By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX – Nationally active speakers at a “legislative seminar” here examined the damage to the legal system and individual conscience, welfare, and morality if American courts impose a fiat favoring the “same-sex marriage” novelty.
About 300 people gathered at Phoenix Catholic diocesan headquarters for the September 6 program, “Catholics in the Public Square,” dealing with their legitimate political responsibilities in American society.
The half-day program began with an 8 a.m. Mass at nearby St. Mary’s Basilica, where Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmsted urged listeners to have faith that God will bring a greater good from the undoubted evils of the present time.
“When persecuted, we endure. . . . When slandered, we respond gently. Now, that’s not easy,” Olmsted said, adding, “. . . We’re the world’s rubbish. We are God’s treasure.”
Nationally known marriage defender Maggie Gallagher, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based American Principles Project (APP), told the gathering in a diocesan meeting hall, “As I see it, the courts are stepping in to shut down this debate” about marriage.
APP defends foundational American principles in law and morality.
Around the nation, in state after state, people had voted to protect traditional marriage, but federal courts are overthrowing such measures as unconstitutional now — even if defense of traditional marriage is part of the state Constitution itself.
If the courts do try to shut down the debate, Gallagher said, the question is whether the result will be like that following the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education or instead Roe vs. Wade.
The Brown decision in 1954 declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. The Roe decision in 1973 ruled permissive abortion to be a constitutional right.
It’s typical that if the high court rules on an issue, Americans come to accept it, Gallagher said, noting that people didn’t want to be racists. However, the court’s radicalism on abortion continues to be rejected by large segments of society more than 40 years later.
“I was told a lot of things when I was a young woman” about “what was inevitable,” said Gallagher, who was born in 1960, including that permissive abortion simply would be accepted. “I was told there’d be no pro-lifers left,” but today’s young generation is the most pro-life of all.
A law based on denial of human nature could do a lot of damage, but “it will not stand,” she said.
Earlier in her talk, Gallagher said, “A lot of the retreat from marriage in our culture . . . is a form of generational abandonment,” with the young left to figure it out on their own.
“I grew up in a society that says we have separated sex from reproduction,” she said, yet “the girls keep getting pregnant, and no one seems to notice it.”
Being told that using birth control will prevent pregnancy 95 percent of the time leaves a significant possibility for pregnancy, especially if the sexual activity occurs over a number of years, she said.
As for the popularization of “same-sex marriage,” “Our [traditional] understanding of marriage is not only going to be privatized, but stigmatized and marginalized. . . . If you see a difference, there’s something wrong with you,” Gallagher said.
In her own life, when she was “a young woman atheist,” a “big part of what led me back to the Catholic faith” was reflecting on abortion, which involves killing that which should be most precious to a woman, she said.
It didn’t seem right that “we should choose our sex lives over our children’s lives,” said Gallagher, whose first child was born out of wedlock.
Another speaker, Alan Sears, head of the Scottsdale, Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), told the audience, “The attempts to redefine marriage are not private matters” but affect basic law and social policy.
Sears is president, CEO, and general counsel of ADF, which defends faith, religious liberty, and traditional values.
Changing the very definition of marriage can’t be based “on false senses of compassion,” Sears said, adding that those wanting “same-sex marriage” are “very confused people” who “need our prayers and need our love.”
The “fight for ‘same-sex marriage’ ” can’t disclose where it actually plans to go in transforming the legal system because people would oppose it, he said.
Increasingly, “mental health care” is being used as a weapon against people who believe in traditional marriage, Sears said, citing the case of a Colorado baker and his employees “ordered into mental-health reeducation,” with monthly reports being required on progress attained.
Could people imagine, Sears asked, a Muslim caterer being ordered to cater bacon for a Christian wedding, or a black artist being ordered to celebrate the Ku Klux Klan? However, business people are ordered to suppress their consciences and honor “same-sex marriage.”
“These cases of today give us a little taste of what we face tomorrow” if people don’t stand up against it, and also vote, he said.
Sears began his talk by commenting that “lay participation in the elections is absolutely critical” because this determines whose lives are protected and what freedoms people will have.
Conscience “is punished and suppressed” often today “in the name of tolerance,” he said, and people’s liberty and human dignity “are under legal assault . . . in ways that are chilling and unimaginable as never before.”
When Obamacare demands that a business engage in “direct cooperation with evil,” the government message is “your conscience or your business” because the fines to be imposed for resistance are crippling, “millions upon millions of dollars,” Sears said.
Although the Obama administration freely grants waivers and exemptions to whomever it pleases, Sears said, no one asserting religious conscience has received such leniency.
ADF has a perfect record of winning these cases, Sears said, but the administration digs in its heels instead of relenting.
“Despite [ADF] winning 20 cases and losing zero cases . . . the battle continues” against every Catholic charity, every Catholic college, and every St. Vincent de Paul Society organization, he said.
“It is not the role of any government, any Caesar” to decide who is religious enough to qualify for legal protection, Sears said, adding that ADF’s clients “are not troublemakers. . . . They’re not extremists,” but they’re under government assault.
On another issue, Sears told of a nurse ordered to participate in an abortion or lose her job, even though this was contrary to her nursing contract, and of nursing applicants being required to agree to do abortion training as a condition of merely being allowed to complete their applications.
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