[immoceefe]

One of the problems with things like marriage is that it is something that is state sanctioned, state controlled. So you have to make the distinction between the Church's role and the state's role, and as long as those are closely intertwined there will be conflict. The Church can make a pronouncement that same sex marriage is damaging to all of the parties involved, including the eventual children who will be adopted, damaging to society, against God's will and intention at creation and so on, but it will eventually be ruled a hate crime and the Church will be sanctioned for it, e.g. losing its tax deductable status. At some point the Church will be required to change its own rites to include same sex marriages, and at that point, the Church is going to have to decide what it is, the true Church, the true faith, willing to suffer persecution, or just another sociological phenomenon.

This is the direction we are headed, sooner rather than later and the Church is quite unprepared to deal with this type of problem. It has to do with the lack of discernment of demonic forces at work at large, or at least a cowardice in terms of addressing them. In a sense, the Church does not care what people do outside of its body. Historically, and for sound theological reasons, it has been more concerned, almost exclusively concerned with its own purity vs. the purity of society at large, and just assumes that the society at large is following the ways of the world and is lost. At some point I hope that we will return to this norm. It is not that society's sins cannot or should not be addressed, but preferably in terms of the threats they pose to us. We cannot save society from itself, especially when it is engaged in a massive murder/suicide pact. And if we focus on fixing society's sins, we do so only at the risk of avoiding our own. How many Orthodox faithful have had abortions? How many Orthodox faithful have homosexual tendencies, or other sexual or immoral compulsions that require healing? By addressing these things as society's problem, we avoid looking close to home.