Your arguments about procreation being the primary purpose of marriage are by now tired and old. Courts have already ruled those to be fatuous. Were this a valid argument, two seventy-year-olds or an infertile couple would be barred from marriage. Moreover, gay couples CAN procreate! Surrogacy is a wonderful advance in medical science.

The United States is historically and traditionally a Judeo-Christian nation. Consequently, it would stand to reason its public laws would reflect that moral code, which is to uphold and protect traditional marriage and reject all other forms.

A contraceptive mentality effectively regroups heterosexual relationships into the same category as homosexual ones. Remove children from the equation, and the two relationships become nearly indistinguishable, hence, the current face of our culture.

The argument about polygamy and bigamy is spot on. If a person can accept one type of non-traditional marriage, the natural consequence likely should be that they accept other non-traditional types, too. If they do not, they are logically inconsistent. To me, such would indicate a different underlying motive.

I do stand by my words: sterile sex is unnatural sex. It is sex divorced from its natural, biological end, which is procreation. This doesn’t mean that every sexual act must result in conception to be legitimate, it means that every sexual act must be open to the possibility of conception to be properly ordered, or, put another way, natural.

This is why Catholics (those who care about following Church teaching, anyway) practice NFP rather than use contraceptives during times where pregnancy wouldn’t be the best idea. They abstain during fertile times, or, in more serious cases, may abstain altogether, knowing that if they miscalculate or have an extra glass of wine and throw caution to the wind, the baby that will result is one they will welcome, even if it’s one they didn’t seek to conceive. As a man I know with a particularly large family likes to say, “All our children are planned and wanted: planned by God, and wanted by us.”

Sexual acts that by their nature or by direct intervention are rendered sterile are divorced from the possibility of conception or willingness to accept it should it occur. They are not open to life. They are sterile, in a total sense of the word. It’s about sex only, and conception is excluded from the equation.

Infertility is not, in and of itself, sterile. Plenty of infertile couples desire conception and are open to life. And couples who for some reason (illness, old age, medically-necessary hysterectomy, etc.) continue to correspond by their actions to God’s design for human sexuality are certainly not guilty of any unnatural act. They do not voluntarily seek infertility, or render their sexual intimacy sterile. It is so because of external factors.

Those who know and understand Catholic theology know and understand that intention is a critical component of human action. Whether it is the priest on the altar intending to consecrate the host (if he does not so intend, it is not consecrated) or the couple intending to render their marital relations sterile, intention matters in the assessment of moral or immoral acts. And outcomes are affected as well. Which is why there is a world of difference between a couple using contraception, which is an artificially imposed barrier to conception, and a couple using NFP, which simply takes advantage of the not-always-fertile nature of human sexuality. The latter requires self-denial and sacrifice. The former is selfish, and gratification seeking.