speakeasy 
Innovative Casanova
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RE: Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage in the United States
Just read a 4 part piece on the case for natural marriage. He argues that the traditional side lost the debate here because they really don't know how to argue effectively on this topic. They totally allowed the left to frame the debate for the last 10 years, and now we are where we are as we continue to descend down the slippery slope.
https://stream.org/defend-marriage-reality-part-1/
Part 1:
Quote:In the spring of 2011, much of the world watched and listened as Kate Middleton and Prince William repeated their wedding vows in Westminster Abbey. They committed to love and honor one another for life. But if you travelled deep into the forests of Papua New Guinea, you would find people doing much the same thing with a little less pomp and a lot less television coverage.
Christians have always treated marriage as sacred; but marriage isn’t unique to Christianity. Every known culture has it, with a few differences here and there. Some cultures have allowed polygamy, for instance, and some have arranged marriages. Though romantic love is often part of the story as far back as Jacob and Rachel, the idea of marrying primarily for love is a more recent invention. But there is a constant, underlying theme: marriage as a norm is a public joining of a man and a woman, with a special connection to the bearing and raising of children.
The sun has risen and set on cities, cultures, and kingdoms for thousands of years, and yet marriage as the union of male and female has endured. Now every American state is embroiled in a debate about what marriage is, and the Supreme Court is poised to overturn by a judicial fiat voter-endorsed state laws recognizing natural marriage. What most of the human race took for granted, judges and legislators now think they can uproot. Ours is one battle in a global war on marriage throughout the “civilized” world.
At the moment, the skirmishes involve religious freedom: should Christian bakers and florists be forced to participate in same-sex “marriage”? These are important fights to win, but they are rear-guard actions — last defenses before wholesale surrender of marriage as a public institution.
It’s past time for a massive counter-offensive, and it will have to start at the grassroots. With some notable exceptions, the courts, academia, the media and big business have thrown their weight against marriage. The Lord has promised us that the gates of hell will not prevail against His Church. We have no guarantee for the United States of America, or Western Civilization.
If we don’t work together to reverse the destruction of marriage, and soon, we could witness its collapse as a public institution in this generation. But first, we need to understand what’s happening, and why, so that we can know what we must do. That’s the purpose of this series.
The problem did not start with “same-sex marriage.” An epidemic of divorce, aided and abetted by the sexual revolution and a “contraceptive mentality,” began weakening the institution of marriage decades ago. In the 60s and 70s, states enacted “no fault” divorce laws. When the law had once made divorce difficult, it now made it easy, because scholars claimed that people remaining in unhappy marriages was a much bigger problem than broken marriages. They were tragically wrong.
Marriage is now even less binding than a business contract. As marriage expert Maggie Gallagher has written, “Marriage is one of the few contracts in which the law explicitly protects the defaulting party at the expense of his or her partner.”
Along with changing laws has come a changed culture where divorce carries little stigma. Acceptance of divorce rose from 59% of Americans in 2001 to 68% in 2013. This naturally follows from the rise in the number of people who have been divorced. The divorce rate for first marriages — between forty and fifty percent — is about twice what it was in 1960. About 2/3rds of second marriages, and 3/4ths of third marriages, end in divorce. This trend is even more startling when you realize that divorce rates have gone up while marriage rates have gone down.
Sixty percent of Americans in first marriages now live together beforehand. “Co-habiting” is considered a good trial run that will prevent a divorce later, but statistics show that people who shack up before getting married are much more likely to divorce than those who keep two addresses until their wedding day.
This change in divorce law came in the wake of relentless assaults on marriage and chastity from such academics as “sex researcher” Alfred Kinsey and anthropologist Margaret Mead. They misled millions to believe that homosexuality and promiscuity were normal and healthy. Marriage was artificial and repressive. Later we learned that their work was deeply flawed, even fraudulent, but the damage was already done.
If bogus sex research and birth control pills were dry twigs and tinder, no-fault divorce and abortion-on-demand were the blowtorch and gasoline. Together, they created a raging bonfire. We have now been stoking its flames for decades, long before talk of same-sex “marriage.” Together, they have reduced the bond connecting marriage, sex and childbearing to ashes.
If we want to understand the current war on marriage, we can’t ignore this ugly backstory.
