The Supreme Court, You and Me, and the Future of Marriage - by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson and Robert P. George

In The Public Discourse 

Here we’ll describe just what the Court said and didn’t, what it got wrong, what that means in practice, and where it leaves the fight for a sound marriage culture

Here’s the least reported fact about yesterday’s rulings on marriage: the Supreme Court refused to give Ted Olson and David Boies, the lawyers suing to overturn Prop 8, what they wanted. The Court refused to redefine marriage for the entire nation. The Court refused to "discover" a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Citizens and their elected representatives remain free to discuss, debate, and vote about marriage policy in all fifty states. Citizens and their elected representatives still have the right to define marriage in civil law as the union of one man and one woman.

And we should continue doing so. Already, in the wake of yesterday’s ruling, Governor Mike Pence of Indiana has called on his state to pass a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Marriage matters for children, for civil society, and for limited government. Marriage is the institution that unites a man and a woman as husband and wife to be father and mother to any children that their union produces. And that’s why the government is in the marriage business. Not because it cares about adult romance, but because it cares about the rights of children.

If you believe, as we do, in the importance to children and to society of the marriage-based family, then of course you were hoping for different results in yesterday’s marriage cases. But you probably also put your trust in the institutions of civil society—in that vast arena between man and state which is the real stage for human development. And in that case, you never expected a court of law to do our work for us, to rescue a marriage culture that has been wounded for decades by cohabitation, out-of-wedlock child-bearing, and misguided policies like no-fault divorce. Your only question at 10:00 AM yesterday was whether the Supreme Court would leave us the political and cultural space to rebuild that culture, or get in the way.

The answer was that the Court would leave us some space—for now. Five justices in United States v. Windsor have seen fit to put the republic on notice. While coy on state marriage laws, they have held that we the people—through overwhelming majorities in Congress and a Democratic President—somehow violated the Constitution in enacting the Defense of Marriage Act.

Here we’ll describe just what the Court said and didn’t, what it got wrong, what that means in practice, and where it leaves the fight for a sound marriage culture.

What Happened in Windsor and Perry

In United States v. Windsor, the Court heard a challenge to Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage as a male-female union for federal purposes created in federal law. Justice Kennedy and the four more liberal justices—Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer, and Ginsburg—struck down that section. Dissents were filed by Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia, and Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas.

In the second case, Perry v. Hollingsworth, the Court considered Proposition 8, the referendum in which California citizens amended their constitution to preserve conjugal marriage in state law. The California attorney general, normally responsible for defending such laws, refused in this case, so Prop 8’s proponents stepped in. But the Court ruled that they had no standing—no legal right—to do so. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan. Justice Kennedy dissented, joined by Justices Alito, Thomas, and Sotomayor.

What That Does—and Doesn’t—Mean

The Supreme Court did not strike down all of DOMA, just Section 3. It left intact Section 2, which prevents the states from being forced to recognize other states’ same-sex marriages. This leads to the broader point that not a single justice said anything against the validity of any state marriage policy, including state conjugal marriage laws. That means, of course, that not a single justice voted to strike down Prop 8. Instead, the Perry majority ordered the Ninth Circuit Court to set aside (“vacate”) its own ruling against Prop 8.

That leaves us with some confusion as to the status of Judge Vaughn Walker’s district court decision that ruled against Prop 8. Some scholars think Walker’s decision must be vacated, too. Each same-sex couple seeking to marry in California would then have to sue for a special kind of court relief, applicable only to that couple. Others think that Judge Walker’s decision would stand, but they debate whether it would apply to all state officials or only the county clerks named in the suit. Governor Jerry Brown, for his part, has directed all county clerks to begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses. This will surely be challenged in state court by the proponents of Prop 8.

Trouble Spots

The Court ruled that Prop 8 proponents were not the right party to bring the suit. Wherever vague and conflicting standing doctrine points, its application here eviscerated the California referendum process. That process was designed to let citizens pass laws, and amend their constitution, to check and balance government officials. If those same officials can effectively veto provisions of the state constitution by refusing to enforce and then refusing to defend them, the point of the referendum process is defeated.

