Gender Matters Even More

A Spanish Cardinal agrees with us that today's gender ideology is a revolt against our biological nature:

Cardinal Antonio Maria Rouco Varela of Madrid said this week that gender ideology and the laws inspired by it, such as those condoning so-called gay marriage, are an expression of “man’s rebellion against his biological limits.”

The cardinal’s comments are included in a new book entitled, “Interviews With Twelve Spanish Bishops,” by Isidro Catela. Sales from the book will be donated to pastoral work in Kenya.

Cardinal Rouco said the law on homosexual marriage “is a modern version of the desire to be like God the Creator and not his creatures, to not accept his law, which reveals the fundamental goods of man and of society and, therefore, guarantees the dignity, freedom and equality of mankind better than any human construct that is outside it,” he added.

The cardinal noted that human laws need not coincide to the letter with the moral law, but they must protect fundamental concepts “without which society cannot subsist.”

Gender differentiation is a part of our nature as embodied creatures. Male and female is who we are. The handful of exceptions of people with ambiguous gender should not be used as leverage to jettison the entire concept of gender from society.

Gender Matters

The Family Policy Council of West Virginia sounds like my latest Mercator article. Here is the West Virginia blog:

New York and Colorado, following California’s action, may not seem connected, but they clearly are in at least one respect: the battle to redefine marriage is essentially one that has as its ultimate outcome the belittling of gender.

In other words, in California, the Supreme Court has effectively said that at least one of the genders does not matter in a marriage. In New York, the decision to open marriage to everything and anything is one that says at least one gender in a marriage is disposable. Colorado, in choosing to adopt a N.O. has said, in matters that ought to be given respectful privacy, gender is not to enter the discussion.

The question that must then be asked of the opponents of marriage must be, “Which one?”

Which gender is not important? Is the female gender in a marriage more important than the male? In matters of public accommodation, is the male gender to be given more privacy and protection over the female? To the children that will be affected by the decisions of judges and governors, will the opponents of marriage kindly identify whether a mother or father is more important?

Ultimately, the redefinition of marriage strikes at every single person, if for no other reason than they must answer that simple question, “Does gender matter?” Those who support marriage do so because they answer that question with a resounding, “YES!”

Here is my Mercator article:

Can we be confident that even same sex marriage is the ultimate goal? I think the honest answer is no. The freight train of same sex marriage will not stop at the station called simple “equality.” The legal equivalence of same sex couples with opposite sex couples means that marriage will no longer be society’s most reliable method of attaching mothers and fathers to their children and to each other. Marriage will become a gender-neutral creation of the state, which actively detaches children from at least one of their parents. Parentage will not flow automatically from the marital union, but will have to be assigned by the state. The final stop on this train is the complete de-gendering of society, along with the continual incursion of the state into civil society.

The state must hold that mothers and fathers are completely interchangeable. Biological parents married to each other become officially equivalent to one parent plus their lover. The state will be indifferent as to whether children have any connection with their biological parents.

The experiences of other countries with same sex marriage illustrate that this is no mere expansion of an existing institution. In Spain, the words “mother” and “father” were removed from birth certificates in favor of “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B”. Courts in Canada have assigned parental rights to three adults. Similar experiences from Massachusetts and the UK leave no doubt that the state will have to continually intervene to prop up same sex marriage, and the gender-oblivious society that comes along with it. Sexual orientation will be viewed as immutable, with sex itself as a mere social construct.

I'm glad to see that I am not the only person who believes that gender itself is at stake in the debate over same sex marriage.