Sometimes it really does not matter what the political trends of the day are telling us we ought to do.
So says Chris Cillizza, political blogger at the Washington Post.
He cites a whole bunch of polls that indicate support in the nation is very markedly trending toward support for same-sex “marriage” across most demographics as his evidence.
There’s a real problem with making categorical statements like this: they ignore the ongoing nature of politics and immutability of Truth.
Now, granted, politics of the state are not governed by Truth unless those who hold the levers of power remain docile to Truth, but just as the political winds have been shifting over time in favor same-sex “marriage” according to the polls Cillizza cites, given more time and more political seasons, the winds may very well shift back in the other direction.
Those of us who will never accept the notion that the contractual arrangement a same-sex couple enters into could be called “marriage” will never accept it because “marriage” means something—something written into what it means to be man and woman, something beyond emotional attachment and sexual gratification, something that is not subject to polls.
“Right is right if the world be wrong.”
And while the world thrashes about from one extreme to the other raging against the authority of Truth, Truth remains where it is, offering the world the opportunity to settle down and be at peace.
In this vein, in his first address to the world’s diplomats to the Vatican, Pope Francis cited “spiritual poverty” as one of the great threats to peace. That does not just mean world peace and wars among nations, it goes right down to the peace within nations, within cities, within communities, within families, and even within our own selves.
Whether that spiritual poverty leads people to hold up odious signs that say awful things like “God hates fags;” or to write the sorts of things people say against us here at CatholicVote when we write pieces like this against gay “marriage;” or to something much less brutal but still a personal assertion of self-will; it is a raging against the peace that comes from docility to Truth.
The politics of the day may be trending toward a codification in law of some contractual arrangement available to same-sex couples that approximates marriage, and they may even use that word in the writing of the law, but that does not make it marriage.
Oh… I can’t quit now without recalling a brilliant exchange in Robert Bolt’s masterful play about St. Thomas More, “A Man for All Seasons.” During one of his interrogations by Cromwell, Cranmer, and Norfolk, More responds to a question about the King’s authority by pointing out (and I’m reproducing this from memory), “Some say the world is flat, while others think it round: it is a matter capable of question. But if the world is flat will the king’s command make it round, and if it is round, will the king’s command flatten it?”
Just so.