USA Today writer blames the Church for redefining marriage

Folks, I read with interest the following entry in the Faith and Reason section of USA Today. It's entitled Who redefined marriage? Not Prop8 judge: Look in the mirror, experts say. Rather than taking the thing apart piece by piece, I want to focus on two statements, as follows:

The Christian religion uniquely is the first religion not to make procreation central to marriage, or even to religious life. Early Christians idealized the person who went out to organized for the faith, rather than to get married. And the church always held that failure to procreate is not grounds to dissolve a marriage.

That may be true of Christian sectarianism, but in the Catholic Church we don't see it that way. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

The openness to fertility

1652 "By its very nature the institution of marriage and married love is ordered to the procreation and education of the offspring and it is in them that it finds its crowning glory."160

Children are the supreme gift of marriage and contribute greatly to the good of the parents themselves. God himself said: "It is not good that man should be alone," and "from the beginning [he] made them male and female"; wishing to associate them in a special way in his own creative work, God blessed man and woman with the words: "Be fruitful and multiply." Hence, true married love and the whole structure of family life which results from it, without diminishment of the other ends of marriage, are directed to disposing the spouses to cooperate valiantly with the love of the Creator and Savior, who through them will increase and enrich his family from day to day.161

1653 The fruitfulness of conjugal love extends to the fruits of the moral, spiritual, and supernatural life that parents hand on to their children by education. Parents are the principal and first educators of their children.162 In this sense the fundamental task of marriage and family is to be at the service of life.163

1654 Spouses to whom God has not granted children can nevertheless have a conjugal life full of meaning, in both human and Christian terms. Their marriage can radiate a fruitfulness of charity, of hospitality, and of sacrifice.

This has been the teaching of the Catholic Church in like, forever. There's no esoterica in the Catholic Church, therefore these teachings may be verified by anyone with the desire to look them up.

Since many, if not most, of the churches born from the Reformation have abandoned the connection between marriage and procreation, it cannot be said that they did so in attention to any evangelical command or instruction, or by attachment to natural law, but out of their desire to protest, dissent, and innovate. Theirs is not the original teaching of Christ or of the Apostles. At the very least, the author should've made the correct distinctions, representations, and exceptions needed to advance a more coherent argument.

One more quote:

The state's interest in an enactment must of course be secular in nature. The state does not have an interest in enforcing private moral or religious beliefs without an accompanying secular purpose.

And what the judge found was that the supporters of Proposition 8 could not demonstrate any secular purpose sufficient to establish a "rational basis" for denying same-sex couples the fundamental right to get married.

The problem here is that the sages quoted in USA Today article deny the ultimate basis for legitimate civil authority. We Catholics do have the right notion of civil authority:

1902 Authority does not derive its moral legitimacy from itself. It must not behave in a despotic manner, but must act for the common good as a "moral force based on freedom and a sense of responsibility":21

A human law has the character of law to the extent that it accords with right reason, and thus derives from the eternal law. Insofar as it falls short of right reason it is said to be an unjust law, and thus has not so much the nature of law as of a kind of violence.22

1903 Authority is exercised legitimately only when it seeks the common good of the group concerned and if it employs morally licit means to attain it. If rulers were to enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order, such arrangements would not be binding in conscience. In such a case, "authority breaks down completely and results in shameful abuse."23

Nowadays, most philosophical, judicial, and political thinkers either question or deny outright the natural law basis of all civil authority. Many don't bother to think that any claims based upon natural law can form the basis of right reason. Whether by design, unwillingness, or inability to think along the lines of a morality based upon natural law, they feel perfectly free to affirm the "right" of people to engage in same-sex "marriage."

By denying the validity of natural law morality today's "experts" want to close the debate. An appeal to natural law morality effectively dismantles their arguments. They can't have that and, if allowed to prevail, the conversation will be closed by judicial fiat without giving a hearing to those of us who defend the eternal validity of natural law morality. Therefore any positive law and/or judicial decision recognizing same-sex "marriage" represents an illegitimate exercise of power and therefore constitutes a serious abuse of authority. Recognizing same-sex "marriage" is a kind of violence perpetrated by the state against its own citizens.

These are two fatal flaws I find in USA Today's article and because of its glaring omissions, the question "Who redefined marriage?" and the whimsical answer "Not Prop8 judge: Look in the mirror, experts say" cannot be held by by anyone without sacrifcing fairness, intellectual integrity, and honesty.