"We possess fundamental rights to things such as life, liberty, and property because these things are intimately connected with our self-ownership. As Locke helpfully explains, we own property in external objects because we own our free actions of appropriating them, and we own our free actions because we own ourselves. For Locke—as well as for the American founders and Lincoln—this was as far as our fundamental rights went."
Evidently Catholics still don't read Paul much. Those who do will recoil at the idea that "we own ourselves". This is the sort of Enlightenment revolution in thinking which was characteristic of the transition from the Age of Faith to the Age of Reason, and is still the sticking point between the so-called conservatives of modernity and the real pre-modern variety. Christians recognize no such idea as owning the self because they believe that they "are not their own":
"What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's." -- 1 Corinthians 6:19f.
The truth is that there are no fundamental rights such that we can distinguish between those rights which inhere in us and those which don't. Life? It comes to an end. One cannot stop the Grim Reaper. Liberty? There is no such thing. Even the freest man must eat, drink, eliminate and breathe. Property? In death you cede it to another. You cannot take it with you, not even the coin in your mouth. It goes to the Ferryman.
The right to marry is an alien idea to those who know it simply as what must be done. If there is no marriage, who will exist such that there is a country a hundred years hence which still can reasonably be called the one you grew up in?
America, for example.
America, for example.
