3 Comments

peg
January 9th, 2013 | 4:09 pm

My daughter and I attended this discussion—thanks to FT for advertising it—and it was an hour well-spent. The speakers are impressive, and I am relieved they are on our side. It was sobering to hear Dr. George state that same-sex “marriage” will not redefine marriage but rather abolish it, and that this is, in fact, the expressed hope of some of its noisiest proponents. God help us.

Chairm
January 13th, 2013 | 3:08 am

This presentation (and the question and answer session) makes for a useful companion to the book. I hope a transcript will be produced.

1. Comprehensiveness is the key for that to which commitment is given — not just by the bride and groom but also by society which holds the meaning of marriage in high esteem. Commitment alone does not provide the content of the marital type of relationship.

2. Comprehensiveness happens to justify the cultural and legal treatment of the husband and wife as a single entity. When the husband is ill incapacitated, his wife speaks for him as if she and he were one. When the wife bears children, he and she are responsible to their offspring and to each other in those responsibilities as co-equal parents. The husband and wife are closely related due to this comprehensiveness which is volitional and also bodily (i.e. coital)

3. Civil law need not be a perfect encoding of the core meaning of marriage; but the law needs to be drawn closely to that core for it is that core which justifies the preferential status of marriage and it is societal regard for that core that justifies the boundaries around marriage both in terms of eligibility to enter and regulation of dissolution (whether by death or civil action such as in adulty/divorce or annulment). This is so in the great monotheistic religious law systems but also in common law and civil law systems as well.

4. The primary consequence of the imposition of the SSM idea (which is the revisionist idea with a gay emphasis) is abolition of the marriage idea in civil law — and, the advocates hope, also in the culture at large. The preferential status of the marriage idea would be dropped; the marriage idea would first be demoted to a merely protective status that would be wrapped around non-conjugal types of relationships); but the obvious goal of the advocates is that the marriage…

Chairm
January 14th, 2013 | 8:59 pm

To complete the thought in item #4:

The obvious goal of the advocates of SSM is that the marriage idea (ie the conjugal view) is to become anethema to the new state enforce orthodoxy. The marriage idea will be demoted to a barely tolerative status in law and social policy but also culturally. That is the goal sought by those who push the gay emphasis in their promotion of the SSM idea.