THERE seem to be two positions emerging for concerned people on the same-sex marriage issue. Irrespective of how a vote is taken, I should think that Catholics will take this as a matter of serious moral judgment.
Some will take the more timorous position and retreat from the secular wrangling to the relative safety of preserving the sacramental character of marriage. Others, perhaps more bravely, will continue a more robust contest with the secular modernity that proposes the new legislation.
Following the decision of the United States Supreme Court in June, the New York Times columnist, David Brooks, has been writing interesting essays on the subject. It seems to me that his position is both courageous and well-considered.
Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex.
Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose. Consider a different culture war, one just as central to your faith and far more powerful in its persuasive witness.
We live in a society plagued by formlessness and radical flux, in which bonds, social structures and commitments are strained and frayed. Millions of kids live in stressed and fluid living arrangements.
Many communities have suffered a loss of social capital. Many young people grow up in a sexual and social environment rendered barbaric because there are no common norms. Many adults hunger for meaning and goodness, but lack a spiritual vocabulary to think things through.
The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organisations to help nurture stable families.
Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other.
Those are the people who converse with us about the transcendent in everyday life. This culture war is more Albert Schweitzer and Dorothy Day than Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham.
We can continue to contest the breeding ground for what is a relatively new thinking on marriage only by confronting the vacuum of faith and values that defines the space of modern society and its self-generating notions of the self and society.