A reader writes from Australia

Last updated on: December 29, 2014 at 9:16 pm by Mark Shea

A reader writes from Australia 2014-12-29T21:16:48-07:00 Mark Shea

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Hi Mark – I came across some of your writings on Patheos and read some of your columns. I am not Catholic, although I have a lot of respect for Catholicism and find myself in general philosophical agreement with it.

Anyway, I am writing about a social issue and to make a suggestion. I notice that your opinion pieces and also quite a few others by various Christian sites that are opposed to same-sex marriage. I am also conscientiously opposed to it, although I find that amongst my friends and even family, I am something of the odd man out, as it seems that most people support it.

So the idea has occured to me that it might be very useful if there were a recognizable kind of movement of people who conscientiously oppose same-sex marriage without a particularly or overtly religious or Biblical kind of image, and who were not affiliated with any particular religious group. It would enable a lot of people, like myself, to signify that we oppose the gay marriage juggernaut. The purpose would be to present conservative social arguments against same-sex marriage while recognizing individual rights.

My belief is that ‘gay rights’ basically constitute ‘the right to privacy’. When laws against sodomy were overturned in many liberal democracies, it was on the basis that the police had no right in people’s bedrooms. I agree with that, and think that the right to privacy is pretty well sacrosanct. But as we have seen, the gay rights movement have leveraged that to create a much higher level of expectation as to what constitutes gay rights. We are all now obliged to say that homosexual relations are the same as normal conjugal relations, which they are obviously not. Apart from anything else, it is an offense to truth.

Anyway, I won’t pre-empt all the various arguments. What I think is needed is a recognizable ‘opposition to gay marriage’ movement, prefereably global, non-sectarian, strictly and absolutely opposed to any form of violence or denigration, but with a recognizable set of core beliefs based on rational principles, and a logo or symbol of some kind.

I want there to be such an organization, so I can join it, so am contacting some like-minded people to see if there is any interest. I don’t have any kind of web profile or platform myself but am a tech writer and experienced debater on philosophy fora, so can work on copy, essays, and the like.

I think this is what you are looking for.

My own take is no secret: when you make “marriage” mean anything, you make it mean nothing. Gay “marriage” is a fiction, just as marriage to the Eiffel Tower, a roller coaster, and a warehouse are fictions. One does not help marriage by making the word mean anything, for words that mean anything are the same thing as words that mean nothing at all. If you are gay and want to pretend to have a wedding, nobody’s stopping you. But this is not about that. What gay “marriage” really is, is an attempt to create a legal basis for punishing those who will not pretend that homosex is not sinful and disordered. That’s what this is all about.

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