Two men who climbed on the stage during a speech by an invited speaker at the recent National Marriage Day Breakfast in Parliament House Canberra are complaining because they were forcibly removed.

The pair, who had smuggled a cardboard banner into the breakfast inside their coats, are claiming that “the ordeal had left them shaken” and have filed a complaint with police.

The media are using this event to try to discredit marriage.

Check the biased headlines:

“Gay activists attacked” (ninemsn 13)

“Men ‘assaulted’ ” (sbs)

“Protestors expelled from ‘anti-gay’ ” breakfast (sx)

“Marriage breakfast ‘faggot -ree’ ” (same same)

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There are many good reasons why marriage should by law be a state entered into by a man and a woman for life.

The reasons are so obvious that they hardly need repeating.

Some of them were set out on this blog on July 31.

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Marriage was invented by God.

Obviously.

Marriage is a Sacrament of God’s Church.

Through Marriage, as with all Catholic Sacraments, God offers grace.

Grace is a practical thing. The Sacramental grace conferred by Christian Marriage offers married couples extra power, not available by any other means, for dealing with life’s day-to-day problems. Couples who are not married must struggle on without this grace and power. Most come unstuck.

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The Church’s teaching is summarized in the Church’s 1917 Code of Canon Law, “the primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children”.

The intention of having children, provided that this is possible, is consequently essential to the very substance of the matrimonial contract, which is for “acts which are in themselves capable of engendering children”.

This makes “same-sex-marriage” a contradiction in terms.

Thanks to the errors spawned by the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, the Catholic position on marriage has become a little confused. This will be reversed, but has not been done so effectively enough so far.

The 1983 revision of the Code of Canon Law unfortunately seems to place the two ends of marriage on an equal and independent level, even listing first the secondary end (i.e. mutual support, or the good of the spouses): “The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered towards the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring”.

This new concept of marriage, as being for the couple themselves, and not so much for children, has led to Catholics since Vatican II no longer having large families. Artificial birth control, the destruction of Catholic families, is no longer condemned as a mortal sin, for marriage is now too often considered in a selfish way.