Archbishop Dolan Compares Same-Sex Marriage To Incest
-by Bridgette P. LaVictoire
“I mean, I love my mom. I don’t have the right to marry her, okay? There are certain rights and attractions in life that are very beautiful and noble but don’t entitle you to marriage.” Archbishop Timothy Dolan made those statements to 60 Minutes Overtime. The problem for Dolan is that the Catholic Church has a history of turning the other way while consanguine relatives marry each other. In fact, they were able to get Church approval to do just that, more often than not.
He also stated to Morley Safer:
“I mean, I love my mom. I don’t have the right to marry her, okay? There are certain rights and attractions in life that are very beautiful and noble but don’t entitle you to marriage.” Archbishop Timothy Dolan made those statements to 60 Minutes Overtime. The problem for Dolan is that the Catholic Church has a history of turning the other way while consanguine relatives marry each other. In fact, they were able to get Church approval to do just that, more often than not.
He also stated to Morley Safer:
“I have a strong desire to play shortstop for the Yankees. I don’t have a right to, because I don’t have what it takes. And that would be what the Church would say about marriage. We would say marriage by nature, marriage by definition is between a man and woman for life, giving children. Don’t tamper with the definition.”
The advocate also reported:
Pressed by Safer to explain how exactly marriage equality would harm heterosexual marriages, Dolan responded, “Because where then would the tampering stop?”
Let us make something very clear here- the ‘nature’ of marriage as being defined as being between a man and a woman is something fairly new in the world, and is something pushed by Christian based cultures such as those found in the West. Many cultures had marriages which were not based on the one man-one woman dynamic, but that is part of the problem, is it not?
Men like Dolan are not just homophobic bigots, they are ethnocentric bigots. They do not believe that any other culture or religion engages in marriage of any type. That is easy to see. Islamic cultures have marriage between one man and up to four women. The Celtic cultures had, under Brehon law, marriages without gender specificity. A man could marry another man, a woman another woman, a man could marry two or more women, a woman could marry two or more men.
The thing is, Dolan is wrong. There is no actual movement to allow incestuous marriages, and an easy counter to that is to hold up King Charles II of Spain as a really good reason for why incest should not be allowed. After centuries of inbreeding, Charles II was so deformed and congenitally stupid that he made a horrendous ruler. When they opened him up to do the autopsy, they found that his internal organs were badly twisted. Simply put, incest has real consequences for the next generation. Homosexuality does not- nor does polyamory.
Both homosexuality and polyamory (to cover both polygamy and polyandry) as recognized marital forms have no issues what so ever. Cultures have had such marriages and not collapsed, but if you look at the slow degradation that was done to the Egyptian pharaohs over the centuries due to brothers and sisters marrying, you see why incest is bad.
Simply put, from a rational and ethnographical standpoint, Dolan is wrong. What is more, Dolan is out of step with Catholics in the United States. Last night, Lawrence O’Donnell made an excellent point with regards to the issue of Catholic support for marriage equality, and that video follows.
Simply put, this is not about same-sex marriage, this is about the fact that the Roman Catholic Church cannot get over the fact that society is moving beyond the religious and into the secular, and that destroys their power.
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