Marriage

Strong Words on Marriage by Douglas Farrow

"The church, which has been enabled evangelically and sacramentally to see into the heart of marriage—to recognize its covenantal as well as its contractual features, its eschatological as well as its civil consequences—has an obligation to nurture and protect marriage, not only for itself but for its neighbours.  It has an obligation to defend the family and civil society from the threat of absorption into the state.  It cannot do this, however, if it brackets the problem of homosexuality or fails to address the gnostic temptation inherent in the same-sex movement.  Still less can it do so if it insists on bracketing its own problem: the complicity of its members in the culture of sterile sex.  For it is only in that culture that same-sex marriage is thinkable."

- Douglas Farrow, "Same-Sex Marriage and the Sublation of Civil Society" in Desiring a Better Country

Anscombe, Natural Community of Marriage

"For we don’t invent marriage, as we may invent the terms of an association or club, any more than we invent human language.  It is part of the creation of humanity and if we’re lucky we find it available to us and can enter into it.  If we are very unlucky we may live in a society that has wrecked or deformed this human thing."

- Anscombe, "Contraception and Chastity"