It bears repeating because some people refuse to listen. God invented marriage, not man. God designated marriage, not as a contractual agreement, but as a covenant. Governments may be able to regulate contracts, but a covenant is based on the laws of God and not man. Thus marriage is an institution outside of the bounds of government.
Government was happy to intrude into the marriage because when we gave tax exemptions based on marital status, or when we taxed a person’s estate upon their death, or when the State stepped in to direct the disposition of an estate, or when we used the State to enforce marital fidelity or grant divorces, we had to allow the State to define who was “married” and who was not.
As with all things Statist, the secular State’s definition of marriage and divorce has come to have more weight in society than God’s definition.
God defines marriage as being between men and women. While many men whom God called righteous in the Bible practiced polygamy, Jesus is quoted in Matthew chapter 19 that from the beginning of humanity, it was God’s intent that marriage would only be one man and one woman. In Mark chapter 10, Jesus stated that God, not man, joins the husband and wife and the two are “one flesh”, an act that by its very nature is only heterosexual.
God defines sexual relations between people of the same sex as against His law, that is immoral. In Revelation 22:15, a book dictated to John by Jesus, God tells us that anyone who practices sexual immorality will not be granted eternal life.
These are ecclesiastical considerations that are outside of secular government, that is unless we want government to police sexual behavior between consenting adults based on the standards of the Bible, assuming we can agree what those are. Do we want Congress to have that debate?
Maybe it is time to get government out of the marriage business and to return it to the private sphere. The problem for me today is that people who want to call themselves “married” against God’s law (as I read it) are willing to use the State to force me to recognize that marriage, which I cannot do. The want to have the State’s public education system indoctrinate my children that homosexual marriage is “normal”. They want to force me to subsidize the homosexual marriage in the tax code just like the godly marriage is subsidized, and they will use state agencies to punish me for “discrimination” if I decline to accept their status in any way.
If the State must force me to acknowledge its power to declare two men to be “married”, then I must support efforts to remove that power from the State. If people who don’t want God defining their personal morality demand a separation of church and State then let us also have separation of marriage and State as well. If those people don’t want any displays of the Ten Commandments in government buildings, they cannot hide behind the Commandments that protect marriage when it comes marriage that God cannot sanction.
If some Republican senators support same sex “marriage”, let us examine the counter-factual case. What should the law be with respect to people who decide to live together without being married as the State would define it?
The answer clearly is that citizens have the right to form whatever private relationships they please and the State has now power over them. This is a basic liberty and one that is also protected by the Tenth Amendment (”The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”)
In other words, the State is powerless to regulate marriage as much as it attempts to claim and act otherwise. My reasoning is simple: States commonly forbid marriage under some circumstances such as people who are related too closely such as cousins. But they are free to live together anyway. It is just that they will not be considered to be “married” as the State defines it.
So, what exactly is going on when two people who otherwise do not qualify to be married by the State, and who could live together, demand that the State marry them? I think that such people are far more interested in destroying the institution of marriage as God defined it than they are in forcing their way into the institution.
As I stated in my previous post, because forces hostile to God’s institution of marriage have seized control of the State mechanisms for defining, defending and enforcing marriage, for the sake of marriage it is time to remove the regulation of it from the State and return it to being a private matter.