Defending marriage

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Instead, they argue about "rights" or about "discrimination." But the fact is, the law already severely restricts who can and can't marry. Marriage is restricted by age, by previous marriage status and by kinship, for starters. And marriage necessarily has to be "discriminatory." Its definition has to exclude other pairings (roommates, brothers and sisters, etc.) from claiming the benefits given to married couples.

Why does society have to restrict marriage so severely? Because marriage performs a crucial function. Its purpose is the propagation and protection of children, and to conform sexual relationships to morality. Homosexual "marriage" would do none of these things.

If either of your parents chose a homosexual "marriage," you wouldn't be here. And if you're a parent, you know how having children changed you. Parenthood provides a citizenry with more patience, ambition and dedication to the next generation than it ever would have developed otherwise.

A dangerous lifestyle

There is an "inconvenient truth" that few are willing to mention. Homosexual lifestyles are not healthy - physically, emotionally or morally.

Doctors advertise heavily in homosexual publications, because male homosexual sex routinely injures its participants. Even in countries where homosexuality is accepted, the evidence is irrefutable that homosexuals suffer higher rates of depression and suicide than the general public.

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The arrest of Sen. Larry Craig, is telling. Who can imagine anonymous sexual liaisons between men and women becoming such a problem that police details would have to be dispatched to airports? Women's different sensibilities put a natural check on the sexual appetites of men.

Children are bound to suffer if their parents are part of the homosexual scene. From the Village People song "YMCA" to the Showtime television show "Queer as Folk," homosexual culture has long celebrated sex with teens. One of the most-often searched for pornography terms on the Internet is a homosexual slang word for teenage boys.

In The Gay Report, by homosexual researchers Karla Jay and Allen Young, the authors report that 73 percent of homosexuals surveyed had at some time had sex with boys 16 to 19 years of age or younger. Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, calls a report of the John Jay Criminal College a "bombshell." John Jay found that the Catholic abuse crisis wasn't pedophilia but "homosexual predation on American Catholic youth." He told the National Catholic Register: "I'm astonished that people throughout America are not talking about it, thinking about it, and wondering about what the mechanisms were that set this alight."

Consequences

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that legalized homosexual "marriage" will mean simply keeping things the way they are, only being more kind and fair to homosexual couples.

In fact the changes will be dramatic: The word "marriage" will be applied to more and more relationships. Polygamists in Canada are already making significant strides in gaining legitimacy for their "marriages." American polygamists are gearing up to follow.

If homosexual "marriage" is legalized, it will - by law - be as celebrated as marriage is today. Public schools will include texts and materials treating the two types of marriages identically. So will ads, billboards, posters and displays at your public library. If you die, your children could be adopted by either a homosexual couple or a heterosexual couple - to prefer one over the other would be illegal.

What you can do

Write to your representatives in state and federal government. Find their names and addresses by typing in your ZIP code at Vote-Smart.org. Use the arguments above or your own arguments. Ask them to back the Federal Marriage Amendment. Ask what they plan to do to stop the assault on marriage.

Pray. Pope John Paul II asked Catholics to pray daily Rosaries for defense of the family. He said attacks on the family were "menacing ... so as to make us fear for the future of this fundamental and indispensable institution and, with it, for the future of society as a whole."

Embrace your Faith

Evangelize. Pope Benedict XVI says the world needs to see evidence that traditional marriage is a path to human flourishing. The world is looking to us as examples - for good or ill. The first way to evangelize is by joyfully living our own family lives deeply.