Part 2:
Quote:Two recent books, one by libertarian Charles Murray, the other by progressive Robert Putnam, tell much the same story: upper income Americans are more likely to enjoy a traditional marriage culture where men and women marry, stay married and wait until marriage to have children. For lower-income Americans, in contrast, co-habitation, childbirth without marriage and absentee fathers are quickly becoming the norms rather than the exceptions.
The marriage track involves a virtuous circle. If you graduate from high school and college, get married and then have children, neither you nor your children are likely to live in poverty. And your kids are likely to follow in your footsteps. In contrast, if you don’t graduate from high school or college, hook up and have babies out of wedlock, you’re likely to be poor and to stay poor. And your kids are likely to follow in your footsteps. In short, the poorer among us have suffered disproportionately from the decline in marriage, and the decline in marriage helps keep poorer Americans poor.
That’s why marriage and the family aren’t just a Christian thing. Marriage is a human thing. It may be personal, but it is not private. Like a rock dropped in a pond, assaults on marriage create ripples that work their way across the entire surface of civilization. The difference is that the pond ripples disappear; the cultural repercussions do not.
The collapse of marriage and the epidemic of divorce since the 1960s have given social scientists decades of data to study, and the results are in: marriage is good for us and divorce is not.
Men and women in their first marriages tend to be healthier and happier than their counterparts in every other type of relationship — single, widowed or divorced. They’re also less depressed and anxious, and less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. “Seventy percent of chronic problem drinkers are divorced or separated, and only 15 percent are married,” note Glenn Stanton and Bill Maier.
Married adults are, on average, more sexually fulfilled. They’re also, on average, better parents, better workers and are less likely to be perpetrators or victims of domestic violence.
Let’s be honest. Most men, left to their own fallen instincts, would be promiscuous. Their sexual energies need to be properly channeled so that they think and act for long-term goals rather than fleeting, short-term pleasure. George Gilder argued in the 1970s and ’80s that the channeling of male sexual activity is one of the most important functions of marriage. It’s crucial for civilization because it helps civilize men. Other scholars have confirmed Gilder’s point, by showing a link between the state of marriage and the historical rise and fall of civilizations.
Social scientists have concluded that married men are less likely to commit crime and more likely to hold down jobs. You don’t need a Ph.D. in sociology to see that unattached single men wandering the streets are more inclined to trouble than the same men attached to wives and children.
Single people can, of course, live fulfilling lives. The Apostle Paul commends the single life as a wonderful gift for those who are called to it (1 Corinthians 7:7-8). I have friends — not just Catholic priests and nuns but evangelical lay men and women — who are called to the single life. It’s easy, perhaps too easy, for us married folks to forget that singleness has its own dignity. And for some vocations, it’s arguably better to be single than to be married.
Those of us called to marriage, however, tend to be much better off if we are married rather than divorced. Marriage scholars Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher sum up the results of thousands of scientific studies: “A good marriage is both men’s and women’s best bet for living a long and healthy life.”
They’re speaking statistically, of course. Any institution can be distorted and even destroyed by human sin, and stout souls can sometimes overcome even the worst circumstances, including abuse and abandonment. Still, all things being equal, marriage is good for us.
Of course, all this data involves marriage as everyone understood it until week before last: between a man and a woman. If you’ve been reading the paper or the Internet recently, however, you might be thinking: if marriage is such a good thing, why would we want to deprive same-sex attracted men and women of it? Why wouldn’t we want men to be able to marry men and women marry women, if they love each other? What’s the problem?
To answer that, we have to first answer a prior question: What exactly is marriage? That’s the subject of the next part of this series.
Part 3:
Quote:Too many Christians and conservatives are either surrendering or retreating from the public argument over marriage. But we have hardly begun to fight! Precious few of us know how to make the case. We get impatient when it comes to learning multi-step arguments. Instead we may paraphrase a Bible verse or two, start every sentence with, “As a Christian I believe …” or crack a joke, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”
This is no way to defend marriage reality. Not only does it not convince fence-sitters. It confirms the accusation of gay activists that we want to impose sectarian ideas on society. We can, and should, do better. We need to be ready and able to mount thoughtful, public arguments in defense of marriage, arguments that will resonate with reasonable people regardless of whether they recognize the Bible as authoritative.
