I'm looking forward to the Vatican document on Liturgical abuse in the same way I look forward to a constitutional amendment that affirms marriage is between a man and a woman.
What's the correlation?
It's the in both cases, the "informed professionals" have sought to impose norms that are counter to what the average person knows to be true.
If you see a nun in a leotard prancing about the sanctuary during the 1st reading, the average person knows that's wrong.
When mayors are "marrying" same-sex couples, the average person knows that wrong, that it's not a marriage but rather a farce and a political statement.
So the idea that guidelines on liturgical abuse could be "repressive" is quite outrageous. If the liturgists who brought us the Mass of the Unordained Women or the Dance of the Winter Solstice had repressed their own desire to remake the liturgy in their own image, we wouldn't need the document.
People are longing for truth and a prayerful liturgical atmosphere. I'm sure the guidelines will help with that in as much as the Do-it-yourself-Liturgists can bring themselves to obey them.
When you have a duplex house,
With a couple living in each half,
And one couple has civil rights
Which the other couple doesn't,
Because one couple forced their religion
On the second couple,
Then the average person knows that's wrong.
The Catholic management position on gay marriage is successfully overtaking what the average person
knows is wrong because the average person is
scared to stick up for what he knows is wrong.
The Catholic management position on gay marriage
does not follow what the average person knows
is wrong.
noah,
Fascinating that the polls to show that the populace has an innate knowledge that not redefining marriage to include monogamous gay relationships is wrong. Actually, they rather show the opposite, that the populace has an innate knowledge that gay "marriage" is wrong.
As to your underlying point, that refusing to redefine marriage is a violation of gays' civil right and that it is an example of Catholics (and others I presume) shoving their religion done gays' throats, I think that is entirely false. To fundamentally alter the institution of marriage to include gays would essentially be the government saying that gay relationships, gay sex within those relationships, have the same social significance (why else should the government be involved in marriage at all) and the same moral goodness as marriage and normal heterosexual sex within marriage. What gays really want is state approval for their lifestyle, for the government to scream "gay is good", and they are eager to use non-democratic means (i.e. the courts) to get it.
The truth is, gay relationships, and gay sex within those relationship, clearly do not have the same social significance, nor the moral goodness. Marriage, as it is currently defined, is the basis of the family and of human society. It is fertile by its nature and provides the best, most stable place in which to raise children. In a healthy society, most children will be born to married parents and the great majority of marries couples will have children. This warrants state recognition of marriages, since it is in the state's profound interest to promote the begetting and stable raising of the next generation. While it is true that some gay couples do either adopt children, or conceive them in laboratories or through artificial insemination, they are of themselves inherently sterile. A gay family is and always will be a wholly artificial thing, which means that gay relationships will never be the basis for human society. That means they lack the social significance that is the reason for the state to favor a particular kind of sexual arrangement (monogamous, heterosexual, (semi)permanent) over others (e.g., polyamorous, bi-sexual, temporary).
As for moral goodness, that is an argument for another time. But I do maintain that the moral opinion of Catholics and other moral conservatives is every bit as legitimate as that of libertines and secularists.