Well that'll do for me:) Another warrior of the right falls to logic. I've always said this isn't a political issue (despite the severe politicisation of it in Canberra) but a human one.
He goes further than that however, addressing the very way churches currently enter the public secular space and try to influence legislation according to their religious beliefs. They appear to be incapable of seeing that secularism is the system that gives them their religious freedom in the first place. But more than that, they don't appear to have adjusted to secular western society being "post christian" and that christianity is now a minority in today's world.
Sheridan, although he frames it in his religious terms, put's it much better than me:
What then of the churches?
I am not asking them to change their own doctrines or their own practices. Doctrine can and does evolve but that is not my argument in this case. I think the churches do themselves a disservice by trying to hang on to the very few specifically Christian enforcement elements of an ambient culture of long ago, at least a half-century or more, when the culture explicitly acknowledged its Christian inspiration and the attempt to form institutions in accordance with Christian norms.
No Western society was ever really a Christian society. But past injustices don’t invalidate Christian inspiration; they invalidate, or show the weakness of, the efforts to implement the inspiration. And in any modern, secular state, of course, religion should be a matter of conscience within the bounds of the normal law.
Churches are mistaken to try to hang on to old elements of legal enforcement of a bygone social orthodoxy. The empty pews of the Anglican Church in England show how little that offers, how sterile an approach to contemporary life that is.
Of course, Christian activists don’t see themselves as trying to hang on to institutional privilege but rather as defending basic social goods.
I have the greatest sympathy with them. I think the failing of traditional Christianity across the Western world is the greatest single cultural crisis we face. It is very much an open question whether a civilisation can survive without transcendent belief.
But the churches would be much better to recognise themselves as minorities in Western society and indeed to demand minority rights. They need to advocate for the Christian vision of the good life but not primarily through legal enforcement.
Already a huge proportion of the marriages the state recognises are not approved marriages as far as some churches are concerned.
Catholic orthodoxy has it that normally you cannot remarry after divorce. For a long time Ireland enforced this prohibition.
But now that society has accepted no-fault divorce, it’s up to Christians to propound their vision of marriage through means other than the law. If they wanted to they could engage in their own voluntary legal arrangements beyond those of the state. There is no prospect at all of the state taking things back to the old days for them. And in reality that’s not the state’s job anyway.
Some arguments some Christians make against gay marriage I positively disagree with.
The talk of a “stolen generation” being made up of children in gay couples because they are not with both their biological parents is an attack really on all non-biological parents. It’s a bad attack.
I have always been a million per cent supporter of adoption, interracial adoption, any kind of adoption. The only criterion for being a good parent is to love the child unreservedly.
In Christian tradition nothing is more powerful than the Holy Family — Joseph, Mary and Jesus. Central to the story of the incarnation is the fact Joseph is not the biological father of Jesus. I find the example of Joseph a profound inspiration to all stepfathers.
This is not a theological interpretation. It’s merely the inspiration I find in the gospels, a source I generally never quote in political discussion.
We have to recognise that we live in an essentially post-Christian society. The legal and religious institutions of marriage should part company.
That’s a challenge for religious folks — to try to live up to their ideals and win people to these ideals. And it’s an opportunity for others to fashion as good a life as they might. The Australian
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