Forum Friday: Same-Sex "Marriage" and the Law, Part II

"Ask, and ye shall receive." That's certainly an appropriate verse to describe your response to last week's Forum Friday post. (If you haven't read the post, please take a moment to do so.)

The discussion was very fruitful, at times heated, yet, for the most part, civil, and I'd like to thank "Fallbride1" for starting it. It will all be quite useful as I prepare my blog post on the Catholic stance toward moral and social questions in the realm of politics.

Rather than move on to a new discussion this week, however, I'd like to extend this one just a bit. Last week, I asked you to address two questions:

• While we agree [with the Church's teaching], why should Catholics try to make everyone else agree too?


• Is there a Church teaching that implies or demands that we take political action to get the general society to agree with our teachings?

Now I'd like to add a third and a fourth:

• How does/should the fact that our society increasingly rejects the moral teachings of the Church affect our political action?


• Is there a point at which individual Catholics (if not the Church Herself) should abandon the political realm and simply focus on converting a population increasingly in need of conversion?

Again, please try to confine the discussion as closely as possible to these two questions. I look forward to reading your responses in the forum.