The Catholic Position?

The abortion issue highlights the point that, to the Church, marriage is not a political matter, but a spiritual one involving the blessing of God.

This claim is undermined, though, by research that has suggested the Church supported, blessed, and even had a special ceremony for same-sex unions before about 1400.

Saints Sergius and Bacchus and the apostles Philip and Bartholomew were said to be blessed in their same-sex unions by early Church leaders, in a forgotten ceremony whose name translates literally as "the making of brothers."

If this claim, put forth to great controversy by the late, gay Yale historian John Boswell, is true, then it means the proscription of gay marriage is not a timeless spiritual law. Rather, it is just the current consensus on a long-standing debate in the Church, a debate that has now completely reversed itself.