The President Who Opposes the Right to Life Admits to ABC News He Opposes Marriage

This President's decision to give this interview to ABC news from the Whitehouse sends a signal

The main stream media is abuzz over the acknowledgement by President Barack Obama in an interview with ABC News that he no longer supports marriage as between one man and one woman. Homosexual Equivalency activists want us to hail the Presidents "evolution" as some sort of enlightened act when it is just plain wrong and dangerous for the Nation.  Borrowing a page out of the playbook of the Anti-Right to Life movement they have persuaded the media to use loaded, Orwellian language on one more vital moral issue, marriage. I will not do so.

P>WASHINGTON,DC  (Catholic Online) - The main stream media is abuzz over the acknowledgement by President Barack Obama in an interview with ABC News that he no longer supports marriage as between one man and one woman. The politically correct way of writing about his announcement would be to follow the verbal engineers in the Human Rights Campaign, the Nation's largest Public Interest Law Firm promoting what they call the "LGBT Agenda", and say the President supports "marriage equality". I will not do so. The President opposes marriage.

Homosexual Equivalency activists want us to hail the Presidents "evolution" as some sort of enlightened act when it is just plain wrong and dangerous for the Nation.  Borrowing a page out of the playbook of the Anti-Right to Life movement they have persuaded the media to use loaded, Orwellian language on one more vital moral issue, marriage. I will not do so.

I was not surprised that President Obama told Robin Roberts of ABC news on Wednesday, "it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married." It has been his position for a long time. He followed the strategy he has used in the past to sound as though he "struggles" with such profoundly important moral and social decisions.Then, he comes down on the wrong side. 

Remember his response to Pastor Rick Warren's question concerning his position on abortion when he ran for the office in 2008?  Since his election he has championed its legal protection in all circumstances and now seeks to compel its funding with federal tax dollars, extracted unwillingly from those who oppose abortion as an intrinsic evil, the taking of innocent human life.

The use of his Vice President and popular Education Secretary earlier in the week to soften the ground for this big reveal - having them come out against marriage as between one man and one woman - was political strategy. He agrees with the homosexual equivalency movement that homosexual sexual practices are morally equivalent to the sexual expression of marital love between a man and a woman.

Now, along with them, he wants to use the power of his office to ensure that Federal and State governments decree that homosexual relationships are legally equivalent to marriage. He is not fond of popular votes such as the recent overwhelming vote of the people of North Carolina to defend Marriage. The President champions the revolutionary cause of building a society where the positive law of the Nation forces us all to call to be a marriage what can never be a marriage - or face the police power of the State for failure to do so.

The truth about marriage is not simply a "religious" construct.  The Natural Law reveals - and the cross cultural history of civilization affirms - that marriage is between a man and a woman, open to children and intended for life. Marriage is the foundation for the family which is the privileged place for the formation of virtue and character in children, our future citizens. The family is the first society, first economy, first school, first civilizing and mediating institution and first government.

To defend marriage is NOT to discriminate against any person, including those who define themselves as homosexual or lesbian. To limit marriage to heterosexual couples is not discriminatory now, nor has it ever been. Homosexual couples cannot bring into existence what marriage intends by its very definition. To now "confer" the benefits that have been conferred in the past only to stable married couples and families to homosexual paramours is bad public policy and will seriously injure the common good.

Marriage between one man and one woman, intended for life and open to the bearing and rearing of children is the fundamental building block of society. The family is the first cell of society. It is a relationship defined by nature itself, revealed and affirmed by the natural law that binds all men and women. Civil institutions do not create marriage nor can they create a "right" to marry for those who are incapable of marriage.

The institutions of a just government are supposed to defend marriage against those who would undermine it - not redefine it out of existence. Government has long regulated marriage for the common good. For example, the ban on polygamy and age requirements were enforced in order to ensure that there was a mature decision at the basis of the Marriage contract.

In the interview with ABC News, as the President attempted to make his decision seem to be a thoughtful evolution, he spoke of his administration's decision to no longer enforce what he called the "Defense against Marriage" Act. The Federal Law his administration refuses to defend is called the "Defense of Marriage "Act. That slip of the tongue is instructive and revealing.

