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By Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse

Selling the organs of aborted babies is big business and Planned Parenthood can deliver most organs intact chirped Dr. Deborah Nucatola between mouthfuls of food a few days ago. Nucatola, a high placed executive at Planned Parenthood, unwittingly exposed the grisly work of her organization in an undercover video released by the Center for Medical Progress, a pro-life group.

The video is disturbing. Nucatola’s demeanor, her perfunctory manner about manipulating an abortion to preserve the quality of particular body parts for resale, her eagerness to cultivate the client reveals no shred of conscience about trafficking in the harvested organs of unborn children. She talks like a salesman selling a cell phone upgrade.

Evil enters the world when a man puts his hands in service to a lie. Evil enters because the man has to restructure reality to conform to the lie, lest reality reveal that the lie is indeed a lie.

The lie operating in Nucatola’s glib descriptions about fetal parts is that the aborted baby is not a baby. It takes titanic self-deception to deny the humanity of a fetus (Latin for “little one”) but in the battle between avarice and charity many choose the cash. That’s one reason why they lie.

When the lie becomes more widely accepted the broader culture shifts. Those who believe the lie (who see the lie as true) marshal persuasion and intimidation to make others believe the lie and shift society even more.

Planned Parenthood, the behemoth of the abortion industry had this to say about the revelations:

• The video “falsely portrays Planned Parenthood’s participation in tissue donation programs that support lifesaving scientific research.”
• “Patients sometimes want to donate tissue to scientific research that can help lead to medical breakthroughs…”
• “There is no financial benefit for tissue donation for either the patient or for Planned Parenthood.”

It is clear these replies were crafted by a public relations flack. No time was wasted coming up with them and they studiously avoid any suggestion that the “tissue donations” were the intact organs of an aborted child.

The lie has become institutionalized. An industry has arisen around it. Planned Parenthood rakes in about $1.5 billion in revenues each year from operations. It routinely aborts around 150 unborn for every one adoption referral. Since Roe v Wade in 1973 over 57 million abortions have been performed, many of them by Planned Parenthood.

The lie is not new. Carrie Buck, the Tuskegee experiments, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII and other sorrowful chapters of American history were predicated on the same lie: some people are less than human. Even today, Mother Jones magazine, the flagship of progressive ideals declares that the revelations are “…another right-wing nothingburger.”

Through a lie German Nazis built gas chambers and Russian Communists the Gulags. Through a lie American Progressives launched their war of eugenics against Blacks, the poor and the infirm that continues today in the abortion industry.

Critics have been struggling to find the proper metaphor to define the outrage. Most draw on Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the gruesome cannibal from literature.

But evil is seldom sensationalist. It’s banal. It accomplishes its work over lunch and in private clinics by men like the mild and proper Dr. Joseph Mengele — Nucatola’s prototype and in whose steps she walks.

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Source: Crisis Magazine

By Tyler Blanski

Why are so many straight people pro gay? Because the normalization of homosexuality is the premier achievement of heterosexual ideology. “Gay” and “straight” are not taxonomies but ideologies. They are not orientations but disorientations: whether bi-, homo-, or hetero-, hyphenated sexuality makes us lose our sense of direction toward the truly sexual, and the victims of such ideology are children.

The words “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are nineteenth-century neologisms made to sever romance from responsibility and sex from fecundity. “Heterosexuality was made to serve as this fanciful framework’s regulating ideal,” writes Michael Hannon, summarizing Foucault, “preserving the social prohibitions against sodomy and other sexual debaucheries without requiring recourse to the procreative nature of human sexuality.” The myth has become fact, and that is why so many straight people are pro gay. Homosexuality ratifies heterosexuality.

The very principles and practices that aid and abet homosexual ideology only validate heterosexual ideology: cohabitation, no-fault divorce, sterile sex, the exultation of romantic love, the trite story of the couple who rebels against the world so they can ride off into the sunset together, the assumption that children are a lifestyle option, even a purchasable commodity through adoption and in vitro fertilization. Heterosexuality, I would argue, is in fact protohomosexuality.

The Protohomosexual

Who is the protohomosexual? He is the troubadour poet in twelfth-century France idealizing romance and sexual passion, the knight of Arthurian legend pledging to serve his lady in trouthe and curtesie as if she were a goddess worthy of adoration. He believes erotic love is a high spiritual experience, the highest experience. Andreas Capellanus’ handbook advises that secrecy and suspense will fan the flame of passion; family obligations and children will stifle it. Lancelot and Guinevere betray King Arthur, Tristan and Iseult break the law, Romeo and Juliet go insane, and in the name of “love” every new fling causes undeserved pain for others. All of this is, of course, the raw material for blockbuster videos and bestselling novels in America today.

The serious flaw with the whole system of Courtly Love is its inherent tendency toward anarchy and narcissism. Meeting alone in the dark, far removed from everyday responsibilities and social constraints, lovers do not really get to know one another. Their supposed love for one another is grossly self-absorbed, their lovemaking little more than mutual masturbation. With the flattering image reflected in the other’s eyes, they imagine themselves identical. The heterosexual, who is the protohomosexual, gazes dizzily at his beloved as if at his own reflection in the water.

The protohomosexual’s narcissism, his inflated sense of self, leads him to believe that the irresistible force he calls “love” is inherently ennobling and that his liaisons need no other sanctioning than mutual consent. But his passion only propels him to deceit and unintended cruelty—to his beloved, to his family and hers, to any children they might conceive, even to himself.

Star-crossed lovers standing up against the world in order to get married is a tired cliché. Yet marriage-as-rebellion and sex-as-self-actualization remain the unquestioned stage upon which we woo, marry, and divorce one another. This is the house we have erected for conceiving and rearing children.

It is a house of cards. Having already overturned the social and moral pressures of the community and erected a dating system not unlike civil war, having already privatized marriage and turned it into a statement about his freedom and erotic preference—“This is my choice, my love!”—the protohomosexual closes the curtains of his bedchamber to find only another obstacle to his happiness: fertility.

Long before anyone dreamed of normalizing sodomy, heterosexual ideology contended that sex should be first and foremost recreation. The only problem with this contention is that sex is naturally creative. But as heterosexual ideology evolved, so did technology: with latex, the right surgical procedures and chemicals, it became possible to believe that sex is firstly recreation—a belief greatly accelerated by pornography. A simulacrum of the real thing, like sodomy, pornography shrewdly crops fertility from the scene. Sex is not about future flourishing but about immediate fun.

