Cannae, not Cana

Pat Archibald at the National Catholic Register:

Marriage Is Dead And The Church Is Next

DOMA is dead. 

And, technicalities aside, Prop 8. in California is dead, paving the way for same-sex marriage there.

While many people will try to dissect these opinions and look for legal silver linings based on the narrowness of this or that part of the rulings, make no mistake, as a practical matter marriage as we knew it is over. The dam has burst even if all the water has not yet traversed the breach. 

Marriage, as the union of a man and woman for the purposes of raising children and for mutual support as recognized in culture and law, has ceased to exist. The only reason that marriage needs be recognized by law is that previous generations understood its value and wished to confer certain legal and societal privileges to it so as to encourage it. They rightly understood that marriage is the cornerstone of a society. 

Advocates have used those legal and societal privileges to beat, twist, and deform the very meaning and purpose of marriage. We now view the purpose of marriage solely as the conferring of these legal and societal privileges, and thus they can be granted to anyone and anything. 

While many states have sought to forestall the redefinition of marriage in their states by statute or constitution, today's ruling basically invalidates their efforts and has opened the floodgate to approval of same sex marriage across the nation with no reasonable recourse. Marriage as we knew it is dead. 

With the universal legal recognition of same-sex marriage a fait accompli, the next fight will on the Church doorstep. The next battle will be to force Churches, most particularly the Catholic Church, to recognize and conduct same-sex marriage. The refusal to do so will result in a series of escalating legal and financial ramifications. 

Eventually, becuase of its refusal to recognize immoral unions as marriage, the state will refuse to recognize Church marriages. As a result, more and more people will bypass Church marriage altogether, further marginalizing faith in this country. This effort is and has always been a war against religion and in particular a war against the Catholic Church. Right now, it is a war we are losing and after today, perhaps it is fair to say that we lost. 

Yes, the Church has the guarantee that it will ultimately prevail, but that does not mean it will prevail in the United States. The failure to see the real target of this war and frankly the weak response to the threat by Church leaders and rank and file have doomed marriage and put the target squarely on the sanctuary. 

I don't know if religious liberty can be saved in this country, but it is worth fighting for. I for one will continue to fight, but at least now everyone should understand that the battle is real and we are losing. I just hope that we haven't already lost.

The succinct truth.

We are well into this cultural war. The rout is next, and is probably inevitable.

Of course, we Christians are just visitors on this battlefield, and our final victory will be total. But our culture is in a collapsing vortex, and it's going to get much much uglier for us. 

I believe in teleology. There are ends in things. There is goal-directeness in nature, and I believe that human affairs hew to ends, even though few of the protagonists really understand the ends for which they work. This is certainly true in the gay marriage debate.

The gay marriage movement-- tsunami really-- has nothing to do with marriage. Since homosexual unions aren't marriage, and we heterosexuals have made a pretty big mess of real marriage all by ourselves, the "marriage" aspect of this debate is a chimera.

The gay marriage movement, like the contraception mandate, is a devastating attack on Christianity. It is a brilliant application of Saul Alinsky's fourth rule for radicals:

4) Make the enemy live up to his own book of rules.  

That's precisely what they're doing. Christians are the guests of honor in gay weddings-- the only guests that matter, really. Attendance is mandatory. Non-compliance is homophobia. We will be forced to either abandon our faith or live in accordance with Christian teaching, which will result in our legal and cultural annihilation. Christians who refuse to collaborate with gay marriage or comply with the contraception mandate will be isolated and systematically reduced to penury or silence. Don't count on the courts to save us. Our victories will be small and brief. Our defeats will be massive and lasting.

For Christians this is Cannae, not Cana. We have been out-flanked by modern Carthaginians. We have been enveloped by brilliant ideological and political maneuvers, and we will likely share the fate of the Romans. Our enemies aren't Hannibal. They're totalitarians, who are much worse-- "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state."

Have no illusions about what they plan for us.

So whence this unholy, albeit brilliant, attack on Christians? It's worth noting that Alinsky, who was a dark genius, dedicated his book "Rules for Radicals" thusly:

“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history... the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.”

There are ends at work in this.