Marriage in Modernity

Interesting issues:

One question I’m intensely interested in is why Mormon faith communities are so much more successful than other religious groups in terms of family. They have much higher rates of marriage, lower rates of abortion, divorce and unwed childbearing than, say, Catholics. We Catholics tend to go to orthodoxy for all the answers, but there’s something to be said for orthopraxy, too. How do we live the faith successfully and transmit a marriage culture to the next generation under modern conditions? What institutions and practices can parents, schools, neighborhoods, faith communities and professionals adopt that help make marriage not a theory but a lived reality?...Both divorce and donor insemination affect children’s identities in ways that we have only begun to think about and explore. Divorce is not just a practical problem for children. It poses an existential or ontological problem: How do I trust the family when the family can fall apart? Without the family, what is my core identity?

Adult children conceived by donor insemination are beginning to point out similar existential issues on their origins. The parent they love deliberately deprived them of access to the other biological parent, the so-called sperm donor. For at least some — and it looks like many of these children — the biological relationship continues to matter, even though the actual family of the child pretends it does not.

They point to the reality that donor conception is used because biology does matter: Their mother wanted a child who was her natural child. But the child’s longing to be connected to his or her mother and father — the two people who made him or her — is treated as a non sequitur. It’s just not taken seriously.

...In the old days, the Church did regulate marriage, but the king backed up the Church court’s decision. But marriage isn’t just a spiritual matter. It involves property and support obligations, which are either enforceable or not.

So it’s important to continue fighting for marriage and family in the political and legal arenas.
To abandon the civil order is to make marriage a thing only of the spirit, and to abandon it as a real and enforceable promise. To abandon the political fight will be viewed as a moral abdication as well. The only reason abortion is still a live moral issue is that people acted like they really believed it’s wrong to kill babies, which means you fight politically, as in other ways.

To concede “gay marriage” is to concede that the idea that children need a mom and a dad and that marriage is oriented towards this end is no longer a publicly defensible idea. Defending it privately won’t get easier, but it will get harder.

Truth is truth. If marriage is the union of a husband and wife, because children need a mother and father, we can’t abandon non-Catholic children. We have an obligation in justice, as well as love, to fight against an unjust civil order that redefines marriage and its purposes...