Male and Female He Created Them. And for a Good Reason
by Anthony Esolen, Crisis Magazine:
It has been just six years since I wrote Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity, warning against the fantasy that two members of the same sex can marry one another, when they cannot even have sexual relations but can only mimic them. I founded my arguments not upon Scripture or the teaching of the Church—indeed I did not refer to them at all—but upon common observation, historical and cultural precedent, and the biology of male and female.
The principal opponent I had in mind was not the person already engaged in the fantasy, but the fence-sitter, the “moderate,” who can be found in all of us, and not usually to our credit. The earth is heaving from beneath, and we shrug because it’s not making our own house tremble, or at least not too much. We cannot worry about everything. No one has the energy for that. So in a time of rapid change and decay in our fundamental institutions, we keep a handhold on this or that which seems healthy enough for our purposes for the time being. “The public schools are dreadful, but ours is not so bad,” we say. Or we say, “At least our children will have a mother and a father.” The sky is not falling.
Predictions of disaster usually fail. This is because they extrapolate from trends, which are temporary, or from the rate of change in a trend, which is more temporary still, or because they imagine a future factor which confirms and accelerates the change. But sometimes the predictions come true, and this is not by chance. When the prediction is based upon the playing-out of principles, and when it is buttressed by historical precedent and a firm grasp upon human nature, it is likely to come true, mainly because it is not a prediction so much as a cold and penetrating analysis of what already is. So it was when Pope Paul VI predicted that the mass use of contraception would lead to more abortions and more children born out of wedlock, and the world, inattentive and irresponsible, laughed. But the world was wrong, and the Pope was right.
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