Wesley already addressed the statements of Scottish Catholic Cardinal Keith O’Brien, but the Cardinal’s statements go beyond just being wrong. Everything he said was based on inaccuracies and even internal contradictions.
Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalize slavery but assured us that ‘no one will be forced to keep a slave’. Would such worthless assurances calm our fury? Would they justify dismantling a fundamental human right? Or would they simply amount to weasel words masking a great wrong? I think it’s a very, very good example of what might happen on our own country in the present time.
I think if the UK does go for same sex marriage it is indeed shaming our country. We’re taking standards which are not just our own but standards from the Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations where marriage is defined as a relationship between man and woman and turning that on its head. We are trying to redefine something which has been known and revered for centuries and making it something rather different. This is changing the whole notion of what marriage and what a family is. It affects children who are born, who have a right to a mother and father.
The natural law teaching of what marriage is is quite simple. It is natural for a man and woman to be together for the procreation and education of children and for their own mutual love. I think that it is time now to call a halt to what you might call progress. I do not call what is happening nowadays progress. I would say that countries where this is legal are indeed violating human rights.
The fair comparison is not someone proposing the legalization of slavery today, it’s the battle for the abolition of slavery in the 19th Century. On the one side you had progressives who were inspired by the liberal ideals of the enlightenment seeking to expand the freedom and rights enjoyed by the majority to an oppressed minority. On the other side were conservatives who used religion, backed by the very text of the Bible, to support maintaining the status quo.
The Old Testament outlines the rules and practices of a societies institution of slavery, an explicit enforcement of the practice, just as it also mandates the execution of homosexuals. The New Testament is complicit with the institution of slavery, just as it furthers the notion that homosexuality is an abomination. Those who turned to the Bible to inform their views were on the wrong side of the slavery debate two centuries ago, just as they’re on the wrong side of the LGBT equality debate today.
The UN does not define marriage as being between man and woman, it defines it as being between one man and up to four women. This is obviously so it would have the support Muslim countries, but it doesn’t change the fact that it does not support “traditional” Western marriage as found in the UK and most of the US.
The Cardinal also gives three reasons for which people get married, “for the procreation and education of children and for their own mutual love“. So why not let same sex couples who want to provide for the “education of children” be able to take them off the hands of the state and give them a home and why not let same sex couples join “for their own mutual love”? After all, they are meeting two of the three purposes of marriage this priest see’s, that’s certainly a lot more than barren or elderly people who the church has no problem marrying.
Marriage equality does not take any rights away from churches, straight couples, or celibate priests. Whether or not same sex couples can marry, churches will still be able to establish their own standards for who qualifies for their clergy to officiate, just as many churches do today when they refuse to marry one of their members with an outsider, straight couples will still be able to get married, and Cardinal O’Brien still won’t be allowed to.
The expansion of human rights never takes away the rights of anyone, although it might challenge their privilege.