The Mainstream Media and Its Ignorance on Marriage

How do we know that Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn is foolish? Well, let’s take a look at Sunday’s column and count the ways:

1.) He believes that the same-sex marriage debate will “fade into history.”

2.) He believes that “ten years from now, when a betrothed or married couple is same-sex, it will be just as matter of fact as to a couple today being interfaith or interracial.”

3.) He apparently thinks the elimination of sexual complementarity from the legal definition of marriage can change non-marriages into real marriages as opposed to merely unions recognized as marriages.

4.) He has a fanciful notion that it is “progress” for the government to recognize same-sex unions as “marriages.”

5.) Zorn’s belief that if six, or seven, or 40 judges overturn the will, knowledge, and collective wisdom of thousands of Americans—many of whom could likely run intellectual circles around these hubristic judges—means next to nothing in regard to the ontological reality of marriage. What judicial hubris tells us is that we’re fast becoming a nation untethered to either the Constitution or truth. And in the process, we the people are losing both our freedoms—chief among them the free exercise of religion—and our capacity to govern ourselves.

6.) Those former supporters of true marriage who, in Zorn’s words, “have quietly folded up their tents” should be ashamed and are as culpable for the cultural damage done, including the impending persecution of dissidents and the suffering of children, as Zorn and his accomplices. While Zorn and his ideological ilk foolishly gloat, children, like the “banished babies of Ireland” are intentionally severed from their mothers or fathers. Christians have a responsibility to stand boldly for the rights of children no matter the personal cost.

More important, any church leader or lay person who folds up his tent, either abandoning God’s design for marriage and sexuality or abandoning a persistent and courageous explication of them will eventually lose respect for the authority of Scripture in other areas of life. And the abandonment of faith in the authority of Scripture undermines the entire American project which, as Eric Metaxas and others explain, depends on virtue, which in turn depends on faith.

Here are some other truths of which Zorn (and scores of foolish Americans like him) seems profoundly ignorant:

Homosexuality per se bears no points of correspondence to skin color. In other words, they are not analogous.

Legalized same-sex “marriage” per se bears no points of correspondence to interracial marriage. In other words, they are not analogous.

The belief that marriage is inherently sexually complementary is no more hateful than the belief that marriage is inherently binary.

The government’s legal recognition of only sexually complementary unions as marriages no more denies citizens the “right” to marry than does the government’s legal recognition of only unions between two people not closely related by blood denies citizens the right to marry.

Claiming that marriage is solely about who loves whom with no connection to reproductive potential necessarily means legalizing plural marriages and incestuous marriages. Actually, if marriage is solely constituted by the presence of intense loving feelings with no connection to reproductive potential, then there is no reason for government involvement at all. The government has zero vested interest in recognizing, affirming, regulating, or promoting deeply loving inherently non-reproductive types of relationships.

There is no more government interest or public value in affirming and recognizing as marriages those sterile homoerotic unions than there is in affirming other deeply loving relationships like platonic friendships. Homosexual couples cannot suddenly justify their unions as “marriages” simply based on the presence of children, because they’ve already argued that marriage has no connection to children. There are many people in all sorts of relationship configurations that are raising children. If it’s the mere presence of children that makes a union deserving of being called a “marriage,” then any two or more people raising children together should be allowed to marry—or at least any two or more who really love each other.

No, the debate will never go away. Legally recognizing homoerotic unions as marriages is as profoundly wrong as were legal prohibitions of interracial marriage. While prohibitions of interracial marriage were based on the false belief that blacks and whites are inherently different, prohibitions of same-sex “marriage” are based on the true belief that men and women are different and that those differences have meaning for the public good.

No, the debate over the nature of marriage and the government’s recognition and regulation of marriage will never go away. If “progressives”—our current public censors—don’t ban dissent on issues related to homoerotic identity politics, this debate, like the one over legalized feticide, will persist.

Protecting true marriage is second only to protecting the lives of the least among us in terms of its importance to the health and welfare of this once great nation. The twin moral crimes of legalizing the slaughter of the unborn and legally recognizing homoerotic unions as “marriages” are dramatic manifestations of the enmity between unsaved man and God.

This issue will remain until the end of this great nation or the end of redemptive history, whichever comes first.

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