The US Senate on Tuesday voted 61-36 to pass the Respect for Marriage Act (RMA), a bipartisan bill that requires states to recognise other states’ marriage licences, and create a private right of action for ‘any person who is harmed’ by a state’s or an organisation’s failure to recognize their ‘marriage’.
The passage is hailed as ‘an extraordinary sign of shifting national politics on the issue and a measure of relief for the hundreds of thousands of same-sex couples who have married’ since the US Supreme Court’s 2015 decision that legalized gay and lesbian ’marriages‘ in the country.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the legislation was ‘a long time coming’ and part of America’s ‘difficult but inexorable march towards greater equality’. President Joe Biden immediately tweeted:
‘Today’s bipartisan Senate passage of the Respect for Marriage Act proves our nation is on the brink of reaffirming a fundamental truth: love is love. I look forward to the House passing this legislation and sending it to my desk, where I will proudly sign it into law.’
Delusions of ‘Same-Sex’ Marriage
There are two fundamental pretensions with the RMA. The first, as explained in a previous article, is that ‘love’ in itself gives people the right to marry. It does not, nay justify the redefinition of marriage between a man and a woman.
Marriage is the mutual commitment of a man and a woman with the intention to accept the unity and indissolubility of the spouses, with the end of procreating and properly raising offspring. It is not the desire to emotionally and physically share intimacy, especially not with the same sex. In fact, even some Roman emperors, for example, had male lovers, but they knew they could not contract a marriage with them.
If marriage was to be redefined, where would society draw the line? What would be next? Polygamous marriages? Sologamy in which a person decides to marry him or herself?
The second falsehood is that children in ’same-sex’ marriages are not harmed. The truth is that the would-be adopted children in a same-sex relationship would always be in a want—thy would either have no mum or no dad. If the mother chooses a woman or the father chooses a man as a life partner, the children always lose something enormously valuable and irreplaceable: a mother or a father. In other words, as Dr Michael Bauman, Professor of Theology and Culture at Hillsdale College, bluntly explained:
‘When Mommy has sex with another woman, it doesn’t make that other woman a Daddy. Having sex with Mommy doesn’t make you a Daddy any more than drinking milk makes you a calf.’
This is why—a reminder as we see Nativity scenes during the Christmas season—Benedict XVI said in 2009 on the occasion of the Feast of the Holy Family:
‘The first witnesses of Christ’s birth, the shepherds, found themselves not only before the Infant Jesus but also before a small family: mother, father and new-born Son. God had chosen to reveal himself by being born into a human family and the human family thus became an icon of God.’
More so, as Jonathan Soroff, who identifies as homosexual, said in 2013:
‘It’s demonstrably not the same as heterosexual marriage—the religious and social significance of a gay wedding ceremony simply isn’t the same. We’re not going to procreate as a couple and while the desire to demonstrate commitment might be laudable, the religious traditions that have accommodated same-sex couples have had to do some fairly major contortions.’
Legal Protection for ‘Same-Sex’ Couples?
Pope Francis said last year, ‘If a homosexual couple wants to lead a life together, the State has the possibility to give them safety, stability, inheritance; and not only to homosexuals but to all the people who want to live together (in a civil union).’
Many countries, regrettably, adopted this, thereby giving the impression that ‘same-sex’ unions are the same as heterosexual ones. What makes the RMA a victory for ‘same-sex’ couples is that civil unions, at least in the US, are only legally protected at the state level. Marriages, on the other hand, receive recognition from both the federal and the state level, and thus the cohabitants, for example, can file federal taxes jointly or claim social security benefits under RMA.
The delusion in this is that marriage was never considered to be a subject of ‘equal protection’, i.e., a civil rights issue in either state or federal constitutional law prior to the LGTBQ+ movement. The same can be said for Europe.
Yet the argument behind this is to legally equate homosexual intimacy with that between a man and a woman. First, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in the Bowers v. Hardwick case (1986) that homosexual activity was not constitutionally protected, and therefore states had the right to criminalize it if they chose to do so. However, in 2003, the Court overruled this decision in Lawrence v. Texas, and homosexual lifestyle was recognized as equal to that of heterosexual. Then Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy declared about homosequals:
‘[T]he state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.’
Of course, those with same-sex orientation have undergone unwarranted harassment, if not worse—something that can never be justified. At the same time, heterosexuals who own restaurants, for example, and who have refused to host ‘same-sex wedding’ celebrations on their private property have not just been accused of being homophobic but have been sued for discrimination. The same can be said of some of us priests who preach on how marriage, according to natural law, is exclusively between a male and a female.
Advocates for ‘same-sex marriages’ sustain that it is discriminatory to form opinions about marriage. The double-standard is that they permit themselves to make value judgments about who should contract a marriage by arguing that heterosexual marriages are the same as those of gays and lesbians. And the aforementioned RMA will only make matters even more challenging for those who seek to live according to the law of nature, as God intended.
