Answer to Jake II - Ethics

Jake's comments on my post in answer to him were fantastically well done, and I urge you to go read them. Due to the limitations of the Blogger comment system Jake noted there, I'm going to put up my reply as a series of blog posts rather than attempting to respond only in the comment thread. One unfortunate aspect of that it is that visually, it gives my argument more weight than it deserves, and Jake's less. Please do discount that as much as you can. The first response (on ethical issues) is below the fold. Response on legal issues to follow in another post. Thanks again to Jake for a wonderful discussion.

The Vine

Today’s Gospel tells us that after Our Lord healed a certain leper, people talked.

The report about him spread all the more, and great crowds assembled to listen to him and to be cured of their ailments, but he would withdraw to deserted places to pray.

– Luke 5:15

Again we are reminded that while the Incarnate God could and often did heal ailments afflicting the biological life of the body (bios), that wasn’t really the Problem of Evil that God came among us in human flesh to solve. Sin and death were. Christ came to give us life everlasting (zoe) through the conquest on His Cross of sin, and the consequent conquest by His Resurrection of the death that sin brought into the world of men.

This is the plainspoken Good News consistently proclaimed throughout the New Testament and the Patristic writings of the early Church. But why should we trust the witness of the early Church? What if right from the beginning, it was just some delusional cult?

Vogt's Essentialist Argument

Catholic blogger Brandon Vogt has written a thoughtful article opposing ten justifications for same-sex civil marriage. (h/t Mark Shea.) I begin this response by noting that very laudably, his article opens with an aside that “[a]ll people, regardless of sexual orientation, deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.”

This overlong post will address only Vogt’s first argument–specifically, why it fails to be the sort of non-religious argument suitable for use in the secular public square that Vogt claims to be aiming for. Heaven help the reader, but there are ten sections in all, which I shall address when I can and insofar as they interest me. Oddly enough, this post doesn’t contain any reflections whatsoever on the prudence or desirability of same-sex civil marriage: considering the metaphysics behind Vogt’s first argument and its unreadiness for prime time in the secular public square takes me far enough afield by itself.