Meanwhile, it is hard to criticize the basis of the DOMA case because it is hard even to say what that basis is. The opinion begins with a learned reflection on how family law has historically (but not exclusively) been left to states. Yet it refuses to strike DOMA down just on that ground. After all, DOMA leaves state family law intact as ever. It controls only how the federal government allocates federal money and benefits when it comes to marriage. Congress can’t impose on the states in this matter, to be sure; but then why would the states be able to impose on Congress?

The Court also doesn’t rest its decision just on equal protection principles, though these too are discussed. If equality required Congress to cover same-sex partnerships with its marriage-related laws, wouldn’t the same be true of the states? Yet the majority claims to reach no decision on the latter.

Finally, the Court doesn’t just rely on the principle that the government can’t deny liberty without due process. On the Court’s own accounting, that rule protects substantive rights only when they are deeply rooted in our nation’s history and traditions. But as of 13 years ago, no jurisdiction on our planet, much less in our nation, had enacted same-sex civil marriage.

So if not federalism, or equality, or due process, then what? What is the basis for the Court’s ruling? As Justice Scalia points out, the Court itself won’t say. It discusses each of these principles before refusing to rely squarely on any. As for how they might stretch, multiply, merge, or pile up to support the Court’s holding anyway, several theories have arisen. But even some who cheer the decision have called its reasoning less than coherent or satisfying.

Justice Kennedy, for his part, is just sure the Constitution prevents the federal government from treating opposite- and same-sex state marriages differently. All he knows, in other words, is that Section 3 of DOMA must go.

In fact, we would have been better off had he stopped there. DOMA, he goes on to insist, must have been motivated by a “bare desire to harm,” or “to disparage and to injure.” Its sole purpose and effect is to “impose inequality,” to deny “equal dignity,” to “humiliate.” He infers all this from a few passages in its legislative history about defending traditional morality and the institution of traditional marriage, from its effects, and from the act’s title. Most importantly—and scandalously, given his obligations as a judge—Kennedy does so with nothing more than passing reference to arguments made for DOMA in particular, and conjugal marriage in general. How else could his reasoning leap from the people’s wish to support a certain vision of marriage, to their alleged desire to harm and humiliate those otherwise inclined?

The effect of this refusal to engage counterarguments is the elevation of a rash accusation to the dignity of a legal principle: DOMA’s supporters—including, one supposes, 342 representatives, 85 senators, and President Clinton—must have been motivated by ill will.

The Heart of the Problem—and Solution

The bottom line? The defense of conjugal marriage matters now more than ever. It won't be long before new challengers come. But whether they succeed may depend on how vigorously the democratic debate is joined by what Justice Alito describes in his clear-eyed dissent.

In his DOMA dissent, Justice Alito goes out of his way to frame the central issue of both cases: They involve, he writes, a contest between two visions of marriage—what he calls the "conjugal" and "consent-based" views. He cites our book as exemplifying the conjugal view of marriage as (in his summary) a “comprehensive, exclusive, permanent union that is intrinsically ordered to producing children.” He cites others, like Jonathan Rauch, for the idea that marriage is a certain commitment marked by emotional union. And he explains that the Constitution is silent on which of these substantive, morally controversial visions of marriage is correct. So the Court, he says, should decline to decide; it should defer to democratic debate.

The Court is likelier to defer to democratic debate if it believes there’s a genuine debate to defer to. If the conjugal view’s supporters are instead cowed into silence, or convinced to forfeit on the ground that loss is “inevitable” anyway, five justices will see no obstacle to imposing the consent-based view nationwide.

Never mind that this emotional companionship rationale entails that moms and dads are interchangeable. Never mind that it makes nonsense of other norms of marriage, unable as it is to justify the limits of permanence, exclusivity, or monogamy. Never mind that by its logic, the law’s “discrimination” against multiple-partner bonds, too, would embody a “bare desire to harm” those most satisfied by other bonds.

