Family is our bright future

“The crisis of family values, which in many ways has affected our country, requires urgent decisions aimed not only at improving legislation, but also at changing attitudes towards the family, towards children, towards parental responsibilities. Our society is called upon to realize that without a moral feat, family life is unthinkable life, but we as a people have no future,” said the head of the Synodal Information Department, Vladimir Legoida, commenting on the planned changes to the Family Code, which are being considered by the Duma.

In the recognition by some states of same-sex cohabitation, he sees “the final chord of a long process of abandoning the concepts of chastity, abstinence, and marital fidelity. In the public space of many countries, sin has become equal to virtue and has been recognized as worthy of human freedom, in fact degrading the individual to the state of a slave of passions.”

Meanwhile, “throughout the history of mankind... the union of a man and a woman has never been questioned as an ideal category.” Why the Moscow Patriarchate believes that allowing same-sex marriage calls into question traditional marriage is unclear. After all, drunkenness is also a sin, but many people drink and this does not call into question the existence of non-drinkers. To each, as they say, his own. From the church point of view, drinkers are in a state of “slave to passions,” and the church even tries to fight this, but does not at all stop anti-alcohol wars with the involvement of the Duma. Of course, same-sex marriage is a kind of new frontier, but there is no doubt that, insisting on the legalization of marriage, representatives of the LGBT community are drawn to the very traditionalism for which the Orthodox Church so advocates. What is better: to live as a family, even a same-sex one, or to randomly indulge in sin, wandering around taverns and changing partners every day? If the whole point is in the “sacred” word “marriage,” then in many Western countries various forms of legal recognition of same-sex relationships have long been invented, which fit such families into a legal framework and give them legal guarantees, for example, regarding property. But we don't have that either. That is, the state pushes people to the most unbridled sin, and the church diligently encourages it in this.

Meanwhile, calling on all citizens “to a moral feat,” she is unable to achieve not only a feat, but even the slightest bit decent behavior even from her own monks in Gelendvagens. Why, I wonder? Doesn't he really want to? I think he wants to, but he can’t. What gives her hope for success in “transforming society on the basis of family morality” and “raising children on the principles of virtue”? State help? But the state already has negative communist experience of this kind, and it is somehow doubtful that minus for minus in this case will give a plus.