One woman expressed despair about defending marriage at any level: “I don’t know, I can’t get all riled up about gay marriage,” she wrote, going on to say that heterosexuals have already messed up marriage enough.”
Another didn’t see the harm in same-sex marriage in the first place: “When people say that gay marriages threaten my marriage, my husband and I just look at each other incredulously. How, exactly?”
Several people admitted they find it hard to defend marriage when called upon to do so. One such person wrote, “I just feel like a bully when people say I’m trying to deny other people their rights.”
Those and other comments led me to do a series of posts on the blog in an effort to sort out the different issues at play. I hope they helped, but I can’t help wonder in the end if our apathy towards defending marriage doesn’t spring in the end from a failure to love our brothers and sisters with same sex attraction.
Bear with me on a tangent. Have you heard of Lacy Dodd? She’s a Notre Dame alumna who protested that university’s honoring the President a few years’ back. She wrote in the First Things blog at the time about her experience being pregnant out of wedlock her senior year. Her boyfriend, also a Catholic Notre Dame student, offered to pay for her abortion. When she protested this was wrong, he replied, “all that pro-life stuff is just talk.”
Dodd ends her essay inquiring of Notre Dame’s president, “Who draws support from your decision to honor President Obama --the young, pregnant Notre Dame woman sitting in that graduating class who wants desperately to keep her baby, or the Notre Dame man who believes that the Catholic teaching on the intrinsic evil of abortion is just dining-room talk?”
