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“In our nation’s culture wars,” wrote Thomas Wenski, the Archbishop of Miami, in an editorial in Saturday’s Sun Sentinel:
…the two sides are fighting about the understanding of man and his relationship with reality. One side — and today, “gay marriage” is its poster child — holds that anyone can essentially create his own reality. This side holds for a radical autonomy by which truth is determined not by the nature of things, but by one’s own individual will. The other side holds men and women are not self-creators, but creatures. Truth is not constructed, but received and thus must reflect the reality of things. Or, as the Book of Genesis says: “Male and female he created them.” (Genesis, 1:27)
Just to be clear, Archbishop Wenski believes that a virgin gave birth to a deity who was nailed to a piece of wood to save us from the wrath of his father; and that this deity rose from the dead, floated in the air, and ascended through a magic portal to heaven. I mention this not to cast aspersions on Wenski’s faith — I’ll do that in a moment — but to underline what Wenski means when he asserts that it’s his side of the culture wars that is concerned with the “reality of things.”
Wenski’s Saturday editorial is a brief diatribe against gay marriage, and as that quotation suggests, its construction doesn’t demonstrate a tremendous amount of authorly self-awareness. (Nor does it demonstrate much editorial self-awareness, for I doubt the Sentinel realizes that Wenski has been republishing this exact same article in different news outlets for at least three years.) Wenski does not believe gay marriage is good, just, or right — he believes its acceptance signifies an erosion of the bedrock values upon which our society is based — but his essay fails to argue this point convincingly, or even coherently. It is six paragraphs long, and makes four claims. Three of these are senseless, and I’ll address those first. They are:
- Queers are intolerant. Wenski: “Those who see ‘same sex
marriage’ as progress toward a more ‘tolerant’ society will, with
characteristic intolerance, label their opponents as ‘intolerant,’
‘bigoted,’ ‘homophobic,’ and so on.” - Queers should be grateful they’re not being arrested anymore. Wenski: “And even those Americans who hold homosexual activity to be immoral
and sinful are increasingly tolerant of homosexuality as a ‘private’
phenomenon. They might invite the person who experiences same sex
attractions to conversion … but they do not invoke the coercive power
of the state to force such a conversion.” - The purpose of marriage is child-rearing. Wenski: “Marriage has been primarily about the raising of children … The
state has had a legitimate interest in favoring such traditional
marriages as a way of investing in the future of society.”
A few brief responses:
- Wenski
accusing the gay-marriage-crowd of intolerance is almost pure
gibberish, akin to saying that blacks who opposed Jim Crow were
intolerant of Southern whites, or that women who fight for wage equality
are intolerant of sexist CEO’s. Both statements are technically true,
and both statements make useless hash of the word “tolerance.” The
argument would have some bite if gay activists were trying to force
Catholic clergy to perform same-sex marriages, but they’re not. Catholic
clergy ought always be free to marry whomever they choose, and no one
argues otherwise. - Wenski’s second point, that queers should be
grateful that the world’s decent folk aren’t monitoring and punishing
their bedroom activities, is even less sensible than his first. As it
happens, queers are grateful for the strides that have been made
towards equality, and our memories are long enough to remember who
opposed those strides. Wenski seems to suggest that the outcome of the
Supreme Court case which legalized consensual sodomy, Lawrence v. Texas,
was an example of Catholic compassion and moral largesse. That’s not
the case. If Wenski and his co-religionists had their way, private,
consensual homosexual acts would still be illegal. - It really
could be said that the purpose of marriage is to create environments in
which children may be healthily reared, and Wenski is more than welcome
to his opinions about what such an environment might comprise. But the
child-rearing argument is really a moral one, and its validity is
inherently subjective. For example: Most heterosexual married couples —
including those for whom the Archbishop performed the nuptials — would
insist that their marriages are about a great deal more than
child-rearing. And whose opinions are more trustworthy? Those of actual
married couples, or those of an unmarried, self-proclaimed virgin?
But
we can’t say the Archbishop is exactly wrong on any of these points,
because he takes no ownership of them. He insinuates and infers, dancing around his own
conclusions — as though afraid that committing them to paper in short,
declarative sentences would too easily expose them to refutation. Only at
the end of his essay, in outlining his fourth argument, does Wenski
take a clear position:
That marriage is a life-long union between a man and a woman is
certainly part of Catholic teaching, which holds it to be a sacrament. However, marriage as an
institution predates both church and state. Since it is not a creation
of church or state, neither has any authority to change the nature of
marriage.
Even here he is begging the question
— saying, in effect, that tradition is good because it’s traditional
— but at least his opinion is clear. However, grownups cannot beg the
question and expect to be taken seriously, so the argument would be
beneath rebuttal if Wenski, while making it, hadn’t demonstrated such
extraordinary ignorance of his own religion.
Apparently, the Archbishop is unaware that early Christians, beginning with Paul, absolutely loathed marriage. They saw it as an excuse to fornicate. In the second century, Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage, wrote:
The
first decree commanded to increase and to multiply; the second enjoined
continency. While the world is still rough and void, we are propagated
by the fruitful begetting of numbers, and we increase to the enlargement
of the human race. Now when the world is filled and the earth supplied,
they who can receive continency, living after the manner of eunuchs,
are made eunuchs unto the kingdom. Nor does the Lord command this, but
He exhorts it.”
In other words: Getting married is okay, but God would prefer you not.
For
obvious reasons, the spread of Catholicism necessitated a gradual
softening on marriage and all its filthy attendant sex. By the ninth century, the
Church was even performing marriages. (Prior to that, the Church
mostly just recognized local marriage customs.) The form of marriage the
Church ultimately propounded — indissoluble, monogamous, and with a
dowry — became the template for modern Western matrimony. You’ll note
that Wenski implies, but doesn’t quite say, that these monogamous,
heterosexual marriages have been the norm in recorded history. Wenski
doesn’t quite say it because it’s a lie. Wenski’s own holy books
document a long history of polygamy, most of which was approved by
Wenski’s god. The biblical David, the shepherd boy who felled Goliath
and became king, had eight wives, and his nuptials predated those performed in Wenski’s churches by several millenia. What could be more traditional?
Of
course, this history is one that Wenski would rather elide, historical
elision being a necessary pastime of professional Catholics everywhere.
There is something repellent about a man assuming moral authority by
virtue of his rank in an organization which, when it had the power,
spent a millenium burning women and subjugating “savages,” and which is
now engaged in an international cover-up of the rape and torture of
children.
Let me rephrase that: Wenski has a platform in the Sun Sentinel
not because of his stature as a journalist, or as an essayist, or as an
ethicist, but because he has risen to prominence in an organization
which has institutionalized and then lied about the rape and torture of
tens of thousands of children. To treat such a man as a moral authority
is laughable. If he possessed any true moral authority, he’d have cut
and run long ago — or, at the very least, have the decency to use
his Sun Sentinel platform not to pontificate, but to apologize.
UPDATE: The Catholic blogosphere has responded to this article, and I’ve responded to its response. Click here for more.
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