A Lighter Moment: Same Sex Marriage Blogalogue
Friday November 21, 2008
Categories: Same Sex Marriage Blogalogue
I met Rod yesterday, and we had a great time sitting on his porch, drinking coffee. I can say, with all candor, that I thoroughly enjoyed his company and now consider him a friend. I'm working on a post today...
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About The New Christians
Tony Jones is the author of many books, including The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier and The Sacred Way: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life. He is a leader in the emergent church movement and a renowned expert on postmodern theology and the American church landscape.
Find out more about Tony, his books, and his speaking schedule at his website.
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Consequences of gay marriage redefinition: heterosexual women and children lose all legal protections and recourse against abandonment by spouses.
The child-rearing/family responsibility of heterosexuals is biological, and is what marriage law is all about.
To redefine marriage law as NOT pertaining to "child-rearing" protections (i.e., gay marriage) is to expose women and children to grave material risk of abandonment.
Humanity cannot afford to redefine marriage law around non-family non-reproducing couples, so long as the material rights and protections of women and children are at stake.
Give gays their own contracts that address their own life situation. We must *not* allow a "one-marriage-contract-fits-all" disaster to occur. The economic well-being of heterosexual women and children is at stake.
"Consequences of gay marriage redefinition: heterosexual women and children lose all legal protections and recourse against abandonment by spouses."
Do you have any evidence to support that astonishingly paranoid claim? Any rational or scientific argument whatsoever? Is this the experience in Mass? The Netherlands? Canada? I thought not.
Malcolm-
Does the Graphjam come with any proof that existing families are in no way destroyed from the results of this pending legislation?
Hey Tony why not change the definition of other things God has given us also? Like the Sabbath, Dominion, the church, etc.? Gay marriage is an oxymoron, it doesn't even begin to make sense. When you change the definition of marriage you destroy the very purpose of the institution (to glorify God through a trinitarian relationship (man, woman, Jesus) by reflecting His glory in the marriage relationship.
Marriage is given and defined by God. It is about the gospel, it is about "Jesus and the church."
"Submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church." Ephesians 5:21-32
We don't have the right to change or redefine marriage. If we do, it ceases to be marriage, we change the entire meaning.
Malcolm swall: Do you have any evidence to support that astonishingly paranoid claim? Any rational or scientific argument whatsoever?
A Walker: I have legal proof. The stipulations of gay "marriage" law would be that marriage is a temporal cohabitation/romance contract easily dissoluble by one partner without penalty and with no material risk to the other partner. That's what the legal code would be.
Now, insert heterosexual women and infants/children into that legal contract, and presto, serial victimization with no legal recourse for women and children!
In contrast, the legal code of traditional marriage protects women and children, as it is based around the procreative/family realities and responsibilities that active heterosexuals encounter at a 98% rate of incidence over their lifetime.
The legal code of "marriage" proposed by SSM advocates offers zero protections of women and children. Men are free to exit the contract, and women and children are left to destitution and chronic poverty.
If we are using Christ and his church as an example of marriage, then it would actually be more biblical for a husband to have multiple wives...just a thought.
The word Marriage may have derived from Religion, but the act there of didn't. The conjoining of individuals into a relationship is based on our primitive need for love and companionship, for social or legal engagement. The Traditional Christian Marriage may have been blessed by God. But the earliest of such unions existed thousands of years before, this Christian Institution was created. With History, we are given hundreds of thousands of years of human and social change. Your choice of Religion is your free will, choosing your mate is the root of our existence.
1 Christ
1 Church
The multiple thing doesn't work...
A Walker and Brian, What happened to love? You can disagree without attacking. As it is now, a marriage is easily dissoluable by one partner you don't need gays to make that happen. I work in family law, I've worked with gay and strait couples. The ones that have been most concerned with their children through that difficult process are the gay parents.
I have a feeling that has to do with the love that has to be there to make something happen on purpose, rather than a teenaged accident.
I think Tony meant this as a lighter moment, as in his title for this post, "Same Sex Marriage Blogalogue: A Lighter Moment". Sometimes we humans take ourselves too seriously. We need to lighten up more!
Jen: As it is now, a marriage is easily dissoluable by one partner you don't need gays to make that happen.
A Walker: Marriage defenders understand this and have been trying to repeal the "No-fault" divorce nightmare which removed legal protections from women and children and destroyed the permanence of marriage. Gay marriage is a further erosion away from permanent marriage based around procreation of families (the fundamental basis of marriage law protections).
Making gays and heterosexuals live under the same contract law when their circumstances and realities are entirely different is nonsensical and bad law. Moreover, it will further erode the marriage social contract by opening it up to people who have no expectation of procreation (the reason for "marriage" in the first place). Once that's the case, why deny marriage to any two or three or four people who wish to cohabitate?
No one -- NO ONE -- serious is talking about forcing churches to perform marriages against their theologies. Religious blessings are different from marriage LICENSES.
Maybe the gay marriage fight should be retitled the gay CIVIL marriage fight. Does that clarify it for you?
A Walker:
Polygamists procreate all the time.
So it strikes me that bans -- or permissions for -- gay marriage are entirely irrelevant to your argument that gay marriage will lead to polygamy.
One might even say the opposite is true, that saying marriage is linked only to heterosexuality, rather than a committed consenting adult COUPLE, permits all kinds of variations of heterosexuality to be included in the definition or marriage.
Of course marriage law applies to heterosexuals only, for the act of heterosexual intercourse places women (and the children they conceive in the act) at immediate grave economic risk. Gays have no such issue requiring contracts to ensure material provision.
As for polygamy, it does reproduce perfectly robustly, *but then the man can't provide materially for all those people,* and the women and children are left destitute and fending for themselves. So polygamy contracts, like gay marriage contracts, fail to protect women and children from destitution.
Polygamy is simply not workable in the modern world, even though it was essential to tribal survival in the ancient world.
And this was the lighter moment.
Is there a sense of humor in the house?
No wonder Jesus preferred tax-collectors and social cast-outs to the hyper-devout. We know God has a sense of humor, don't recall his forbidding the rest of us to ignore that aspect of "made in his image".
Yikes.
Strictly for the record, gays are intrinsically involved in maintaining society. We are overrepresented in the teaching, health-care, policing and military professions. Sort of like the Uncle Wolf explanation for homosexuality in other high-level mammals.
From some of whom we are descended.
The point about cultural & earth-wide consequences of allowing Gays to marry was not actually commented upon.
My Comment: Good point. Major geological catastrophes likely won't ensue - as our logic is not able to connect these 2 events at this time. Nor can I personally see noticeable effect in my own way of life.
If we take a second and imagine the personal and human-wide consequences of allowing SSM, what changes in our existence would come about?
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