On November 23, 533, Emperor Justinian signed in the capital of the Empire, Constantinople, and ordered the publication of the introductory book to his Corpus Iuris Civilis (the basic text for most of Western Law), known as "The Institutes" (Institutiones).The Institutes are not a legal code, but a textbook introduction to Roman Law, filled with important definitions. Though issued by a Catholic Emperor, the Institutes explain traditional, pre-Christian, concepts of Roman Law. As a textbook, the Institutes provide practical examples next to the legal definitions. For instance, this is its definition of Natural Law, illustrated by an example:
The law of nature is that law which nature teaches to all animals. For this law does not belong exclusively to the human race, but belongs to all animals, whether of the earth, the air, or the water. Hence comes the union of the male and female, which we term matrimony; hence the procreation and bringing up of children. We see, indeed, that all the other animals besides men are considered as having knowledge of this law.
The main example of Natural Law provided by those eminent Roman legal scholars charged by Justinian to write the Institutes is matrimony, the union of male and female. One must, therefore, go to the roots of Western Law to understand why it is so important for the most influential groups of the current age to subvert the foundations of common sense. For instance, as seen yesterday, when the European Parliament strongly urged the European Union's 25 member states to "ensure that same-sex partners enjoy the same respect, dignity and protection as the rest of society".
As the pope said last June:
Today, the various forms of the erosion of marriage, such as free unions and "trial marriage", and even pseudo-marriages between people of the same sex, are instead an expression of anarchic freedom that are wrongly made to pass as true human liberation. This pseudo-freedom is based on a trivialization of the body, which inevitably entails the trivialization of the person. Its premise is that the human being can do to himself or herself whatever he or she likes: thus, the body becomes a secondary thing that can be manipulated, from the human point of view, and used as one likes. Licentiousness, which passes for the discovery of the body and its value, is actually a dualism that makes the body despicable...