(It cannot go without mentioning that artificial contraception was considered to be immoral by all Christians, Protestant and Catholics alike, in all places and at all times, until the Lambeth Conference of 1930. Within a single generation a universal and unbroken Christian ethic was blanketed, smothered, and left for dead. The condemnation of what Martin Luther considered an act “far more atrocious than incest or adultery” is now considered to be a Catholic quirk.)

Pornography is the diversion, birth control is the smokescreen, and abortion is the last resort. But there is another problem. Having made his statements and had his fun, the protohomosexual wakes up to find that he has entered into an indissoluble bond.

Heterosexual ideology raises a question: if marriage is not primarily a comprehensive conjugal union, if it’s an emotional bond with your Number One Person, why should it be permanent? And so we come face-to-face with the brainchild of the 1970s, no-fault divorce. If your spouse has gained weight, if his sneeze is embarrassing, if the sex is tepid, if your self-actualization or your happiness is on the line, you can drop him faster than you can say girls just wanna have fun. No-fault divorce gives full ventilation to heterosexual values.

The slow evolution of the heterosexual is in fact the emergence of the homosexual. With the flattering image reflected in the beloved’s eyes, homosexuality is just another version of Courtly Love. The cultural acceptance of sodomy, so obviously sterile and unfruitful, only legitimizes the belief that sex is recreation. Same-sex “marriage” reinforces the value system of no-fault divorce by affirming the belief that marriage is not primarily about commitment and children but about happiness; it simply joins the long heterosexual tradition of seeing marriage as a vehicle for rebellion.

To claim that homosexual behavior is wrong would be to hold others to a moral standard to which one’s own heterosexual behavior does not conform. Whether bi-, homo-, hetero-, all forms of hyphenated sexuality want the same thing: sex without moral or generative limits, relationships without cultural or familial constraints. We are in flight from sexuality and we are using sex as the vehicle for that flight.

Who is the protohomosexual? He is you and me.

The Real Victim

The protohomosexual pits the couple against society, even against the family. He manufactures contraceptives and pornography, he legalizes abortion and legislates no-fault divorce and gay “marriage,” and as he backs out of the driveway of his third marriage he feels like he’s been, of all things, the victim of religious prejudice! But who is the real victim of hyphenated sexuality?

The real victim of hyphenated sexuality is not the lesbian lobbyist or the gay picketer. The real victim is the youngest and most innocent among us. Free love costs, and children pay.

The gay marriage debate is not about homosexuality, but about marriage. It’s not about who gets to marry, but about what marriage is. What marriage is depends on what a human person is, and the fact remains that every single one of us was born of a woman, begotten of a man. Marriage and children are indelibly linked.

If humans did not reproduce sexually, and if children could simply swim away from their mothers after birth like baby sharks, then the institution of marriage would never have been established. Historically, marriage laws served to reinforce the bond between children and their parents, especially to link children to their fathers. The real matter at hand is children’s rights.

In an effort to divert attention away from children’s rights, it will be argued that marriage has been redefined before. How many wives did Jacob have? Didn’t marriage once constitute one adult man and one adolescent girl? Anti-miscegenation laws were still on the books less than 60 years ago. As our society redefines who counts and who matters, it will be argued, marriage changes. Besides, if straight couples can adopt children, why can’t gay couples?

But polygamy is not an argument for gay marriage. That there are examples of polygamy in history is not even an argument for polygamy. The exception does not prove the rule: the exception breaks the rule. Anti-miscegenation laws were not a redefinition of conjugal marriage but rather the imposition of racial prejudices upon the institution of marriage. That at one time men over 18 could marry women under 18 does not at all challenge the traditional definition of marriage; rather, it challenges the contemporary definition of adulthood.

The question is not whether a woman who experiences same-sex attraction can be a mother, but whether two moms make a marriage, and if the coupling of two women is a healthy norm for rearing children. Adoption exists because of tragedy, either abandonment or death. Still, every child has a right to a father and a mother. Just because tragedies happen, this does not give us license to preemptively deprive children of the right to both a mother and a father.

The question is not if people who identify as gay count and matter. Of course they count and matter. The question is if a homosexual relationship constitutes a marriage. The question is, given the fact that humans reproduce sexually and that our offspring are not born into this world self-sufficient, if marriage remains the natural means of human flourishing. Sex has become artificially severed from procreation, the family, our body’s natural (biological) purposes, and children have paid the price.

In the end, everyone pays the price. We are not peacocks. We do not merely mate. We marry. We long for relationships that are trustworthy and lasting, for wholeness, and for a life that is serious and deep—and for a future. Generativity and childbirth, homemaking and childrearing, concern for the future, for lineage, all of it is at stake in the long revolt against human sexuality. The utopian spasm of hyphenated sexuality is harmful to men, to women, and especially to children. The traditional norms of marriage were established to protect innocent people, especially children. They are evidence of advanced civilization.

Children have a right to life. Children have the right to a father and a mother. Children have the right to be raised in faithful, committed marriages. Who are we to deprive them of this right?

We Are Oriented

In speaking of sexual orientation, I feel almost revolutionary (in the sense of a circle coming back to its beginning, its right place). I am trying to expose the sexual orientation in each one of us—the orientation that’s so sweet it hurts. We take our revenge on it by calling it names like Attraction or Libido or Sex Drive. It is the sexual orientation we cannot ignore and cannot admit, though we want to do both. We cannot admit it because it threatens the whole big fake program we’ve been living. Yet we cannot ignore it because it is written in our very bodies and upon our deepest heart. I would like to set free the idea that we are neither homosexual nor heterosexual but simply (now perhaps unbelievably) sexual. As male and female, we are, all of us, oriented. We are oriented toward sexual reproduction.

And it haunts us. We pretend the link between sex and fruitfulness is a barbarism from a darker age. We sterilize ourselves, we take drugs to suppress our fertility, as a last resort we get an abortion, and we behave as if we have settled the matter. But all this is a ruse. Beneath the fabricated sexual taxonomies and technological subterfuge there remains the undeniable human orientation toward sexual reproduction. The menstrual cycle, the erection, the womb and breasts all remind us of this orientation. Even a condom cannot conceal the fact that what you are spilling is nothing less than seed. Biology and human nature remind us that human sexuality is oriented toward children and the future.

