In the wake of the Supreme Court's recent same-sex marriage
decision, these sober thoughts occur:
(1) The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has
rendered a decision that puts the Court at odds with the
Constitution, with reason and with biblical religion.
(2) SCOTUS has gotten it wrong before. It got it wrong on
race in Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson (which upheld
segregated public facilities). It got it wrong by concocting
a constitutional "right" to abortion-on-demand in Roe v. Wade
and doubled-down on that mistake by getting it wrong on
abortion again in Casey v. Planned Parenthood. Now SCOTUS has
gotten it wrong on marriage. There are remedies to SCOTUS
getting it wrong; one of them is a careful re-examination
during the 2016 campaign of the theory of "judicial
supremacy," which holds that the Constitution means whatever
a majority of the Court says it means.
(3) The marriage battle was lost in the culture long before
it was lost in the courts. The foundations of our culture
have eroded; now, the "new normal" insists that literally
everything is plastic, malleable and subject to acts of human
will. The result is a moment of profound moral incoherence in
which understandings of human nature and human happiness that
have stood the test of experience for millennia are being
discarded as mere rubbish - and those who resist trashing the
moral patrimony of humanity are dismissed as irrational
bigots, religious fanatics or both. This "new normal" is
willfulness-on-steroids, especially when that willfulness
involves human sexuality. Nothing, it seems, constitutes
aberrant behavior - except the public defense of traditional
virtue.
(4) The Catholic Church in the United States bears its share
of responsibility for this incoherence. It was clear 60 years
ago that the old mainline Protestant cultural hegemony was
fading, that an alternative cultural foundation for American
democracy was necessary and that a new cadre of
citizen-leaders, capable of articulating the moral truths on
which the American democratic experiment rests, had to be
raised up - and the prime candidate for doing all that was
the Catholic Church. It might have happened. But too much of
the church's clerical and lay leadership lost its nerve after
"Humanae Vitae"; the window of opportunity closed amid the
maelstrom of the '60s and the decadence of the '70s; and the
forces of incoherence won the day .
(5) The "new normal" will not leave the Catholic Church
alone. Like everyone else who contests the "new normal's"
ideology of "anything goes," the Catholic Church will be
aggressively attacked for daring to oppose that ideology. So
the church must learn - fast - how to play good defense,
defending the right of our institutions to be themselves and
of our people to be themselves; it will do a service to
America in the process. (A good primer for thinking through
these issues is the recent pastoral letter by Washington
Cardinal Donald Wuerl, "Being Catholic Today: Catholic
Identity in an Age of Challenge.")
(6) The long-term answer to the "new normal" - and to the
dictatorship of relativism the "new normal" is trying to
impose on universities and professions (without encountering
much resistance), on traditional religious communities (less
successfully, so far) and on individuals (through
reprehensible but effective bullying and shaming) - is the
re-conversion of the United States to right reason, moral
truth and a biblical way of seeing the world. This is a
multigenerational project; it necessarily will be ecumenical
and interreligious. From the Catholic point of view, the only
possible response to the "new normal" is a robustly
evangelical Catholicism: one that displays true happiness in
lives of solidarity with others; one that links that
happiness and solidarity to friendship with Jesus Christ and
the truths His church teaches, inviting others to consider "a
still more excellent way" (1 Cor 12:31).
(7) And that means a thorough catechesis of the Catholic
people of the United States, not least through preaching:
preaching that forthrightly challenges the too-often-typical
Catholic shrug at the "new normal"; preaching that calls
Catholics to deeper friendship with Christ, meaning deeper
conversion to His truth.
Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and
Public Policy Center in Washington and the author of
Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century
Church.