I’m not sure what you mean by ‘post-modern’. Some facts about facts:

1. We never have them all
2. Anyone who is attempting to communicate ideas in a fact based manner selects the facts that are important to his/her argument and arranges the selected facts in accordance with a value hierarchy that supports his/her idea (further limiting access to the set of ‘facts’)
3. Traditionally facts have been interpreted (given meaning) within a social/cultural narrative or mythos that goes far beyond meer logic
4. If one changes the narrative, then the interpretation of the facts changes, just as if one changes the assumptions underlying any logical argument, the outcome of the logic is likely to change.
5. If the mythos is one founded upon the revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ the facts will be given an entirely different meaning and value that when they are interpreted within a scientistic/materialist mythos or the mythos generated by a particular polticial ideology.
6.The data that are considered facts by differing narratives will tend to be different, even radically different. For instance, for Orthodox the facts of the lives of the saints are of great import. For the scientistic materialist, the saints are not even real and hence not facts at all.

Some conclusions:

Empiricism assumes a uniformity in the material world that simply does not exist. Facts can, when properly used and when bias is properly considered, bolster the legitimacy of a particular idea and even prove it within the constraints of logic, but they never ‘speak for themselves’ .

God is the only one who speaks for Himself, the only one whose existence is not contingent and therefore unchangeable. Since He has revealed Himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ, it behooves us to subjugate our own will, biases and ideologies to the Truth. Anything else is irrational and illogical.

I suspect any study of the financial assets of those who are actively homosexual as compared to the married would look like the letter ‘U’. Those who are ill, and disproportionately many are at a younger age seriously and chronically ill, must spend on medical care. Those who have their health have spending timing and amount discretion the married with kids only can dream about.

Gays are by and large wealthier. No one to take care of except themselves. The same would hold true for heterosexual singles, but they tend to get married, gays don’t. (I don’t expect many long-term or committed relationships to develop among gays. We’ll see.) Their wealth is more a function demographics than anything else.

As for families and civilizations, scripture reveals the family predating even Abraham. Remember Adam and Eve? Sounds very foundational at least in my version of it. Jesus blessed the wedding at Cana, that predates the Church too. Nuclear families are a cultural development but only because time and distance dissolved the larger extended bonds that defined it before that. The notion of family however — mom, dad, kids, uncles, aunts, cousins — is still preserved. None of this spontaneously generated 40 years ago.

So your request for justifications can’t really be met, not at least until we get some of the elementary facts in order.

What lawsuit was that?

Actually IIUC gay people and couples are said to be more likely to not be poor or not to stay poor than straight couples and their children! This mathematical irony is, however, unrelated to the fact, I believe, that “the nuclear family” is NOT “the bedrock of civilization,” but rather the bedrock of true civilization is the Orthodox Church, ITS families and monasteries. Again I ask what explicit o/Orthodox justification there is for us to ally ourselves with the reactionary political-cultural worship of the nuclear family (a recent invention itself), of the last 40-some years? Its main U.S. proponents use it as cover for the Republican Party, and Fundamentalist Protestantism ie heresy. Again, what explicit o/Orthodox justification? I’d like to learn if there is any, sincerely, because I haven’t seen much. Thank you.

Who took “the Bible” out of U.S. public schools? U.S. Catholic bishops, in a lawsuit almost a century ago. Why? Because the religion being taught in these Protestant-run school systems, they believed, threatened the faith of Catholic children attending public schools. (In fact the Bibles in question were Protestant, not Catholic — nor Orthodox.) Today their basic position remains unchanged: to obtain government funding for Catholic schools, although Catholic “liberal Democrats” lately have started to realize that, whatever problems public schools might have, de-funding them could be worse. [Personally I’d like to see a state or school district propose to fund ALL elementary and secondary education within its borders, irrespective of religious or nonreligious sponsorship, ISTM potentially meeting the Constitutional difficulty with “establishing religion”!] Should U.S. Catholic bishops reconsider their position? Which way should Orthodox go, given recent highly-publicized Hierarchical ‘moral’-political alliances with “conservative” religious and political forces in Western Europe and the USA — and why? ISTM most Orthodox public spokespersons have been short on explicit o/Orthodox justification for their punditry, leaving some of us confused and concerned … especially when they attack explicit Orthodox justification for opposing viewpoints.

Wow, you’re sounding downright post-modern to me! 😉

What’s that canard about making abortion legal will make it safe? Greed and homicidal intent always produces butchers.

You are right, Andrew. And it is not an issue of a friendly or unfriendly government. The Church has a lot of baggage to discard which it has accumulated since the Edict of Milan.

Nick, this is why the future of American Orthodoxy is so important. Its really a question of freedom to answer the call of Christ and the responsibility that comes with it. That article you put up is tragic. It says nothing about vocations but only clergy as “state workers”. I have come to believe more and more that we should pull the plug on state subsidies for Orthodox Churches and make the church free to live its faith. Making Orthodox Christians responsible for everything from their Church building to building up vocations is a good thing.

Many of the great heroes of the faith after all were successful because of their fidelity not because they received government subsidies. St. Paul did not get checks from the Greek ministry of culture to preach the Gospel.

Amen to that Andrew. And, when the Church got really tight with the Empire, the bishops adopted the fashion of the Emperors rather than the simple deacon’s dalmatic. They no longer remained part of the people but evolved apart from the people. They even denied us the right to hear the anaphora, including the anamnesis, so we could not longer remember what it is all about. Then they instituted the silliest of rubrics and started teaching those rather than teaching Christ.

I love that quote, Chris. Thanks for sharing. That quote pretty much sums up how I feel about the Orthodox Church’s response (or unanimous lack thereof) to the worldwide abortion epidemic.