2008
Why not let gays have marriage? We’re not using it.
This may seem odd for a conservative Christian blogger, but I’m not especially agitated about the California Supreme Court’s decision to recognize same sex marriage.
When I put something on the curb with my trash, the police can search it without my authorization, and my neighbors can take it if they want it. Sure, it’s still on my property, but I’m saying I don’t want it anymore and releasing it to other people. And whether you like it or not, that is exactly what heterosexuals, including Christians, have done with marriage.
There are four elements of the marriage crisis
* Marriage: The marriage rate has plunged 50% since 1970. If the same percentage of couples were marrying now as in 1970, there would be a million more marriages a year – 3.3 million marriages, not 2.2 million. Those who have never-married aged 30-44 have tripled from 6.8% in 1970 to 20.4% in 2005.
* Divorce: Half of all new marriages end in divorce. There have been 42 million divorces since 1970 hurting 40 million children. One quarter of all adults age 18-35 have grown up in divorced families.
* Cohabitation: The number of unmarried couples living together soared 12-fold from 430,000 in 1960 to 5.4 million in 2005. There are only 2.2 million marriages a year. Thus, cohabitation has become the dominant way male-female unions are formed. Couples who marry after living together are 50% more likely to divorce than those who did not.
* Unwed births: Out-of wedlock births jumped from 5.3% to 37.4% or from 224,000 to 1.5 million children from 1960-2004. Cohabiting couples are as likely to have a child under 18 as married couples (41% vs. 46%).
And the divorce rate for Christians is about the same as for other people. These things are a total disgrace, and a clear indication that our society has abandoned marriage. Now that somebody else wants it, we grab the toy and scream, “Mine!” People rightly call us out as hypocrites for this behavior. We can’t unring this bell. It’s over. As Ed Morrissey points out, “Government stopped being in the sacrament business at the moment it offered no-fault divorces.” Whether California successfully passes legislation to undo the Court’s decision is a moot point. Same sex marriage is going to be a reality in this country in our lifetimes. And polygamous marriage will inevitably follow.
My main concern is the same one The Anchoress has expressed, “my line gets drawn whenever someone implies that a church must go against its own theology and sacramental understanding of marriage.” I’m concerned that in the name of “human rights,” and “antidiscrimination” someone is going to sue a church for the right to a church-sanctioned wedding and win, creating a legal requirement for a pastor to marry anyone who asks. It’s not that far-fetched an idea; a New Mexico photographer was hauled before a “Human Rights” tribunal for refusing to photograph a same sex commitment ceremony and was fined $6,600.
The rallying cry in response to this verdict will be to “Save marriage!” but we need to begin with our own. Pastors need to stop renting out churches to brides who simply want a beautiful set for their big wedding productions and reserve church weddings for Christians who have undergone counseling and understand the ramifications of what they’re doing. As Christians we need to make sure our own marriages are solid and we need to stand up with our friends whose marriages are in trouble and help fight to preserve their marriages.
As Americans we need to make sure that Canadian-style extralegal “Human Rights” commissions like the one in New Mexico are stopped so that our right to express biblical precepts and to live by them is preserved. Like it or not, the “battle to save marriage” ended a long time ago when we surrendered. The battle for religious freedom and freedom of expression is just beginning and we would do well to join it.
Added: Abraham Piper’s 22 Words on the subject:
Fighting gay marriage like it’s killing civilization seems inconsistent amid cultural curses like adultery, groundless divorce, and pornography—all hetero and legal.
Click through to read some very interesting comments.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
I agree that corrupted marriage laws are the main problem. No fault divorce allows someone (typically the wife, who initiates 65-90% of divorces) to grow bored with the other spouse and find someone more exciting. Then the person who was responsible for the demise of the marriage lays claim to 50% or more of the marital property, and also asks for alimony to maintain the marital standard of living. Financially, the law actually encourages divorce in many cases.