The point is that by assuming the consent-based view, the majority in the DOMA decision took sides in the very debate it was claiming to sidestep out of respect for state sovereignty. Had the justices taken the trouble even to describe conjugal marriage supporters’ reasons in their own terms, it would have become obvious that these weren’t bigots but garden-variety political opponents.

So our first task is to develop and multiply our artistic, pastoral, and reasoned defenses of the conjugal view as the truth about marriage, and to make ever plainer our policy reasons for enacting it. That will make it more awkward for the justices to apply their DOMA reasoning in a future challenge to state marriage laws. Only conjugal marriage supporters can decide—by what they do next—whether the Court, when it next returns to marriage, will find a policy dispute lively enough to demand its deference.

Our second task is to take a long—and broad—view. Whenever and however the legal battle is won, our work will have only begun. Despite the Court’s libels against half their fellow citizens, this debate is not about “the bare desire to harm” any group. Indeed, for conjugal marriage supporters it is not, ultimately, about homosexuality at all. It is about marriage. The proposal to define marriage as nothing more specific than your top emotional bond is one way to erode its stabilizing norms, so crucial for family life and the common good.

But it is just one way.

Before same-sex anything was at stake, our society was already busy dismantling its own foundation, by innovations like no-fault divorce and by a thousand daily decisions to dishonor the norms of marriage that make it apt for family life. Atomization results from these forms of family breakdown—and from the superficially appealing idea that emotional closeness is all that sets marriage apart, which makes it gauche to seek true companionship and love in non-marital bonds. Part of rebuilding marriage will be responding to that atomization—reaching out to friends and neighbors suffering broken hearts or homes, or loneliness, whatever the cause. That, too, will make the conjugal view of marriage shine more brightly as a viable social option.

In short, winning the legal battle against redefinition is only a condition of winning the political one. And winning the political one is only a condition (though necessary) for rebuilding a healthy culture.

Yesterday's most important developments in that broadest struggle, of course, did not happen at a marble courthouse in Washington, but in a million minds and hearts and households across the country, as people chose in ways great and small to honor—or not—the demanding ideals of marriage and family, and community. As champions of civil society, we always knew that. Yet it would be naive to deny the law's effect on those ideals. That's why the courthouse matters—and why we must keep up our witness to the truth about marriage, by word and deed, until it is safely beyond judicial overreach.

Enthusiasm for neuro-everything seems to be waning in the light of evidence that brain scans don't tell us very much - by Denyse O'Leary

In MercatorNet

Could we be reaching the end of materialist neuroscience?

It’s possible. It’s becoming conventional to assert that the mind is not the brain—even New York Times columnist David Brooks, who wrote an “evolutionary psychology” novel a few years ago, is now doing it. Literary Darwnism, as represented by Brooks’s widely panned novel, is also taking a hit. And science tabloid New Scientist has started to scoff at the idea too. Of course, medical neuroscientist Raymond Tallis has been scoffing at it for years, as have others.

But perhaps the most significant new development is that top biology review The Scientist recently featured a cautiously favourable review of a new book trashing the idea that current neuroscience is close to “reading minds,”Brainwashed: The seductive appeal of mindless neuroscience by psychiatrist Sally Satel and psychologist Scott Lilienfeld. The book is a comprehensive discussion of why we can just forget the pop media claims about the power of fMRI imaging, leading many to believe that neuroscience will eventually be able to read minds. Indeed, one well-known defender of that proposition allows us to know that for now psychiatry and psychology can continue. Never mind the government reading your mail; neuroscientists will read your mind.

Claims like, for example, that conservatives are turned on by “their own disgust” and liberals just like being turned on, period are taken seriously, as a portent of things to come.

As if that would generally explain responses to a local issue like a new plaza or discharge home for parolees? Would some such claim really override the difference it would make to the lives of the individuals in the neighbourhood? Maybe, maybe not. People, otherwise liberal, have been known to be alarmed when they discover that a local group home may house serial violent offenders. Conservatives could be for or against a new road.