This orientation has been deformed and dehumanized by all our theorizing and manipulation. But whatever else we may be, as men and women we are sexually complementary and mutually involved in generation. This is no social construct. This is the permanent and irreducible truth of biology and human nature. This is our heritage and our future. This is our doom. We depend on this orientation for our own future flourishing.

We are, every one of us, oriented toward the sexual. Sexuality without the artifice of an ideological prefix is the deep reserve of life, of generation, of offspring. And because human offspring require an unquantifiable amount of physical and moral care, sex and marriage are, as they have always been, linked.

Ovid’s tale serves as a warning: Narcissus falls in love with his own image in the water, declines the affection of Echo, and finally dies because love without an-other is sterile and hopeless. Because sexual love is naturally creative, it would be a mistake to expect, like Narcissus, that a lover should reflect oneself. Lovers are bound not by feelings (as the troubadour poets thought) but by the marital bond, to be open to life and to be responsible for one another. Marriage is the social correlate to the biological fact of human fecundity.

The traditional definition of marriage is not rooted in religion and homophobia, but in biology and human nature. Gay “marriage” might work for private ideology, but it does not work for society. Marriage was not established because humans are romantic and enjoy intimacy but because humans reproduce sexually and children need both a father and a mother—to be conceived and reared. Everyone has the right to marry, but that does not make any sexual or romantic relationship a marriage—although heterosexual ideology clouds that fact.

Heterosexuality is in fact protohomosexuality: the difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality is a matter of preference, but the values and goals are the same. Yet marriage reminds us that we are oriented toward the sexual, and that’s why marriage has become a battleground. That’s why so many straight people are pro gay.

Editor’s note: The image above is a detail from “Echo and Narcissus” painted by John William Waterhouse in 1903. 

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By Dr. Vigen Guroian

In recent decades, a vehement campaign has been waged in the United States to redefine lawful marriage so that marriage includes couples of the same sex. The argument has been cast principally as a civil liberties issue, and on June 26, 2015, this argument won the day. By a 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court declared that marriage is a constitutional right for all citizens, and that laws banning same-sex marriages are unconstitutional.

The Court’s decision is the fruit of a ruinous juridical and legislative nominalism that twists the meaning of marriage beyond anything before recognizable in our culture or in historical religion. This nominalism embraces the strange notion — strange to the Orthodox faith, certainly — that the love and desire which two persons have for one another constitutes a marriage even when they are of the same sex. Several decades ago, Robert Bellah, in his book Habits of the Heart (1985), described an ethos to which increasing numbers of modern folk adhere —and now, it seems, the Court as well. Bellah calls this ethos “expressive individualism.” Expressive individualism, he explains, “holds that each person has a unique core of feelings” that should be allowed and enabled “to unfold or be expressed” in order that an authentic and self-fulfilling “individuality is . . . realized.” It is this notion that inspirits the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, apart from the legal and constitutional embellishments presented as arguments.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy repeatedly appeals to the “dignity” of the person, nine times in all. In Kennedy’s hands, however, dignity takes on a distinct meaning as a secularist “god-term”² of expressive individualism. Dignity, in his hands, stands for the belief that self-expression and self-realization of personal desire are among the foremost values and ends that the law should serve. As Justice Clarence Thomas rightly observes in his dissenting opinion, this notion of dignity is not that dignity biblical faith recognizes, a dignity that is grounded not in human desire or law but rather in that creative act of God wherein He endows every human person with the imago Dei – the image of God.

In addition, Kennedy speaks of marriage as a “union” of two individuals, yet he does not tell us how the two “become something greater than they once were.” He merely asserts that this is so. He does not suggest how this union is deeper than the momentary feelings or desires that bring two persons together. Kennedy’s embrace of expressive individualism is limiting. It cannot find the important difference between a partnership of two persons of the same sex and a sacred union of two persons of the opposite sex that traditional jurisprudence and the Christian faith uphold.

It is difficult to imagine how the Supreme Court’s action can be interpreted as anything other than a repudiation of millennia of human and divine wisdom about the nature and the meaning of marriage. For until our day, our culture, informed by biblical religion, understood marriage strictly as a union of one man and one woman. Until our day, this conviction was reflected in common morality and ensconced in civil law. Now this meaning has been exploded, vacated from the law.

This obliges the Church to be much clearer than it ever has been about its theology of marriage, what it means by marriage, and why a partnership—and partnership is the right term, not union or marriage—of any sort between persons of the same sex is not in character nuptial. We must realize that under the new order, Orthodox Christian beliefs about marriage will be judged by many (a judgment the law now supports) as an offensive totem of a backward religion. This calls for serious soul-searching about how, henceforth, we are to live as Orthodox Christians in this society. I believe justice Samuel Alito is entirely sober and not being the least bit alarmist when he warns in his dissenting opinion: “The decision will also have other important consequences. It will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” as their nonconformity will be analogized to the denial of “equal treatment for African-Americans and women.”

History and Our Understandings of Marriage

Some reflection on history will help us to understand where we stand in this place and at this moment. In pagan Rome during the first centuries of the Christian era, marriage was one of several acceptable forms of cohabitation and family life, and was available as a legal status only to free citizens. If two such persons, man and woman, lived together by consent in a regularized fashion and assumed the roles and responsibilities of husband and wife, then they were considered married under the law. Roman law stipulated that marriage in its essence was not about intercourse, but about the free consent of the individuals entering into it. Marriage would exist, therefore, where there was the intention to form a household and did not require legal formalization, though that was available and qualified a couple for the special privileges accorded marriage. These privileges included passing down the family name to children, and inheritance of the father’s estate by the legitimate offspring of the marriage. To one degree or another, the early Church found its way to bless the civil marriages of couples under Roman law. By virtue of the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage that includes same-sex couples, it is wrong for the Church to receive and consecrated civil marriage.

Nonetheless, the Court’s decision is not wholly discontinuous with the past. The Court continues to embrace an understanding of marriage as contract, a view that many churches also share. This view of marriage based in consent and contract gained dominance in Latin and Western Christianity as the Church ingested Roman law.

