For each of the 12 days of Christmas, I’ll review and fill out one of the “12 Ways of Christmas” …

In this photo Tom McFeely posted a couple of weeks ago, a woman’s sign asks: “When can we vote on your rights, Rick Warren?”

She was upset at Rick Warren’s involvement in the inauguration of Barack Obama, even though he was a leader in California’s Proposition 8 campaign to end homosexual “marriage” there.

Her sign is effective. It asks a question that at first we have a hard time answering. “Why should this woman’s rights be subject to a vote, and not the heterosexual Rick Warren’s?”

First of all, Rick Warren and the woman have the same rights: They may marry someone of the opposite sex. Rick Warren is denied the same thing she is: He may not marry someone of the same sex.

But if you think about it, even on the woman’s own terms, Rick Warren’s rights are at stake in the homosexual “marriage” fight.

A married couple are “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” who share an address, but they are also so much more. Marriage is the mortar that makes the family the basic building block of society. Society specially recognizes marriage because by it children will be raised in a healthy way and their parents will be concerned about the community and the future. Rick Warren has the right to have his marriage so recognized. But unelected judges in California attempted to change the definition of marriage. The new definition: Marriage is society’s affirmation of a loving relationship.

Once marriage is redefined that way, what happens to a Rick Warren’s marriage? His marriage is no longer any more valuable than a roommate relationship (and if he believes otherwise, he’d better watch out, as Jennifer Roback Morse pointed out).

To prove it, watch the groups of people who seek marriage as soon as its definition is changed. Polygamists are already saying, “We want to call our loving relationship called ‘marriage,’ too.”

In Germany, a brother and sister want to be married. In Colorado, Time magazine reported on threesomes and other odd groupings who want to be married.

Once the definition of marriage is simply a court’s recognition of a romance, then everyone has the right to be “married,” but no one has the right to be married in the sense the word has always had.

Thus, our fourth way of Christmas, appropriate on Holy Family day, was:

“God puts the family at the center. In days when the definition of marriage itself is under attack, the Christmas story reminds us that it’s not the individual but the family that is at the center of human society. When God the Son became human, he didn’t become a powerful man, as he certainly could have. He chose a mother and a dad and became a baby.”

As Pope John Paul II put it, “Families should grow in awareness of being ‘protagonists’ of what is known as ‘family politics’ and assume responsibility for transforming society; otherwise families will be the first victims of the evils that they have done no more than note with indifference.”

— Tom Hoopes