This changes matters because, as the New Scientist article puts it,

"That, at least, is the popular conception of neuroscience and it's worth big money. The US and the European Union are throwing billions of dollars at two new projects to map the human brain. Yet there is also a growing anxiety that many of neuroscience's findings don't stand up to scrutiny. It's not just sensational headlines reporting a 'dark patch' in a psychopath's brain, there are now serious concerns that some of the methods themselves are flawed."

For one thing, all that fMRI ((brain imaging) really does is show which brain areas have high oxygen levels when a person is thinking something. It simply cannot tell us what people are thinking, because many brain centres are active and those that are active may be activated for many reasons. Each brain is unique so data from studies must be averaged. But thoughts are not averaged; they belong to the individual.

Flawed methods are only a minor problem with this pseudodiscipline. A bigger one is the basic idea that the mind is simply what the brain happens to be doing. For example, as Satel and Lilienfeld note, you don't have to be a Cartesian dualist to doubt that hate, generally, can actually be detected in our brains in a useful way, as one study has attempted to demonstrate.

From The Scientist:

"'Brains are hot,' Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld acknowledge in Brainwashed, their 'exposé of mindless neuroscience' (mostly practiced not by neuroscientists, they stress, but by 'neuropundits,' among others). The 'mediagenic' technology of fMRI imaging has made the brain, aglow with metabolic hotspots, into a rainbow emblem of the faith that science will soon empower us to explain, control, expose, exploit, or excuse every wayward human behavior from buying to lying, from craving to crime."

As if. If religion can’t save us, science won’t either. And it is not clear that very many of the claims made are science.

Note: “Neuropundits?” One outcome of the many questionable claims made for brain imaging is the rise of terminology like “neuromania,” “neurohype,” and “neurobollocks.” The authors of such bon mots are, typically, sceptical neuroscientists.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.     

P. Fernando Paiva sobre a Misericórdia como cura de quem padeceu a dor do aborto provocado

Are You Out of Your Brain? Reflections on Free Will and Neuroscience - by Mark S. Latkovic

In The Public Discourse

 

If, by chance or interest, you have been following contemporary neuroscience, the expression “Are you out of your mind?” should be shelved in favor of the expression “Are you out of your brain?” Or, more accurately, if more cumbersomely, we should ask, “Are you out of your mind=brain?”

This would bring our language up to speed with modern neuroscience (it might also, however, confuse my children and yours). After all, most of the neuroscientists, philosophers of mind, and others who write about the human brain, speak of it as the organ that we think with. It is easy enough to assume the truth of this dubious claim by absorbing, like a sponge, stories in the media that propagate it.

As if to press the Delete key on the views of untold numbers of thinkers who have argued, for centuries, that thinking cannot be reduced to a physical organ of the human body, or more recently, that thinking cannot be reduced to the brain and central nervous system, today’s neurobiologists and neurophilosophers do precisely that: they say that thought can be explained largely by reference to the brain’s electrical-chemical processes.

Neurophilosophers such as Patricia Churchland and Daniel C. Dennett have argued that the mind equals the brain. Thinking, for them, is simply the result of the firing of neurons, neural connections, and various material forces taking place in the brain. As Dennett says, the soul is really a bunch of “robots” and these “robots” are “the mindless swarms of neurons and other cells that cooperate to produce a thinking thing—just not an immaterial thinking thing.” Therefore, psychology is really biology for such contemporary brain scientists.

To be sure, thinking presupposes a functioning brain, but it cannot be reduced to this fist-sized organ. Thinkers ranging from Aristotle (d. 322 BC) and Aquinas (d. 1274) to Mortimer Adler (d. 2001) and Benedict Ashley, O.P. (d. 2013), have shown that thinking is a spiritual or immaterial power of the human person (and only the human person), not a material property.

