Replies

Thank you all for a very interesting and enlightening discussion. I'd like to share with all of you the conclusion your answers are leading me to, but first a little worldview background.

I believe the Bible accurately reflects the origins of man. Therefore, I believe we all have one common ancestor whose name is Noah. From Noah we have a basic understanding of G-d and righteousness which is reflected in the commonality of almost all of the world's religions. Despite our different developments on different continents, there are basic rights that are recognized the world over which lead our founders to declare them "unalienable" and coming from "the Creator." There may be other explanations but this is the one I accept.

I also believe that G-d created us with a basic need for Him and a basic knowledge of Him. These show themselves in a spiritual yearning and a conscience. Again, you may have your own explanation but this is mine.

Now let's look at the problem I have been wrestling with. Since about the 1960s there has been a concerted effort to deconstruct human sexuality. Where as there had been the notion that human sexuality was an expression of our nobility, the deconstruction has been to refer to it as an animal apetite, similar to our apetite for food. "They" took sex outside of marriage, then fidelity was removed, then love, to the point where marriage was only a piece of paper used to ruin a relationship or confer legitimacy on offspring. Even this latter is unimportant in today's society. Nobody will think twice if you're a bastard - it must means your parents have to do a little more work in writing their wills.

There is no evidence of a human conspiracy to deconstruct marriage, but there is evidence of a human conspiracy to reconstruct it. The homosexual agenda could best be described as a homosexual juggernaut. We've become so desensitized to homosexual behavior that, when an adult described fisting to a minor in an educators workshop there was more outrage that the "private" meeting had been recorded than in what the recording revealed. Nothing upsets us, nothing phases us. Most of us want it to go away and leave us alone.

Until the idea of homosexual marriage comes up. We have been uninterested in drawing lines. Homosexuals can do whatever they want as long as we can catch the football game and hopefully see Brittney Spears' new breasts. But marriage causes us to turn away from the tube at least long enough to say that enough is enough. Our opinion is so firm that even the 9 Dim dwarves, rather beholden to the homosexual lobby, have the courage to say no to homosexual marriage. They get around this by supporting marriage in everything but name, calling it "civil union" and the public accepts this and turns back to the tube. "Yeah, we'll let them have everything marriage gives them, just don't call it marriage. That's the ticket.

WHY? Why can America accept homosexual sex, which the Bible and centuries of tradition tell us is a twisted perversion, but not homosexual marriage? What is it about that word that caused the homosexual juggernaut to stumble? Nothing else got the public's attention, why marriage?

I had no answer when I started this thread. Now I am leaning toward one. We do still have a hint of the Divine Image in all of us, and we do still know that marriage is not just a physical union nor a legal institution. Somewhere deep within we remember Noah and the G-d he served. At some base level that most Americans don't even admit they have, they see a spiritual line is about to be crossed. And their spirits rose up and informed their consciences that if this line were crossed there would be no turning back. Homosexual "marriage" is not on the slippery slope, it's in the abyss. Their consciences have listened and they have acted by tellinge pollsters they could not support gay "marriage."

Absent a spiritual reaction which they don't understand and can't explain, I can't see any other reason why the idea of "homosexual marriage" would bother people any more than the idea of "free love."

I welcome your thoughts.

Shalom.

Your basic premise is that our laws should follow the moral code outlined in the Bible. It happens that I agree, with only the pragmatic caveat that it doesn't matter what laws are written down if the majority of the people do not choose to abide by them. A piece of paper solves nothing. It is the moral code of our society - which the majority will abide by whether anyone is watching or not - that truly guides our behavior.

In the best of all worlds, our society would feel guided by the moral code of the Bible - and again it wouldn't matter whether the guidance was reinforced with secular laws or not.

This is an area, though, where I think the furor over gay civil unions is really a sign of guilt on the part of 'normal' people. Homosexual acts are no worse - as a sin - that heterosexual immorality. And people know it. Yet if we celebrate the James Bond promiscuity in movies and TV, what basis do we have for telling homosexuals their own lifestyle is wrong? How many freepers have been divorced (for reasons other than adultery by their spouse)? We have lost our moral anchor, and blatant public lewdity is only a symptom of the root disease, as is the desire for homosexuals to have public validation through their claim to what has always been considered, 'an honorable estate.'

Step one: Let us (the normal, heterosexual, family-focused ones) get the beams out of our own eyes. Once the majority quit supporting public validation of heterosexual immorality, we'll have a better basis for declining - as a society - to validate homosexual immorality.

And a cornerstone of that, in both the doctrine of the Bible and the Constitution of this country, is that faith (and an associated moral code) can't be forced on someone. We need to keep our desires for society to operate on a moral basis separate from the laws, for if the only way we can get the majority to abide by our morals is at the point of a gun (under threat of legal sanction), then we've already lost.

I'd like to thank everyone on this thread for a great discussion, too. Rather than a lot of threads that denigrate into insults, both of fellow posters, and whatever group is being discussed, this thread has focused on ideas, rather than pre-packaged rhetoric.

Some thoughts from me on this discussion:

I can appreciate that the discussion of gay marriage, civil unions, and even the legal acceptance in Lawrence vs. Texas of private homosexual behavior is quite upsetting to people who view the world through a Judeo-Christian lens. The various religions, denominations, and sects that have developed from the Bible construct codes of conduct and behavior that keep their congregations functioning by social contract, and as a consequence, it is often necessary to draw lines between "us" and "them". Sometimes interim groups can be perceived, sort of "kind of like us, but not really us, but certainly not 'them'". I've seen this in some Christians who accept other Christians only if they are not Catholic, Mormon, etc., and have a tolerance of those from outside Christianity, if they are Jewish, for instance, when it is convenient on certain issues, like the government structure of Israel, for instance.

