Behind the Push for Same-Sex Marriage

Bioethics Expert Sees an Ideological Intention

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ROME, APRIL 6, 2004 (Zenit.org).- A “manifestly ideological” intention to put an end to the very meaning of matrimony is behind the move by homosexual couples to have their unions declared “marriages,” says a bioethics expert.

Claudia Navarini, professor of the School of Bioethics of the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical Athenaeum, said the recent World Congress of Families, in Mexico, warned about the risk that civil society runs, by tolerating or favoring homosexual unions.

Such unions, she said, are “contrary to nature and human dignity and to the institutions of society, such as the family and marriage.”

Navarini cited the recent vote by lawmakers in Massachusetts for an amendment to the state Constitution to recognize homosexual unions as civil unions, while defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

Despite this, the amendment stirred “the indignant reaction of gay movements, which would have preferred the recognition of gay marriage as that of heterosexual persons, with relevant rights and responsibilities, invoking as the basis the principles of social and juridical equality and of non-sexual discrimination,” Navarini told ZENIT.

However, the family has “very precise natural characteristics which are at the origin of ordered civil coexistence and as such promote the harmonious psychological and ethical development of persons,” she said.

The foundation of the family “is not just any union between human persons,” but “marriage understood as the union of a man and a woman in a bond of exclusive and indissoluble love, structurally open to life,” the professor continued.

This affirmation “represents a fact of nature that arises from the honest investigation of the human reality, valid for all human beings,” she said.

“In fact, the exercise of sexuality has a biological basis, expressed in the physical and complementary differences between man and woman, who consent to the sexual act and, consequently, to procreation,” Navarini said. This complementarity encompasses the “psychological, emotional, intellectual and spiritual structure.”

Moreover, the stability of the conjugal union “constitutes the fertile terrain for carrying out the educational task,” she added.

“Obviously, nothing of all this is possible for homosexual couples, who enter into unnatural relations from the psycho-physical point of view; they are generally brief and promiscuous and are unfit to receive and raise children, including adopted ones,” the professor said.

In regard to this last aspect, Navarini confirmed that psycho-evolutionary imbalances in children are now known and linked to the absence of reference to sexual bipolarity. She cited in this respect the American College of Pediatricians report “Homosexual Parenting: Is It Time for Change?”

“One would have to ask why gay couples are so concerned about having the state equate their unions with marriage, precisely at a time characterized by the growing tendency to substitute the conjugal bond with ‘free living together,'” Navarini observed.

In her opinion, “the intention is manifestly ideological: to weaken, split and finally eradicate the very meaning of marriage, by deforming it with simple simulations, and so destroy the family, the reality of which proclaims inexorably the radical truth about man.”

Therefore, “to recognize homosexual unions legally or to compare them to marriage would mean not only to approve deviant behavior, with the consequence of converting into a model in present-day society, but also to obfuscate the fundamental values that belong to the common heritage of humanity.”

Navarini said that those who contribute to the common good, while respecting the dignity of homosexuals, should ensure that the “irreplaceable foundations are clearly emphasized of a society ordered to the measure of man and according to the plan of God, in keeping with the natural law.”

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