Defend What Marriage Used to Mean

A FB friend of mine posted this concerning my opposition to gay marriage.

What is the problem with saying and thinking, I am happy that you are happy. Not everyone in this life is going to choose to live their life in the same manner, that is one of complexities of free agency. I happen to agree that should you choose to reject customers due to their life style then you are in the wrong, unless they are attempting to engage you to commit a crime, sux it up and respect your customers right to choose, should you not wish to practice business as such then build yourself a commune and move there.

This was my response.

 I don't know that I would have the stomach to deny a wedding cake for a gay wedding. In real life, I might just avoid the controversy. I will defend the right of others to do so. 

It is possible to say, "I am happy you are happy" 

And also say to your own conscience and possibly your family or co-workers, "Conjugal marriage is the ideal arrangement to raising healthy, productive, responsible, capable children. Children have an inherit right to be raised by the parents who created them. For their parents to model love towards each others and for them to create an environment of respect, love and growth." 

Just because the ideal does not happen does not mean it does not exist. That it should not be sought. Gay marriage is just another development in the redefinition of marriage over the last half century or so. Birth control has allowed us to more easily separate conjugal relations with conception. That there is a natural relationship between romantic love, marriage, sex and creating and raising children. One of the main reasons for marriage is help create a bond between a man and his offspring. For him to commit to and follow through on continuing to love and support his wife and the children he creates.  

Just because birth control, no fault divorce and now gay marriage are seeking to change marriage to only one component of what marriage used to mean, does not mean that we should not try to remember what it used to mean. That by abandoning some of the crucial components of what marriage used to mean generally, has dramatic consequences for our society.

See also discussingmarriage.org

Here is a FB thread for and against conjugal marriage as the only valid definition of marriage.

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The freakout isn’t about homosexuality per se, it’s about the secular world shoving its idea of sexual morality down the throats of orthodox Christians. If you haven’t read Rod’s piece Sex After Christianity, you really should, and if you haven’t, I think you should be able to connect the dots between the Christian cosmology of sex and the Christian opposition to same-sex marriage as a “condensed symbol” of Christian resistance to secularism writ large. ("Burnt by the Sol", Rod Dreher, Apr 2, 2015)

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Our post-Christian culture, then, is an “anti-culture.” We are compelled by the logic of modernity and the myth of individual freedom to continue tearing away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified. 

Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology. In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen. ("Sex After Christianity: Gay marriage is not just a social revolution but a cosmological one", Rod Dreher, Apr 2, 2015)

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'... Gold told me that church leaders must be made “to take homosexuality off the sin list.” 

His commandment is worthy — and warranted.' 

Not “must be persuaded,” but “must be made.” Compelled. Forced. And not forced to change our behavior, but forced to change what we believe. Because You Must Approve.

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Can you imagine the outcry if Ross Douthat, an orthodox Catholic colleague of Bruni’s, writing a piece endorsing as “worthy — and warranted” the idea that pro-LGBT Christians and others “must be made to put homosexuality back on the sin list”? I’m a conservative Christian who believes the traditional teaching, and I would find such a coercive statement appalling. But of course nobody on that side seems to have the slightest doubt about their cause, their motives, or their methods. None. In a holy war, there is no room for doubt.

Can you imagine the outcry if the Times published a column saying that Jews or Muslims must be “made” to quit believing a tenet of their religion? If socialists must be “made” to disavow any of their political convictions?

But not when the target is conservative Christians who persist in their heresy. ("Christians ‘Must Be Made’ to Bow", Rod Dreher, Apr 4, 2015)

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A critical mass of families built on such marriages

A family built on the marriage of a man and woman supplies the best setting for God’s plan to thrive—the setting for the birth of children, who come in purity and innocence from God, and the environment for the learning and preparation they will need for a successful mortal life and eternal life in the world to come. A critical mass of families built on such marriages is vital for societies to survive and flourish. That is why communities and nations generally have encouraged and protected marriage and the family as privileged institutions. It has never been just about the love and happiness of adults. (General Conference Apr 2015, D. Todd Christofferson)

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Update 2017-08-24

I believe that there are biological as well as social/psychological factors involved in sexual orientation. The reason for each persons sexual orientation lies somewhere in the spectrum between the two.

If the church does anything other than hold up a man marrying a women then having children as the ideal, it changes an elementary aspect of what marriage has meant for millennia.

I am not sure what role homosexuality plays in God's plan. I do know that homosexuals do play a role because God loves them infinitely.