Restoring the Natural Definition of Marriage

This Thursday, March 19, the Church celebrates the Solemnity of St. Joseph, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary and patron of the Universal Church.

Of all the saints, Joseph stands as the model of faithful fatherhood: the man whom God entrusted with the protection of the Holy Family, and who fulfilled that mission with quiet, unwavering devotion. In him we see what marriage and fatherhood are meant to be, i.e. a sacrificial gift of self, ordered toward the good of spouse and children, rooted in obedience to God’s plan.

It is fitting, then, that as we approach this great solemnity, that the question of marriage itself has returned to the public square in an unexpected way.

On March 10, the Idaho House of Representatives voted 44-26 to approve House Joint Memorial 17. This is a resolution declaring that the Idaho Legislature “rejects the Obergefell decision” and calling on the U.S. Supreme Court to “reverse Obergefell and restore the natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman.”

Obergefell, as you may recall, was the U.S. Supreme Court decision that imposed same-sex “marriage” on the United States, by judicial fiat.

The resolution, sponsored by Rep. Tony Wisniewski, declares that the High Court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges “arbitrarily and unjustly” set aside the understanding of marriage that “has been recognized as the union of one man and one woman for more than 2,000 years.” Idaho voters had amended their state constitution in 2006 to define marriage in precisely those terms, only to see that amendment overridden by federal courts.

The resolution now moves to the Idaho Senate.

Importantly, however, Idaho isn’t the only state to consider such a resolution. According to Newsweek, at least nine states have introduced similar measures: Michigan, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.

Obergefell and Roe: Egregious Judicial Activism

When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Obergefell decision in June 2015, it didn’t discover a right that had always existed in the Constitution. It invented one. Full stop.

By a 5-4 majority, the Court declared that the Fourteenth Amendment required every state to license and recognize “marriages” between two persons of the same sex – despite the fact that no such right had ever been recognized in American law, and despite the fact that the people of numerous states had explicitly voted to define marriage otherwise.

The parallels to Roe v. Wade are unmistakable.

In both cases, the Court fabricated a constitutional right that the text does not contain, short-circuited the democratic process, and elevated individual autonomy to the status of a supreme value, detached from any obligation to truth, to nature, or to the common good.

The arrogance of the judges who were willing to impose their will upon the entire nation using specious legal reasoning as a fig leaf is simply breathtaking. In the case of Roe, the consequences were almost unfathomable: countless millions of dead preborn children. In the case of Obergefell, the consequences are more subtle, but still far-reaching, as the decision radically redefined one of the fundamental pillars of society.

Laws Shape Society… and Souls

As I so often emphasize in this column, law is not morally neutral. As Pope St. John Paul II wrote in Evangelium vitae, civil laws “play a very important and sometimes decisive role in influencing patterns of thought and behavior” (no. 90).

The CDF’s 2003 document on proposals to recognize same-sex unions develops this point, noting:

If, from the legal standpoint, marriage between a man and a woman were to be considered just one possible form of marriage, the concept of marriage would undergo a radical transformation, with grave detriment to the common good.

The CDF added:

Legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage would mean not only the approval of deviant behavior, with the consequence of making it a model in present-day society, but would also obscure basic values which belong to the common inheritance of humanity.

This is precisely what has happened since Obergefell. The redefinition of marriage has become a tool for restructuring society’s most fundamental assumptions about sex, gender, family, and the rights of children.

Of particular importance is the way parenthood is severed from biology. And a child’s natural right to a mother and a father is subordinated to the desires of adults.

The CDF warned of exactly this:

Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development. This is gravely immoral.

Then there are the growing assaults on fundamental freedoms in the name of a distorted idea of “tolerance.”

 As the Idaho resolution rightly observes, the Obergefell decision has also “resulted in a violation of religious rights of individuals and companies.” We have seen this play out repeatedly: bakers, florists, photographers, and adoption agencies compelled to participate in or affirm same-sex unions against the dictates of their conscience.

The pattern is the same one we see in Brazil’s persecution of those who affirm biological sex, and the same one the U.S. Supreme Court recently pushed back against in Mirabelli, which I discussed in last week’s column: the coercive logic of an ideology that demands not mere tolerance, but active affirmation – and punishes those who refuse.