This line-drawing game goes on in each human life. It's necessary for our sanity! How else do you make sense of a world that has evil in it? I, for instance, consider myself pro-life, but I'm in favor of the death penalty. How do I do this? I draw the line between innocent life, and guilty life. The circumstances that challenge these lines are on the fringes, like insanity. I don't believe that we have the right to execute an insane criminal, but who is insane? I have no problem telling a woman who is pregnant by consensual sex that she should carry a baby to term, but what do I say to a pregnant 12 year old who was raped by her mother's boyfriend? Clearly, in the last case, there are two innocents to consider.

Some denominations have tried to come to grips with moral dilemmas raised by the need to treat gay people in our society fairly, with ancient Biblical injunctions to shun homosexuality. These churches have wrestled with the same dilemmas when it came to what to do about slavery, or the treatment of women, or racial equality. They see themselves properly as leaders of our society in dealing with these matters, and feel that they need to go forward from Biblical ideas that were relevant in an underpopulated world, but seem less so on a planet of six billion people, when deciding how to interpret language that was designed to fulfill the idea of "go forth and multiply".

Certainly, not every right-minded religious idea is right for our society. I was a Catholic during the mid 1980's when the US bishops were castigating Ronald Reagan for the military buildup of his Administration. War is hell, and does hurt a lot of people, but I'm glad that we got the payoff of the collapse of the Soviet Union during the Reagan-Bush years. The bishops' high minded idea was wrong, the Soviet bear responded to strength, not flower bouquets, and the good guys won. I suspect that is the way that many people here feel, that mainline Protestant denominations who are accepting of gay clergy, or are looking for ways to sanctify gay unions, are using high-minded (in their opinions), but mushy thinking in their analysis.

America, for better or worse, is the world's ultimate marketplace of ideas. Our Constitution enshrines change, if the people demand it, as much as it sanctifies fairness through constancy. Right now, the debate on gay marriage is joined, and important decisions are being made. The side that wins this debate is the side that convinces the most people in the middle that it is right. At this point, the middle says that while it's shocked by the Massachusetts court decision (because it probably wasn't paying attention), it really doesn't have an answer as to why gay people should not have some fairness in this area. The middle remembers when gay people were forced to be closeted, and it really doesn't want to shove them back in there, no matter what churchgoing conservatives think. The middle looks back with horror on gay bashing, and while it might have misgivings about hate-crime laws, it certainly doesn't want to see gay people being beaten up or killed because of their sexual orientation. Any arguments from the right that remind the middle of gay bashing are not going to influence anyone in the middle.

The same is true of religion based arguments. A powerful tradition in America is the idea that while each person has the right to practice their own religion, they do not have the right to impose the beliefs of that religion on others who do not believe. Certainly, a consensus born of religious thought or moral belief can infuse itself into law, but it needs to have a basis in objective moral reality, rather than just a reflection of mere ritual. An example of this is the repeal of "Sunday laws". When you have a majority government composed of people who ritualistically hold Sunday as a sacred day, you have laws that restrict alchoholic beverage sales on that day, or restrict businesses from opening on a "day of rest". A society that becomes more "live and let live" lets people decide whether they will work on Sunday, or buy a beer on that day. The people who wish to keep the Sabbath holy, get to do so, while the rights of others are not infringed.

The gay marriage debate centers on this. Unless conservatives can use this interim period where the middle is still uncomfortable with the idea of full gay marriage, but accepting of civil unions, as an opportunity to explain the actual harm that heterosexual marriage will endure by letting gays into the civil (but not religious) institution of marriage, then the period of discomfort will pass. Showing people in the middle that gay marriage and civil union are really the same thing, will only accellerate the process of acceptance of gay marriage, unless there is real harm shown. Just simply arguing that "it changes thousands of years of tradition," or "it's not Biblical," or "marriage is for procreation," is not going to do it. The folks in the middle have seen many traditions change, they are reluctant to infuse law with religion, and they know a lot of marriages that do not involve procreation, so these arguments will not wash. If conservatives want to win, they need to keep this as civil union, and preserve a distinction between full marriage, and what is essentially a contract right. The toothpaste is long gone out of the tube on civil union.

The fact that fundamentalist religious people are completely up in arms about this delights those on the left to no end. Expect them to be in society's face about this issue, and they'll do whatever they can to provoke an overreaction that will make them political hay. I'm sure they take some slight comfort whenever an abortion clinic is bombed, it gives them a chance to paint the pro-lifers as being so far away from the mainstream as to ridicule their ideas. They'd just love an opportunity to see a huge overplaying of the hand that Republicans have been dealt. They know that there's a period of time for the eventual societal acceptance of gay commitments, and they know that it's not going to happen before the 2004 election. If Republicans are seen as just saying "marriage is between a man and a woman", and offering the compromise of civil union where the courts force the issue, they can defuse this issue as cutting against them. The folks in the middle who are uncomfortable with even civil union can blame Howard Dean as the personification of it, and for those who are comfortable with civil union, Bush can win them over on other points, he has many to make. Howard can't bash Bush in a debate about his traditional view of marriage, after Howie's complained about making election debates being about "God, guns and gays".

The left won the abortion debate in this country, because the right didn't see them coming in time. If the right wants to win the gay marriage debate, then it had better change its tactics. There are some places where gay marriage and abortion would be acceptable, just like there are places where gay marriage or civil unions and abortion would never be acceptable. When we try to have the entire nation all one way, the left usually wins this debate.

Thanks again to ArGee for starting this thread, and thanks to all who provided light rather than heat.