Is the right to marry a person of the same sex a civil right?
The short answer
No. Natural law — the sense of good and evil written on every heart — shows that not every kind of behavior is a right. Genital relations between two people of the same sex violate the nature of who they are to one another. Acceptance of such "marriage" has come through the volume of propaganda and the habit of putting feelings before reason, not through rational argument.
Natural law
The situations are quite different, and natural law reveals the difference. Natural law is a sense of good and evil written on every person's heart, telling us which acts are good and rational and which are evil and irrational. It tells us that not every behavior is a right: murder and incest are not rights, because they go against human nature, and we know inherently that they are wrong.
An analogy
If many people began saying incest was a right and that denying it was like discrimination by race or sex, our first reaction would be moral outrage, since relations between parent and child violate who they are to each other. Yet we might eventually be swayed by the sheer volume and intensity of propaganda rather than by reason.
The same pattern
That is what has happened with so-called same-sex "marriage." Genital relations between two people of the same sex violate the nature of who they are in relation to one another; their bodies are not designed for it.
Feelings and reason
Our culture tends to put feelings before right reason. Reason says feelings should come second; making reason subject to feelings courts disaster.
Continue exploring
- Are marital relations not supposed to be pleasurable, since they are for reproduction?Q&A
- How can the Church call homosexuality unnatural when animals show homosexual behavior?Q&A
- How is NFP different from the sin of Onan?Q&A
- If sex is good for us, why is the Church so hostile to it?Q&A
- Is marital intercourse sinful if the spouses do it with lust for each other?Q&A
- Am I required to have a large family?Q&A