It’s excruciating to see Bottum, usually a wonderful writer, mire himself in such a tedious pile of glop. In a painfully self-referential, meandering and seemingly half-hearted slog, he manages to completely misread the Manhattan Declaration (which in no way and at no point compares modern America to ancient Rome – the only mention of the latter is as part of a review of Christian history), offers no recognizable theological insight that might aid his supposed case, and then never actually gets around to presenting a Roman Catholic’s case for same-sex “marriage”. All he can manage in the end is a tepid recommendation against continuing opposition and a rather obviously forlorn hope that the movement will somehow produce something other than a disaster. But then, all of it seems a forlorn hope. The Roman Church can’t possibly take his advise, a movement based on the replacement of a coherent definition of marriage with, well, nothing in particular, cannot possibly hope to avoid massive damage to its purported object, and the attacks occasioned against Rome will obviously simply take on another form once this one goes belly up. What a sad waste of [i]Commonweal’s[/i] pages and, alas, my time.
It’s excruciating to see Bottum, usually a wonderful writer, mire himself in such a tedious pile of glop. In a painfully self-referential, meandering and seemingly half-hearted slog, he manages to completely misread the Manhattan Declaration (which in no way and at no point compares modern America to ancient Rome – the only mention of the latter is as part of a review of Christian history), offers no recognizable theological insight that might aid his supposed case, and then never actually gets around to presenting a Roman Catholic’s case for same-sex “marriage”. All he can manage in the end is a tepid recommendation against continuing opposition and a rather obviously forlorn hope that the movement will somehow produce something other than a disaster. But then, all of it seems a forlorn hope. The Roman Church can’t possibly take his advise, a movement based on the replacement of a coherent definition of marriage with, well, nothing in particular, cannot possibly hope to avoid massive damage to its purported object, and the attacks occasioned against Rome will obviously simply take on another form once this one goes belly up. What a sad waste of [i]Commonweal’s[/i] pages and, alas, my time.