JUDGE VAUGHN --WALKER GOT IT WRONG
Personal Blog of Cardinal Mahoney of The Archdiocese of Los Angeles - 8-4-2010
Today it was announced that U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker has ruled that Proposition 8 which was enacted by the People of California is unconstitutional. His decision fails to deal with the basic, underlying issue--rather he focused solely upon individual testimony on how Prop 8 affected them personally. Wrong focus. (No actually Judge Walker focused on the lame and inventifacted arguments of your side.)
There is only one issue before each of us Californians: Is Marriage of Divine or of Human Origin?
(A secular judge does not decide matters of theology and faith, but matters of secular constitutional law. Catholicism is still free to discriminate in it's sacramental interpretation.)
Judge Walker pays no attention to this fundamental issue, and relies solely upon how Prop 8 made certain members of society "feel" about themselves.
Those of us who supported Prop 8 and worked for its passage did so for one reason: We truly believe that Marriage was instituted by God for the specific purpose of carrying out God's plan for the world and human society. Period. (I doubt this is even remotely true. You did it because it fit your political and theocratic agenda. If you were actually defending 'god's' plan, you'd be advocating for male polygamy and the status of women and children as chattel property.)
Every single religious faith community in our known history has held this belief since recorded history began. Every indigenous group discovered down through history also understood this belief about marriage, and carried out cultural and religious practices to sustain that belief. Marriage is of divine origin, and that belief is embedded deeply into the heart and spirit of human beings--also described as the natural law for the human family. (Total inventifact.)
Judge Walker assumes that the institution of marriage is of human and civil origin, and therefore, that "marriage" can mean anything any person wishes to ascribe to the institution. Wrong. (No, Judge Walker was correct.)
The union of a man and of a woman in a life-long loving and caring relationship is of divine origin. No human nor civil power can decree or declare otherwise.
It is too bad that Judge Walker chose to listen to anguished voices about their perception of marriage rather than plumb the depths of the origin of this divinely inspired institution. (Actually, I think he did plumb the depths and discovered you are totally inventifacting. Oh and by the way, most of the anguished voices were those advocating for prop 8 and those he did ignore.)
For many of us, we will continue to believe that God is the origin of marriage, and we will follow God's constant revelation to that effect.
We in the Roman Catholic Community are totally "pro-marriage" and "pro-family" precisely in the understanding God gave when the first human beings received the breath of God's spirit.
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Poor Roger, now he's down to looking silly. His only two rebuttals are Judge Walker did not take God into his decision and he based it on the 'anguished' emotional testimony of a few gay couples. I suspected the proponents of Prop 8 were going to have some trouble rebutting the points Judge Walker made, but really, this is so lame. It almost makes me wonder if Mahoney produced this lame rebuttal on purpose, sort of going through the motions because he's expected to go through the motions. Pretty much like someone who knows the bridge game is lost, but has to play every last card until there are no more.
The Prop 8 crowd ran pretty well playing the trump card of gay marriage 'hurting' straight marriage and family life, but when that canard was trumped by the facts, there aren't many arguments or cards left to play. I guess God becomes the wild card in this scenario, the deus ex machina of solutions. It's too bad constitutional law is not based on theology. I exactly precludes playing someones definition of 'what god wants' as an argument.
Cardinal George, in the USCCB rebuttal, played the 'what the people want' card. That's a pretty weak card because two years after Prop 8, polls show a slight majority of Californians now in favor of gay marriage. It appears that change is fueled by a change in the attitudes of Hispanic Catholics. Maybe they are remembering what happened to their indigenous ancestors when a theocratic state trampled all over their culture in the name 'of what god wants'.
As an Anglo Catholic maybe Cardinal Mahoney forgets that Our Lady of Guadalupe presented herself as a pregnant single mother, not a married matriarch. The message was as much about the importance of children as the future of humanity, not heterosexual marriage. The standard family model in indigenous culture was not one man/one woman, but extended families of grand parents and aunts and uncles and cousins and even adopted family members. It took the tribe to raise a child and there were good reasons for that. One of the most important reasons was to teach the child the importance of seeing themselves as part of an inter dependent community, not an isolated individual.
It is the western notion of nuclear family that conveys the message of isolated individuality. When that nuclear family implodes, as it does over half the time, the isolation experienced by the children of that mini tribe escalates enormously. When this last ditch attempt to promote the nuclear family is finally spent, I sincerely hope we take a serious look at the whole notion of the nuclear family. We might just find that when it comes to raising our future generations it's not a very good idea at all---except for the global economic system which absolutely needs a work force unencumbered by attachments which hamper employee mobility.
If we actually took a real look at the nuclear family we might find it has sacrificed the whole notion of the good of the family and it's children for the sake of the good of the corporate economy. We might find this very recent understanding of the 'healthy' nuclear family has actually sacrificed God's design for that of Mammon's design. Perhaps this whole crusade against gay marriage is actually designed to stop society from embarking on that kind of analysis.
