USCCB: Frequently Asked Questions About The Defense Of Marriage

The Meaning of Marriage & Sexual Difference

1. Marriage: What’s a good starting point?
2. Where does marriage come from?
3. What is marriage?
4. Why can’t marriage be “redefined” to include two men or two women?
5. What is sexual difference?
6. Isn’t marriage just about love and commitment between two people?
7. Why does a person’s gender matter for marriage?
8. How is the love between a husband and a wife irreducibly unique?
9. What is complementarity?
10. Why does the Catholic Church care so much about marriage?
11. Where can I learn more about marriage?

The Gift of Children

1. What does marriage have to do with children?
2. Does the Church think that marriage is a mere “instrument” for having children?
3. What’s the difference between a husband and wife who can’t have children, and two persons of the same sex, who also can’t have children?
4. Why is a child meant to have both a father and a mother?
5. What about single parents? These families lack a father or a mother, just like households headed by two men or two women.
6. Aren’t children adaptable to many different family forms?
7. Don’t studies show that children do fine with two “moms” or two “dads”?
8. What about adoption?
9. New technology like “in vitro fertilization” (IVF) can enable two men or two women to have a child. Why does the Church teach that this is unacceptable?

The Common Good & Human Dignity

1. What does “intrinsic dignity of the human person” mean?
2. What does marriage have to do with human dignity?
3. Does the Church believe that people who experience same-sex attraction have equal dignity?
4. What does “the common good” mean?
5. Isn’t marriage a private relationship? What does it have to do with the common good?
6. Isn’t marriage just a religious issue that the government should stay out of?
7. What are basic human rights?
8. Is marriage a basic human right?
9. What’s the harm of same-sex “marriage”?
10. But isn’t it unjust discrimination to not allow two men (or two women) to marry?
11. What about civil rights?
12. Isn’t allowing two men or two women to marry just an extension of allowing interracial couples to marry?
13. What about equality and fairness?
14. What about “civil unions” or “domestic partnerships” between two persons of the same sex?

Religious Liberty

1. What is religious liberty?
2. How are marriage and religious liberty connected?
3. How could changing the legal definition of marriage have any effect on religious liberty?
4. But would ministers really be forced to officiate at the “wedding” of two persons of the same-sex?
5. What’s the real threat to religious liberty posed by same-sex “marriage”?
6. Have any of these threats come to pass?
7. Doesn’t a religious exemption protect institutions and individuals if they believe that marriage can only be between a man and a woman?