Kentucky and the Confusion over ‘Rights’ and ‘Beliefs’

The word “belief” is not the appropriate word for marriage; marriage is a fact, not a “belief.”

By Published on September 10, 2015

The September 2nd edition of The Wall Street Journal discussed the case of Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who will not issue a marriage license to two gays who armed with newly-found “constitutional rights” (Davis has since been jailed.) At the end of this piece, a gay man sums up his position thusly: “You (the clerk) have a ‘right’ to your ‘beliefs’. You don’t have the ‘right’ to take our (gay men’s) ‘rights’ based on your ‘beliefs’”

One could hardly find a sentence oozing more slippery criteria than this one. I have put quotation marks around the words “beliefs” and “rights”. The word “rights” appears three times, “beliefs” twice in a sentence of twenty words. The word “reason” does not appear at all. Nor does the word “law” occur, let alone the word “marriage” or “liberty.

Let’s begin with the word “marriage.” This word means the union of a man and a woman for the purpose of begetting, raising, and educating their children in a home.  If an “arrangement” between two human beings cannot instigate or beget a human child, it is not a marriage. If we insist on calling it a “marriage,” we speak equivocally. That is, we lie to ourselves about what is. [Editor’s note: See “Four Responses to the ‘What About Infertility?’ Argument” by Ryan T. Anderson.]

Read the article “Kentucky and the Confusion over ‘Rights’ and ‘Beliefs’” on catholicworldreport.com.

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