"Gay Marriage" Now Legal in UK

So as of the stroke of midnight, so-called "gay marriage" became legal in the UK and the first same-sex couples were "wed". It is all over the news here, and the rainbow flag which is a symbol of LGBT pride is flying over whitehall no less!

The idea I think is that the very perception of gay relationships will change with the advent of "gay marriage", as one of those taking part articulated on the news. For society, I think this will have major repercussions, but not sudden ones. It is part of a decline in moral standards which purports to be about love and equality but in truth betrays any true academic notion of either.

Now I do understand that there are many homosexual couples who think that this is about equality and love. I don't think anyone should have to feel marginalised in society, or threatened, or hated, it makes me sad to think they might feel that way. But I cannot help but feel "gay marriage" is forcing a confrontation and trying to enforce a societal norm that says apples are actually oranges. 

But they're not.

True equality is about tolerance despite our differences, not rolling out legislation to normalise certain sexual preferences. Similarly, love does not automatically equate to marriage, who would say it does? And why do we have to reduce our relationships to genital transactions? Why would gay couples want to try and entertain the pretence that their same-sex relationships are the same as heterosexual relationships?

Yesterday, the founder and co-ordinator of Catholic Voices, Dr. Austen Ivereigh, made an appearance on jeremy Vine's Radio 2 lunch time show. In his interview, he explained that he had no problem with gay couples expressing their love for each other, but that "gay marriage" marked a paradigm shift for society away from pro-creative relationships to relationships based on other criteria (e.g. love). Now I think I am a fairly bright boy, but even I find the logic of this argument incredibly difficult to follow. Especially as the first counter always thrown at it seems to be infertile heterosexual couples. The reason infertile heterosexual couples' marriages are not invalid in Catholic theology is because they remain open to life. But Austen can't really appeal to that in his argument, because it means that he is really referring to the sterility of any sexual act divorced from the possibility of pro-creation, and that is the problem here: the separation of the sexual act from its fundamental purpose.

My point is that I am concerned that Catholic Voices are surely trying to sell some snake oil to the media with this line (not that it's working, mind you). They want to pretend that it is fine to engage in same-sex acts, whilst explaining Catholic teaching on marriage in some other way. It's about our traditional understanding, it's about the children, it's about a meaning, a model, it's about anything rather than what it really is about: that homosexual acts are disordered.

We all have disorders and we all commit sins. The Church teaches that homosexual acts are sinful, it also teaches that fornication, adultery, contraception, and masturbation are sins. If I express agreement with the Churches teaching on fornication, adultery, contraception, and masturbation, that's fine. People might look at me like I'm a bit weird, but it's my choice. But if I express agreement with Church teaching on homosexuality, I am ridiculed, laughed at, mocked, called a homophobe, a bigot, and even spat upon in some sort of ironic parody of the sort of behaviour gay people were once (and in some cases, still) forced to bear.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has now publicly capitulated on the issue admonishing Christians to "demonstrate in word and action, the love of Christ for every human being," as he put it. Yet how are we to do that unless we tell the truth? The revealed position on this issue has been clear and stable for thousands of years. If God exists and He wanted us to think something else about it, why did He include such unambiguous condemnation in Sacred Scripture?

It is quite true that the Biblical literature owes to the different epochs in which it was written a good deal of its varied patterns of thought and expression (Dei Verbum 12). The Church today addresses the Gospel to a world which differs in many ways from ancient days. But the world in which the New Testament was written was already quite diverse from the situation in which the Sacred Scriptures of the Hebrew People had been written or compiled, for example.
What should be noticed is that, in the presence of such remarkable diversity, there is nevertheless a clear consistency within the Scriptures themselves on the moral issue of homosexual behaviour. The Church's doctrine regarding this issue is thus based, not on isolated phrases for facile theological argument, but on the solid foundation of a constant Biblical testimony. The community of faith today, in unbroken continuity with the Jewish and Christian communities within which the ancient Scriptures were written, continues to be nourished by those same Scriptures and by the Spirit of Truth whose Word they are. It is likewise essential to recognize that the Scriptures are not properly understood when they are interpreted in a way which contradicts the Church's living Tradition. To be correct, the interpretation of Scripture must be in substantial accord with that Tradition.