To one degree or another, in Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions alike, consent was “baptized” as the cardinal element of marriage, and contract as its material representation. The Roman Catholic Church eventually defined marriage as a sacrament, but the principle of consent and rule of contract have been at least as important in its theology of marriage. These stand behind the Roman Catholic Church’s belief that the bride and groom administer their marriage to one another, and are reflected in its denial of divorce. (I do not have the space here for a more nuanced discussion of the Roman Catholic theology of marriage, especially more recent emphasis on the “nuptial mystery” by some writers, including John Paul II, which is more compatible with Orthodox theology.)

In the Orthodox tradition, consent was less pivotal in defining a marriage. The clerical officer (bishop or priest) representing the Church, blesses and marries the bride and groom, and the couple is by this act bonded as husband and wife to Christ and the Church. The conjugal love union, and not consent or contract, is understood to be the very heart of marriage. Marriage is a sacrament of love, but not just any sort of love. This love union is founded and grounded in God’s will, in His creative act of making mankind male and female, so that, through their love for each other and their sexual union, a man and a woman may become “one flesh.” Consent and contract more properly belong to betrothal (though Orthodox marriage rites include consent often by inference – and in some cases, as in the Slavonic version of the Byzantine rite, explicitly).

The Logic of Consent Allied with Expressive Individualism

Many North Americans, even Orthodox Christians, quite simply assume that the couple’s consent seals the marriage – that in a practical sense, the will and desire of the couple bring the marriage into existence, and that the withdrawal of will and desire to be together is sufficient to terminate a marriage. This is what present secular marriage and divorce law reflects. The point is simply this, that the principle of consent has remained fixed as a cultural norm even as contemporary people have forgotten the sacred meaning and sacramental depths of marriage, while at the same time they have been adopting an ethos of expressive individualism.

The principle of consent, the logic supporting it, and a godless understanding of love as personal desire are what today enable the advocates of “gay marriage” to make great headway in the legislature and the courts—even within the churches, especially Protestant churches that lack a sacramental understanding of marriage. It should surprise no one that as the belief diminishes in these churches that homosexual acts are sinful, unnatural, or psychopathically abnormal, the argument for gay marriage gains plausibility and persuasiveness among their adherents. There prevails among many religious as well as secular people the belief that when two homosexual persons love each other, and desire and freely consent to share their lives with one another as a domestic couple, the state should grant this partnership legal status as a marriage. The Supreme Court has now also embraced this view and made it the law of the land.

Since the logic of consent and contract as well as equal protection under the law are deeply embedded in our cultural ethos and in modern jurisprudence, it is easy to imagine that the sorts of changes in marriage law and tax codes that the gay lobby has won may eventually be extended to other same-sex households that are not homosexual. How could the state possibly discriminate—or even ask the questions needed to discriminate—between homosexual and heterosexual couples of the same sex that come to get licensed? How can the state differentiate one love from another? If marriage is no longer defined as strictly between a man and a woman, why shouldn’t widows or widowers, brothers or sisters, and the like, who live together for mutual assistance and economic reasons, be granted licenses for domestic partnerships with all the legal benefits and protections now accorded to married couples?

It would make much more sense under present circumstances for the state to abandon the language of marriage altogether and issue simple contracts of cohabitation. Even before Obergefell v. Hodges, civil marriage had become virtually meaningless under a regime of unilateral and no-fault divorce in which the norm of permanence disappears. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court has shown that is does not even know what marriage is.

A Two-Tiered Arrangement

This revolution profoundly challenges the traditional understanding of marriage. It is emblematic of the crossroads at which our society is poised on many fronts. And it places Orthodox and other Christians in an agonizing countercultural position, whether they care to be there or not. Careful navigation in the culture’s tumultuous waters is required, at least as careful and considered as the period in Christian history beginning with the emperors Theodosius I and Theodosius II of the fourth and fifth centuries through Justinian in the sixth century. For this was the period in which Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, and the great law codes were promulgated that truly defined and shaped Christendom as a social realm. This has been our legacy up until now, when the heart and spirit of Christendom are, alas, being banished from North American soil, and the last remnants of these codes, which privileged marriage, supported sanctions against abortion and suicide, and provided for public prayer and the observation of Christian holy days, are eradicated from the land.

For reasons that in this essay I can only sketch, and especially in light of the Supreme Court’s radical decision to legalize same-sex “marriage,” it is imperative that the Orthodox churches cease to cooperate or collaborate with the government in marrying persons, as has been done in one form or another within Christendom since the fifth and sixth centuries. This action would bring about a de facto two-tiered arrangement in which Orthodox Christians would obtain a civil contract to meet the legal requirement and qualify for married status before the state, and then come to the Church to receive the sacrament or marital blessing. Even under present arrangements, two marriage certificates are issued in most states, one religious and the other civil. Henceforth, the Church would no longer assume responsibility for consecration of the civil contract. By so acting, the Church would lodge its profound disagreement with the state’s unilateral and theologically erroneous redefinition of marriage. And the difference between marriage within the Body of Christ and the new forms of “marriage” that society has invented would be made clear. I believe that this action should be taken immediately. We should not wait.

My reasoning is that much like Roe v. Wade, Obergefell v. Hodges will ignite heated conflict in society as a whole and within the churches themselves. This decision will give courage to significant numbers within our own churches who also believe that the Church should embrace same-sex marriage or give some kind of blessing of these relationships. It is completely naïve to think there are not such views in our congregations or within the Orthodox theological world. The abortion decision not only divided the nation—it split churches. Same-sex “marriage” is not just a moral issue; it is a sacramental matter. It affects how we envision ourselves as the Church. We must not underestimate the dangers that this issue presents.

We should not wait for the federal government to pressure churches to conform to the new order with punitive sanctions, likely including the threat of the denial of tax-exempt status. If the government acts first and our churches merely react, the risk of dissension and division within the ecclesial body increases. If we act out of strength and conviction now and make it clear that we no longer can accept the state’s definition of marriage as in any way consistent with the Mystery of Marriage, we may be able to bring along even the vacillating and faint of heart.

