The Christian Medical and Dental Associations (CMDA) unanimously adopted its Same-Sex “Marriage” Public Policy Statement September 18, criticizing the “radical revisionist view” which “ignores millennia of legal and cultural affirmation” of marriage, and endeavors to replace it with a subjective concept of marriage based on emotional relationship.
The CMDA said this skewed belief is divorced from the natural and objective elements of marriage – physical union and procreation.
“Marriage is a consensual, exclusive and lifelong commitment between one man and one woman, expressed in a physical union uniquely designed to produce and nurture children,” the CDMA statement said.
“The universal recognition of conjugal marriage by virtually every civilization throughout history, arrived at from both secular and theistic perspectives, testifies to the natural evidence for marriage, its objective structure and its significant contribution to human flourishing and societal stability.”
The CDMA statement was released just a few weeks prior to the U.S. Supreme Court’s October 6 dismissal of five U.S. states’ petitions to review lower court decisions overturning their marriage protection amendments.
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The CMDA said that recognition of marriage as being between one man and one woman does not necessarily impede acceptance of other consensual relationships.
“The core debate hinges not on a moral evaluation of various types of relationships, but rather on the objective qualities that make marriage, marriage,” the CMDA statement said.
The benefits to children raised by both a mother and a father, the greater economic stability of intact families and the high cost to government and society when marriage breaks down were all listed by the CMDA to illustrate the government’s stake in preserving marriage.
The CMDA also critiqued court decisions that have asserted that support for marriage is not rational and instead based on hostility toward homosexuals, saying that these judgments have paved the way for religious persecution toward proponents of traditional marriage.
“Once the government adopts an official position that opposition to ‘same-sex marriage’ is based solely on animus and constitutes discrimination, the state can assert a compelling interest to advance this social policy–even if doing so means trampling the rights of religious conscientious objectors,” the CMDA statement said. “This assertion of government power to enforce the ideology of the state threatens not only the individual exercise of conscience but also the entire constitutional balance of the church-state relationship.”
“Such an aggressive, state-sponsored squelching of the free exercise of religion, as expressed in faith-based dissent, creates a powerful deterrent to free speech and the exercise of conscience,” the CMDA said. “Apart from the intervention of courts and/or a reversal of societal values, faithful supporters of conjugal marriage stand to face a virtual ideological Inquisition of increasing intensity.”
The CMDA statement concluded with a list of policy recommendations that would protect the rights of faith and conscience in law and policy, and in particular safeguard against legal assault of physicians who practice in accord with their conscience.
The entire CMDA statement can be viewed here.
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