December 6th, 2008 by Todd Lemieux
I have hesitated to write this next article as I have been praying about it for a good deal of time, yet it is something that will not leave my mind. Ever since the election, it is something that I have wrestled with and thought about, knowing what the right thing is, yet unable to deny the pain that is felt by a good number of my friends on this issue.
When it comes to the topic of homosexuality, it is an issue that I do not take lightly. I have friends who wrestle with this and, to be honest, they are funny, honest, and caring individuals for the most part. They know that I do not agree with their behavior, but now that this issue has become political and I find myself on the other side of the fence, I truly fear losing them as friends, so this is at once a plea for their friendship and an explanation as to why I cannot support anything other than what is now known as traditional marriage.
History
Rather than a history of marriage or homosexuality, I offer my own history from my own life.
In high school I was, to be honest, an opinionated bastard. There really is no other way to put it. I had set in my mind that the world worked a certain way and if you did not fit into the mold that I had determined was a “good person” then as far as I was concerned you were destined for hell.
When I look back on that person I don’t know how I sustained any type of friendship since I didn’t even do a good job of living up to my own standards. One of the areas where I had no patience for people at all was in sexual sin. My own temptations in private had absolutely no impact on the judgementalism that I leveled on the people around me.
At the same time, I had a soft spot in my heart for the underdog. If there was a person in school who was being picked on, most times I would try to stick up for them. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
As I grew and matured into a young man and dealt with my own conflict of faith that was brought on by my own weaknesses, my soft spot for the underdog never changed. I would often find myself in arguments sticking up for an unpopular position or a person who could not defend himself.
This would manifest itself in arguments against abortion but for the dignity of people who struggled sexually, especially friends of mine who were homosexual. Eventually I came to live in a house after college with a good number of people who considered themselves to be homosexuals. I remember a number of conversations with them regarding the homosexual lifestyle, my own misconceptions about it, and even the people involved in it.
At this point I believe that I am the last person that would demonize an individual for being a homosexual or for dealing with that temptation. I certainly have had moments during my time as a youth minister when I disciplined students and teenagers who thought that the term “fag” was an acceptable comeback to another person.
I dealt with teens and adults who have struggled with all sorts of temptations, from homosexuality to heterosexuality, and I have seen these temptations overcome and succumbed to by various individuals.
The truth is, I do not know what another person is dealing with as far as their temptations and background in their lives. I am the very last person to be sitting in judgment as to a person’s motivations in his or her life. I do not understand, though, why we would identify ourselves with our sexual desires, which are only a part of us, not who we are.
I think I am better now at dealing with my own demons. I still have them and I still wrestle with them and they have changed over the course of the years, but while I have never dealt with the temptation of homosexuality, I don’t know why anyone’s temptation is a bigger sin than anyone else’s or that it deserves special attention or judgement.
Marriage
I think that the biggest argument about marriage is the idea that it should be for anyone who loves each other.
The problem is that marriage was never meant to be about someone’s desire for another person. While it might be helpful and even important if two people desire each other, marriage is about one thing and one thing only: children.
Anyone can be in a committed relationship without the term “marriage” attached to it. Marriage is a way for society to protect the weakest members of its group: women and children. You can argue that women are not weak, but since the dawn of man, the widow and the orphaned were considered the ones in society that were most preyed upon. Widows were often forced into prostitution while orphans became criminals and beggars. We have seen the damage done today through divorce as fatherless families lead the demographic that produces crime and poverty. When Judaism became a way of life in Canaan, it was the first civilization to protect these groups. This was through marriage.
In marriage, two people make a commitment in front of society and God to produce children and bring them up to be a benefit to that society. The husband and father has an obligation to that family and to the mother as well. The fact that this has fallen out of practice in the last 40 years does not negate the previous 5000 years.
What our society has done is separate childbirth from marriage and make marriage purely about the desire to have our society recognize that these two people can have sex whenever they want. We want “cute couples” who have Pottery Barn homes that can be renovated for an HGTV special and the freaks with children end up on The Nanny.
Children have become optional. Instead of being the main purpose of marriage, they have become an unintended consequence or a piece of decoration on a Christmas card at best. They are tolerated instead of treasured.
As soon as children become optional, adultery, incest, polygamy, beastiality, and homosexuality present no impediment to marriage for marriage is simply about two people wanting to be together and what makes their desire any less than someone else’s?
Questions
The immediate reaction to this is “what about the couples that cannot have children that get married? Are you saying that they should not be allowed to be married?”
The interesting thing about this question is that you have to go outside the natural order of things to a physical defect (infertility) in the person in order to justify what is quite simply a physical normality (homosexual infertility). You are then saying that because of the unnatural infertility in one legally recognized relationship you should legally recognize a naturally infertile relationship.
Granted there have been medical advancements and science can do all types of things, but because science can manipulate our bodies to do all types of things doesn’t justify doing it. We still do not know all of the medical complications that can arise from all of the ways that we try to skirt nature.
Once marriage has become simply a matter of two people wanting to share a tax burden rather than obligating themselves to make more people, it is hard to argue against any two people of any gender (or any three people) getting married if that is the only ground that you walk on. For why should you draw the “marriage line” at two people? What makes anyone’s desire for partnership better than anyone else’s?
If marriage is about society making more people, growing children and having them protected in the best way possible, then we need to fix heterosexual marriage because it has gone completely off the rails. Perhaps that is the problem.