The Orthodox Theology of Marriage

Allow me for a moment to address the theology of marriage that the Orthodox Faith holds so that we can be unmistakably clear about why same-sex “marriage” is not only wrong but also is potentially a source of grave confusion about what it means to be the Church. According to the new wisdom, legal marriage will be defined to cover a broad range of consensual domestic relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual, so that all who enter into these arrangements may receive the benefits traditionally reserved for marriage between a man and a woman. Marriage will be defined precisely as a civil liberty under the law, irrespective of sex or procreative intent.

By contrast, the Orthodox theology of marriage is grounded in the Church’s doctrines of God and Creation. While an anthropological argument opposing same-sex “marriage” on biological or natural law grounds is not necessarily incompatible with the Orthodox Faith, it is not sufficiently theological, nor is it ecclesial. For the Orthodox Church, the primary argument is sacramental and ecclesial.

From the standpoint of Orthodox theology, whether or not the individuals who seek a same-sex union are homosexual or heterosexual is not what is theologically decisive. Neither is the argument of procreation – in other words, that same-sex couples cannot produce offspring in the manner that heterosexual couples are able to do. While human beings, like other members of the animal kingdom, are sexually dimorphic, mate, and produce offspring, only human beings marry; birds and monkeys do not. A spiritual and sacramental dimension of human existence modifies human sexuality and transforms the human organism into something unique in the animal kingdom. Marriage is sign and symbol of this unique dimension of human sexual coupling. This is what makes marriage a sacrament; and male and female are the essential and non-substitutable elements of that sacrament. Thus, the Orthodox objection is to same-sex unions and not “gay marriage” per se, though the latter is a subset of the former.

Sacramental Union

The world is itself sacramental. In other words, it is epiphanic of God its Creator. The appointed sacraments of the Church are not exceptional (super) realities; they are not magic. Rather, they are specifications of the symbolical ontology of Creation, and they witness to the fact that humankind is created in the image of God. Each of the sacraments names and employs particular “natural” elements, reveals their epiphanic character, and employs their inherent capacity to serve God’s salvific purpose. Bread and wine are natural symbols of flesh and blood. Christ reveals them as symbols of His body and blood, in and through which He is verily present; and by consuming these translated elements, we enter into the most intimate communion with Him as one ecclesial body.

Male and female are the exclusive elements and symbols of transformation in the Sacrament of Marriage. Marriage brings male and female together as God originally intended them: as spouses and companions to each other, husband and wife, one Christic and ecclesial being (Eph. 5:30–32). Through the sacrament, God seeks to heal our divided humanity at the primary source of its division, the alienation of male and female; He renders it whole once again; He restores male and female natures to their original unity and integrity.

This sacramental union of bride and groom is no mere cipher or allegory of human relationality, as some proponents of “gay marriage” argue. Bride and groom are not nominal titles that may be bestowed upon any two persons, irrespective of their sex or gender, who enter into a “loving relationship.” There is nothing incidental, accidental, or volitional about heterosexual humanity, or the fact that the male is groom and the female is bride, or that the marital union of a man and a woman is an icon of the eschatological union of Christ and the Church.

Christ is the Groom and the Church is His Bride of the New Creation. The referend of groom is the first man, Adam, and the referend of bride is the first woman, Eve. The nuptial Adam-Eve humanity of the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, is the analogue of the heavenly nuptials of the marriage of the Lamb in the Book of Revelation (19:7), the last book of the Bible. The creation of nuptial humanity is an epiphany of the eternal humanity of God precedent to its complete revelation in the Incarnation. The creation of nuptial humanity is a prophecy of the Church, which itself, through its nuptial union with Christ, fulfills the goal and purpose of Creation. Human willing and choosing cannot change marriage’s essence, or the symbolism that God has ordained for it.

Thus, in the Orthodox Faith there could never be such a thing as same-sex marriage. There is not a same-sex equivalent to bride and groom. To insist that there are such equivalencies, and to act on this error, not only represents marriage as something it is not but also envisions salvation as something it is not.

Three Key Actions

The essence of marriage as a conjugal love union is symbolized in the Orthodox rite of marriage by three key actions: the joining of the hands of bride and groom, the crowning of the couple, and the sharing of the common cup. At the start of the Orthodox rite of matrimony, the celebrant joins the right hands of the bride and groom, by which is affirmed the primordial bond of union proclaimed by Adam: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh . . . and the two shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:23–24). The Orthodox service recapitulates God’s primal act by which Adam and Eve were brought face to face to know each other as “self of self,” united in love, the image of God in His perfect communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

There follows the crowning of the couple. This indicates that, like every sacrament, marriage brings the Kingdom of God into our midst. Every marriage is, as St. John Chrysostom explains, a little church, in which the virtues of the Kingdom are learned and rehearsed. The bride and groom are king and queen of this new heavenly kingdom of their marriage. And God calls upon them to exercise within the domestic household that form of dominion over the world that He instructed the first couple to practice. The crowns are also a reminder that the Kingdom of God is won only though self-giving and self-sacrificial love, as when Christ went willingly to the Cross.

Last, the sharing of the common cup recalls Christ’s blessing of the wedding in Cana of Galilee. The water changed to wine is the sign that “marriage in the Lord,” as St. Paul puts it, is a sacrament of the Kingdom of God. “Natural” marriage is revealed as the matter or material of the sacrament. Sharing the wine is emblematic of the one-flesh union and the life of mutual love to which husband and wife must aspire. This practice of the shared cup and the remembered events at Cana also allude to Baptism and Eucharist. It is a means by which persons become members of the Body of Christ and participants in the divine life (2 Peter 1:4).

Marriage and Eucharist

As I alluded above, the early Church initially saw no need to perform a special ritual for marriage. It recognized the validity of marriage that the civil authorities performed and authorized. Rather, the Church gave couples its blessing and invited them to share the Eucharist together as a sign of their union in Christ and belonging to the Body of Christ. It was not until the ninth and tenth centuries that a complete rite of matrimony emerged. At this time, marriage was gradually removed from the Eucharist altogether, and just the sharing of the common cup remained, which may in some places have existed alongside the Eucharist. Today, this isolation of marriage from the Eucharist, whatever the historical reasons for it, needs to be reexamined.

