that polygamous marriage would bring about, but if you ask most people to explain why we don't allow the practice, they'll not be able to go much beyond, "Because it's wrong." Most people don't even have to think about it. Which is precisely where we were as a society on gay marriage until practically the day before yesterday.

We expect the state to come down hard on polygamists because we recognize, if only intuitively, that maintaining the moral ecology of our culture requires saying, "Thou shalt not" to polygamy, and enforcing that precept with the power of the law. The polygamist's community's plural marriages affect everybody else's marriages by implicitly delegitimating the normative model. The plural marriages of west Texas don't affect the integrity of your marriage, but if they were to be tolerated, and then mainstreamed in time, it would undermine the moral basis for monogamous marriage. What's so special about a two-person marriage when any polymorphous arrangement involving consenting adults receives the same legal and social sanction? In time, society becomes indifferent to traditional marriage, and that will have social consequences.

He says much more and is worth a read.