Religion & Law

You are right, Michael,  that i did not address the discrimination issue. The issue there is whether it makes sense to subsidize only potential parents (because of the strong state interest in the welfare of children) and, if so, how tightly tailored the legal categorizations have to be. (I personally would like to see them drawn more tightly, including legally recognized unions of same-sex adoptive parents, but not including other same-sex couples, and excluding legal recognition of new unions of elderly heterosexuals, but not excluding different-sex couples whose infertility remains hidden from public scrutiny.)

You are wrong, however, to call the lack of "recognized, respected" unions a lack of "liberty" for same-sex folks. If you go that route, the lack of any human good can be called a lack of "liberty" to have that good. This is not just a confusion, it is a skewing toward statism and against subsidiarity. After all, it is normally the State that is at fault for restraining our liberties. Once we reframe the issue as an absence of the human goods (rather than the liberties) of "recognition" and "respect", we can see that there are obvious alternatives to the State as sources for these goods. In any healthy society, and above all in a liberal one, the State should not be the sole or even the primary source of the recognition and respect we all need. If our society today is drifting in that direction, we should be paddling hard against the current.

I realize that there is a old Catholic tradition of expanding the scope of the positive sense of "freedom" which you are no doubt drawing upon. But that tradition comes out of natural law thinking that, when grafted onto modern centralistic statism, ends up having the State be the sole or major proponent of human excellence or flourishing. That's a mistake, in my view.