A serious look into the history of marriage leaves no doubt that marriage is closely related to the Eucharist (as well as to baptism). Now under the new regime of Obergefell v. Hodges, there are compelling reasons for the Church to demonstratively rejoin marriage and the Eucharist—that is, to bring them into greater liturgical proximity. It is a common practice in the Armenian Church for couples to take Communion together on a Sunday preceding their wedding. I would like also to see a nuptial Eucharist to be made available, and even encouraged. I will explain why in a moment.

My immediate point is that as the Eucharist is the “home” of Christians, so also is it the home of Christian marriage. The early Christian apologists, who fully acknowledged the legal validity of civil marriage, insisted upon this mystical connection between Christian marriage and the Eucharist. The late second-century writer Tertullian, in a letter to his wife, beautifully expressed this sentiment:

What words can describe the happiness of that marriage which the church unites, the offering strengthens, the blessing seals, the angels proclaim, and the Father declares valid. What a bond is this: two believers who share one hope, one desire, one discipline, the same service.

St. Theodore the Studite, in the early ninth century, mentions two elements that belonged to Eucharistic marriage as early as the fourth century. He informs us that a crowning ceremony existed, followed by a brief prayer, a prayer that is virtually replicated in Orthodox rites of marriage today:

Thyself, O Master, send down Thy hand from Thy holy dwelling place and unite these Thy servant and Thy handmaid. And give to those whom Thou unitest harmony of minds; crown them into one flesh; make their marriage honorable; keep their bed undefiled; deign to make their common life blameless.

This simple blessing encapsulates the entire meaning of Christian marriage. God marries man and woman, and only man and woman, as God also is present at every Christian marriage. Christian marriage is a mystery, and this needs to be made clear to the courts for constitutional reasons as protection under the free exercise clause. I believe closer performative proximity of marriage and the Eucharist may be very important for making the case.

More About Mounting a Defense of Marriage in Our Present Circumstances

Rejoining marriage and the Eucharist is not just a matter of sentiment. Nor is it only a theological matter. It is also practical, even strategic. Sometimes, the children of God need to be as wise as serpents. The free exercise clause of the Constitution – the First Amendment – will be crucial to the Church’s defense as it insists that its marital practices are off grounds for the state. We must be in the best position possible to mount the argument that Christian marriage is integral to Christian worship – that it is a mystery of the Church linked to the Eucharistic feast.

Even this defense may not be as easy as it once might have been. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court seems to have fixed on a conception of marriage far removed from sacrament and worship. This is the idea that marriage is an “expressive association.” The concept is related to expressive individualism. It is far more attuned to individual autonomy variously expressed. It can be blind to the freedom of an ecclesial body or its communal exercise of prayer and worship. It is telling that in his majority opinion Justice Kennedy makes no mention of the free exercise clause as a protection from over-reach by the state. Rather, he speaks in patronizing terms of the protection that the First Amendment gives to “religious organizations and persons” that they may “seek to teach principles [this writer’s emphasis] that are . . . fulfilling to their lives and faiths.” Teaching is not exactly the exercise of faith, whether we are speaking of worship, blessing, or prayer. If I may say so, Kennedy’s words are a chilling reminder of how faint our courts’ appreciation is of the relation of marriage to the exercise of religion, specifically the church as a praying and worshiping body of believers, and marriage as belonging to that.

We are in a place at present when vigilance and strong leadership are needed. As I have said, the moment has arrived when clergy must no longer act as agents of the state in signing (or in any way giving the impression of consecrating) civil contracts. This must be done so that the faithful understand that what the state now defines as marriage is not the Church’s belief. We should put our minds to welcoming this moment as an opportunity to clarify what the Church’s vision of marriage truly is. This new catechesis should be the joint endeavor of bishops, priests, and laity – of episcopal letters, sermons in parishes, and religious education at all levels. And we must begin no later than tomorrow.

ENDNOTES

1. Portions of this essay first appeared in an article entitled “Let No Man Join Together: An Orthodox Christian View of a Besieged Sacrament,” which was published in Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, January/February 2011. It, however, has been significantly reworked for this volume.

2. Following the rhetorician Richard Weaver, a term that is perceived automatically as good.

Vigen Guroian is retired Professor of Religious Studies in Orthodox Christianity at the University of Virginia. Included among his books are Incarnate Love: Essays in Orthodox Christianity, Ethics After Christendom: Toward an Ecclesial Christian Ethic, and The Melody of Faith: Theology in an Orthodox Key. He is presently completing for Oxford University Press a book on marriage in the Orthodox tradition.

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Source: Pravmir.com

By Maria Stroganova

Father Victor, please tell us how the Orthodox of America reacted to the decision of the US Supreme Court recognizing the legitimacy of same-sex marriage throughout the country?

To tell you the truth, we feel like we are in mourning. Of course, no one was surprised that it happened. We all understood that the majority of the Supreme Court would vote in favor of the decision to register same-sex marriages. It all started a long time ago, and over a year ago, the Supreme Court declared the Marriage Protection Act illegal. Now this is the result.

Of course, homosexuals claim that they are looking for equality in civil life and they want gay husbands and wives to have the right to visit each other in the hospital, inherit property, to have children, and the rights which are provided to traditional couples. I think, though, they actually are pursuing other goals.

Just this morning, I read an interview with a rather famous Russian emigrant, Masha Gessen, who has long been an activist in the LGBT movement. She, of course is an anarchist, but they listen to her opinion in America, and she said: “Our goal is to destroy marriage as an institution, so that there is no longer the concept of marriage.” Her words need to be taken very seriously.

I am also very concerned about what will happen next. What group will now demand equality. Now someone might say: Why not, for example, legalize polygamy? This already occurred in American history among Mormons, and now people are talking about it again. Why can’t a man have several wives, — and a woman a few husbands? Moreover, isn’t it, in some sense, more natural than same-sex marriage? So who knows what awaits us — and what will they now teach our children and grandchildren in school? It is really disturbing for all of us, because now, homosexuality is considered the norm, it will be introduced into the school curriculum, children will grow up with it, and will get used to it. It is still being debated in the school boards of various regions of America. In some places they defend the traditional approach to teaching children about gender and others, who are more liberal, have simply told children, that a child may have two fathers, without a mother, and non-traditional families are presented as the norm.

We know what will then happen. Now that same-sex marriage has been legalized in the country, it has just become a matter of time before propaganda will be promoted throughout the schools. Parents who are unhappy and have other views can home-school children or send them to religious schools, but in ordinary schools, everything will be “under the law.”

