ARTICLES

One More Battering Ram

CRISIS'S MICHAEL UHLMANN RESPONDS TO THE ARCHBISHOP

By Michael M. Uhimann

Archbishop Levada's willingness to discuss an important and controversial decision confirms the opinion, rendered in the first paragraph of my March column, that he is a faithful shepherd and a man of good will. My esteem for his character and abilities, however, did not (and does not) preclude my judgment that the modus vivendi he reached in San Francisco was a serious mistake. Bishop Levada's reply has not only not dissuaded me, it has prompted a new worry: I now fear that, precisely because he is a good man who wishes to be recognized for his loyalty to the Magisterium, he will defend his decision, not merely as a prudential necessity, but as a positive achievement worthy of emulation.

A wise man once remarked that it takes more time to refute a refutation than it does to restate an argument. Lacking both time and space, I will limit my comments to what I think is the central flaw in the Archbishop's position, but before doing so I would like to clear up a preliminary matter. Bishop Levada takes umbrage because, he says, I "rush[ed] into print" without the courtesy of an inquiry in his direction. But I hardly "rushed" into print. By the time I wrote, the matter had been widely ventilated for some weeks in the news media and in episcopal circles as well where, I hasten to add, the San Francisco resolution has not been uniformly applauded. As my column was an opinion-piece, not a news story, and as the essential facts were not in dispute, there would have been little point to a conversation. The difference between us has to do not with the facts but with their interpretation.

Bishop Levada defends his action on two grounds. First, the Church will not now have to acknowledge the moral equivalency of marriage and homosexual "domestic partnerships" as a condition of receiving City funds. That is certainly an improvement, and had Bishop Levada defended this outcome as the least bad resolution under difficult circumstances, he could have chalked it up as a tactical victory and girded himself for the next assault against Church teaching on marriage and sexuality. But the Bishop also argues that by expanding the definition of domestic partner to include any legally domiciled member of the employee's household, he achieved a "breakthrough" that "broadens the scope of health benefits for uninsured children, elderly persons and so many others whose lack of health insurance is genuinely a national scandal." Furthermore, he says he moved the discussion from one of "'discrimination' against homosexuals to one in which the provision of greater benefits is the issue."

This argument is persuasive only if one assumes that the dispute between the Church and the City had to do with the distribution of insurance benefits to the needy. But the fight began, let us remember, when the City sought to coerce the Church into subsidizing homosexual and other morally illicit relationships. This legislative impertinence was politically and legally unprecedented, and more than arguably unconstitutional on at least three grounds. But let that pass. The larger point, from which Bishop Levada prescinds, is that the regulation was only incidentally concerned with benefits; its central purpose was to advance the cause so long sought by gay activists -- the legitimation of homosexual relationships as the moral equivalent of marriage. It is all well and good to discuss expanded economic benefits for the needy, but I fear that by doing so, Bishop Levada has allowed himself to be drawn onto the ground of his -- and the Church's -- enemies. Men of good will are, I think, particularly inclined to lower their guard when otherwise dubious policies are advanced in the name of aiding the needy. Here, the interests of the poor and elderly, and of vulnerable children, are being exploited on behalf of an agenda that has a wholly extraneous and baleful purpose. No less exploited are the good intentions of those with charitable dispositions.

But to stress the quantity and distribution of benefits, as Bishop Levada does, confuses the idea of the common good as it has been authoritatively articulated in Church social teaching with the idea of social welfare as it is bandied about by politicians and bureaucrats. There are points of coincidence between the two, to be sure, but they are not the same thing. This is a larger subject than can be dealt with now, but suffice it to say here that the Church has never equated the good of society, rightly understood, with the distribution of material things, even certifiably good things like expanded insurance coverage.

Moreover, utilitarian debate about who ought to get what kind of benefits diverts our attention from the disintegration of the family, which is directly or indirectly the cause of virtually all the social and economic ills that rightly worry Bishop Levada. The causes of its disintegration are complex and beyond my present purpose, but easy divorce and the contraceptive revolution probably did more than all the economic factors one could name.

We shall be a long time putting those particular genies back in the bottle, but the traditional family is not going to survive very long if the special benefits and protections bestowed upon marriage are whittled away in the name of advancing an extraneous social agenda. These benefits and protections are woven by the dozens throughout our legal system, in everything from income tax treatment and the distribution of property to the custody of children and the relationship of spouses to relatives and third parties.

They were put into the law precisely to mark marriage as a decisively important -- indeed, the decisively important -- social institution. Gay rights activists and others who for diverse reasons oppose the Church's teaching on sexuality and the family resent the law's protection of marriage as an affront to their autonomy, and they will not rest until the last vestige of that special protection is eliminated. It is precisely for that reason that those who would defend marriage must also defend the traditional dispensations of the law that protect it, and they must do so forcefully and without apology.

When the very idea of marriage itself is under assault across a wide moral and legal front, it is unwise and dangerous, though no doubt more comforting, to talk divertingly about whether and to what extent people other than married persons could benefit from another's insurance coverage. Whatever the merit of this observation, in the present context, it trivializes the larger issue. The extension of marital benefits to an apparently unlimited class of other relationships -- which is precisely what would be permitted under the revised San Francisco regulation -- cannot but further undermine the institution of marriage. It is not clear whether the chief "beneficiaries" of Levada's compromise will be homosexuals or heterosexual couples living together without benefit of clergy, but he's going to find it hard to sell the virtues of marriage to people who can obtain most of its social and economic (not to mention its sexual) benefits without pledging their troth.

Finally, Bishop Levada is going to have a hard time preventing his argument from becoming just one more battering ram against the full range of benefits now reserved more or less exclusively for married couples. If, for example, an assault mounts against joint-filing status in tax law (a privilege now restricted to married persons), will Bishop Levada consider it another triumph for social justice when that privilege is extended to everyone else? And, closer to home, if the California legislature again passes a state domestic partnership law (as it did in 1994), only this time copying its language from San Francisco's revised regulation, will he then urge the Governor to sign it because Catholic social teaching favors the extension of economic goods to an ever-expanding class of beneficiaries? And if not, what will his argument be? *

Reprinted by permission of The Morley Institute, publisher of CRISIS, Washington, D.C. To subscribe, call 1-800-852-9962 or visit www.crisismagazine.com.

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