Category: Marriage & Family

Our Black-Robed Masters (thank you, Mark) at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court have taken away the remaining wiggle room from politicians wanting to avoid the gay-marriage question. Civil unions, say the Justices, do not meet Our requirements: you, the legislature, must pass laws letting homosexual couples marry as We command.
The weaselly state Senate president, Robert Travaglini, wanted to obstruct a vote February 11 on a proposed state constitutional amendment to protect marriage from the Goodridge decision, but his excuse — the lack of clarity on whether civil unions would satisfy the judges — has just evaporated.

AP writes:

Tacking Jr. or II onto a boy’s name is too common, a new father decided, so the self-described engineering geek took a software approach to naming his newborn son.
Jon Blake Cusack talked his wife, Jamie, into naming their son
Jon Blake Cusack 2.0.

Most bad baby names are just embarrassing, but this one’s philosophically bad. Let’s get this one straight, parents: babies are not products; people are not things. OK?

An interesting article by Stanley Kurtz about Nordic countries’ experiment with gay marriage. He claims that gay marriage, far from strengthening traditional marriage, has contributed to the latter’s decline.
I don’t think Kurtz proves his case. He does prove that gay marriage has done nothing to stop the collapse of the family in Nordic countries. However, I don’t think you can make the leap to say that it has hastened it, either. More interesting are some other points, particularly that mothers working outside the home, bastardy, and weak family bonds are caused or at least aggravated by a huge welfare state. (In other words, if you’re a Catholic Democrat, you are in favor of creating conditions where sexual sins will flourish.)
Here’s some good news, though, about the Nordic folkways and their growth in Europe:

Yet the pattern is spreading unevenly. And scholars agree that cultural tradition plays a central role in determining whether a given country moves toward the Nordic family system. Religion is a key variable. A 2002 study by the Max Planck Institute, for example, concluded that countries with the lowest rates of family dissolution and out-of-wedlock births are “strongly dominated by the Catholic confession.” The same study found that in countries with high levels of family dissolution, religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, had little influence.

My ancillary theory, based on being in Norway for a couple of weeks, is that Scandinavians have a very high incidence of beautiful women in their population, and that it would take severe mortification to avoid temptation. But my view has not gained ground among social scientists.

From AFP‘s end-of-year wrap-up:
SANTIAGO – After living together for 57 years, Isolina Ojeda, 107, and her 86-year-old lover Oscar Martinez finally decided to make it official by getting married. After the ceremony, the blushing bride, slightly hard of hearing, said: “We had to get married, as God intended. It’s a sin to live the way we were living.”

A friend of mine sometimes answers questions from non-Catholics over the Internet, and he recently got a puzzling e-mail from a man interested in the Faith. The gentleman and his Catholic wife were apparently married in a Protestant ceremony (presumably without a dispensation). His wife has been under the impression that if he becomes Catholic and they marry in the Church, the ceremony would “have to” be conducted at a side altar.
I’m not familiar with that practice, though according to what I find on the ‘net, it apparently used to be customary for mixed marriages to be solemnized away from the main altar of a church. Does anyone know when this practice went away? Was it a matter of law?
In this couple’s case, if he becomes Catholic, it won’t be a mixed marriage, so even if the rule were still in place, it wouldn’t seem to apply. All in all, the lady’s concern may be unnecessary.