                                —CDF Document on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons No. 5

We cannot pretend this is not the case, and those who attempt to interpret Scripture in a way which is sympathetic to a homosexual perspective are denying that there is any truth in Scripture, or that God intended it as a means or revelation, in effect they are saying God got it wrong, and the Magisterium means nothing. The Holy Spirit does not exist, or work in and through the Church, and we have been wrong for 2,000 years. To my mind, you might as well forget about it all if you're going to say that, surely?

The Church states with St. Paul “All Scripture is inspired by God”. God is the primary author of the Bible but He employed human authors as well but He did not merely assist them while they wrote or subsequently approve what they had written. God the Holy Spirit is the principal author of Scripture while the human writers are instrumental authors. They freely wrote everything in the Bible and what they wrote was what God wanted them to write. It thus follows that if the authorship of the Bible is divine, it is inerrant because God cannot lie or make mistakes.Since the Bible is divinely inspired it must be without error in everything its that its divine and human authors affirm to be true. 

This does not mean that the Bible is some kind of all purpose encyclopaedia of information covering every field of study. It is not a science textbook. Nevertheless the Church has never wavered on this issue and Sacred Scripture and Tradition are completely in tune, as explained very clearly in the CDF Document quoted above which also states that the Church…

...refuses to consider the person as a "heterosexual" or a "homosexual" and insists that every person has a fundamental Identity: the creature of God, and by grace, his child and heir to eternal life. —op. cit. no. 16.

Whilst making the uncompromising assertion that:

As in every moral disorder, homosexual activity prevents one's own fulfillment and happiness by acting contrary to the creative wisdom of God. The Church, in rejecting erroneous opinions regarding homosexuality, does not limit but rather defends personal freedom and dignity realistically and authentically understood.— op. cit. no. 7.

The truth about the "gay marriage" phenomenon is that it is nothing new, despite being applauded as modernism, and a sign of progress and the development of our society. In fact same-sex union was known in Ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Mesopotamia, in some regions of China, such as Fujian province, and at certain times in ancient European history.

At least two of the Roman Emperors were in same-sex unions; and in fact, thirteen out of the first fourteen Roman Emperors held to be bisexual or exclusively homosexual. The first Roman emperor to have married a man was Nero, who is reported to have married two other men on different occasions. Firstly, one of his freedmen, Pythagoras, to whom Nero took the role of the bride. Later as a groom Nero married a young boy to replace his young teenage concubine (whom he had killed) named Sporus, in a very public ceremony…

"...with all the solemnities of matrimony, and lived with him as his spouse A friend gave the "bride" away "as required by law." 

The "marriage" was celebrated separately in both Greece and Rome in extravagant public ceremonies. When we think of these historic events, do we see them as legitimate social experiments that failed, or the sick toying with the truth of human relationships by an opulent and decaying society? This is certainly not progress, but rather a regression to an ancient perversion we left behind a long time ago when we discovered it only served to sicken society.

In the Bible, love is made a moral adventure invested with metaphysical grandeur which compares the fidelity of husband and wife to the ideal of faithfulness between humanity and God. As secularism seeks to remove more and more areas of life from ecclesiastical control, we find this model increasingly misunderstood, ridiculed and attacked. No bad thing you might think, but in reality the result is a dystopian nightmare: sex without love, promiscuity without limits, love without commitment, fatherhood without responsibility, predatory males, females often only left to bear the burden of childcare alone; in short, the sexual habits of the higher primates. Ecclesiastical control seeks to consecrate the biological instinct and etch upon it the charisma of moral beauty.

The natural direction of the current teleology is the dialectic which asserts that male and female are irrelevant constructs to be eradicated using the full force of the state. Marriage is, amongst other things, the explicit recognition of the need for the sexes to mutually cooperate for the future of society, of the need of children for a mother and a father: for men and women to teach boys and girls how to be become husbands and wives and mothers and fathers. "Same sex marriage" is an act of ontological fraud that denies the realities of male and female. It is therefore an act of violence and rebellion against our created nature.