Letter: Same-sex unions aren't marriages
Patrick Plain, left, and Seong Man Hong, both of New York, celebrate after getting married at the City Clerk's office in New York. Credit: AP, 2011
Newsday's "Couples and inequalities" [Editorial, July 27] seeks a just and compassionate approach to same-sex partners in the way of survivor's benefits. But you build on an inadmissible principle: Same-sex unions are OK, should be legally sanctioned, socially approved and called marriages.
But the person entering a heterosexual marriage and the one entering a homosexual union choose substantially different objective realities. The first enters a union which by nature, universally and from time immemorial, includes the intrinsic purpose and possibility of generating children. The second enters into a union, though it may include strong emotional ties, that cannot by nature generate children and of its nature universally excludes such generation.
Thus your call to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act is a call to strike down nature and, in the thought of our country's founding fathers, nature's God.
Nature knows only one marriage. Civil government didn't create it and cannot recreate it.
The Rev. Daniel S. Hamilton, Lindenhurst
Editor's note: The writer is the pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church.
