Dear Ms. Goodman:

I write to support your thesis that gay marriage is not the cause of the cultural crisis of marriage; it is a consequence.  However, I think you have missed the mark by thinking that the real cause of the crisis is love.  May I suggest another possibility?  You yourself mentioned it when you wrote:  “Heterosexuals claimed the right to decide to have children [or nor].”  By so doing, they separated love from the service of life.  They redefined the notion of love by seeking to find a meaning in sexuality apart from its physically intrinsic orientation to procreation. 

In the process, a number of curious things happened.  The common good around which a couple could build a sexual relationship without using one another for a private good disappeared.  Procreational sex became recreational sex.  Pleasure, without the fear of unwanted consequences, became the good that had to serve as the justification for sex.  However, pleasure, by its very nature, is always a private good.  It can never serve as a common good around which to build a lasting relationship.  Inevitably, the other (normally the woman) ends up feeling being used by the other (normally the man) as the means to achieve his private ends.  Sex in these circumstances closes one in upon oneself.  No wonder that women so often feel themselves being used.  Sexual frigidity is not by chance.  It comes as the result of bitter experience.

Moreover, once love is separated from the service of life, sex no longer has consequences.  Once pleasure becomes the end of sexuality, sex itself is trivialized.  Thitherto, pleasure had always been understood to be a consequence of seeking after a common good to which both parties could subordinate their pursuit of private goods.  With the advent of contraception, that was no longer possible.  Without accepting the possibility that sex can have consequences that go beyond the couple engaged in it, there is no giving of self to the other.  Instead each is psychologically orientated toward what he or she can get from the other.  Self-sacrifice for the good of the other does not appear.  We end up with two people who are looking to be loved, but not one of them capable of doing the self-sacrificing that is the core of mature loving.

Homosexual sex was originally packaged as “gay” sex precisely because it allowed for pleasure without consequences.  The justification for contraception and for homosexuality are, as you correctly implied, the same.  If the religious right hopes to ban same-sex marriage, you are correct in saying that they need to change a few other attitudes also.  One cannot have one’s cake and eat it too.  But one thing they do not have to change is the notion that marriage is a personal relationship.  Marriage is both a personal and an institutional relationship, the institution of love. 

The religious (together with the non-religious) left, however, need to change their idea of what a “person” is.  Somehow, they think that you can have a person without a body.  It does not work that way.  I do not “have” a body; I am my body.  Gender is not secondary to the person and his identity.  It is primary.  The view that I am a person in either a male or female body is anthropological dualism.  The givenness of our bodies is one of the fundamental truths about the human person.  Our sex is not a matter of choice.  It is a given. 

Only a man and a women can have sex in the service of life.  It is physically impossible for same sex couple to have sex in the service of life.  Only a man and woman can who have capacitated themselves by pledging themselves to one another until death parts them can have sex that is in the service of life.  Sodomy is not marriage.  This is the fundamental reason you cannot “legalize” homosexual marriage, no matter how inconvenient the bodily facts might appear.  It would not be marriage in the service of life.  Only by entering into the cross – whatever shape it may take – will you ever discover and rejoice in your real identity in the eyes of God.