Category: Marriage, Family & Life

Anastasia de Waal argues that while Labour thinks it is being liberal, its position on the family is actually highly conservative. Its policy is currently determined not by its own priorities, but by Conservative policy and past notions of the repressive ‘traditional’ family. Labour therefore considers family structure to be solely Conservative moralising territory and marriage irrelevant to 21st century policymaking. Instead, the government has focused on celebrating so-called ‘diversity’. But Labour’s nominally inclusive stance is actually blurring the lines between the poor family and what Labour imagines to be the ‘modern’ family:

‘What are construed [by Labour] as positive manifestations of diversity are in fact very often negative manifestations of deprivation and limiting circumstances. This is not to deny that new opportunities to end unhappy relationships and a greater freedom of choice in family life have positively affected families right across the socio-economic spectrum. However, non-marriage and parental separation in the UK today disproportionately represent the problematic, as opposed to the progressive, elements of family diversity.’

Labour’s misjudged resistance to acknowledging the importance of family structure is undermining its equalising agenda, perpetuating inequality between both the classes and the sexes.

Lower marriage rates and greater numbers of cohabitating parents are strongly connected to what Anastasia de Waal terms ‘structural poverty’, that is, unemployment-related poverty incurring further poverty through parental separation. The relationship between unemployment and parental separation is hugely significant because child poverty in Britain is concentrated in single-parent households.

Labour’s treatment of fathers as ‘optional extras’ is exacerbating difficulties for women and children. Whilst the aim has been to be non-judgemental to mothers and children in separated families, in reality the effect has been to legitimise irresponsible fathers.

Civitas Marriage in modern Britain: out of reach, not out of fashion

The Bible gives one consequential answer to these two queries: the human being is created in the image of God, and God himself is love. It is therefore the vocation to love that makes the human person an authentic image of God: man and woman come to resemble God to the extent that they become loving people.

This fundamental connection between God and the person gives rise to another: the indissoluble connection between spirit and body: in fact, the human being is a soul that finds expression in a body and a body that is enlivened by an immortal spirit.

The body, therefore, both male and female, also has, as it were, a theological character: it is not merely a body; and what is biological in the human being is not merely biological but is the expression and the fulfilment of our humanity.

Likewise, human sexuality is not juxtaposed to our being as person but part of it. Only when sexuality is integrated within the person does it successfully acquire meaning.

Thus, these two links, between the human being with God and in the human being, of the body with the spirit, give rise to a third: the connection between the person and the institution.

Indeed, the totality of the person includes the dimension of time, and the person’s “yes” is a step beyond the present moment: in its wholeness, the “yes” means “always”, it creates the space for faithfulness. Only in this space can faith develop, which provides a future and enables children, the fruit of love, to believe in human beings and in their future in difficult times.

The freedom of the “yes”, therefore, reveals itself to be freedom capable of assuming what is definitive: the greatest expression of freedom is not the search for pleasure without ever coming to a real decision; this apparent, permanent openness seems to be the realization of freedom, but it is not true. The true expression of freedom is the capacity to choose a definitive gift in which freedom, in being given, is fully rediscovered.

In practice, the personal and reciprocal “yes” of the man and the woman makes room for the future, for the authentic humanity of each of them. At the same time, it is an assent to the gift of a new life.

Therefore, this personal “yes” must also be a publicly responsible “yes”, with which the spouses take on the public responsibility of fidelity, also guaranteeing the future of the community. None of us, in fact, belongs exclusively to himself or herself: one and all are therefore called to take on in their inmost depths their own public responsibility.

Marriage as an institution is thus not an undue interference of society or of authority. The external imposition of form on the most private reality of life is instead an intrinsic requirement of the covenant of conjugal love and of the depths of the human person.

His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Ecclesial Convention of Rome 2005

On May 15 the California Supreme Court â??overturned the gay marriage ban,â?? according to news media reports. What the court really did was command a radical redefinition of marriage, the most basic institution of any society. It brought same-sex â??marriageâ?? to the largest state in the union and front and center into the presidential campaign.

The arrogance of this judicial fiat cannot be overstated.

The 4-3 decision directly overrules the will of the people of California expressed in a 2000 referendum, when 61.4 percent voted that â??[o]nly a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.â?? The justices seem to have forgotten that they are merely interpreters of the law. Instead they styled themselves as Platoâ??s philosopher kings stooping to undo the will of those they deem less enlightened than they are.

As Heritage Foundation scholars Jennifer Marshall, Daniel Patrick Moloney, and Matthew Spalding wrote, the decision â??is long on public policy preferences, and extremely short on law.â??

According to E.J. Dionne writing in the Washington Post, Carol Corrigan, one of the dissenting justices, is a supporter of same-sex marriage. Nonetheless, she sees such judicial overreach as the breaking of the courtsâ?? â??covenantâ?? with the people of California. According to Dionne, Corrigan:

â?¦argued that in a democracy, â??the people should be given a fair chance to set the pace of change without judicial interference.â?? She added: â??If there is to be a new understanding of the meaning of marriage in California, it should develop among the people of our state and find its expression at the ballot box.â??

God bless her!

Alan Wisdom & Jim Tonkowich California Same-Sex â??Marriageâ??: The Arrogance of the Judges, and the Silence of the Churches

and see James D. Berkley High Priests of Secularity