Your summary sounds right to me, though in my experience as a Catholic, I don't even hear it explicated so clearly. It's just "Protection of the Family" to which I always wind up going "Huh?" and have to go do research to figure out what the heck the actual rationale is. Because I'm innately libertarian and it's hard for me to comprehend this kind of thing. :-/
Another argument I see is that without regard to religion or culture, throughout history, all societies have been built upon male/female reproductive family units. Human children need a stable family for proper upbringing, so it is beneficial to all of society to support such units as much as possible. Since same-sex couplings can never naturally produce children, and do not have the normally-expected combination of male and female influences, they are not an acceptable analogue.
And, the final argument I see (which is really the only one that persuades me) is like jadasc said, that if same-sex unions are legally declared to be equivalent to marriage, that churches with contrary beliefs will be forced to perform them. I have no idea what protestant churches would do if that came to pass, but I know the Catholic Church in the USA would have to shut down its parishes and go underground.
I know a group of seminarians in this country who honestly expect to live out at least part of their career as priests in prison. I think that's expecting an awful lot of change to happen very fast, but, such things have happened historically, elsewhere. Already in this country Catholic hospitals and charities have had to shut down due to legislation which would force them to do something contrary to Catholic teaching, if they had continued to operate.
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Date: 2008-11-05 09:34 pm (UTC)Another argument I see is that without regard to religion or culture, throughout history, all societies have been built upon male/female reproductive family units. Human children need a stable family for proper upbringing, so it is beneficial to all of society to support such units as much as possible. Since same-sex couplings can never naturally produce children, and do not have the normally-expected combination of male and female influences, they are not an acceptable analogue.
And, the final argument I see (which is really the only one that persuades me) is like
I know a group of seminarians in this country who honestly expect to live out at least part of their career as priests in prison. I think that's expecting an awful lot of change to happen very fast, but, such things have happened historically, elsewhere. Already in this country Catholic hospitals and charities have had to shut down due to legislation which would force them to do something contrary to Catholic teaching, if they had continued to operate.