Courtney McGrailPerhaps predictably, the Supreme Court of the United States’ decision to legalise same-sex marriage throughout the US has dominated online Catholic discourse in recent weeks.
Firstthings.com has published a fascinating online symposium on the decision and its implications, and Ross Douthat argues on nytimes.com that the judgment is profoundly ironic, with the court having embraced a conservative view of marriage as “essential to human dignity and flourishing” in an era when western society has been turning away from the institution.
Writing at edwardfeser.blogspot.com, California-based philosopher Edward Feser argues that the same-sex marriage debate is characterised by a conflict between attitudes rooted in reality and in a radical scepticism.
The claim that marriage is inherently heterosexual is hard to justify, Prof. Feser maintains, not because it is unreasonable, but because “it has always been regarded as a paradigm of reasonableness”.
Defenders
By questioning so common-sense a conviction, radical sceptics can leave defenders of reality floundering, he says, because “very few people can give a solid, rigorous philosophical defence of what everyone really knows to be true”.
Although rhetorically effective, radical scepticism is ultimately incoherent and self-destructive, he continues, summing up arguments he has made elsewhere by saying “to defend ‘same-sex marriage’ you have to reject natural law, which in turn requires rejecting a classical essentialist and teleological metaphysics, which in turn undermines the possibility of making intelligible either the world or the mind’s ability to understand it”.
Insisting, nonetheless, that “reality absolutely always wins out in the end”, Prof. Feser says “the trouble is just that the enemies of reality, though doomed, can do a hell of lot of damage in the meantime”.
Wesley Hill at spiritualfriendship.org picks up on the difficulty of persuading people of marriage’s nature by recalling an old blogpost that said: “In the America of our day, it is about as difficult (or as easy) to make what the Church teaches about marriage comprehensible and convincing (the latter more difficult than the former) to the educated locals as it is to make the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception or the Real Presence so.”
Those almost invincibly ignorant of Church teaching need conversion not argument, Dr Hill quotes the author of the old blogpost as saying, and “what the Church ought to do to encourage that is to burnish the practice of marriage by Catholics until its radiance dazzles the pagan eye”.
In a separate post, Dr Hill grapples with why he and other traditionalist Christians were moved by the happiness of gay people in the aftermath of the court judgment, and ventures that at heart “we were wanting our friends not to be lonely and alienated from love, and we were wanting them to keep hoping and searching for Love Himself”.