When reproduction, human life, and children are considered a burden and not the main focus of marriage, the idea of sacrifice, the idea of a self-giving love becomes secondary.
Do I love my wife? Absolutely.
Do I desire good for my wife? Absolutely.
Do I want to be a partner to my wife for my entire life? Absolutely.
Is that the reason we are married? No.
If you want the reason for our marriage, look at our two daughters. When my wife and I argue, fight, and disagree, we know that there is something beyond our earthly temptations and desires that are more important.
They are two girls that are little bit of me and a little bit of her.
Our obligation and responsibility to each other, to them, and to our society as a whole is more important than our selfish desires.
If marriage is completely about the production and rearing of children, then there are a few obstacles that may arise as we begin to contemplate this relationship in our society.
Sexual Desire in Marriage
One cannot deny that sexual desire is a part of marriage, but the difference here is that sexual desire is not the reason for the marriage in the first place. The couple is not getting married because of their sexual desire for one another.
Rather, the sexual desire of the couple is simply a manifestation of the desire to have children, of which having sexual intercourse is an integral part. Since having children can only come about in a natural sense from the sexual union of a man and a woman, the desire to have children must be regarded as a heterosexual desire, even if the person exhibiting the desire for children is considered a homosexual.
Sexual desire in marriage serves a purpose other than reproduction. For the couple that is reproducing, sexual desire often does not lead to a child, but many times leads to the bonding of that couple in a relationship that will be supportive of the children that they have or will have.
But what if this “bonding” effect is seen as the sole reason for a couple to get married, if they marry out of loneliness, or the need to simply fulfill desires manifest for them from childhood.? When this is the case — when “what I want or need” dominates the thinking — anyone who is married will tell them that they will find a marriage fraught with difficulties.
In the family where there are children present, yet the couple does not conceive when engaging in sexual intercourse, this bonding ensures that the parents will remain together to support the children and continue to develop a protective family unit so that the children can continue to grow to be contributing members to society.
Sexual Desire Outside of Marriage
In recent years our society has become quite obsessed with the idea of sex as a means of exchange. We use sex in order to cure loneliness, we use sex to cure our need for acceptance, or we use sex to cure our low self-esteem.
When sexual intercourse occurs outside of marriage it often leads to pain, disappointment, heartache, and it’s the opposite of what we desire it to be. Our society has been on a 40 year campaign of removing consequences from sexual intercourse so that it can simply function as some type of drug, a weak cure to loneliness, and a bandage to blind us to our real needs and make us feel good about ourselves.
What are some of the consequences that we have tried to remedy so that sexual intercourse outside of marriage would not lead us to some type of permanent fixture on another person?
Pregnancy.
Disease.
Emotional bonding.
Personal responsibility.
While it is always good to do everything we can to limit disease in our society, the idea that the creation of human life is something that can just be tossed aside every time we want to have sexual intercourse has led transformed the way that we view sex and sexuality in our society.
Pope Paul VI was right when he wrote that removing pregnancy as a consequence of sexual intercourse could lead to greater incidences of adultery, for if there are no consequences, why limit bad behavior?
This adultery would also lead to higher incidences of single parenting as fathers refuse to take responsibility for their children they conceived outside of marriage. This would lead to an increase of poverty. Anyone who has worked with single mothers knows the struggle that they have making ends meet and keeping their family afloat.
As pregnancy is removed as a consequence of sexual intercourse than the need for marriage itself is also eliminated, for what is the need of getting married when there are no children that are going to result from the relationship?
If pregnancy is removed as a consequence of sexual intercourse, then what makes the relationship of man and woman any different than the relationship of same-sex couples, polygamous couples, or even incestuous couples who may be “in love”?
For if the end goal of marriage is simply the sexual bonding of two people and we had ceased to celebrate parenthood and the creation of a new human being as a significantly different relationship from all others, there can be very little argument that one person’s idea of marriage is any better than any other person’s idea.
Children Are Special
The truth is, without a relationship that makes more people, there would be no people to advance us in science, technology, or any other fields. We lose potential presidents, Heisman Trophy winners, Olympic athletes, doctors, diplomats, priests, saints, teachers, youth ministers, and even the people in that cause us to be charitable as we give to them out of love.
Why is making children so important?
Because children solve the Social Security crisis. Because children can solve the environmental crisis. Because children can solve the problem of alternative energy. Because children can solve the problem of lessening resources in an increasing world.
In fact, every good idea and every movement forward in humanity has come from someone who was at one point a child.
The instant we as a society lose the respect and awe, the desire to protect and care for children in those relationships that cause children to come forward, is the instant we have lost our society, our future.
Therein lies the deepest problem that no one would like to confront. It is only those who will stand up for all human beings and their inherent dignity, who can show us that our dignity goes even beyond our own desires.
In short, the Catholic Church will fight for the dignity of all human beings, but will not tolerate behavior that lessens the dignity of those human beings. That same moral standard requires that we fight against any indignity, against any notion that human beings are to be used, commodified, or made disposable, no matter which part of society becomes disposable to another.
In the end, the Catholic Church, like Christ, accepts all.: Will bury the dead without question. Will care for the sick without question. Will house the homeless without question. Will provide care for those abandoned by a society too busy pursuing its desires without question. Will serve the poorest of the poor, the “widows and orphans” of society without question.
Because we have been redeemed to something bigger than desire.
