The recent legislation in New York opening the door to legally sanctioned unions of same-sex couples (by fiat of positive law) raises the question about whether those Catholic public officials of New York who supported the new law in some fashion acted in conformity with the Church’s teachings on Catholics in public life. It may be that those public officials who voted for this proposal or who signed it into law did not consider what the Church asks of her members who are public officials and engaged in actions which conflict with the Church’s teachings.
And what are those teachings regarding this matter. Well, both Blessed John Paul II and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have set them out clearly. I have recently addressed the importance about values in the exercise of the state’s authority [HERE], so I shall not replicate that discussion here. But what needs to be considered today is the essential question regarding what the Church expects of her members who exercise public responsibilities in formulating the laws by which society is governed.
Here is what the Church asks of them:
First of all Catholics—regardless of whether they hold public office or not—are obliged to pursue the common good as the Church defines it.
Second, if there is law already made that conflicts with the Church’s teachings, then Catholics have the responsibility of registering their disagreement with it and, then, doing what they can to enact restrictions to limit the extent of the mischief that has been or may be generated by the original law especially when there is an effort to amend or renew funding for such a law. This assumes that it would not be possible to repeal such a law upon its being revisited by those whose office it is to re-examine the legislation.
However, this was not the case in New York since the legislation of New York had until a few days ago only permitted the union of one man and one woman, not two men or two women. What did the Church’s teachings mandate in this context?
Catholics—especially those whose responsibility it is to make law—have the duty as a member of the Body of Christ to (1) express opposition clearly and publicly to proposals that would acknowledge homosexual unions, and, then, (2) do what is necessary to defeat the proposal by voting against it and by encouraging others to do the same not only on the grounds of faith but also on the foundation of objective reason.
For those Catholics who believe, perhaps quite earnestly, that the recent legislation of New York redefining marriage “feels good” need to re-examine why they think this and why they believe it is consistent with the teachings of their Church. To believe that the cause of equality has been protected or that fairness and civil rights are enhanced are false foundations for supporting the new definition of marriage. When these arguments are made by Catholics in support of the new law defining marriage, they demonstrate by word and deed that they know not who they are when the claim the moniker Catholic.
On a more technical legal issue, it is interesting to note that the legislation contains a provision that if any element of the act is declared invalid as a result of the judicial process, the entire act will be invalid. This may well suggest that public officials who supported the legislation in some form may not be so confident about that which they undertook in seeking its passage.
RJA sj
Friday, July 1, 2011
I just finished attending a two day seminar on Woman in the Church and in the World, sponsored by the Siena Symposium for Women, Family, and Culture. The seminar included some wonderful sessions on the problems confronting women, the Marian Dimension of the Church, the family as "domestic Church," the mission of the laity, among others. Among the other participant attendants were MOJ'er Lisa Schiltz and MOJ friend Teresa Collett.
While are many substantive issues I could write about (and perhaps Lisa will blog on one or more of those), one of the things that came up for me is something we also touched on (albeit in a different context) at the recent Law and Religion Roundtable that several of us have written about here on MOJ - the need for care in the language that we employ.
One of the symposium participants leveled the criticism that secular feminists buy into a mindset of male normativity (not her term). That is, they accept a male hierarchy of values and seek to have women embody those values as well or better than do men. (In fact, I don't think that is an accurate characterization of most secular feminist thought, but that is beside the point of my thrust here.) The suggestion is that Catholic thought brings a better approach to the table in its notion of complementarity, which does not demand of women that they try to “be men.”
My concern is not with the notion of complementarity but in how it is discussed. As I listened to a number of comments, rather than promoting a notion that women’s talents and gifts were as important as men’s, some of the language seemed to replace one hierarchy of values with another. Thus, for example, one person spoke of having a child as involving a total lifegiving sacrifice that is fuller than any other possible sacrifice of self humans are capable of. (What does that say, not only to males, but to women without children?) Another made a comment suggesting that there is a preference for the contemplative over the active, suggesting that female receptivity was of a higher value than male action. Complementarity, it seems to me, ought to be about dumping the idea of ranking of male and female gifts/talents, not about replacing one ranking of values with another.
It may be that neither of the comments I gave as examples (nor several others of a similar ilk) were intended to suggest this, but that is how it sounded. Hence my admonition that we all need to be careful in how we discuss these issues if we want to persuade that they offer a better way of thinking about issues.
A New York town clerk takes her stand, though perhaps she should have waited until she had an actual case before her. I consider myself to be a strong advocate for rights of conscience, but I think those rights are much more difficult to defend for state actors (not necessarily impossible, but much more difficult).
First Things' daily "On the Square" has a set of interesting pieces by Archbishop Charles Chaput, Gregory Laughlin, and Robert Miller on Brown v. EMA, the California violent video games case that Steve Shiffrin has posted about here recently.
Earlier this week, Ross Douthat wrote a column lamenting sex-selective abortion based on Mara Hvistendahl's new book, "Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men." He concluded:
[T]he sense of outrage that pervades her story seems to have been inspired by the missing girls themselves, not the consequences of their absence.
Here the anti-abortion side has it easier. We can say outright what’s implied on every page of “Unnatural Selection,” even if the author can’t quite bring herself around.
The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re “missing.” The tragedy is that they’re dead.
Hvistendahl now responds, and wisely (in my view) points out that "[r]eproductive rights in the United States have been positioned around the notion of absolute choice, and facing advances in reproductive technology like early and easy sex determination involves addressing the question of whether there may in fact be some limits to the reach of choice." Prochoice advocates have been unwilling to tackle that question, and thus prolife advocates have an advantage in the debate because sex-selective abortions are so morally troubling to most Americans. But that's as far as the prolife advantage goes, according to Hvistendahl. After all,
Women make the decision to abort because women know best how difficult it is to be female. Further reducing a woman's rights would only make her more wary of having a daughter.
Hmmm . . . we face a pressing problem of girls being targeted for abortion, but we should not use the law to curtail abortion rights because that will just make women more likely to target their daughters for abortion, knowing how much more difficult life will be without a robust set of abortion rights? I agree that a person can oppose a right to sex-selective abortions without necessarily opposing a right to abortion more broadly, but Hvistendahl's logic is a bit of a stretch, it seems to me.
