We Only Lose Marriage If We Spend All Our Time Saying We Will Lose Marriage

[NB: This post is not in reaction to Emily's recent post on a similar subject. She focuses on the importance of witness and I want to focus on the importance of fighting on all fronts to keep Catholic witness alive, while also addressing an ongoing problem I'm noticing about how Catholics are unilaterally tempted to give up a winnable culture war.]

In the battle to protect marriage, we can’t choose to win, but we can choose to lose.

By this I mean that we can’t know with 100% certainty that we can win this struggle over how marriage is defined in law and understood by culture. But we can very well decide, and sadly many Catholics have been tempted to decide, that we’re going to lose whether we put up a fight or not. This is no way to win, and it’s the only way people ever lose — by deciding they’re going to lose.

I’m not sure how much more good news in the fight to protect marriage I can give before some fellow Catholics give up their deep-seated conviction that we’ve already lost. A massive 61% victory in North Carolina (including a +8% victory among people under 45). Clear signs that Obama’s choice to endorse same-sex marriage has hurt him in the polls. Pollsters telling the Wall Street Journal they feel the real support of same-sex marriage is barely 40% nationwide. Gallup saying marriage is up seven points over it was last year, marriage winning at the ballot box 32 times…

… and these are all supposed to be signs, somehow, that we have lost?!

At least, that’s the impression you might come away with when you hear many Catholics talk about marriage. And the next time this happens to you, here are three big points to keep in mind.

First big point: Catholics who believe we have inevitably lost marriage have succumbed to a deep cultural pessimism that has everything to do with how they view history and the future and has nothing to do with marriage. So how about we stop blaming it on marriage? Pro-marriage has a better shot of winning (and so does pro-life, by the way) than any of our pre-conceived notions about how bleak the future will look like. It’s up to us to write the future, and how good that future is will be hugely impacted by how much optimism we view it with. History does not move in one direction, it moves in the direction we move it, by God’s grace. And momentum is as easily gained as it is lost, or reversed.

Second big point: I’m really starting to lose patience with people telling us that “don’t worry, I’m going to keep fighting for marriage” in the same breadth as saying “… but we’re going to lose.” Really. We’re going to lose? So why not save the breath and just let the inevitable take us sooner? Seriously, who has ever felt encouraged by the coach who said “Jimmy, I think you should run that race, but let’s face it, you’re coming in last.” I bet you coaches who tell their runners that don’t win many races. And yet so it goes for what passes as pro-marriage pep talks in many Catholic circles.

Third big point: Witness matters. You bet it does. And what kind of witness do we give when we publicly confess our fear that we have lost the fight to protect marriage? A soldier besieging a city feels elation when he hears his enemy behind the battlements whispering the harbinger of defeat: “We will lose.”

But shame on those within the walls who shout their despair from the cornices and thereby encourage the attackers outside!  When Christ told the disciples to be “wise as serpents” he was giving us a clue that proclaiming and defending the truth might require a modicum of strategic thinking.

Here’s what I mean, back in practical terms: if we lose the public battle over marriage ALL of the Church’s ability to witness and minister to foster strong vocations to marriage will be in jeopardy. If anyone seriously thinks that after the public definition of marriage is changed to be genderless that will have no effect on, oh, pre-Cana programs, priests being able to speak from the pulpit about marriage, Christians being able to council couples, you name it, just try to think of the last time you saw a church that said “Whites Only” or a marriage crisis counselor with an “Irish Need Not Enter” sign — because the lethal promise of the pro-gay marriage movement is that if you oppose gay marriage you are like someone who opposes interracial marriage or is therefore a racist … and the government has ways of dealing with people like that. In the two examples I mention above, with good reason, in the case of marriage, for no reason that’s going to be good for (or kind to) us Catholics.

Don’t believe me? It’s already happening. It’s happening because opponents of marriage know their best chance at getting us to give up our beliefs and is to bully us into abandoning them. The persecution is getting more intense because we are more stubbornly opposing their efforts. But if we think the persecution is bad when they are at the gates, imagine what it will be like if they make it into the heart of the city.

Marriage defined by law, uniformly, nationwide, is the only thing that can stand in the way of this great threat of same-sex marriage: it’s ability to push out of the public square, silence, intimidate and threaten anyone and everyone who believes in marriage as the union of husband and wife. Our marriage laws are the last (and first) bulwark of a health society and the foundation of strong families.

Or, to put it simply, if we agree witness matters, I can promise you this: same-sex marriage will snuff out our ability as Catholics to witness to the beauty and truth of marriage. For the sharp architects of same-sex marriage, this consequence is a feature, not a bug, of redefining marriage. So, in response, the way we are called to witness, yes witness, to the truth and beauty of marriage is to make publicly, unequivocally clear that we will never, ever abandon our efforts to protect the reality of marriage in law and culture.

That’s how we can and will win.

But if we abandon this political and cultural fight to protect marriage, the personal witness will inevitable crumble, or more likely be stamped out by those who were busy fighting this war on all fronts while we decided to retreat from our greatest strength — marriage.

Read more at CatholicVote.org