Are the Orthodox of America united in having a negative opinion of the law?

So far they are virtually united, but already in some Orthodox jurisdictions priests are beginning to take positions. For example, a priest of the Orthodox Church in America in Boston is talking about the possibility of accepting same-sex couples.

Unfortunately, over the last 15 years, homosexual propaganda has been being circulated and many have already been influenced. Even some Orthodox say: “Well, it is not that bad. Let them do what they want. It doesn’t concern us.” That earthquake of sorts that is occurring, though, is changing the order established by God. It is terrible that we are encroaching on the will of God.

Of course, to a certain extent, we Christians are to blame for what happened. I see that marriage is not revered in Russia or in America. Young people are fine to live together, and only after 5 or 6 years decide to have a church marriage, but prayer in the wedding rite is addressed to a chaste couple. Can you imagine, we, priests, marrying people who already have children. I am not talking about the older generation that did not know the Church, but about the current generation of young people. We do not honor marriage properly as a Divinely established institution.

That said, of course, Patriarch Iliya of Georgia and the Mid-American Diocese of ROCOR condemned the decision of the Supreme Court, also remembering that we have to despise the sin, but are required to love the sinner.

There is another danger, though. We recently learned that in the UK, a rich gay couple is suing the Church of England, wanting the opportunity to marry. So, an attack on the Church has already begun. In general, people are afraid to say anything bad about the homosexual lifestyle, because anyone who is against it is immediately accused of homophobia and misanthropy. Our freedom of speech has already been limited and I am afraid that in time, it will become worse and worse.

Have you had such a precedent, so that this sort of couple has come and asked to be married?

No, there hasn’t been. There was, however, a so-called Orthodox Christian who leads this way of life and he asked if he could get married in our church. Of course, we told him that it is absolutely impossible. This, though, was the only instance — and of course, if such efforts are made in the future, we will flatly refuse.

Every person is a child of God, and everyone deserves to receive attention and pastoral care. After all, we help the infirm and mentally ill and don’t turn anyone away. We all need God’s help, but cannot allow sin.

Is such a development in America possible, that eventually pressure will be put on the Church and the Church will be required to accept gay marriage?

Yes, it is possible. Nothing surprises me. Of course, I can’t predict this, but could we have expected 15 years ago that same-sex marriage would be legalized? It’s mind boggling, especially so quickly.

The other day I was listening to an interview with a representative of the gay movement, and the interviewer asked: “What’s next?” – “Next, we are going to set out to other countries. We are going to carry out our policy in other countries where it is prohibited.”

Last year, I was in Georgia and when gay parades were organized there, the Orthodox were outraged and resisted. Now, though, if they want to join the European Union, it will simply require them to hold gay parades legally and to give the country’s homosexuals full rights. Now it’s just a normal requirement.

So, dear Russia, hold on, for they will soon set out for you too.

Translated from the Russian. 

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Don’t fall for the ‘marriage equality’ sales pitch. It’s a deception.

Source: The Federalist

By Stella Morabito

Same-sex marriage is a notion that contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. I doubt many have thought this through, with the ironic exception of the elites who have been pushing the agenda the hardest.

Most people are weary of it all and going along to get along, especially since dissent has become such a socially expensive proposition, almost overnight. That in itself should deeply concern anyone who values freedom of expression.

Sure, true believers scattered across the land really do think the entire project ends with allowing same-sex couples to marry. Most persist in the blind faith that a federal ban on the standard definition of marriage will have no negative effect on family autonomy and privacy. That’s a pipe dream.

The same-sex marriage agenda is more like a magic bullet with a trajectory that will abolish civil marriage for everyone, and in doing so, will embed central planning into American life. And that, my friends, is the whole point of it. Along with Obamacare, net neutrality, and Common Core, genderless marriage is a blueprint for regulating life, particularly family life.

The Rainbow’s Arc

Unintended consequences usually come about when we are ignorant or maybe lazy about a course of action. But we usually crash land after following an arc of logic, which in this case has gone largely undiscerned and unaddressed in the public square.

Americans are in a fog about how marriage equality will lead to more central planning and thought policing. This is partly because the media and Hollywood only provide slogans to regurgitate while academics and judges push politically correct speech codes to obey.

Let’s explore the fallout of that arc of faulty logic. Included below are some 15 of the gaping holes in the “marriage equality” reasoning that Americans have not thought through.

1. The Kids Are Not Alright

In March, six adult children from LGBT households filed amicus briefs opposing genderless marriage: see here, here, and here. You can read testimonials of many such children in a newly released anthology by Robert Oscar Lopez and Rivka Edelman, “Jephthah’s Daughters: Innocent Casualties in the War for Family ‘Equality.’”

Whenever a parent is missing—for whatever reason—a child feels a primal wound. In this respect, parents belong to their children more than children belong to their parents. We ought to recognize that privileges of civil marriage should ultimately exist for children, not for adults. Children have the right to know their origins and not to be treated as commodities. Same-sex parenting—which increasingly involves human trafficking, particularly with artificial reproductive technologies (see number eight)—deliberately deprives a child of a mother and/or a father. The “marriage equality” agenda requires that such children bear that burden alone and repress their primal wound in silence.

2. Love’s Got Nothing to Do with State Interest in Marriage

“Love is love” is an empty slogan when it comes to state interest in marriage. How two people feel about one another is none of the state’s business. The state’s interest is limited to the heterosexual union because that’s the only union that produces the state’s citizenry.

And it still is, whether the union happens traditionally or in a petri dish. Each and every one of us—equally and without exception—only exists through the heterosexual union. In any free and functioning society, there is a state interest in encouraging as much as possible those who sire and bear us to be responsible for raising us.

3. The Infertility Canard

Just as the state has no litmus test for feelings or motives, it has no litmus test for any heterosexual couple who do not produce children because of intent, infertility, or age. Conflating same-sex couples with childless or elderly heterosexual couples seems to be the fallacy of composition: claiming something must be true of the whole because it’s true of some part of the whole.

Sorry, but the heterosexual union, no matter how it takes place, is the only way any citizen exists, including intersex and transgender citizens. So recognizing that union without prejudice remains the only reason for state interest in marriage.

