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World Marriage Day was February 8, and St. Valentine’s Day was February 14. The connection between marriage and romantic love makes the personal sacrifice required for a good marriage a source of joy for husband and wife. But while our calendar celebrates the experience of love and marriage, the very nature of marriage is questioned today.

A recent statement by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith speaks clearly to the question: “Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose. No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman, who by mutual, personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons. In this way, they mutually perfect each other in order to cooperate with God in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives.”

There is nothing specifically Catholic about such a statement. It’s the understanding of marriage that can be found among Chinese Confucians, Sri Lanka Buddhists and Indian Hindus. Our own faith teaches us that Christ raised the natural institution of marriage to a sacrament, gracing it as a symbol of his own love for his Church; but the Church did not invent marriage. And neither did the State, ours or any other. In reminding the courts and the citizens of this country about the nature of marriage, the Church is once again being accused of imposing “her” ideas on society. But if the courts should declare that a circle is really a square, that wouldn’t make it so. The same is true of marriage. No matter what any court or government says, there is no such reality as a marriage between homosexuals, a so-called “gay marriage.”

What there is between homosexuals, as between heterosexuals, is friendship. At its best, friendship humanizes people, drawing them out of themselves, stabilizing their lives and gracing them with a sense of the relationship God calls all to enjoy with himself. But not every sort of friendship, honest enough in itself, can be expressed erotically. A married man, for example, can be a good friend to a woman not his wife. But he cannot have sexual relations with her. Two homosexuals can be friends and even sacrifice for one another. What they cannot do is express that love and respect through sexual relations. This is difficult if not impossible to understand in a culture that says sexual activity means nothing except what the people engaged in it choose to make it mean. It is a difficult if not impossible teaching to live by if we are left to our own devices and strength. But we are not. Because Christ is risen from the dead, we are never alone. The power of God’s grace makes possible what would otherwise be impossible. Our faith not only instructs us about the proper use of the gift of human sexuality, it also brings us into the presence and power of a teacher who is also our savior and our Lord, Jesus Christ.

Not only individuals have rights; so have institutions and groups, such as the family. They have, first of all, the right not to be manipulated by legal legerdemain. The family is not one among a number of different kinds of human groups and relationships or equally acceptable lifestyles. The family is founded on the community of husband and wife, whose love for one another as “two in one flesh” (Mt. 19:6) brings children into the world and into God’s own family. Love for one’s spouse is the best gift a parent can give to children.

In a recent newspaper column, Dennis Byrne wrote: “My reasoning and my experience tell me that we (he and his wife) could not have raised our own children without the life-molding power of different sexual roles. A mother and a father are important for children, at various stages of their lives, precisely because they are a mother and father, a man and a woman. Each sex brings something different, important and wonderful to the lives of their children.” This is the overwhelming experience of the entire human race. The differences between men and women cannot be eradicated in the language of merely individual rights. We should do what we can to help all those, married or unmarried, to take the best possible care of children they love and are responsible for; but it is not bigoted, despite the pressures from some in the media and universities and elsewhere, to work to prevent any group of judges from arbitrarily redefining the nature of marriage and family.

Richard Posner, himself a distinguished jurist and judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, a man with no ties to the Catholic Church, recently wrote in careful fashion that nothing “in the (U.S.) Constitution or its history suggests the right to homosexual marriage. Recognizing homosexual marriage would place a very public stamp of approval on homosexual relationships—which is the principal reason why heterosexuals tend by quite large margins to oppose not only homosexual marriage but even ‘civil unions’ and other marriage simulacra … It could be said that these are issues too important to be left to a committee of lawyers—which is what the Supreme Court is after all.”

Nevertheless, the Church’s efforts to remind Americans of what the history and wisdom of the rest of the human race, as well as divine revelation itself, take for granted will be caricatured as a breach of the distinction between civil and religious realms. Thus will the nature of marriage become one more instance of a battle for understanding religious liberty. We are becoming a society where individual conscience might still have “rights” but where religious institutions as such have only the rights that secularists deem appropriate. That’s no reason to back away from the argument on marriage, but it is reason to go into it well-informed. A good place to start is with the USCCB statement “Between Man and Woman: Questions and Answers About Marriage and Same-Sex Unions.” It can be accessed from the Archdiocese’s Family Ministries web site, www.familyministries.org.