For instance, in the Summa Contra Gentiles, St. Thomas Aquinas gives five arguments to show why the intellect and the senses, or, as we would say today, why the mind and the brain are not the same. They hold up just as well today as when Aquinas formulated them over 700 years ago, and they have been further developed and refined by Ashley and others.

First, Thomas argues that both human beings and animals possess sense, but only the former have an intellect. The truth of this comes from the observation that animals act in a determined and uniform way by instinct, whereas humans are able to act freely in diverse ways for a goal. That is, humans can think about the best means to realizing the goal they seek and then freely choose it. This is evidence that intellect and sense cannot be equated (Ashley deals with recent studies attempting to show that animals can use language. But he shows that only humans speak a syntactical one; see Ashley, Healing for Freedom, pp. 183-88).

Second, Thomas notes that while the sense power is aware of singulars, the intellect is aware of universals. This is because every sense power knows through individual species, since it receives the species of things in bodily organs. Ashley gives the example of how we can think of both five apples and five oranges (species), but also the number five (universals) (see Healing for Freedom, p. 190).

Third, Thomas observes that our senses take in only material things. The sense organs do this by being physically as neutral as possible to a sensible quality (e.g., eye to color). Thus, I can see red roses without my eyes actually becoming red roses. Or, I can hear a sound without my ears literally becoming that sound. Sensible qualities are the proper object of the senses and exist only in them, not in the intellect. The senses are bereft of knowledge without these sensible properties. On the other hand, the intellect knows non-bodily things, such as wisdom, truth, and the relations existing between things (Ashley notes that this is especially evident in the use of human language, whereby we can assert and know propositions as either true or false; see Healing for Freedom, p. 193).

Fourth, a sense knows neither itself nor its workings. Thomas gives the following example: sight neither sees itself nor sees that it sees. This self-reflexive power (or self-consciousness)—i.e., knowing that you know something—belongs to the intellect alone. Ashley explains this by pointing out that an extended body cannot have every part of its body be in contact with every other part. That is why the human brain, as a material thing having quantity, is unable to have this reflexivity: it is a network of neurons connecting one point of the brain with as many other points of the brain as possible. But no matter how much we compress a body (such as the brain, if that were possible without destroying it) and no matter how interconnected its points by the transmission of signals, we cannot place every part in contact with every other part (see Healing for Freedom, p. 198). So, once again, we can affirm that intellect and sense are different.

Fifth, sense is corrupted by too much of a sensible object. Stated another way, our senses can be overloaded, e.g., the sun can blind one’s eyes. But intellect is not corrupted or overwhelmed by thinking about superior concepts. In fact, knowing abstract and universal concepts makes someone better equipped to understand lesser things later on. So, while our eyes can have too much sunlight, our minds cannot have too much knowledge of God. The sensitive power therefore differs from the intellective power (see Ashley’s discussion of this argument in Healing for Freedom, pp. 199-203, as well as how he relates it to Goedel’s Theorem on pp. 198 and 202-03).

What causes serious problems for the materialist view is that the materialist understanding of the brain makes a mockery of the scientific enterprise itself, in that the materialist brain researcher holds up his research as proof that we think with our brains and in fact appeals to this evidence to convince you and me of the truth of his position. In making this move, the materialist is appealing to a free will that we, in his worldview, actually no longer really have—it’s an illusion too. But if freedom is an illusion, it renders his scientific appeal rather unscientific, as well as unworkable. He is, in other words, caught in a contradiction.

That is, if he is right to deny that thinking is an immaterial process, then he can no longer coherently try to persuade us to “come over” to his way of understanding things. We are in fact already determined: some of us are determined to “think” he is right and some of us are determined to “think” he is wrong, all depending on the particular physiochemical activity going on in our brains. (An early version of this “self-referential” argument against determinism, by Joseph Boyle and his co-authors, is proposed here.)