Rational human beings will obviously shy away from marriage under such circumstances. That’s why the marriage rate has halved. If half of marriages end in divorce, and the “economically disadvantaged” spouse during a divorce claims alimony and eats half your assets, then you’d have to be a fool to marry anyone who makes less money than you do. If you do want to get married, of course, a prenupt can alleviate some of your fears — assuming a judge upholds it. But even with that, chances are you may still wind up divorced, perhaps with kids involved. And most people are too stupid to get prenupts (even though a middle-class individual needs to hang onto his assets far more desperately than a multimillionaire does).
The situation is at least as corrupt now as it was during the days of slavery, when the law sanctioned the routine breakup of black marriages.
May 16th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
I strongly agree! I now find the whole same-*** marriage fight to be a huge diversion. As Christians we need to be fighting poverty and oppression. I supported several anti-homosexual “pro-family” politicians in 2000 through 2004, but many turned out to be incompetent or corrupt once in office. I now think these politicians were using our fear of homosexuality against us. Jesus told us to open our hearts to sinners…I’ve being trying that route, and getting much better results. I befriend two homosexual women in my office, now they attend church and have started reading the bible. We don’t agree on everything, but I feel they have a better relationship with Jesus now than when I avoided them.
May 16th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Opening the door to *** marriage will soon lead to polygamy and even bestiality. What it is saying is that you can do anything you can imagine. Now in point of fact, you can. But by making it all legal, it says that society sanctions it and approves of it. This is not healthy for society and leads to all manner of perversions. This is why we should not approve of *** marriage, because of the harm it does to society as a whole.
We tend to focus today very much on the rights of individuals, and what individuals ought to be able to do. We lose sight of the impact these actions have on society as a whole. Whatever is sanctioned for individuals has repercussions for society as a whole. Does it produce disease (HIV/AIDS)? Does it lead to a lot of unwanted children? Does it lead to a lot of physiologically damaged people? Does it lead to large numbers of abandoned women and children? Is is morally degrading and thereby damaging to the moral fiber of society? All of these possible outcomes are legitimate reasons for society not to sanction these deviant sexual arrangements.
Heterosexual marriage is well known to be God’s plan for mankind. Anything else (other than celibacy) is well known to be a perversion. All of these things have been done in the past; mankind has experience with all of them from before. We think that we must repeat the mistakes of the past only because of our arrogance. What fools we are!
May 16th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
I did not write ***. Perhaps it would be more clear if I wrote homosexual marriage or ***** marriage. Is this web site so politically correct that it censors a simple three letter word that means cheerful and happy?
May 17th, 2008 at 9:14 am
I highly doubt that homosexual marriage is a “slippery slope” to polygamy, incest, or bestiality. Even conservatives put the homosexuals at 3%-6% of the population…that’s at least 9 million people! That’s a huge fraction of voters (similar to Asians or Jews). But we simply do NOT have a large number of people demanding bestiality, polygamy, or incest. So I highly doubt that we’ll see these evils legalized. I mean, look at Utah, which is politically dominated by Mormons…but even they don’t have legal polygamy.
May 17th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Utah does not have legalized polygamy because outlawing polygamy was a condition for admitting Utah to the US.
May 18th, 2008 at 12:19 am
That’s my point…polygamy was not that important to most of them. Only a small minority of mormons believe polygamy should be legal…so small in fact that they have no chance of mustering the political power to legalize it. And if mormons can’t even get polygamy passed, then it is not really a threat. Hence I don’t buy the “slippery slope” argument that homosexual marriage is going to lead to polygamy, bestiality, and incest.
Has legal firearms lead to legal handgrenades, tanks, or fighter planes? Has legal alcohol lead to legal cocaine, crack, or heroine? Has legal pornography lead to legal prostitution?
I’m not saying I condone any of those. But historically speaking, the slippery slope argument applies only sporadically.
May 18th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Jasper:
Sorry, but I’m afraid you’re mistaken about whether g@y marriage leads to polygamy (not sure about bestiality). There are in fact court cases in the system (U.S., Canada, Europe) now asking judges to expand upon the logic of pro-g@y rulings on behalf of polygamous couples. Elsewhere, because Arab families who’re recent immigrants tend to favor cousin-marriage, there are lawsuits to overrule state objections to marrying people who’re too close in blood relation. In Germany, a brother and sister sued for the right to marry, patterning the language of the suit after that of lawsuits brought by g@y couples demanding civil unions.
