I recall arguing and arguing that marriage is special because the whole of society depends on its strength and integrity; and I recall my gay friends rolling their eyes and pointing to statistics about heterosexual marriage—statistics on fornication, on out-of-wedlock births, on domestic abuse, on adultery, and on divorce—and letting them speak for themselves. Straight people have not made a good case for marriage. We, as a nation, have not behaved as if it’s worth preserving.
Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.
Image by Ian MacKenzie via Flickr (Creative Commons)
Sounds like too much work to be feasible and too easy to quit. We should dial it back to the days when women had to work hard and men took it easy and policed their own ranks for quitters.
After all that’s basically what proverbs 31 is all about. The woman is running around and the man is hanging out by the city gate.
Great points. If we as Catholics did a better job modeling marriage, our arguments against same-sex marriage would hold more weight.
Thank you so much for this! When the UK Parliament was voting on these issues, I hoped to hear our bishops making just these points to their congregations. Instead in some cases we got homilies which appeared to be aimed more at the media and told us how terrible the decisions of the state were. Bless you and thank you for asking us to have the humility to look to the logs in our own eyes!