We are surely not free, according to this view, either to accept or reject the materialist’s argument equating the mind with the brain. But if we actually are free, then we could not in truth equate the mind with the brain, since free choice, like our ability to know, is a spiritual power not dependent on anything material. Science then, by the logic of materialism itself, can no longer be about the rational pursuit of truth, but about power struggles over fixed, predetermined conclusions. To borrow a recent expression from American politics, “It’s a bridge to nowhere.”

I find Gilbert Meilaender’s expression of the mind-brain relationship much closer to the truth. He says our thoughts are “both located in the brain and distanced from it—which is why we are capable of what [philosopher] Thomas Nagel has called ‘the view from nowhere.’” Nagel, himself an atheist, has gotten into hot water lately with his fellow secular philosophers for questioning the very truth of the materialistic/naturalistic account of mind and cosmos. (See the Public Discourse discussion of Nagel’s book here.)

Many of the neurobiologists who deny the immateriality and existence of the rational and intellectual soul, and who therefore deny the immateriality of thinking, seem never to have heard the ancient and modern arguments for these truths. Or, having heard them, they have either forgotten them or rejected them.

This rejection is often driven by the atheistic and neo-Darwinian assumptions of the prestigious scientists who work in this field. These assumptions must be challenged, however, if science is to retain its rightful place as an inestimable source of knowledge and wisdom in our society. Moreover, it is important to note that not all scientists are atheistic materialists; there are many internationally respected scientists who are firm believers in God, among them the recently deceased Hungarian priest-physicist Stanley Jaki who taught at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

Science deserves more from its scientists than scientism. And so do human persons, whose own God-given dignity depends on the existence (and the acceptance) of the rational soul and the idea that its “faculties” are the “powers” of knowing and willing—not the powerful inner workings of our brains. In the end, as an “embodied intelligent freedom,” to borrow the recent phrase of Benedict M. Ashley and Kevin D. O’Rourke, man’s marvelous brain serves his thinking; it doesn’t do it for him. If you said it did, I think you’d be out of your mind.

A psicóloga M. José Vilaça fala sobre Teologia do Corpo, ideologia do género e trauma pós-aborto

A ditadura e violência Franco-gay

La Manif Pour Tous en France por FreeMyFrance

Nozze gay, la resa dei vescovi francesi - di Massimo Introvigne

In NBQ 

Quello che succede nella Chiesa cattolica in Francia, dopo le grandi manifestazioni contro la legge Taubira che ha introdotto il matrimonio e le adozioni omosessuali, è di qualche interesse per l'Italia, dove rischiamo di vedere presto lo stesso film.

Riassumo, per comodità del lettore, solo le ultime puntate della saga. 4 giugno:  il Consiglio «Famiglia e società» della Conferenza episcopale francese (CEF), presieduto dal vescovo di Le Havre mons. Jean-Luc Brunin e che comprende vescovi ed esperti, pubblica il documento «Proseguiamo il dialogo!»,  dove invita alla riconciliazione fra quanti - anche all'interno del mondo cattolico - hanno militato su sponde opposte nella questione del matrimonio omosessuale. 10 giugno: diverse voci del mondo cattolico conservatore - non necessariamente legato agli ambienti cosiddetti «lefebvriani» - chiedono che la CEF revochi l'incarico ai componenti del Consiglio «Famiglia e società», accusati d'insegnare una dottrina in materia di unioni omosessuali non conforme al Magistero della Chiesa. 13 giugno: interviene il Consiglio permanente della CEF che, senza sconfessare il Consiglio «Famiglia e società» - e ovviamente senza revocarne i membri - precisa però che tra chi manifestava contro e chi a favore della legge Taubira la Chiesa non è neutrale; che chi si opponeva a una legge che apre «ferite» nel corpo sociale aveva ragione; che il suo impegno «non è stato vano» e che dovrà continuare occupandosi di «altri campi dove la vigilanza è richiesta per il rispetto della persona umana», allusione evidente alla legge sull'eutanasia il cui iter legislativo è già cominciato in Francia.