These, if you think about it, are not really a “stretch.” If the state is truly “out of the sacrament business” then marriage represents a contract, which is either (a.) in a special class of contracts, or (b.) just like any other contract.
If it is just like any other contract, why then, what business does the state have preventing two parties from entering into a contract which doesn’t violate the free consent of anyone?
And if it is not just like any other contract, then…why not? For the sake of children? Well, the prevalence of contraception and extramarital *** and DINKs means that children and marriage are not especially related topics in the modern mind. And though there is evidence to suggest that a child is better off raised in a stable one-parent home, let alone a two-parent home, than in a home headed by g@y lovers, that kind of argument isn’t going to make it into the courtroom for political correctness reasons (”How dare you say we can’t love our kids!”). You could argue the special nature of the marriage contract by showing that civilizations without solid intact exclusively heterosexual marriages are likely to fall into barbarism of one kind or another, but though I myself believe this to be true, it’s not the kind of argument that’ll fly in court.
In short, you can’t designate marriage (officiated by the state) to be in a special category of contract UNLESS you can argue “compelling state interest”…and none of the arguments on that topic are likely to get a hearing in a modern court. Heck, they can’t even see a compelling state interest in forbidding no-fault divorce in marriages where children are involved…and if avoiding poverty, mental health issues, academic problems, and increased likelihood of arrest in the next generation is not a “compelling state interest,” I don’t know what is.
Now, when it comes to bestiality, I don’t think that g@y “marriage” is the problem; it’s the striking down of laws against persons of the same gender engaging in *** (so called “sodomy” laws) that created that problem. The logic there is: In the case of “sodomy,” as long as it’s consensual, then no-one’s rights are violated. In the case of bestiality, it can’t be consensual since the animal has no power of consent. You might think that the case would therefore classify bestiality in with pedophilia, but kids have rights, and animals don’t. Consequently, as long as the animal belongs to the sicko in question, “nobody’s rights were violated,” and courts (extending upon their logic in striking down sodomy laws) will likely be forced to allow it.
But Jasper, the ultimate logic of your post is flawed, because you argue that there won’t be people, or enough people, wanting to “push the envelope” in these ways to make a difference. On that, you are in error.
It’s an understandable, and even a noble, error. You yourself wouldn’t do it. You’ve taken some care, perhaps, to befriend good and decent people; as a result, no one you know would do it. (As far as you know.) Your instincts tell you that polygamy or bestiality or public s-and-m orgies are nasty and make you go, “brrrrr!”
What you’re forgetting is that you felt the same way when people first told you what *** men do.
Societies change. Human beings have powerful *** drives, which as a result are easily twisted when not consciously confined to safe and healthy outlets. And because ****** is in a sense “addictive,” especially when combined with the adrenaline rush of the “risky” or the “kinky,” these twists are frightfully hard to cure, and habituated sexual behaviors very difficult to break. (Just ask any porn addict who’s tried to go for a month without getting off to, or even looking at, pornography — especially if he wasn’t busy doing much else that month!)
Trust me. If you can think of it (and probably if you *can’t* think of it) there are people who’ll both do it, and try to gain popular acceptance for it.
This is the world we live in. Welcome to it.
May 18th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
Dadgum this censorious post-filter!
The three-asterisk combinations in the preceding post began with the letter “s” and ended in “ex.”
The six-asterisk grouping began with the letters “org” and ended with “asm.”
Yeesh, it’s like trying to have an adult conversation around my five-year old.
May 18th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
We have completely annihilated the millenia-old definition of marriage, yet you don’t think further alterations will be a problem. I see.
When the polygamists come calling, what will be your logical answer to them? “I just don’t like it,” perhaps? If we were still a democracy, that might suffice. But California has just shown that democracy is irrelevant. Your argument about percentages means nothing, and therefore it doesn’t matter how many people demand polygamy. The judges do not care what you think, or about how many people support your view.
May 18th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
I think Governement should just get out of the marriage business, period. I really don’t think government benefits should be a priority consideration when deciding to marry anyway. Then Christians and others of Biblical morality could get back to what the real meaning of marriage is, a commitment to God and to one another before God.