(1) It is important for the Church to say why she opposes recognition of a legal right to same-sex unions. It is insufficient for her to base her opposition simply on her own right to religious freedom and fidelity to her own beliefs and tradition. Why?

(a) Because those who support legal sanctioning of same-sex unions take the Church’s right to religious freedom to entail a denial of homosexuals’ right to freedom.

(b) And because an appeal in the name of conscience to one’s own religious beliefs carries in the public order only the weight of one expression of religious beliefs over against the range of other expressions of beliefs, including, for example, those of homosexuals.

Opposition to legalized same-sex unions that is framed simply in terms of rights of freedom and conscience, in other words, can only collapse into impotence in the face of our culture’s “proceduralist” understanding of rights and positivist religiosity.

(2) Let us consider in this light how, for instance, the Church’s social institutions should respond to laws requiring them to provide “domestic partner benefits” to employees with “same-sex partners.” Some have suggested that the Church can avoid this conundrum by allowing her employees to designate any “individual” (spouse, sibling, same-sex partner) as the recipient of benefits previously reserved exclusively for spouses. The Church gives up her ability to restrict employee benefits to sexually differentiated spouses, judging that she has relinquished nothing since she has not explicitly redefined marriage, nor explicitly conditioned benefits on one’s being a homosexual.

While it appears that such a compromise may not violate a moral principle in terms of material complicity narrowly conceived, it concedes too much, and at too great a cost. How so?

(a) The compromise acquiesces in the culture’s fundamentally false assumption that churches may witness publicly to their understanding of the human person and human dignity only in the exclusive terms of the right to freedom. The compromise, in other words, suggests that the Church is willing to restrict the scope of her public witness to rights understood formally and to a faith now admitted for all societal purposes to be merely private: a faith that no longer believes it bears a reasonability that is rooted in the nature of man and thus resonates in the heart of everyone — even in America.

Some might argue that the compromise enables the Church to enhance her commitment to social justice by broadening the scope of benefits packages to include non-spousal household members like children and the elderly. But such “enhancement” comes at the expense of the Church’s ability to witness to marriage between a man and a woman as a central part of her social teaching. Consistent with the terms of the compromise, in other words, Church institutions are legally able to allocate economic benefits only on the basis of the culture’s fragmentary idea of social justice, which eliminates recognition of the family as the first and most basic natural form of human community. And Church institutions are able to allocate these benefits, again, only in the name of the right to choose.

(b) The compromise also risks implying that the Church’s witness to the substantive truth about man succeeds in being reasonable only if it avoids provoking opposition and having to suffer the Cross in a public way.

A compromise tied to such assumptions is fraught with dangerous consequences.

(3) An adequate response to the culture with respect to officially recognized same-sex unions, then, must include an integrated witness that explicates as far as possible the substantive reasons, or truth, of the Catholic understanding of the human person (cf. 1 Pt 3:15). Needless to say, when an intense controversy is already underway, it is too late to engage the task of education in the way warranted. It is nevertheless crucial to make known the terms of what is at stake, at least for the sake of those who are willing to listen and indeed who want to understand same-sex unions for what they really are: matters involving the core integrity of the human person.

The fact of the matter is that there is no defense of homosexuality as an objectively legitimate pattern of human life that does not, at root, and however unwittingly, presuppose an understanding of physical nature and the body that has its beginnings in seventeenth-century science, as typified, for example, in Descartes: natural physical order as mechanistic biology; the body as dumb stuff, apt for manipulation and thus construction ad libitum. A more adequate view understands natural physical order and the body primarily in terms of organic form and interior order. The work of John Paul II and Benedict XVI has helped us now to see more clearly that the human body, precisely as body, is an order of love, indeed is a pre-sacramental sign and expression of the order of love revealed in God’s act of creation. What needs to be shown is how this order of love is tied to the bodily-sexual difference, and how this order thus bears a unity-in-difference that is characteristic of the integrity of human love as such, hence in the whole range of its expressions.

What needs to be shown, in a word, is the sense in which the sexual difference, essential for an integrated expression of human love, is thus objectively necessary for authentically human culture.

(4) Of course, to say all of this is only to direct attention to an argument that needs to be made. In making the argument, care must be taken to show the inherent reasonableness of a position whose fullness can be seen only in faith. And care must be taken to show especially how insistence on the importance of the sexual difference, reasonably understood in light of faith, does not attenuate but on the contrary demands principled recognition of the abiding human dignity of those with deep-seated homosexual tendencies.

In the meantime, we should take note: the Church is now paying a heavy price for the fact that her educational institutions — seminaries and universities — have so thoroughly in recent times given over the study of physical nature and the body to reductively conceived sciences, and have thus contributed to the very crisis in which the Church now finds herself.

Again, it is certainly true that the Church has to act, and she must claim her rights and remain faithful to her beliefs. The proposal is simply that in so doing she needs to make every effort to place these rightful concerns in their broader and deeper substantive context: to show as far as possible that what is at stake regarding the objective legitimacy of homosexuality as a pattern of human life and action is nothing less than the presence of love in its objective integrity in human civilization.

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David L. Schindler is provost and Gagnon Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.