Ma che cosa si legge nel documento «Proseguiamo il dialogo!»? A leggerlo di dritto e di rovescio - meglio due volte, perché cede talora a quel linguaggio «ecclesialese», comprensibile solo ai professionisti dei piani pastorali, tante volte sconsigliato da Papa Francesco - si scopre anzitutto che non include nessuna apologia dell'omosessualità, così che alcune critiche su questo punto appaiono sopra le righe e ingiustificate. Il documento afferma che la persona omosessuale dev'essere accolta «incondizionatamente» nella comunità cristiana, espressione che può certo prestarsi a equivoci. Ma precisa che «l'accoglienza incondizionata della persona assolutamente non implica in nessun modo l'approvazione di tutti i suoi atti», che la «differenza sessuale fra un uomo e una donna è l'elemento fondamentale» perché si possa parlare di matrimonio, il quale - per essere conforme a quanto la Chiesa insegna - dev'essere caratterizzato da «unità, indissolubilità, fedeltà e apertura alla vita».

Fin qui, dunque, tutto bene. Si può discutere l'accostamento pastorale che consiglia a chi si senta fortemente attratto da una persona dello stesso sesso di mantenere con questa persona un'«amicizia» la quale, senza negare la presenza di un'«attrazione sessuale», «scelga di non cedere» a tale attrazione. Il Consiglio «Famiglia e società» spiega che, in fondo, questa «amicizia casta» è la stessa che si può consigliare a chi si senta attratto da una persona dell'altro sesso che non è il suo legittimo coniuge. Si possono condividere le considerazioni sul fatto che la nostra società oggi non concepisce più un'amicizia separata dalla sessualità, e che quanto oggi sembra ambiguo in altre epoche era normale e permetteva di coltivare relazioni amicali durature che non si trasformavano in relazioni sessuali. Sul piano prudenziale, però - con tutto il rispetto per gli illustri esperti laici e professori universitari che fanno parte insieme con i vescovi del Consiglio «Famiglia e società» -, ci si può chiedere se il consiglio di mantenere una frequentazione e un'amicizia con una persona nei cui confronti si provi un'attrazione illecita, resistendo strenuamente a questa attrazione, sia oggi realistico. La maggioranza dei confessori probabilmente offre consigli diversi.

Quello però che mi turba di più nel documento «Proseguiamo il dialogo!» - e che ha indotto probabilmente il Consiglio permanente della CEF, pur senza sconfessare apertamente il Consiglio «Famiglia e società», a intervenire - è l'aspetto, per così dire, politico. Il documento è la presa d'atto di una sconfitta, e invita i cattolici a dare «prova di maturità democratica, accettando senza violenza che il proprio punto di vista non abbia prevalso». Tutto il tono del testo è quello di un mesto invito a ripiegare le bandiere, tornare a casa e accettare sportivamente la sconfitta aprendo una stagione di testimonianza silenziosa che tace e si limita a predicare con l'esempio, prova di «maturità spirituale». Operando, anzi, per la riconciliazione, la «coesione nazionale» e l'unità fra cattolici che hanno militato su fronti opposti, atteso che «all'interno della comunità cattolica, queste divergenze non mettono in pericolo l'unità ecclesiale». La riconciliazione, aggiunge il documento, potrà essere trovata impegnando i movimenti e le parrocchie su altri temi più condivisi, tra cui si citano i diritti dei Rom e quelli degli esodati (che ci sono anche in Francia). I giovani che considerano questi temi poco importanti dopo essersi entusiasmati per le manifestazioni contro la legge Taubira devono essere «accompagnati» con pazienza a uno studio più completo della dottrina sociale della Chiesa.

È vero che il documento attribuisce le «divergenze» fra cattolici sulla legge Taubira a diversi modi di derivare «conseguenze politiche» dai principi, e non da diversi principi, e contiene una riserva sulle adozioni omosessuali, su cui manifesta una più decisa opposizione. Ma bene ha fatto l'istanza superiore, cioè la presidenza della Conferenza episcopale, a precisare che in quelle «divergenze» qualcuno aveva ragione e qualcuno aveva torto.

