More on Same-Sex Marriage, and Why It Isn't So Revolutionary After All

A couple months ago, I wrote a blog post about how I don't think same-sex marriage is a re-definition of marriage in our culture at all.

Now, Michael Horton (over on the White Horse Inn blog) is lending some credibility to my claim. He says,

"Both sides trade Bible verses, while often sharing an unbiblical—secularized—theological framework at a deeper level. If God exists for our happiness and self-fulfillment, validating our sovereign right to choose our identity, then opposition to same-sex marriage...is just irrational prejudice.

Given the broader worldview that many Americans (including Christians) embrace—or at least assume, same-sex marriage is a right to which anyone is legally entitled. After all, traditional marriages in our society are largely treated as contractual rather than covenantal, means of mutual self-fulfillment more than serving a larger purpose ordained by God. The state of the traditional family is so precarious that one wonders how same-sex marriage can appreciably deprave it.

Same-sex marriage makes sense if you assume that the individual is the center of the universe, that God—if he exists—is there to make us happy, and that our choices are not grounded in a nature created by God but in arbitrary self-construction. To the extent that this sort of “moralistic-therapeutic-deism” prevails in our churches, can we expect the world to think any differently?"

From either perspective, whether you are pro- or anti-same-sex marriage, we are getting what we deserve.

Is Homosexual Marriage Really a Re-definition of Marriage?

Is contemporary homosexual marriage a re-definition of marriage in America today? I think not.

Before you start posting nasty replies, let me explain.

Many proponents of traditional marriage in our society have stated as clearly as they can the danger of re-defining 'marriage' to include any other arrangement than a man and a woman in covenant relationship.  I have no problem with that.  I would be among those proponents of traditional marriage.

But is what we have in American today, and for the last few decades, anything resembling a covenant between a man and a woman?  Not even close.  As this author describes it, marriage has become about as disposable as toilet paper.  He (Peter Hitchens, the Christian sibling of the late, famous athiest Christopher Hitchens) says, "Why should we care so much about stopping a few hundred homosexuals getting married, when we cannot persuade legions of heterosexuals to stay married? It is a complete loss of proportion."

My parents were married from December 22, 1953, until May 27, 2012 (the day Dad went home to heaven).  That's 58 1/2 years, if you don't have a calculator handy.  How?  They weren't raised in a culture where marriage had been re-defined to an arrangement of convenience.  Folks like my parents raised their kids with the same ideas, but many have participated in the re-definition anyway.

Why is this so? As Carl Trueman notes on the Ref21 blog, "...if homosexuality is a constitutive part of God's judgment, and not simply a cause of the same, then the advent of gay marriage is part of God's judgment (Romans 1) on the way marriage has been effectively dismantled by heterosexuals, some of whom are among the most loud-mouthed opponents of same-sex unions."

In other words, the re-definition of 'marriage' isn't a re-definition of traditional, covenant marriage at all; rather, it's the re-definition of some post-modern convenience we've created to try to justify ourselves before God and make sex between two uncommitted people legal and shameless.  All the modern homosexual re-definition does is throw off the trappings and vestiges of tradition.

Marriage was re-defined in our culture a long time ago, and what's happening now is really simply the wind blowing the stall door open and shut.  The horse left long ago, and has already died of starvation in the desert. There's no need to even bother shooting the poor thing.

Marriage and the Gospel- A Poetic Look

This young man posted a video that went viral a while back; now he's posted this one, which gets toward the heart of marriage as a picture of the gospel.  He's getting better every time.

Christian Love vs Self-Love

Recently, the bumbling buffoon Pat Robertson, who calls himself a pastor, but is rather more a pester than a pastor, made an idiotic remark that a man was justified in divorcing his wife after she became ill with alzheimer's disease, and he was lonely.

I agree with another blogger: this is a repudiation of the gospel of Christ.

In contrast, watch this video about a man who left his job to spend all of his time with his stricken wife.



If there's any divorce to happen, it needs to be the divorce between the church as a whole and Pat Robertson (and all the other prosperity-gospel nuts like him).

I made the following comment in my Sunday School lesson last Sunday:  "Barack Obama is not nearly the threat to the church in America as is Joel Osteen."  I thought there might be some disagreement (you see, Obama isn't very popular here in Texas).  There was none.  The first comment I heard was, "Amen.  Preach it."

Now I think I'd be almost as correct to go back and re-state the comment with Robertson's name in place of Osteen's.