An op-ed in Alaska’s Juneau Empire newspaper presents one of the best Catholic defenses of marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples that I have seen in a long time.  Jim Hale, a heterosexually married Catholic man wrote the piece, entitled “Marriage, gender, and religion,” in response to a July 7th op-ed from Bishop Edward Burns of the Diocese of Juneau, entitled “Liberty and justice for all requires the truth.”

What makes Hale’s argument so good is that he takes on the bishop’s definition of marriage as being primarily about sexual activity, and he does so from someone who is, in fact, married:

“As Bishop Burns notes, the Church defines marriage as ‘a sexual union.’ No one who has ever been married would define marriage that way. As the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid writes of marriage, ‘All’s far from done when pleasure’s over.’ And the task of marriage isn’t just to create babies; all living things reproduce. Marriage is a mutual commitment of two people to create themselves — to forge in their love and loyalty to each other an atmosphere where each can discover all the inchoate power of his or her own soul. It’s demanding, to be sure; it asks of us a certain largeness of heart that we may not always be comfortable with or even capable of. But that’s love — and in the end that’s the only thing that makes a marriage sacred.”

 -read full post at Bondings 2.0, or Hale’s original article.at Juneau Empire