Friday, December 05, 2008

Jimmy Akin on same-sex “marriage”

(The following is a closely-approximate transcription of his answer given to a caller on "Catholic Answers Live" on Thursday November 20, 2008 (3:00 PM hour), show ID # CA-3992 [time reference 40:45 / 55:01]. If you click on that link and queue up the time-slider thingy at the bottom of the Real Audio player that appears, you can listen and read along at the same time. Neato!)


Caller (Vic): My question is with respect to homosexual or same-sex “marriages”. I was debating with a friend regarding his idea that, well, marriage is simply an institution for those who love each other, which seems kind of whimsical because … then anyone should be able to enter into it with … [Jimmy chuckles and interjects: “Oh yeah, parents could marry their children then, if it’s just about loving people.”] Yeah. So someone informed me about an article by a Robert P. George or somebody, with respect to how marriage was never intended to be an issue of the rights of the adults — like well, let’s grant rights just to a male and a female — but it was about the needs of the child, and the benefit of the community in which this child would be beared [sic] and reared with them. So my question is about the Catholic view on that, because he is kind of attacking my faith quite vigorously with that.

Jimmy: OK, this can be approached in a couple of different ways. Marriage does involve the good of the spouses. If you look in the Code of Canon Law and the Catechism of the Catholic Church it’ll say that “the ends of marriage are the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring” … umm … so those are both … goals, and the Church has had a clearer awareness in recent times of the importance of the good of the spouses, that’s something that really has developed in the last couple of decades. But what you can’t do is say, “Oh, well, it would be good for me and my ‘boy-pal’ to get married …um… and fulfill that end of marriage” … and leave the other undone, you know … just as with contraception, you can’t separate the unitive and the procreative aspects [of the marital act], you also can’t separate the good of the spouses from an openness to children. And you are doing that if you are entering a union that by its nature is intrinsically incapable of producing children. (That’s different than a union that for some external reason, some extrinsic reason, can’t produce them, like when the couple is advanced in age or something like that, or they have a medical condition so that they can’t conceive.) If you’ve got two men or two women together … there’s just a difference in their union.

There’s also a problem in that it’s really not good for them. It doesn’t foster the good of the parties if the two people are of the same sex. They may enjoy it on some level; they may say they are deriving benefit from it — but on a fundamental level, they’re not. They’re really harming each other. So neither of the purposes of marriage is going to be fulfilled through a homosexual union.

You can also look at the question another way, and say, well okay, fundamentally, marriage is — I mean, the way the term has historically been used — it refers to a union of a man and a woman oriented towards the procreation and education of offspring. Fine. Suppose you change the meaning of the word. Are you changing the fact that a union between a man and a woman oriented to the procreation and education of offspring is different than any other union? No you’re not. That reality remains the same. The reality of marriage is the fact that there is a union between a man and a woman that is oriented to children, both their production and education. If you stretch the term “marriage” like Silly Putty to refer to other things, you’re not changing the fact that that man-woman union is unique. All you’re doing is obfuscating the fact that it’s unique, but you’re not changing the underlying reality. The underlying reality is a man and a woman can get together in a particular kind of union and do something that two men, or two women, or … a person and a tractor … cannot do together. So all you’re doing is confusing the issue by pretending that something is like the union of a man and a woman, which it’s not. And that just detaches us from reality, it gums up public policy, it devalues the actual uniqueness of the man-woman union, and it will mislead people into thinking that they are married when they’re not, and it will confirm them in a destructive lifestyle that will ultimately harm them in this life and in the next. And that is not loving.


[And that's why he's the PROFESSIONAL apologist, and I'm just a rank AMATEUR! --G/F]

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