We missed Bishop Cordileone's take on efforts to undermine DOMA when it first came out. Here it is now:

It is a curious irony that in this moment of history, when people in a number of countries in the Middle East are agitating for change from dictatorship to democracy, here in our own country, the oldest democracy with a written constitution in the world, there is a movement of the ruling class toward taking more and more power into its own hands. The flashpoint for this movement? The hot-button issue of our day: marriage.

The comparison of the Middle East and the United States, though, is just irony No. 1 among many others in the ongoing saga of the inter-relation between the marriage issue and democracy. The examples are legion, and it would not be possible to list all of them here. I will, though, mention some of the more salient ones. [Continue reading]