To the Editor:
I wish to compliment the extremely well-crafted letter against homosexual marriage rights by Michael Bourland of Newcastle (“Marriage redefinement is the wrong approach”, Page 4, 10/1/09).
In constructing his narrative, he appeals to the nebulosity of “religious and social traditions,” the fashionable philosophical notion of “normative” thinking, the usual semantic boundary conditions of definition and concept in cognitive thinking, the onerous burdens of the legal structures, and, of course, the magical quasi-mystical theological notion of sacraments.
In short, it is a well-thought out sly attack on the institution of marriage to pretend it cannot accommodate homosexual marriages.
Regretfully, facts obtrude on his apparently reasonable arguments. Eleven per cent of the human species is homosexual. It is a common feature in the biological system of many animals. Homosexuality is fairly pedestrian and boring as heterosexuality. The “real” norm of the presumed sacred marriage institution is divorce and adultery. We humans are highly sexual mobile creatures.
The questions that should be asked are: What informs our post-modern notion of marriage? What are its hidden foundations? Has the institution changed over the last 40 centuries as evidenced from our most ancient cuneiform dossier (22nd century BCE) to the Protestant and Roman Catholic Reformation documents (16th century CE)?
What role does our high culture (liturgy, literature and scientific scholarship) play in this debate? How does demographics or ecological over-population unconsciously dictate the course of this debate? Monsieur Bourland would be shocked at the plasticity of this institution within his pronatalist cosmic perspective. It has never been a monolithic structure.
Lastly, our post-modern gays should be congratulated that they do not insist on the gay marriage sacramentum [Latin, “oath”] of the ancient Roman elite, conferratio, but will condescend, as the rest of us, to have the ‘sacrament’ of matrimonium as developed by the Roman Catholic canonists in the 11th century and the Glossators in the 12th and 13th century in the ever evolving Corpus Iuris Canonici of our most ancient church.
In summary, gays enrich the institution of marriage; they do not diminish it. After all, planet Earth is groaning under the collective weight of 6.5 billion humans. Gay marriage rights are a social, economic and political necessity.
J.E.D.P. Malin, New Harbor
