What’s wrong with gay marriage?
By Tom Quiner
Perhaps that’s the wrong title for this reflection on this burning subject.
A better title might be, “what’s right with gay marriage?”
As one person stated:
“I’m a Christian. I do believe that tradition and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman.”
This person acknowledged the sacramental nature of marriage in the eyes of the Christian world. He acknowledged that the act of marrying makes the union between a man and a woman holy. His remarks pointedly excluded same-sex relationships from marriage.
Barack Obama, who spoke the words above back in 2004, stuck to his guns throughout his 2008 presidential campaign that the definition of marriage should be between a man and a woman.
He changed his mind.
Today he came out with a new set of beliefs on the subject in this rambling explanation:
“This is something that, you know, [Michelle and I have] talked about over the years and she, you know, she feels the same way, she feels the same way that I do. And that is that, in the end the values that I care most deeply about and she cares most deeply about is how we treat other people and, you know, I, you know, we are both practicing Christians and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others but, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated…”
So what happened? We have several options:
Option One: Mr. Obama was for gay marriage all along and simply said that he was for traditional marriage just to get elected. In other words, he was simply lying.
Option Two: His belief system evolved from one truth to another over the past four years, and he now discounts the sacramental nature of traditional marriage.
Option Three: He thinks the political winds are blowing in favor of gay marriage, freeing him to jettison yesterday’s belief system for a new, more popular one today. Opinion polls suggest that 47% support gay marriage while only 44% oppose.
There may be some truth in all three options.
Whatever, Democrats are certainly comfortable changing their belief system for the sake of political expediency. (See: “The evolution of principle.”)
The cornerstone of Mr. Obama’s conversion seems to be his application of the Golden Rule, (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) to the issue of gay marriage. The suggestion here is that gay marriage is all about equality, that it is a civil rights issue.
But it obviously isn’t.
Societies throughout history have defined marriage as being between a man and a woman as a mechanism to protect children that could be produced from those unions.
Current traditional marriage laws, for the most part, allow anyone to marry as long as they are of legal age.
People with same-sex attractions are allowed to marry, as long as it is someone of the opposite gender.
By the same token, people with opposite-sex attractions are prevented by law of marrying someone of the same gender. In other words, marriage laws have been applied equally without discrimination. Nothing prevents people with same-sex attractions from pursuing a relationship with someone of the same gender. They simply couldn’t have it formally declared a marriage by the state.
A lifelong pro-gay liberal Democrat wrote a book about marriage called “The Future of Marriage.” Despite his embrace of much of the gay agenda, David Blankenhorn is adamantly against the notion of gay marriage:
“Across history and cultures . . . marriage’s single most fundamental idea is that every child needs a mother and a father. Changing marriage to accommodate same-sex couples would nullify this principle in culture and in law.”
He says that when people get married simply for the sake of coupling, so to speak, fewer people get married, decreasing the number of heterosexual marriages. He sites data from Scandinavian countries with a history of gay marriage.
The result: more children are born out of wedlock.
So what? These kids do worse by about every measurement than kids born into a married family with a mom and a dad.
What’s right with gay marriage?
Nothing.
Marriage between two gay people hurts no one. In a free society, people should not be prevented by government from doing something that does no harm to anyone else.
At the same time, no church should be forced by government to perform any specific wedding and no individual should be forced by government to associate with any particular type of person or group.
I agree that the best environment in which a child can be raised is with its natural mother and father. But, there are many real life situations in which children are raised that are much worse than being raised by a committed, married gay couple.
Government should not use its force to prohibit gay marriage or to prohibit adoption of children by gay couples.
We are well on our way to gov’t forcing churches to do things that go against their teachings. What do we do about that, Kurt?
We fight hard. We definitely call or email our elected officials to let them know what we think. We not only need to stop the trend, we need to revers it.
Ten years from then you can marry your daughter. Maybe even your dog. Our country is slowly redefining everything that this country was founded on. We soon won’t be able to recognize the world we once knew.
My point to my secular friends has been this — what’s needed is not a liberalization of the definition of marriage, but a return to restrictions on what constitutes marriage. It is a covenant between one man and one woman FOR A LIFETIME, and that lifetime covenant, being the most desirable structure in which to raise children,is the only one that should be encouraged by the state. I’d favor rescinding no-fault divorce and restricting marriages to one per lifetime, unless one partner is faultlessly widowed (in other words, you don’t get to kill your spouse so you can marry someone else) — and reforming the adoption process to make it easier for childless married couples to adopt. It’s not a question of how broad the definition of marriage should be, but of how narrowly we want to support different household structures.
Very interesting ideas. There’s no question that no-fault divorce hurt our kids by making it easier for their parents to end a marriage. No Fault divorce was the godfather of gay marriage. It made marriage all about the feelings at the expense of the children in the marriage. I don’t mean to discount the importance of feelings, but they ebb and flow. No fault divorce made it too easy for folks to get out of a marriage when the feelings ebb. What a mess we’ve created.
This is the problem with religion. It leads to people like you deciding you have the right to state whether someone can/or cannot get married to someone they love; not because of their sexuality, but because they love them. The crux of the matter for me is, you’re telling people how to live their lives by the rules of a book older than anyone alive. If religion didn’t exist today, and you found this book in a used book shop, you’d immediately think the author was smoking something strong as they wrote its hateful words. The only thing I can respect you for is actually following the bible, on this point at least. So many people who pretend to be Christians, of whatever denomination, love to ‘pick and choose’ what they’ll follow.
You evidently haven’t read the Bible, or at least the one I know. The Bible is all about love, not hate.
Generally it advocates love, but that isn’t my point. It’s nonsensical to believe, based on an ancient book, that a man was born as the son of a heavenly god. If the bible were to be found today, it would be named as madness and placed in the fiction section of your local library.
Kurt’s point about a gay/lesbian marriage not hurting anyone else is exactly right. Your freedom ends, or should end, when it threatens someone else’s, and many people are threatening other person’s freedom by wanting a ban on same sex marriages or even relationships.