First Things is a journal with a proud tradition of fostering intellectual debate. (Remember when the late Father Neuhaus hosted a symposium on the question of whether the US government had lost its legitimacy?) Now a new editor, R.R. Reno, has stirred things up again by publishing, and strongly endorsing, a call for Christian ministers to stop signing marriage certificates.
The “Marriage Pledge,” as it was called, proposes to “separate civil marriage from Christian marriage” on the grounds that our society and its laws no longer comprehend what marriage really means. In the debate roused by that proposal, the most thoughtful critics of the Marriage Pledge fully agree with the authors of the proposal insofar as they say that our society does not understand marriage. Nevertheless they insist that the Marriage Pledge is profoundly misguided.
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