Nick Peterson: Same Sex Marriage

Okay, here is a small piece of an awesome forum given at BYU from Robert P George, professor at Princeton. It is about abortion and same-sex marraige. In the part I have attatched, he talkes a little about Children in a same sex marraige. I like this forum, SO MUCH, because it is a Catholic perspective on Goverment and why marraige should stay heterosexual. If anyone is interested in reading it, you can find it at http://www.byub.org/talks/Talk.aspx?id=2345

But one may ask, what about
procreation? On the traditional view of
marriage, is not the sexual union of
spouses instrumentalized to the goal of
having children? It is true that St.
Augustine in certain writings seems to be
a proponent of this view. The conception
of marriage as an instrumental good was
rejected, however, by the mainstream of
philosophical and theological reflection
from the late Middle Ages forward, and
the understanding of sex and marriage
that came to be embodied in both canon
law and civil law does not treat marriage
as merely instrumental to having
children. Western matrimonial law has
traditionally and universally understood
marriage as consummated by acts
fulfilling the behavioral conditions of
procreation, whether or not the
nonbehavioral conditions of procreation
happen to obtain.
By contrast, the sterility of
spouses—so long as they are capable of
consummating their marriage by fulfilling
the behavioral conditions of procreation
(and, thus, of achieving true bodily,
organic unity)—has never been treated as
an impediment to marriage, even where
sterility is certain and even certain to be
permanent. Children who may be
conceived in marital acts are understood
not as ends extrinsic to marriage but
rather as gifts—fulfilling for the couple as
a marital unit and not merely as
individuals—that supervene on acts
whose central defining and justifying
point is precisely the marital unity of
spouses. I and others have elsewhere
developed more fully the moral case for
the conjugal conception of marriage as
the union of one man and one woman
pledged to permanence and fidelity and
committed to caring for children who
come as the fruit of their matrimonial
union. I have argued that acceptance of
the idea that two persons of the same sex
could actually be married to each other
would make nonsense of key features of
marriage and would necessarily require
abandoning any ground of principle for
supposing that marriage is the union of
only two persons, as opposed to three or
more. Only a thin veneer of sentiment, if
it happens to exist (and only for as long as
it exists), can prevent acceptance of
polyamory as a legitimate marital option
once we have given up the principle of
marriage as a male‐female union.
To those arguments, I will here
add an additional reason to reject the idea
9
of same‐sex marriage: The acceptance of
the idea would result in a massive
undermining of religious liberty and
family autonomy as supporters of samesex
marriage would, in the name of
equality, demand the use of governmental
power to whip others into line. The
experience of Massachusetts as well as
foreign jurisdictions is that once marriage
is compromised or formally redefined,
principles of nondiscrimination are
quickly used as cudgels against religious
communities and families who wish to
uphold true marriage by precept and
example.

Posted by Nick Peterson