Marriage and the Natural Law

As the Church so often notes, the case for restoring the true definition of marriage rests on more than constitutional arguments, a rejection of judicial activism, or on religious beliefs. It rests on the natural law – on the truth about what marriage is, inscribed in the very nature of the human person.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “a man and a woman united in marriage, together with their children, form a family” and that “in creating man and woman, God instituted the human family and endowed it with its fundamental constitution” (nos. 2202-2203).

The Catechism is equally clear that “homosexual acts are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved” (no. 2357).

These statements are routinely denigrated as “bigotry” by our culture. The conquest of the sexual revolutionaries is so thorough that sometimes it can be difficult to forget that, until very recently, almost all Americans agreed with the statements above, particularly on the definition and nature of marriage.

Prior to Obergefell, the American people had spoken on this question with remarkable clarity. Thirty states had passed constitutional amendments defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. At the federal level, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996, with overwhelming bipartisan support, and a Federal Marriage Amendment was introduced in Congress repeatedly between 2002 and 2015. In state after state, through the most democratic means available – constitutional amendments approved directly by voters – the people affirmed what civilization had always understood.

As the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith stated in its 2003 document: “Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose.” The same document states that there are “absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family.”

Until recently, Americans widely understood this to be true. The Obergefell decision swept all of it aside.

The Family as God Intended

So, why does the Church defend marriage with such conviction? Not out of hostility toward any person, but out of love for the truth about the human person and concern for the common good.

As Pope St. John Paul II said: “As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”

Families are the building blocks of every society. It is within the family that children first learn the virtues of love, sacrifice, and cooperation that are essential for any community to flourish. Fathers and mothers exercise a unique and irreplaceable influence on their children, an influence that no other arrangement can replicate.

In Familiaris consortio, Pope St. John Paul II placed the family at the very center of the Church’s mission:

At a moment of history in which the family is the object of numerous forces that seek to destroy it or in some way to deform it, and aware that the well-being of society and her own good are intimately tied to the good of the family, the Church perceives in a more urgent and compelling way her mission of proclaiming to all people the plan of God for marriage and the family (no. 3).

This is why the Church teaches that attempting to equate homosexual unions with marriage is, in the CDF’s words, “gravely unjust.”

The Catechism is clear that people with same-sex attraction “must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity” (no. 2358). But respect for persons cannot lead to the approval of acts contrary to the natural law, or to the legal redefinition of an institution that exists for the good of children and the stability of society.

The Courage to Speak the Truth

The Idaho House’s resolution may be symbolic in its immediate legal effect. But symbols matter. In a culture that has largely accepted the redefinition of marriage as “settled,” the willingness of elected representatives to stand up and say that Obergefell was wrong – that marriage is what it has always been – is an unexpected act of moral courage.

The U.S. Supreme Court Justices who approved Roe assumed that once abortion was the law of the land, it would remain “settled.” They were wrong. Similarly, the justices who imposed same-sex “marriage” on the country must have assumed that the law would remain “settled.” However, nothing is ever settled where human freedom is in play. And as a society, we still have the freedom to “turn back the clock,” not out of a perverse desire to return to the past for the past’s sake, but rather to go back to a healthier vision of human society and flourishing.

Ever day we see how the ideological revolution that began with the separation of sex from procreation through contraception, accelerated through abortion, and reached a new stage with the redefinition of marriage, is now pressing further still – into the denial of biological sex itself. Each step follows logically from the one before. And at every stage, the Church’s consistent witness has been vindicated as prophetic.

The CDF’s 2003 document concluded with a very clear statement about the role of the state when it comes to marriage: “The common good requires that laws recognize, promote and protect marriage as the basis of the family, the primary unit of society.” Opposing the legal recognition of homosexual unions is not an act of discrimination. It is an act of justice.

As we approach the Solemnity of St. Joseph, let us turn to that great saint and ask for his powerful intercession. St. Joseph knew what it meant to protect a family in a hostile world. The family today faces threats that St. Joseph could scarcely have imagined, yet his mission remains ours: to defend the truth about marriage and the family that God has entrusted to us.

St. Joseph, Terror of Demons and Protector of the Holy Church, pray for us. Protect our families.