And it can’t be just a few of us doing it. There are too many minds to change. If marriage is a public good and a public reality, then all of us, not just a few public intellectuals, must mount solid, public arguments in its defense. If we can’t take the time and effort to properly articulate such an argument, why should we expect our post-Christian culture to learn and embrace our position?
Our situation is much like 1973 after Roe v. Wade was handed down. Many Christians were either tongue-tied or confused on the question of abortion, and many mainline (and dying) denominations came out strongly in favor of legal abortion. But within a few years, faithful Christians and fellow travelers shook off their brain-fog, gathered their strength and launched a counter-offensive. The culture of death has not yet been defeated, but we have made inroads and know how to frame the debate. The same must happen with marriage, and the sooner the better. We have to think. Only when we understand and can frame the debate properly can we hope to retake lost territory.
We can start by getting three things straight.
1. Keep Separate Issues Separate
Don’t conflate separate questions. The debate over marriage is not about the origin of same-sex attraction. It’s not about what consenting adults should be allowed to do in private. It’s not about “homophobia.” It’s not about what you “believe as a Christian.” It’s not even about the immorality of homosexual acts, a related issue that Robert Reilly tackles in an important recent book.
It’s not about restricting certain kinds of marriage. It is always and everywhere about the nature of marriage and its role as a public institution: Is marriage a thing, and if so, what is it?
2. Recognize that Marriage is a Comprehensive Union
Strip away the diversity of cultural traditions — giving dowries, exchanging rings and vows in a church, throwing parties and bouquets — and what remains? What is marriage? Amidst the diversity across cultures, what is striking are the common features, recognized even in ancient cultures that were broadly accepting of homosexual practice. In an article and a later book, Sherif Girgis, Robert George and Ryan Anderson ably boiled down the basic ingredients of marriage:
Marriage involves: first, a comprehensive union of spouses [husbands and wives]; second, a special link to children; and third, norms of permanence, monogamy and exclusivity.
Notice the word “norm” — ideal. The norm is the same even if some marriages fail to fully achieve it. A proper end of the marital act is children, even if a child doesn’t result from every conjugal act, just as a proper end of playing football — to take a trivial example — is to score touchdowns, even if in some football games, nobody scores a touchdown.
Cultures have varied on the permanence of marriage. Cultures also have varied in their openness to polygamy, but even in polygamous societies, the marriages have not involved several men married to several women, all of them mixing and matching in various and shifting male-female pairings. The women in a normal polygamous marriage are all married to one man, and the norm of the one man/one woman conjugal union is typically preserved even in these cases.
We have good historical and religious reasons to legally enshrine monogamy over against polygamy, of course. (Even pagan Rome recognized this.) The point here is that even in polygamous societies, there remained the ideal and the norm of the conjugal pairing of man/woman.
The word “marriage” refers to a relationship different from all others. We relate to our co-workers because of our jobs. We relate to our neighbors because of where we live. We relate to our friends because we have common interests. In marriage, a husband and wife unite comprehensively, with their whole beings. We are spiritual and bodily beings. Any union that is comprehensive — all-encompassing — must include a union of bodies. But bodies can come together in all sorts of ways — dancing, shaking hands, wrestling, playing football and cramming into a crowded subway car. The connection of bodies that is a true marital union will fulfill a vital purpose that could not be fulfilled otherwise.
Think of the biology involved. Each of our organs has a biological purpose. The purpose of the heart is to pump blood, of eyes, to see, of lungs, to draw in air and capture oxygen to supply the body. All of these organs also have a common purpose: they work together to allow our body to live and thrive. Moreover, these organs are complete: they don’t need another human being to fulfill their function.
Each of us, however, has one biological function that by ourselves we cannot complete: sexual reproduction. In women, this includes both the sexual organs and the lactation systems in breasts. (The lactation system requires another human being, a baby, to fulfill its proper end.) Marriage is the institution that frames this natural reality. It intrinsically involves a man and a woman, and is intrinsically related to the bearing of children. That purpose can only be fulfilled by a specific kind of union with another human being of the opposite sex.
