Thoughts on the Gay Marriage debate
Jun/092
While walking down a street in the Pearl District (Portland, OR) a young man standing on the corner startles me as he calls out, “Hi! Hey, are you for marriage equality?” It takes me a second to register what he’s talking about.
Translating the liberal slant I answer, “Uh… you mean gay marriage?”. Chagrined that I want to use the old term instead of the new version, he answers a bit sheepishly, “Well yes, gay marriage.”
“No.” I say, bluntly.
“No?” He raises his eyebrows, now it’s his turn to be startled. I think he’s surprised to find a conservative walking along this particular street. Or maybe most people he encounters are a bit less definite in their response.
“Well, have a good day then.”
“You too.” I say.
The brief encounter gets me thinking back to a conversation I heard on a “progressive” radio show the other day. The host was interviewing the mayor of San Francisco about the recent judgment there. A caller asked “So all these gay couples got married here in California, and I would like to know how it hurts any of these religious people on the right? In what way does it hurt them? There’s no damage to our society, there’s no increase in crime, it doesn’t even affect them!”
The host has a little trouble trying to answer the question, because the caller seems more interested in making his point than actually getting an answer. He keeps interrupting the host. Finally in frustration, the host ends the call and moves on.
I wonder what he would have said in response to the question. I’m sure most people who support “marriage equality” wonder why conservative voters just won’t bend on this. Our position is so old fashioned, so archaic. We want to exclude a certain group of people from having the opportunity to get married. What on earth is so wrong with just letting them? How does it have an effect on us? If they want to stand in front of a judge and have a ceremony, and sign a piece of paper, and say they’re married, what’s wrong with that? How do we justify trying to stop it?
But marriage isn’t just a contract between two people, it’s a stamp of validation from society as well. Isn’t that what a couple getting married wants? They want society to validate their union, they want all of us to look at them and agree and say “Yes, we recognize that you are married.” And that is something that conservative religious people just cannot do.
I decided a long time ago that there’s no way for me to discuss this issue without bringing in religion. To me, and many others, marriage is a religious concept. It’s not political, or purely social, it has a religious nature. We believe that God himself created marriage when he first created man and woman, that it’s part – a very central part – of his plan for us. And we believe God ordained that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Further, we believe that a homosexual relationship in it’s nature is sinful (old news I’m sure, but still persistently relevant).
Even a straight couple who choose to get married by a justice of the peace, without bringing religion or God into their union, are still in my view adhering to some extent with God’s law. They are choosing to marry rather than to live in sin. But a gay couple marrying is wrong, on so many levels. They are attempting to solomnize in a religious ceremony (whether they consider it to be religious or not), a sinful relationship.
So think about what you’re asking conservative Christians to do. You’re asking us to validate gay marriage, to put our stamp of approval on it. In so doing, we must act against our faith. When a gay couple is married, and the law says they are married, the law in effect attempts to proscribe our religious belief. The law forces us to accept them as married with all the sacred and holy connotations that word implies. But how can we do this? For us, it is acting directly against God’s will.
I suppose what gay rights advocates really want is for us to change our religious belief. They want us to accept the idea that God looks on the relationship favorably, that we should have “tolerance” for “alternative lifestyles” and they compare our religious “intolerance” to the attitudes of prejudice and racism in America of the past. It’s interesting to notice the bias in their language, and how they attempt to recaste the debate in favorable moral terms. Phrases like tolerance, alternative lifestyle choices, and marriage equality all sound like virtuous terms on the surface. But to the bible literate Christian, and (I presume) the faithful of many other world religions, sin by any other name is still sin. And tolerance for sin is no virtue. It is acquiesence, cowardice, weakness. Indeed, such tolerance is also sin.
What is most unfortunate, and what adds to confusion on the issue, is that so many Christians have seemingly been taken in by the language of the left to believe that the “progressive” thing to do is to accept the idea that God wants us to allow gay marriage. Several states have already voted to allow gay marriage, and looking ahead, it seems others will soon do so. They attempt to portray our religious reluctance as unkindness, even as hatred for gay people. But we do not have hatred for them, we merely wish to stay true to our religious views.
I will keep my traditional views, and urge others to do the same. Continue to vote no on this issue. We do not hate gay people, but we cannot allow their beliefs to be forced upon us in direct contradiction to the gospel of Christ and our moral beliefs. That is unconstitutional. I can hear the protests of the gay rights advocates now. “For all these years, ” they will say, “you have been forcing your beliefs on us, now you are still trying to force religion at us by preventing our marriages.” But this argument is backwards. Marriage is a traditional religious belief at its roots. They are attempting to take this belief and twist it into something it is not. They can’t have it both ways. We must work to keep marriage what it has always been, and what it was meant to be.
