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What's The Problem With Gay Marriage

Plus: the Champions League is decadent and depraved...

Eamonn McCann, 28 Mar 2012

The Catholic bishops are up in arms about gay marriage. Wouldn’t you think they’d be more circumspect about elbowing their way to the front of a fight about sexual relationships?

 

No need to report the sexual savaging of children, they maintained until the week before last. Even now they are iffy about the extent to which reporting is required. But equal rights for two men or two women in a loving relationship? Would turn God’s stomach, that would.

The Co. Antrim-born boss of the RC Church in Scotland, Cardinal Kevin O’Brien, is leading the charge in Britain. Gay marriage would be “madness”, a “grotesque subversion of a universally accepted human right” leading on to “further aberrations”.

When it was explained that churches would not be required to recognise gay marriage, O’Brien shot back: “Imagine for a moment that the Government had decided to legalise slavery but assured us that ‘no-one will be forced to keep a slave’. Would such worthless assurances calm our fury?”

Eh?

O’Brien came up our street a while back, over to preside at celebrations of the centenary of the Long Tower Church. Free Derry Wall was overprinted the night before his arrival with the proclamation: “No forgiveness without firm purpose of amendment.”

O’Brien will have gotten the reference – but seems to have missed the message. Pondering the broken-backed logic of the bishops’ position, I recalled the pithy prescription of the Code of Canon Law 1016: Salva competentia vicilis potestatis circa civiles eiusdem matrimonii effectus.

In his definitive “Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma”, Ludwig Ott elaborates: “The State is entitled to regulate the purely civil legal consequences of the contract of marriage (right of name and state, marital rights to property, right of inheritance) and to settle disputes about these matters... To the extent that the State legislation and administration of justice invades the jurisdiction of the Church, the Church cannot recognise their validity. Thus the Church rejects as invalid for Christians obligatory civil marriage. She regards such civil marriages not as real marriages but merely as legal formalities.”



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