Posted on 11/22/2003 11:16:24 AM PST by jethropalerobber
The Power of Marriage
Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations.
But marriage is the opposite. Marriage joins two people in a sacred bond. It demands that they make an exclusive commitment to each other and thereby takes two discrete individuals and turns them into kin.
Few of us work as hard at the vocation of marriage as we should. But marriage makes us better than we deserve to be. Even in the chores of daily life, married couples find themselves, over the years, coming closer together, fusing into one flesh. Married people who remain committed to each other find that they reorganize and deepen each other's lives. They may eventually come to the point when they can say to each other: "Love you? I am you."
Today marriage is in crisis. Nearly half of all marriages end in divorce. Worse, in some circles, marriage is not even expected. Men and women shack up for a while, produce children and then float off to shack up with someone else.
Marriage is in crisis because marriage, which relies on a culture of fidelity, is now asked to survive in a culture of contingency. Today, individual choice is held up as the highest value: choice of lifestyles, choice of identities, choice of cellphone rate plans. Freedom is a wonderful thing, but the culture of contingency means that the marriage bond, which is supposed to be a sacred vow till death do us part, is now more likely to be seen as an easily canceled contract.
Men are more likely to want to trade up, when a younger trophy wife comes along. Men and women are quicker to opt out of marriages, even marriages that are not fatally flawed, when their "needs" don't seem to be met at that moment.
Still, even in this time of crisis, every human being in the United States has the chance to move from the path of contingency to the path of marital fidelity — except homosexuals. Gays and lesbians are banned from marriage and forbidden to enter into this powerful and ennobling institution. A gay or lesbian couple may love each other as deeply as any two people, but when you meet a member of such a couple at a party, he or she then introduces you to a "partner," a word that reeks of contingency.
You would think that faced with this marriage crisis, we conservatives would do everything in our power to move as many people as possible from the path of contingency to the path of fidelity. But instead, many argue that gays must be banished from matrimony because gay marriage would weaken all marriage. A marriage is between a man and a woman, they say. It is women who domesticate men and make marriage work.
Well, if women really domesticated men, heterosexual marriage wouldn't be in crisis. In truth, it's moral commitment, renewed every day through faithfulness, that "domesticates" all people.
Some conservatives may have latched onto biological determinism (men are savages who need women to tame them) as a convenient way to oppose gay marriage. But in fact we are not animals whose lives are bounded by our flesh and by our gender. We're moral creatures with souls, endowed with the ability to make covenants, such as the one Ruth made with Naomi: "Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried."
The conservative course is not to banish gay people from making such commitments. It is to expect that they make such commitments. We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.
When liberals argue for gay marriage, they make it sound like a really good employee benefits plan. Or they frame it as a civil rights issue, like extending the right to vote.
Marriage is not voting. It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage. Not making it means drifting further into the culture of contingency, which, when it comes to intimate and sacred relations, is an abomination.
Fine, lobby the NY legislature and the US Congress to pass a law legalizing and encouraging homosexual marriage. Do not expect me to condone or accept the recent base decisions of leftist, above the the law judges.
Abomination?! What a fool.
FMCDH
Suddenly, in the past five years, marriage has gone from being an archaic institution that is the cause of society's problems to being the magic cure to every problem. The old, heterosexual marriage was held in contempt as a form of "oppression," and now the new, gay "marriage" is held in esteem as a sign of "liberation." What is happening is that after years of trying to tear down marriage from the outside, they are now trying to subvert marriage from the inside.
It is obvious that the gay agenda folks are not really interest in holy matrimony; their real intention is to destroy the natural family. What do you think is their motive? I discern two:
1. To create a free-for-all sexually loose atmosphere so whatever anyone feels like doing, he or she can indulge in with no societal or legal restrictions. Evidence for this is ACLU's support for NAMBLA, the support for child-adult sex by many professors and psychologists, and the admitted aim for lowering the age of consent by gay activists.
2. If/when the natural family is destroyed, the government will be the one to raise the children, resulting in total control of society as in "Brave New World". The collective comes before the family.
But Ruth married a MAN! Boaz, I believe. And they begat.
to what end?
you've stumbled upon another popular anti-gay spin point there jeremiah.
but the fact is that no "gay activists" of any account have ever aimed at lowering the age of consent just for the sake of lowering it. their admitted aim has been to eqaulize age of consent laws and "romeo and juliet" laws so that they treat gays and heteros the same (currently they do not in many states).
of all of the gays that you know personally, what portion of them do you suspect of being involved in this secret plot to impose a brave new world of free-for-all sexuality and government control?
In the same way that:
It is obvious that Islamic terrorists are not really interested in promoting Islam; their real intention is to destroy Islam by highjacking the word, 'Islam'. Islamic terrorists, are in fact, anti-Islam.
One doesn't have to be a shrink to understand that those who want to hijack the word, 'marriage,' are in fact, anti-marriage -- marriage as defined as a union between two people of the opposite sex. Yes, you are right. The homosexual community is seeking to destroy the sanctity of marriage by polluting it's meaning -- or perhaps falsely believing that gaining legal possession of the word, 'marriage' will sanctify their sexual habits.
A lemon is a lemon is a lemon regardless of how long you soak it in peach juice.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.