On a separate but related point, Mr. Boylan points out that when his wife’s gay friends got married, nothing horrible happened. I guess this is an argument for the appropriateness of gay marriage, but it presumes that if something is wrong, the earth will shake and the heavens roar when that wrong thing is done. This is simply not the case.

Case in point: When I first smoked a cigarette at the tender age of 14, something which was without a doubt “wrong,” nothing happened. I was not smitten by lightning nor was I filled with dread and fear. But that didn’t make the act “right.”

This lack of immediate effect is a basic characteristic of evil. When Adam and Eve first ate the apple, nothing happened, even though God told them that they would die if they did so (of course, later on they did die of old age, which is something the serpent left out of the conversation).

When the first abortion was performed after Roe v. Wade, nothing happened, at least nothing noticeable to the media and society at large. When Nazis first began gassing Jews to death, no one took any notice.

Silence in the aftermath of an evil act does not negate the evil. Rather, that silence reflects a lack of an ability to discern what is and is not evil on the part of the protagonists, a problem which horribly plagues and pervades our society.