Male and female are “made to fit,” and until recently, probably no one anywhere thought to deny this. To reproduce naturally, to produce a new human being, a male and female must unite their bodies in the sexual act. In this one way, we are naturally incomplete as individuals and organisms. “Marriage,” as one scholar has written, “proposes a reconciliation of the most fundamental natural difference among human beings — sex.”
Of course, we’re not merely physical bodies. Our minds, emotions and souls work in harmony with our sexuality. Sex within marriage is a good thing in itself, even when conception doesn’t result, but the act still naturally tends toward reproduction — toward children. It has the awesome power to produce new human beings. To pretend otherwise, to isolate sex from childbearing, is to court disaster.
The sex act (rather than conception or childbirth) is the consummation — the seal — of marriage. Marriage protects, reflects and reinforces this powerful, complementary, reproductive part of our natures. No relationship between two men or two women can qualify as marriage because this conjugal act is impossible for them.
An infertile man and woman can still marry, since, as the National Review editors wrote in 2010, it is “mating that gives marriage its orientation toward children. An infertile couple can mate even if they cannot procreate. Two men or two women literally cannot mate.” As the editors went on to explain: “A child fulfills the marital relationship by revealing what” that marital relationship is, “a complete union, including a biological union.”
Same-sex unions can’t bring together complementary organs and body systems that are designed to procreate.
Marriage, then, is a comprehensive union of body, mind, emotion and soul, a proper end of which is children. This is why the state and society as a whole have a stake in recognizing it, and setting it off from every other institution.
3. Don’t Abandon Complementarity
Men and women, certainly in our bodies but also in other, less tangible ways, complement each other. One reason Christians may have been slow to make this argument is that many Christian denominations, under the influence of feminism, have abandoned the idea of complementarity, and now treat the idea of innate, God-given differences between men and women with suspicion. This is a fatal mistake. Those Christian bodies that fail to defend male-female complementarity in the next few decades will meet the same fate as those denominations that threw in their lot with Planned Parenthood. They will be assimilated, cease to be meaningfully Christian, and decline. The counteroffensive will fall to those Christian bodies that have resisted the cultural currents.
In short, given the nature of marriage, it doesn’t make any sense to refer to a relationship between individuals of the same sex, no matter how intimate, as “marriage.” The right response to talk about men “marrying” each other is: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Part 4:
Quote:In my previous installment, I showed that marriage has been understood across cultures and centuries to refer to a comprehensive bodily union grounded in the complementary nature of man and woman, a proper end of which is children. And I argued that, because of this, it doesn’t make sense to call a relationship a “marriage” when it’s between people of the same sex, no matter how intimate.
Okay, but what’s the problem with redefining marriage to include other kinds of relationships? The meaning of words shift all the time, right? Why would natural marriages be harmed by extending the word to include same-sex unions? Does it affect your marriage in Texas or North Carolina for two men to “marry” in California or New York?
This line of reasoning might once have been plausible, but not anymore.
Given the weekly assaults on freedom of speech and religion surrounding same-sex “marriage,” the costs of redefining marriage, and enshrining that redefinition by legal fiat, should now be clear. This is like asking, after the currency starts to collapse, if the value of a real dollar in Texas would be affected by flooding the market with counterfeit dollars in New York. Yes, it would be affected, because counterfeits degrade the value of all real dollars in the economy. As economists say, bad money chases out good money.
Enshrining a false definition of marriage in our laws will inevitably harm all marriages and society, quite apart from the obvious assaults on religious liberty we are already witnessing. Same sex “marriage” does not expand the meaning of marriage, but replaces its historical and natural meaning with a counterfeit. To enshrine that counterfeit definition in our laws is to enshrine, and hence enforce, a collective lie and delusion. It is to require that we equate things that most manifestly are not equal.
Just a few examples: If the law says people of the same sex can “marry” each other, we lose any rational basis for barring group marriage and incest, and for encouraging marriage to be exclusive and permanent. The reason for limiting marriage to one man and one woman is that it takes exactly one man and one woman to make a sexually/biologically complete pair. That logic of completion evaporates if people of the same sex can “marry.” The arguments used to defend same-sex “marriage” work just as well for defending any voluntary relationship imaginable.
