Fr. Shenan J. Boquet: Codifying Same-Sex “Marriage” into Law

By Fr. Shenan J. Boquet, Human Life International, Aug. 1, 2022

Father Shenan J. Boquet was ordained in 1993 and is a priest of the Houma-Thibodaux Roman Catholic Diocese in Louisiana, his home state, where he served before joining HLI in August 2011. …

In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.

― Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons, no. 5

Common sense suggests that in a democracy, major legal change should usually follow a change in public opinion. That is, the more people support some new idea, the more likely they will be to elect politicians who support that idea, and the more likely it will be that those politicians will in turn put forward and vote in favor of legislation enacting that idea.

The practical upshot of this view is that if you want to effect political change, you should first focus on changing people’s minds.

However, progressive activists have long known and exploited the fact that the reverse can also be true: sometimes it is more effective to first pursue political change, in the hope that once the law has been changed, then public opinion will follow suit.

Their preferred method for doing this has been to target the courts. Although in theory the courts exist only to interpret existing laws, experience shows that it is sometimes possible to find a judge, or a set of judges, who are willing to so radically “interpret” existing law that their decisions effectively amount to creating wholly new laws….

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