This post is for my fellow conservatives. It's something for you to know, and possibly to say (though without any hope of convincing) when you're asked the stupid, tired, tedious question by homosexual activists, "How does it hurt you if two men can legally marry each other?"
There are so many answers to this that it's difficult to know where to begin or stop. It can make one speechless just being confronted by such a crazy question. We could start with, "You're going to try to make businessmen refer to two men or two women as married in multiple discrimination-type situations, and that's coercion of conscience." Or how about, "I don't want my children taught that two women or two men can be married, and this is going to make that more prevalent in society and harder to avoid." Or, "If anyone and/or his children have any connection with popular culture, this will lead to more public homosexual expressions of affection and to confronting us and our kids with the normalization of sodomy in our faces more, and I consider that highly undesirable."
One could, as I say, go on and on.
But here's something for Christians and conservatives to know, to have said for you, and to have in your own mind even if it will be loudly denied by homosexual activists: The very notions of chastity and purity, and the condemnation of fornication, which are so central to Christian sexual ethics, become meaningless once homosexuality is treated as normal.
Homosexual activists who deny this are lying to you. I suppose it's just barely possible that some Christian pro-homosexual activist who denies it is lying to himself first, but it would have to be a really determined lie.
Think about the throat-choking sick joke of talking seriously to, say, a church high-school youth group about sexual purity and saving yourself for marriage if the church in question blesses same-sex unions and has active homosexuals among its leadership. We are then supposed to pretend that homosexuals have the same notions of purity, chastity, and "waiting until marriage" that we are trying to teach to these young people, but that they just apply them to same-sex couples and unions. Rrrright. Imagine trying to teach a group of church boys at some sort of boys' retreat that pornography is wrong while some of the boys are openly pairing up in male homosexual "boyfriend" couples and while this is smiled upon by the youth group leadership. Oh, homosexual and lesbian sodomy, no problem, just "wait until marriage" (or, as we should say, "marriage"). But pornography--that's bad. Don't get involved with that. Because sins of the flesh are bad. Lust is bad. Fornication is bad. We want to keep ourselves, our minds and our bodies, pure in order to honor God. Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Ghost. Rrrrright.
Homosexuals do not have the same notions of faithfulness, even to one another, that heterosexuals do. Here (a link I've put up before) is just one bit of evidence for this--homosexuals helping us to define down "monogamy."
But beyond that, all those quaint, Biblical ideas about purity, the evils of lasciviousness and fornication, and keeping oneself for one's spouse, are part of a total worldview--a worldview that is, in the jargon, intrinsically "heteronormative." Let's not fool ourselves: The homosexual agenda, the push for approval of homosexual relationships, is part of the sexual revolution. It is part of the attack on the entire set of ideas, as a set, that includes all that stuff about saving yourself for marriage, not looking at pornography, keeping pure, and being faithful to your spouse. It is part of sexual liberation for omnisexual behavior. (That's why "Gay Pride" parades are what they are--namely, something you don't want to know more about and wish you didn't know about if you do.) Those Biblical and Christian concepts of sexual purity cannot be ported over to a pro-homosexual context. The sweet and glorious notions of the complementarity of the sexes and of God's plan for marriage, taught throughout Scripture and engraved in our hearts in the natural law, are woven into their very warp and woof. That's why it should make you just a little bit sick to imagine the church youth group scenarios I referred to above in which youth leaders attempt to continue to teach Christian sexual mores with the "adjustment" of applying them to same-sex couples. It's a no-can-do thing.
Remember this the next time someone asks you how homosexual "marriage" hurts you: It makes a joke of all the crucial, Biblical ideas of sexual purity that are so important to marriage itself and to preparing our young people for marriage. In this sense, every verse in the Bible about the evils of sexual sin and lust, every injunction to purity and chastity, is a verse against homosexuality, even if it isn't mentioned in that location.
If your church, God forbid, embraces the homosexual agenda and approves of homosexuality as not sinful, that is the end of chastity as a serious concept in your church. If you don't want your child taught in Sunday School and church youth group a crazed, warped notion of "chastity" that applies to Bill and Jimmy (high school "sweethearts" who ought to wait for sex until they get "married"), and if you also don't want these ideas simply to fall off the radar altogether while still bringing your child up in that church (which seems to me, actually, more likely) get out fast at the first indication that your church leadership approves of homosexuality.
The life you save may be one more precious to you than your own.
The question with which you begin your post has indeed proven powerful in our society. People seem incapable resisting it, much less refuting it. Yet, the shortest, simplest answer to it is the most appropriate...and it's only one word: Children!
ReplyDeleteThat is, a society that sanctions homosexual marriage teaches society's children that this path of life is as desirable and acceptable as any other - which is, of course, a lie. And all adults - even the homosexuals know it's a lie - BUT THE CHILDREN DON'T. And that's why the sanctioning of homosexual marriage is such a pernicious evil. It deceives children.
Promiscuous sex (of which homosexuality is only one of the more blatant examples) is by no means the only evil we have in America today. It is perhaps not even half the evil we have today. But it is emblematic of our descent into immorality. Unless its tide is turned, God's wrath on our nation will make our children's and grandchildren's lives miserable...and we will have to bear the blame and shame of having made it so.
Since I brought up children myself, Mike, I'm certainly not going to disagree with you. I would add, though, that children act as a sort of magnifying lens. We sometimes see the evil of something more clearly in relation to children even though the evil was already there in relation to all of us. _I_ don't want to see two men kissing, but as I already know about homosexuality, it is _worse_ for my innocent children to see it. And so forth. Adults will be harmed by the destruction of chastity as, of course, they already have been. Children will be harmed by it both in their childhood and after they grow up, because of the way they will have grown up.
ReplyDeleteTo clarify, I meant "brought up children" in the post.
ReplyDeleteYes, Lydia, I think children as "a magnifying lens" is the right way to put it.
ReplyDeleteLydia, this "how can this hurt you" so-called question (it is not ever meant as a question but as an argument stopper anyway) springs out of a false view of what society is, and what it means for society to proscribe something publicly. This false view typically rests on a libertarian idea of society, one that presumes (without argument, of course) that "what hurts you" can only be stated in terms of harming your body, or harming the property that you have legitimate title to. Given that meaning, of course, it is almost impossible to answer the question in a worthwhile manner.
ReplyDeleteSo our strategy, then, must be to re-set the terms of the discussion by not allowing this presumed paradigm to be accepted, and instead respond with something that either insists on a more real paradigm, or at least ratchets up the state of the question by casting doubt on the paradigm itself. Perhaps a pithy response of "and how does my stating publicly that 'you are not married and appear to be on your way to hell' harm you? More generally, how does "hate speech' harm anyone? Calling gays "married" amounts to hate speech in my religion.
Tony, good point. And I like the "hate speech" point.
ReplyDeleteLiberals are very good at understanding "harm" to include immaterial harm in the form of a societal atmosphere when they are trying to rid the world of "sexism" and "homophobia." But when we try to talk about social atmosphere, suddenly they turn into literal-minded libertarians who can't see any harm that isn't physical.