Logic, Not Slippery Slope
This isn’t a slippery slope fallacy because some slopes really are slippery, and this is one of them. The jump from same-sex marriage to polygamy, group marriage and open marriage is already happening. Most same-sex “marriages” that have been performed in U.S. states are not monogamous for long. And in those places that recognize same-sex “marriage,” few gays even bother to “marry.”
“Monogamous marriage,” say Glenn Stanton and Bill Maier, “is democracy for the domestic and sexual lives for men and women.” Polygamous cultures (which are almost always polygynous — one husband with more than one wife) are much more competitive and unstable. Where monogamy is the norm, a man — no matter how powerful, rich, or attractive — can have, at most, one wife. With polygamy, he’s free to “collect” as many wives as he can, leaving the less powerful men without prospects.
History tells us what happens to cultures with large numbers of men lacking marital prospects. Typically the men turn to prostitution and are more likely to prey on the society that has not made a place for them. Polygamy also lowers the status of women, especially of the wives who must compete for the same man’s affection. So rather than balancing the sexual competitiveness of men and women, polygamy makes the problem much worse. This is a Pandora’s Box that needs to stay shut. Redefining marriage to include same-sex unions opens that box, both by inviting further redefinitions of marriage, and by dispensing with the logic of marriage as a man-woman sexual/biological completion.
A War on Religious Liberty
Redefining marriage is already fomenting culture wars in every town, city and school district in the country, and precipitating draconian attacks on religious freedom. Not even seventy-year-old florists in Washington and family pizza restaurants in tiny Indiana towns are safe from assault. What was once prohibited is first tolerated, then celebrated and then compulsory. If same-sex “marriage” is defined as a basic human right, a matter of justice and equality — as its advocates claim — then no one will be free to publicly defend real marriage for long. Government will have to treat traditional views as irrational bigotry.
Parents who complain about their kids being forced to read Heather Has Two Mommies will be viewed like racist white parents who don’t want their children to attend school with black children. Everyone who holds the view of marriage heretofore held in every culture will be opposed by this new culture. Ministries will be forced to resist and suffer the consequences, revise their principles or close up shop. Catholic Charities has already abandoned its adoption services in California, Massachusetts and the District of Columbia to avoid being forced to place children with same-sex couples.
The media already describes those of us who defend natural marriage as anti-gay. What do you think will happen to those who actually criticize homosexual conduct? How long will it take to become illegal? It’s already happened in Canada. Just months after marriage was redefined there, a bill that criminalized such statements became law. “Anti-gay” speech crimes can now be punished by up to two years in jail! In 2008, the Alberta Human Rights Tribunal ordered Rev. Stephen Boisson to pay a $5,000 fine and apologize for a letter to the editor he wrote in 2002, before marriage was redefined. A higher court eventually overturned the ruling, but the incident is a foretaste of the future if defenders of real marriage don’t stem the tide.
Collapse
If we allow government, business and elite culture to redefine marriage, we should expect to see marriage further erode as a public institution. Several European countries that have redefined marriage show what may come. Laws have permitted same-sex “marriage” in the Netherlands since 2001, and rather than a marriage paradise, with straight and gay couples typically living in long-term, monogamous bliss, fewer and fewer Dutch bother to get married at all. Children are no longer connected to marriage. People just live together, and many have a hard time figuring out why marriage is even relevant.
Many well-meaning people think the same-sex “marriage” push is just about equality and spreading the benefits of marriage. This is staggeringly naïve. Its more radical supporters know it’s about destroying marriage itself. Here’s what one activist, Michael Signorile, said in Out magazine back in 1996:
The trick is, gay leaders and pundits must stop watering the issue down — “this is simply about equality for gay couples” — and offer same-sex marriage for what it is: an opportunity to reconstruct a traditionally homophobic institution by bringing it to our more equitable queer value system, … a chance to wholly transform the definition of family in American culture. … Our gay leaders must acknowledge that gay marriage is just as radical and transformative as the religious Right contends it is.
And it won’t end there. It took our society about six seconds to move from denying that marriage is grounded in the natural complementarity of male and female, to denying that human beings are born male or female. Indeed, the transgender movement is now moving in parallel with the same-sex “marriage” movement, and will soon overtake it.
Is anyone really so clueless as to believe that when a society denies human nature in its laws, there won’t be painful repercussions?
(This post was last modified: 06-27-2015 12:52 AM by speakeasy.)
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