In Albany, Governor Cuomo’s office is running with that all-too-familiar inevitability theme on marriage: Gay marriage is inevitable, so surrender your bitter clinging and come along with us and redefine it.
It appears to have worked on three Democratic state senators who previously were votes for traditional marriage.
Winning Republican votes will be key to a vote to go forward.
Maggie Gallagher, chairman of the National Organization for Marriage, points out that even the most optimistic polling on same-sex marriage shows that the Republican base is remarkably united on the issue and votes in 30-some states have presented some electoral evidence against the insisted-upon “inevitability.”
She adds: “We are not going away. Any GOP senator that votes for gay marriage can expect to be as successful as Dede Scozzafava was in GOP primary elections.”
Today, New York Archbishop Dolan, who is also president of the national Catholic bishops conference (which is meeting in Seattle this week), makes a plea:
Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America – not in China or North Korea. In those countries, government presumes daily to “redefine” rights, relationships, values, and natural law. There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of “family” and “marriage” means.
But, please, not here! Our country’s founding principles speak of rights given by God, not invented by government, and certain noble values – life, home, family, marriage, children, faith – that are protected, not re-defined, by a state presuming omnipotence.
Please, not here! We cherish true freedom, not as the license to do whatever we want, but the liberty to do what we ought; we acknowledge that not every desire, urge, want, or chic cause is automatically a “right.” And, what about other rights, like that of a child to be raised in a family with a mom and a dad?
Our beliefs should not be viewed as discrimination against homosexual people. The Church affirms the basic human rights of gay men and women, and the state has rightly changed many laws to offer these men and women hospital visitation rights, bereavement leave, death benefits, insurance benefits, and the like. This is not about denying rights. It is about upholding a truth about the human condition. Marriage is not simply a mechanism for delivering benefits: It is the union of a man and a woman in a loving, permanent, life-giving union to pro-create children. Please don’t vote to change that. If you do, you are claiming the power to change what is not into what is, simply because you say so. This is false, it is wrong, and it defies logic and common sense.
Yes, I admit, I come at this as a believer, who, along with other citizens of a diversity of creeds believe that God, not Albany, has settled the definition of marriage a long time ago. We believers worry not only about what this new intrusion will do to our common good, but also that we will be coerced to violate our deepest beliefs to accommodate the newest state decree. (If you think this paranoia, just ask believers in Canada and England what’s going on there to justify our apprehensions.)
But I also come at this as an American citizen, who reads our formative principles as limiting government, not unleashing it to tamper with life’s most basic values.