Same-Sex Marriage And Totalitarianism

Archbishop Timothy Dolan created a stir when, leading up to the legislative vote in New York state that legalized same-sex marriage, he stated the following:

Last time I consulted an atlas, it is clear we are living in New York, in the United States of America – not in China or North Korea. In those countries, government presumes daily to “redefine” rights, relationships, values, and natural law. There, communiqués from the government can dictate the size of families, who lives and who dies, and what the very definition of “family” and “marriage” means.

Critics, predictably, argued that New York did nothing more than “pass a law to end discrimination against same-sex couples.” However, considering the rising conflict between churches and the states that legalize same-sex marriage (and the propensity for the state to trump the church under the guise of ending “discrimination”) Archbishop Dolan’s concerns appear all the more real.

Dolan was speaking of Totalitarianism, a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life. George Weigel recently wrote at National Review Online about how marriage worked in a totalitarian state, that of communist Poland:

Under Polish Communism, Catholic couples — which is to say, just about everyone — got “married” twice. Because marriages in the Catholic Church were not recognized by the Communist state, believers had two “weddings.” The first was a civil procedure, carried out in a dingy bureaucratic office with a state (i.e., Communist-party) apparatchik presiding.... The entire business was a farce, regarded as such by virtually all concerned. Some time later, [couples] were married, in every meaningful sense of that term, in [a Cathedral].

Ever since the Massachusetts supreme court created a right to same-sex marriage, liberals have proposed resolving the conflict between church and state on the marriage issue by emulating Communist Poland. Alan M. Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard University, wrote in the Los Angeles Times as follows:

The solution is to unlink the religious institution of marriage -- as distinguished from the secular institution of civil union -- from the state. Under this proposal, any couple could register for civil union, recognized by the state, with all its rights and responsibilities. Religious couples could then go to the church, synagogue, mosque or other sacred institution of their choice in order to be married....

Sound familiar? Yet this is the necessary result when the state tries to regulate public and private life by trying “to re-invent the very definition of an undeniable truth – one man, one woman, united in lifelong love and fidelity, hoping for children – that has served as the very cornerstone of civilization and culture from the start.”