By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The U.S. Supreme Court’s “marriage mandate” in 2015 for same-sex couples “is already more far-reaching” than its original creation of a right to permissive abortion in Roe vs. Wade, a national traditional-values leader told an audience at the headquarters of the Catholic Diocese of Phoenix.
“These are very confusing times for many. . . . (T)here are no limits on where this legal tyranny can lead,” Alan Sears told more than 300 people attending a legislative seminar, “Catholics in the Public Square,” on September 17.
Among those in the audience was Bill Montgomery, a Catholic and head of the Phoenix-based Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, one of the nation’s largest public prosecuting agencies.
Sears is president, CEO and general counsel of Alliance Defending Freedom (adflegal.org), an Arizona-based organization that defends and advocates for historic moral values.
Another speaker, Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., invited listeners to “take a sober-minded look at what the sexual revolution has done to our country.”
That revolution asserts the right to “unlimited sex without a live baby,” and all “for free,” she said.
Morse is founder of the California-based, nationally active Ruth Institute, whose resource center provides “research and educational tools to support individuals and families harmed by divorce, the hook-up culture, and other forms of family breakdown,” according to its website (ruthinstitute.org).
Shortly before the legislative seminar began, Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmsted told The Wanderer that people need to remember that God not only wants them to be in a personal relationship with Him, but also “to witness to Him in the public square. And being engaged in political activity, according to the Second Vatican Council, is a noble endeavor.”
Starting the morning, Olmsted celebrated an 8 a.m. Mass at adjacent St. Mary’s Basilica. In his homily, he said the legislative seminar prepares people “to live as good citizens in our country” and to walk confidently into the voting booth.
Sears, the Alliance Defending Freedom leader, said the Supreme Court, having “fabricate(d)” “same-sex marriage” in the Obergefell vs. Hodges decision, has encouraged demands that anyone can marry anyone, even within members of the same family, and that anyone who disagrees is labeled a bigot.
He said opinion polling even says that 20 percent of Catholics say pastors must be compelled to perform same-sex “marriages.”
Catholics’ rising presence in the United States has done little to raise the moral tone, Sears said, adding that people’s consciences now are “subjugated to another person’s sexual appetite.”
Although Sears didn’t name some leading Catholics, those names could include Vice President Joe Biden, Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine, U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and five of the current eight Supreme Court justices.
The public debate is “no longer talking about a legal theory of what could be or might be,” but present-day realities, backed up by penalties, Sears said.
“In this new America, we will be urged to give up more and more smaller freedoms” as the government shrinks the traditional freedom of religion to only freedom of worship within church walls, he said.
Neither a person’s nor institution’s virtues or good works matter, but only how much they bow to secularism, Sears said.
The ACLU is suing the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops because Church agencies won’t supply abortifacients or contraceptives to unaccompanied alien minors, he said.
Sears invited the audience to decide, “Are we going to stand with these brothers and sisters, or are we going to abandon them, knowing our own time is coming” to be confronted?
“I could take the entire morning” to list the various cases going on now against conscience rights, from bakers to pharmacists, he said, adding:
“Mother Teresa was never silent. . . . She spoke boldly everywhere and anywhere,” including to presidents and first ladies.
“We’re not here this morning to whine and cry and complain,” but to answer the call and inspire other people to secure their liberties, Sears said.
“It is also time to fight, yes, fight,” he said. “. . . This is not a time to despair.”
Sears began by noting Mother Teresa’s “plea not to deprive the poorest of the poor from having children.”
There’s a special bond between parents and children, even the poorest, that can’t be replaced by anything else, he said, but there’s a campaign against childbearing through abortion, sterilization, and contraception, including an effort by the U.S. government.
Morse, the Ruth Institute founder, told the audience, “If you have a Facebook page, you are part of the new media,” and can get involved in defending values by sharing articles there. “If you don’t get involved, you’re going to look like California,” she told the Arizonans.
Blessed Pope Paul VI had warned in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae that, given the chance, governments would even intrude into decisions about family size, Morse said.
She added that the population police in Communist China involve themselves in intimate family matters, even literally destroying the living quarters of Chinese who are out of compliance. These family-limiting police are the largest police force in the world, she said.
The sexual revolution and gender ideology hurt human dignity and well-being, Morse said. However, “People with the most money in the Republican Party like the sexual revolution just where it is.”
She said people who have been harmed by the sexual revolution should start by healing themselves so they can heal others, then heal society.
For Catholics, she said, this can begin with the Morning Offering prayer, daily rosary and weekly or even daily Mass.
“The future, I believe, is on our side,” Morse said.
She recalled that in the bleak early months of the Second World War, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill urged his countrymen to set such a courageous example right then that even if Britain were to last for a thousand years, people would say, “This was their finest hour.”
Likewise, Morse said, with today’s moral battles looming, “My friends, let this be our finest hour.”
Ron Johnson, executive director of the Arizona Catholic Conference, the lobbying arm of the region’s bishops, expressed pleasure to The Wanderer at the turnout for the legislative seminar. Johnson recalled that a few years ago, “gay rights” protesters tried to chain shut the gates to prevent that year’s diocesan seminar from occurring, but they failed.
But today those people are running the government, I replied.
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