"Defending" Church Teaching

Dreher responds to one of The Dish's readers:

...if you accept that man as having a husband, and do not challenge it in some way, you have given up an enormous amount of ground.

Andrew Sullivan would say that's progress; I'd say that's regression. We have fundamentally different stances toward the role of religious authority. We would agree, though, that the presence of that man speaking unchallenged in his Catholic parish about his "husband" is an event of enormous cultural significance. This moment was made possible in large part, I believe, because those who ought to have been explaining and defending church teaching, especially the teachings that are hard to understand in our culture, failed to do so. I'm talking about bishops, priests, catechists and parents. You can do as much harm by failing to effectively proclaim the truth as by proclaiming a lie. Emphasis on "effectively," because clearly, different arguments are necessary for our postmodern cultural environment, in which the autonomous individual is widely considered to be the source of authority.