An initiative of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops

Sexual Difference Video

 

Made for Each Other:
Sexual difference is essential to marriage

En Español

A Made for Each Other Viewer’s Guide is available, as well as a Parish Night Outline to facilitate a discussion on the video.

“Love is Love,” declares a popular slogan in support of redefining marriage to include persons of the same sex. Its implication is clear: if marriage is about love, then any two adults who love each other should be free to marry … so the claim goes. Such an idea seems to have a certain appeal today, since it attempts to hold up the most universal of human ideals: love and freedom. But love and freedom don’t operate in a vacuum. Like breathing depends upon oxygen, love and freedom … and marriage … depend upon truth. Crucial questions cry out to be answered: Does love have anything to do with the human body, with being a man or a woman? Is there anything unique about married love? What is marriage?

“Made for Each Other,” the first video of the Marriage: Unique for a Reason series, takes up these and other foundational questions about the meaning of marriage. Marriage is about love, but it’s about a unique love that only a man and a woman as husband and wife can give to each other. In the video, Josh and Carrie talk about why men and women matter for marriage. Their dialogue and interactions illuminate the beauty of sexual difference and complementarity between man and woman as husband and wife. Only through sexual difference can a husband and a wife give themselves completely to one another – so completely that “the two become one flesh” (Gen 2:24). True marital union is not possible without sexual difference.

This is why sexual difference is essential to marriage. Sexual difference is the necessary starting point for understanding why protecting and promoting marriage as the union of one man and one woman isn’t arbitrary or discriminatory. Rather, it’s a matter of justice, truth, love, and real freedom. Only a man and a woman—at every level of their identity: biological, physiological, emotional, social, spiritual—are capable of authentically speaking the language of married love, that is, the language of total self-gift, open to the gift of the other and the gift of life. (Please see the second video “Made for Life,” which explores the topic of marriage and children.)

Marriage is unique for a reason. For further resources, please see the Resource Booklet for Priests, Deacons, Catechists, and Teachers and the blog series on segments of the video.

A particularly relevant resource is Brian Bransfield’s “The Difference is the Difference

Buy the Made for Each Other package at the USCCB Store today!