Related articles and links |  1 of 2

On the face of it, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that the government should stay out of people's bedrooms seems reasonable enough. Had law evolved "ex nihilo"—from nothing—then indeed why not strike down Texas' ban on private consensual sex between adults of the same gender?

But until now there seemed to have been a consensus among societies with monotheistic traditions that all civil law was rooted in natural law, which is written upon created order and, as the apostle Paul put it, "graven on the heart of man."

Natural law is God's witness even to societies, which do not acknowledge him. Since time immemorial most healthy cultures have shared a belief that it is wrong to murder, steal, lie, commit adultery—and commit certain sexual acts considered deviate.

This is not to say that for every violation of natural law, including homosexual behavior, people should be locked up or fined; if this were so, more straight than same-sex couples would find themselves behind bars, simply because the former outnumber the latter. Much of what is against natural law is thankfully no longer punishable.

However, much as we may agree on this, the Supreme Court has taken matters considerably further. "The court system legalizes the departure from natural law," warns the Rev. Gerald E. Murray, a Catholic priest and canon lawyer in New York. "The Supreme Court reads the current liberal agenda as if it were incorporated into the Constitution by those who wrote it. And with that the court is engaging in a major falsehood."

Of course, it is open to debate to "what extent civil law must follow natural law," allows the Rev. Gerald R. McDermott, an evangelical Episcopal priest and professor of religion and philosophy. Yet the Texas case has probably brought the United States closer to same-sex marriage, and that will have more egregious consequences, according to McDermott.

"Once marriage between homosexuals is legal, it will redefine the marriage between man and woman, which will then no longer be seen as a union marked by a life-time faithfulness to one partner, and not as a union open to procreation," he says.

"When both sexes are abandoned," thundered the 6th-century church father St. Cyprian, "this is clear proof of the ultimate corruption." By this the former bishop of Toulon in France meant the corruption of man's status as God's image, and image complete only by the union of husband and wife.

More than 14 centuries later another Frenchman, Jean Vanier, founder of L'Arche movement that fosters community life with people with developmental disabilities, described marriage as God's icon; it follows that seen from this perspective homosexuality is an idol because it does not point to the interdependence between husband and wife.

Murray raises another point: "On what grounds can we now declare prostitution, incest or polygamy illegal? At a recent international conference on human sexuality, Christl Vonholdt, a pediatrician and president of the German Institute for Youth and Society, warned of the many dangers inherent in a Canadian-style acceptance of same-sex marriage, a move that would further damage the public's perception of natural law.

She pointed to the danger of a total annihilation of societal gender norms, a dearth of births, a deepening of the sexual confusion among the young, and disastrous medical and psychological reverberations. According to Vonholdt, 66 percent of all homosexuals die of diseases related to their sexual preference.

Equally troubling is another prospect that is already well under way in Western Europe and Canada—the public marginalization of religions traditionalists as immoral and un-Christian. This may well bring the new, zeitgeist-oriented reading of the Constitution on one issue in conflict with another unshakeable right—the right to freedom of religion.

next page... |  1 of 2

June (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47