Taking it to the Streets: Time to Join the New French Resistance Defending Marriage

Heterosexual marriage, procreation, and the nurturing of children form the foundation for the family, and the family forms the foundation of civil society. Our position in defending of marriage serves the common good. Redefining it does not. What occurred in Paris this weekend is a sign of a resistance movement which is spreading. We must all take our place within its ranks.  It is time for us to take it to the streets. Marriage and the family and society founded upon them are under a wholesale assault and the future of freedom is at risk.

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P>PARIS, France (Catholic Online) -  This past Sunday hundreds of thousands of French citizens, from every walk of life, including moms, dads, children, grandparents, singles, and consecrated celibate clergy, marched for marriage.

If you read most of the headlines coming out of that nation you would have read something quite different from the propaganda press. The headlines asserted they marched against an oxymoron they now routinely call gay marriage. Anyone who opposes their position is now called anti-gay marriage, rather than what they are, Pro-Marriage.

We all should recognize the pattern of the Cultural Revolutionaries and their Press collaborators by now. They change the language, manufacture some new counterfeit 'right' and then accuse those who oppose their social experimentation of being against that newly manufactured "right" and therefore against their feigned progress.

They did it with the Right to Life. They opposed this Right for our youngest neighbors in the womb. Then, they manufactured some new 'right' to take their life in the first home of the whole human race, at any time and for any reason, through legalized procured abortion. They now call it an 'abortion right'. Abortions have no rights, only human persons do and their first right, the fundamental human Right to Life, is taken away in every procured abortion.

Make no mistake, the verbal engineering has captured the propaganda media and we simply cannot trust their reporting. That is why having our own alternatives, such as Catholic Online, and so many others,  is so vitally important to our efforts to defend the real common good. What happened on Sunday is only the very beginning of a resistance movement which must spread across the globe.

The struggle we face in a declining western culture growing increasingly hostile toward the Church is really about a clash of worldviews, personal and corporate, and competing definitions of human freedom, human dignity, and human flourishing. It is a contest over the very foundations of a social order. It consists of conflicting claims about what constitutes true progress.

We insist that true marriage and family have been inscribed by the Divine Architect into the order of the universe. That is because they have. Truth does not change, people and cultures do; sometimes for good and sometimes for evil.

Marriage is the first society into which children are to be born, learn to be fully human, grow in virtue, flourish and take their role in families and communities. We must not be afraid to make the claim that children have a right to a mother and a father. They do.

Of course we care about the single parent family and the many broken homes. However, their existence does not change the norm necessary for a stable and healthy society. In tact marriages and families are the glue of a healthy and happy social order. We need to be a visible, palpable reflection of this truth about marriage and family in our own lives. To live a faithful marriage is now countercultural.

Our convictions and claims concerning life and marriage are not outdated notions of a past era but provide the path to the future. Their recognition and implementation in the social order is the path to true progress. Nor is our position simply "religious". We insist upon the existence of a Natural Moral Law which can be known by all men and women through the exercise of reason.

This is not only a Christian position. It is the ground upon which every great civilization has been built. It is the source for every great and authentic human and civil rights movement. This Natural Moral Law gives us the moral norms we need to build truly human and humane societies and govern ourselves. It should also inform our positive law or we will become lawless and devolve into anarchy.

There is a growing intolerance spreading across the Nations of the West against our rights to free expression, association and participation. This is reflected in a brazen effort to censor any speech which questions the cultural slide into the abyss of relativism.

Efforts to prevent our vocal and public defense of the objective truth about marriage and the family are multiplying. However, they are not succeeding. That was evident once this past weekend in the streets of Paris, France where hundreds of thousands gathered to defend marriage and the family and society founded upon them.

It was also evident in the reporting that the mainline media opposes our efforts. The brave French defenders of marriage and the family and society founded upon them were cast as fundamentalists, extremists and somehow dangerous to the civil order. They are not. They are the face of a new French Resistance which we must imitate, affirm, applaud and participate in.

The news reports made the defenders of marriage and family look violent, when, in fact, the demonstrations were entirely peaceful. Moms, dads and kids even ate picnic lunches throughout the event. Did you see those picnics covered? This is a concerted propaganda effort which has been undertaken by those who seek to enforce a Cultural Revolution.  

We must expose the Orwellian newspeak used by those who oppose true marriage. They are attempting to frame the public struggle by casting those of us who defend marriage as somehow being "anti-gay marriage". We must resist this propaganda ploy and stay crystal clear in our message and cultural mission. Homosexual partnerships are incapable of being marriages.

To limit marriage to heterosexual couples is not discriminatory now, nor has it ever been. Homosexual couples cannot bring into existence what marriage intends by its very definition. To insist with the police power of the State that we pretend otherwise does not serve the common good.

To confer by governmental fiat the benefits that have been conferred in the past only to stable married couples and families to homosexual paramours is bad public policy. To state this is not to be "anti-gay". It is to defend marriage and the family. It is to serve the common good.

Many of the reports singled out the primary role of the Catholic Church in this new French Resistance. It made me even more proud to be a Catholic. The position of the Catholic Church is crystal clear. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church explained in 2003:

"The Church's teaching on marriage and on the complementarity of the sexes reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason and recognized as such by all the major cultures of the world. Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose."

"No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman, who by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons. In this way, they mutually perfect each other, in order to cooperate with God in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives."

Civil institutions do not create marriage nor can they manufacture some new right to marry for those who are incapable of marriage. Government has long regulated marriage for the common good. For example, the ban on polygamy protected marriage as between one man and one woman and providing the stable base for a healthy family. The insistence on age requirements were enforced in order to ensure that there was a mature decision at the basis of the Marriage contract.

Heterosexual marriage, procreation, and the nurturing of children form the foundation for the family, and the family forms the foundation of civil society. Our position in defending of marriage serves the common good. Redefining it does not.

What occurred in Paris this weekend is a sign of a resistance movement which is spreading. We must all take our place within its ranks.  It is time for us to take it to the streets. Marriage and the family and society founded upon them are under a wholesale assault and the future of freedom is at risk.

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