UK proposes to legalize same-sex marriage

Pastor's Corner for Fourth (Laetare) Sunday of Lent (March 18, 2012)

LONDON, MARCH 7, 2012 (ZENIT) The issue of same-sex marriage has been in the headlines in recent days in Britain. Responding to Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposal to legalize same-sex marriage, Edinburgh’s archbishop, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, wrote an article in last Sunday’s edition of the Telegraph on the topic.

'Since all the legal rights of marriage are already available to homosexual couples, it is clear that this proposal is not about rights, but rather is an attempt to redefine marriage for the whole of society at the behest of a small minority of activists. Can a word whose meaning has been clearly understood in every society throughout history suddenly be changed to mean something else? ' The institution of marriage predates any state or government, he explained. 'It was not created by governments and should not be changed by them.' "

The definition of marriage is much more than a matter of public opinion, the letter affirms.

Male and female we have been created, and written into our nature is this pattern of complementarily and fertility… (N)either the Church nor the State has the power to change this fundamental understanding of marriage itself."

What Cameron was proposing in London, the Scotland First Minister is also pushing for in Glasgow. “What is the competence of government to take an ideology and reconstruct society on that ideology?” Archbishop Mario Conti explained. “At the heart of that ideology is the notion that gender is a social construct, and it is not.”

Here are excerpts of an earlier Pastor’s Corner worth our consideration on the question of the gender:[1]

Up to now, we had a unified vision of the human person [based on the unity of the body and soul in man] by acknowledging that the sex makes the gender. Now, ideologues would like to affirm that the gender makes the sex. The masculine and feminine behavior does not correspond necessarily to the biological sex. For them, “the sex is a social category” meaning that it could be modifiable according to the desires of each in connection with the “construction” of the social models. This would be so much as denying man’s autonomy and liberty… The ideologues of the gender “denature” the sexual difference. For, the male and female identity rests on the being[2] itself of the person whereas a sexual orientation depends merely on partial pulsations and primary identifications.

Such governmental action over a whole country could simply be a foreboding of another attack on God’s plan for human life and family.

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Footnotes

1 A conference by Msgr. Tony Anatrella given at Rome in November 2011.

2 A report destined to the UN debates of this on transsexuality and gender confirms that “the sexual identity is inscribed on each cell of the body and can be determined by the ADN test. This is not subject to change.” In “Psycholathology of Sex Reassignment Surgery” by Richard Fitzgibbons and associates, June 2011. This report shows clearly that, for those who pretend to have a gender identity opposed to their biological structure, a surgical operation is not going to solve a properly psychological problem.