This President's decision to give this interview to ABC news from the Whitehouse sends a signal. His reelection means the continued advance of the culture of death. He will further institutionalize the denial of the First Right, the Right to Life for children in the womb. His Health Care Law, if left to stand, threatens the elderly, infirmed and disabled.

He has proven he is no friend of the First Freedom, Religious freedom. His Health and Human Services Secretary, in violation of the First Amendments Free Exercise Clause, wants to compel Religious Institutions to offer sterilization, provide abortificacients and dispense birth control if they offer health care at all. If they do not comply they will face the punitive boot of the Police Power of the State.

His announced "evolution" on "gay marriage" marriage now adds to the list of concerns that he wants to replace marriage and the family and society founded upon it with a different social order.  

We are living under what Pope Benedict XVI called a "Dictatorship of Relativism" Relativism denies the existence of any objective truths which can be known through the exercise of reason and should govern our life together as a society. Divorced from norms to guide the exercise of human choice and govern our behavior, we are rapidly declining as a culture.

When there is nothing objectively true which can be known by all and form the basis of our common life then there is no basis for authentic freedom. Instead, we teeter on the brink of anarchy. Marriage is the next target in the advance of the tyranny of the social and cultural engineers. 

In his apostolic exhortation on the Eucharist, the Sacrament of Charity, Pope Benedict summarized the duty of Catholics when confronted with an assault on authentic marriage:  "Marriage and the family are institutions that must be promoted and defended from every possible misrepresentation of their true nature, since whatever is injurious to them is injurious to society itself."

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church wrote in 2003, "The Church's teaching on marriage and on the complementarity of the sexes reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason and recognized as such by all the major cultures of the world. Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose.

"No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman, who by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons. In this way, they mutually perfect each other, in order to cooperate with God in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives."

I write this article as a private citizen. I am the Editor in Chief of Catholic Online. Catholic Online is NOT a 501c3 non profit organization. It was formed as a for profit company for several reasons; one of which was a growing concern that speaking out on major moral issues would be restricted as the decline of American culture advanced. That is exactly what is happening. We are not precluded from speaking out on such vital issues and we intend to do so.

In articles over the last year, I made no secret of my admiration for a former candidate for the Republican nomination, a man who was "morally coherent" in my articles. He insisted we cannot separate the moral/social issues from economic issues anymore than we can separate the soul from the body. His name is Rick Santorum. When I heard the President interviewed today I even more deeply regretted his withdrawal from this critically important Presidential campaign. However, his candidacy is over.

Catholics in the United States can affect the outcome of the 2012 Presidential election in the United States. That is, if we act in a manner which is "morally coherent" as we exercise our citizenship and vote. That phrase was used in an instruction released in 2002 entitled a "Doctrinal Note on some questions regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life".

The phrase undergirds the "Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church" sections pertaining to the political participation of Catholics. (See, e.g. #565-574): "The social doctrine of the Church is not an intrusion into the government of individual countries. It is a question of the lay Catholic's duty to be morally coherent, found within one's conscience, which is one and indivisible."

"There cannot be two parallel lives in their existence: on the one hand, the so-called 'spiritual life', with its values and demands; and on the other, the so-called 'secular' life, that is, life in a family, at work, in social responsibilities, in the responsibilities of public life and in culture. The branch, engrafted to the vine which is Christ, bears its fruit in every sphere of existence and activity."

"In fact, every area of the lay faithful's lives, as different as they are, enters into the plan of God, who desires that these very areas be the 'places in time' where the love of Christ is revealed and realized for both the glory of the Father and service of others". 

"Living and acting in conformity with one's own conscience on questions of politics is not slavish acceptance of positions alien to politics or some kind of 'confessionalism', but rather the way in which Christians offer their concrete contribution so that, through political life, society will become more just and more consistent with the dignity of the human person."

The Catholic Church as an institution does not endorse specific political candidates. However, the Church does call her members to inform their conscience and then exercise their faithful citizenship in a morally coherent manner. As for this Catholic citizen, this recent interview given by President Barack Obama to ABC News has rekindled my decision to do just that. I will do absolutely everything I can to ensure that this President is not reelected for four more years.

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