Allowing two men or two women to ‘marry’ would involve a fundamental change in our understanding of marriage, from a life-giving and sexually complementary union to a personal, romantic relationship with no true communion or connection to procreation, says Bishop Julian Porteous, auxiliary Bishop of Sydney.
“It will entrench, in a public way, the separation of sexuality from its life-giving aspect and separate the notion of marriage from including the generation of children,” he said.
“It will move marriage from a children-centred institution to an adult-centred one. It will weaken the meaning and dignity of motherhood and fatherhood and declare that
having both a father and a mother is unnecessary for the raising of children. This will deeply affect children and young people’s aspirations for their own marriage.
“Their understanding of marriage would also shift to being about one’s self-fulfilment, rather than about self-giving.”
Queensland Premier and Labor Party national president Anna Bligh is the latest ALP powerbroker to declare support for same-sex marriage.
“It’s an issue that is live out there in the public and I would expect to see it debated at ALP conference,” Ms Bligh told The Australian.
Labor powerbrokers are now demanding that their national conference be brought forward,
fearing the 2012 date leaves it too far in the future for the issue to be resolved.
Bishop Porteous says the right to marry and found a family is a basic human right, but this right has an “objective meaning and content”.
“Current proposals to allow for same-sex marriage will change the meaning of what marriage has been understood to be,” he said.
“Through the normalisation of casual sex, contraception, homosexual acts, condoms, abortion and IVF, our culture has denigrated and obscured the life-giving aspect of marriage and sexual intercourse.”
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