4. Same-Sex Marriage Will Settle Nothing

It’s only the starting point for a glut of philosophically related demands for state recognition and approval of many other types of relationships, including polygamy and incest. This will mark the sudden beginning of an even more sudden end for same-sex marriage, not so much because those other types of relationships prove immoral, but because they serve as exhibits for the argument that all civil marriage—including same-sex marriage—is unsustainable and discriminatory.

5. ‘Marriage Equality’ Opens the Path for ‘Unmarried Equality’

There’s a movement waiting in the wings called “unmarried equality,” which argues that all civil marriage should be abolished because it privileges married people over singles. If same-sex marriage becomes the law of the land, it will set the precedent for abolishing marriage. Far from getting the state out of the marriage business, it will invite the state to regulate all familial relationships, particularly those with children. Once the state doesn’t have to recognize your marriage, it is freer to treat your spouse and children as strangers to you.

6. Transgenderism Is a Big Part of This Package

Americans have not thought through the implications of same-sex marriage and how it is logically a big step to erasing all sex distinctions in law. If we become legally sexless, the implications are vast when it comes to how or whether the state will recognize family relationships such as mother, father, son, or daughter. There’s already a push to eliminate sex identification at birth, which could mean removing sex distinctions on birth certificates. This will seem logical because all gender identity non-discrimination laws already presume that everybody’s sex is something arbitrarily “assigned” to them at birth.

7. It’s an Open Invitation for State Licensing of Parents

If we allow the abolition of sex distinctions and civil marriage—both of which are written into the social DNA of same-sex marriage—we logically allow the state to gain greater control over deciding familial relationships. Civil marriage so far has presumed that a child born into a heterosexual union has the default right to be raised by his biological parents together. How can the presumption of maternity or paternity survive in a legal system that recognizes neither sex distinctions nor a marriage relationship?

The bellwethers are out there. MSNBC anchor Melissa Harris-Perry did a “Forward” spot for the Obama administration in which she stated that all children “belong” to communities, not families. Another friend of the Obama administration, gender legal theorist Martha Fineman, calls for state-subsidized care-giving units to replace marriage and the family.

8. Same-Sex Marriage Commodifies Children

You may think artificial reproductive technologies (ART) are fine as an avenue to obtain children for those unable to conceive. But in the context of genderless marriage, ART ramps up the potential for human trafficking. Check anonymousus.com to read testimonies of grief and loss felt by children who were conceived in this manner. Check the movies “Eggsploitation” and “Breeders” by the Center for Bioethics and Culture to hear stories of the exploitation of women in the industry. There is definitely an element of human bondage in all of this, particularly because human beings are being deliberately separated from their mothers and fathers, in a way that echoes the wounds of slavery’s separations and the search for one’s roots.

9. It Sets a Head-On Collision Course with Freedom of Religion

The handwriting is on the wall. You need only reflect on how a screaming mob managed to conjure up total surrender from Indiana Gov. Mike Pence so he would reject that state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Catholic Charities is closing its adoption services where same-sex marriage laws pressure them to reject their church’s teachings about marriage and family. Owners of businesses that serve the wedding industry are being forced to either scrap their consciences or shut their doors. Anti-discrimination lawsuits against churches that don’t perform same-sex marriages will undoubtedly increase.

10. It Sets a Collision Course for Freedom of Speech and Press

Campus speech codes. Social punishment. Firing Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla for discovering his thought crime of privately believing in marriage six years prior. The utter compliance of virtually every big business in America, every media outlet, every pundit who is permitted to have a voice in the public square.

11. It’s Especially On a Collision Course with Freedom of Association

I already mentioned that abolishing civil marriage, along with legal sex distinctions, puts the government in a better position to regulate familial relationships, and probably to license parents. If we think deeply about these things, it’s hard to avoid the fact that freedom of association begins with family autonomy, a place where the state is supposed to leave you alone in your most intimate relationships. It’s hard to see how freedom of association is not affected, especially when PC speech codes have everyone constantly checking their chit chat with neighbors, co-workers, and classmates. At Marquette University, staff were told that any conversation or remarks construed to be against same-sex marriage were to be reported to Human Resources, even if just inadvertently overheard.

12. Same-Sex Kills Privacy by Growing Bureaucracy

With the erosion of family autonomy practically guaranteed by the rainbow arc of same-sex marriage, private life will tend to evaporate, just as it always does in centrally planned societies. Distrust grows because people fear punishment for expressing dissenting views. The emphasis on political correctness in the name of equality, coupled with an ever-growing bureaucracy, is a perfect environment in which to percolate a surveillance society.

13. It’s Meant to Be a Global Agenda

The United States is already punishing countries and threatening to cut off aid if they don’t accept the LGBT agenda. This is especially true of developing countries, in which the whole idea is foreign to over 95 percent of the population. According to a report by Rep. Steve Stockman, corroborated by a Pentagon official, the administration held back critical intelligence from Nigeria which would have aided in locating girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. The new National Security Strategy recently released by the White House makes clear that the LGBT agenda is a global agenda. And it looks a lot like cultural imperialism of the worst kind.

14. It Promises a Monolithic Society of Conformity

In the past year or two, everyone with something to lose by opposing same-sex marriage—with the honorable exception of Eich—seems to have scuttled their principles. Five years ago, the American Psychological Association voted 157-0—that’s right, ZERO—to support genderless marriage. For an excellent assessment of what this sort of conformity means for a free society, read Brendan O’Neill’s article in Spiked, entitled “Gay Marriage: A Case Study in Conformism.” The agenda was imposed by elites, entirely due to a methodical blitzkrieg of programs and enforcement dictated from above. Same-sex marriage simply could not come about without suppressing dissent in all of our institutions.

15. Expect More Severe Punishment for Dissent

If you think the bullying of businesses, churches, and individuals who don’t get with the LGBT program now is bad, it promises to get much worse once codified. Is this really the sort of society you wish to live in? Where expressing an opinion from your heart on faith, family, marriage, relationships, love, or the very nature of reality—is routinely attacked as hate speech? Because that is exactly what you need to expect.

Justice Anthony Kennedy made it very clear in his words of the Windsor decision that any dissent on same-sex marriage was tantamount to animus. It is but a short step from presuming animus to punishing dissent.

So perhaps the biggest question hanging in the air is this: What will the authorities decide to do to dissenters?