Mi permetto però di dire che neppure il comunicato del Consiglio di presidenza della CEF va al cuore del problema, su cui è opportuna in Francia - come altrove - una riflessione ulteriore. Davvero si tratta di accettare la sconfitta, di «comportarsi da cittadini» - come afferma il documento «Proseguiamo il dialogo!» - «assumendo democraticamente la posizione di minoranza»? O la minoranza, anche sconfitta,  può legittimamente aspirare a diventare domani maggioranza? Le leggi ingiuste devono essere accettate e contrastate solo con la testimonianza silenziosa, oppure - come ha detto Papa Francesco parlando il 15 giugno proprio a parlamentari francesi - le leggi possono anche essere abrogate? E, se ci si limita alla testimonianza silenziosa o si parla d'altro, come creare un clima in cui le leggi ingiuste possano essere cambiate?

Qualcuno ha visto nel documento «Proseguiamo il dialogo!» un ennesimo esempio della deriva omosessualista in certi settori della Chiesa. Mi sembra un'esagerazione: sia pure - per riprendere l'espressione di un vescovo siciliano di cui «La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana» si è recentemente occupata - «sussurrando» la verità piuttosto che proclamandola con vigore, il documento riafferma sul piano strettamente morale i principi fondamentali del Catechismo. Sul piano politico, invece, mi sembra di scorgere nel testo una grande stanchezza. I vescovi e gli esperti del Consiglio «Famiglia e società» si chiedono se davvero «essere cattolici richieda essere sempre "contro" riforme presentate da altri come un progresso», se non si rischi di dare l'impressione di volere «imporre la fede o un punto di vista religioso».

S'insinuano qui precisamente i rischi denunciati dal cardinale Burke in occasione del convegno romano per la «Giornata dell'Evangelium vitae» il 15 giugno. Ci si lascia intimidire dalla critica secondo cui i cattolici non sposeranno persone dello stesso sesso ma non possono impedire di farlo ai non cattolici, anziché rispondere che qui sono in gioco principi di diritto naturale che la ragione può e deve riconoscere a prescindere da qualunque opzione religiosa. Peggio ancora, ci si lascia intrappolare dal mito del progresso irreversibile e ineludibile, per cui si pubblica stancamente qualche documento «sussurrato» per amor di firma, ma in fondo si rimane convinti che la sconfitta è inevitabile e certa, e che tanto vale accettarla «democraticamente» per evitare di farsi dare dai media anche dei cattivi perdenti.

Se non si superano queste due autentiche superstizioni che la propaganda laicista insinua anche nei «buoni» - talora persino nei vescovi - ogni sconfitta prepara la sconfitta seguente. Serve a poco indicare come prossima fermata l'eutanasia, se si pensa che anche lì i cattolici non potranno «imporre un punto di vista religioso» ai non credenti - quasi che la difesa della vita umana valesse solo per chi crede e non fosse anch'essa, com'è, un'esigenza della legge naturale - né, alla fine, presentarsi come quelli che sono sempre «"contro" riforme presentate da altri come un progresso».

In un bel discorso del 7 giugno agli studenti dei Gesuiti, Papa Francesco ha invitato alla virtù dimenticata della «magnanimità», che spinge alle cose grandi e a combattere battaglie apparentemente impossibili. Dirottare le proprie energie dalle battaglie difficili per la vita e per la famiglia ad altre - come quelle sui Rom o gli esodati - che riscuotono il facile applauso dei media corrisponde alla tentazione di non essere scomodi, di compiacere il mondo, di farsi applaudire anziché criticare dai poteri forti che controllano l'opinione. È la tentazione della «mondanità spirituale» di cui parla spesso il Pontefice. Chi è magnanimo, ha detto il Papa il 7 giugno, «non ha paura di andare controcorrente, anche se non è facile». Combatte anche le battaglie impossibili, perché sa che nulla è impossibile a Dio.