Dennis Prager mentioned this article on his show today, and I thought I would link to it, since it is somewhat complementary to my own secular case against gay marriage.
Excerpt:
So, the question is whether redefining marriage in the most radical way ever conceived — indeed completely changing its intended meaning — is good for society.
It isn’t.
The major reason is this: Gender increasingly no longer matters. There is a fierce battle taking place to render meaningless the man-woman distinction, the most important distinction regarding human beings’ personal identity. Nothing would accomplish this as much as same-sex marriage.
The whole premise of same-sex marriage is that gender is insignificant: It doesn’t matter whether you marry a man or a woman. Love, not gender, matters.
Some examples of this war on gender:
- This year Harvard University appointed its first permanent director of bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer student life. The individual, Vanidy Bailey, has asked that he/she never be referred to as he or she, male or female. Harvard has agreed.
- In 2010 eHarmony, for years the country’s largest online dating service, was sued for only matching men and women. Its lack of same-sex matchmaking meant that it violated anti-discrimination laws in some states. As a result, eHarmony was forced to begin a same-sex online service.
- Each year more and more American high schools elect girls as homecoming kings and boys as homecoming queens. Students have been taught to regard restricting kings to males or queens to females as (gender-based) discrimination.
- When you sign up for the new social-networking site, Google Plus, you are asked to identify your gender. Three choices are offered: Male, Female, Other.
- Catholic Charities, which operates the oldest ongoing adoption services in America, has had to end its adoption work in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., because the governments there regard placing children with married man-woman couples before same-sex couples as discriminatory.
Increasingly, even the mother-father ideal is being shattered in this battle to render the male-female distinction insignificant.
- The socialist French government has just announced that in the future no government-issued document will be allowed to use the words “mother” or “father.” Only the gender-neutral term “parent” will be acceptable in France.
- And in Rhode Island this year, one school district cancelled its father-daughter dance after the ACLU threatened to sue the district for gender discrimination. Only parent-child events, not father-daughter dances or mother-son ballgames, will be allowed.
And all this is happening before same-sex marriage is allowed. Imagine what will happen should same-sex marriage become the law of the land.
It will hasten the end of the male-female distinction and of any significance to mothers or fathers as distinctive entities.
It will mean that those who, for religious or other reasons, wish to retain the man-woman definition of marriage will be legally and morally as isolated as racists are today.
And it will mean that teachers and other adults who ask little boys and girls who they would like to marry, will, in order to be in sync with the morality of our times, have to make it clear that it might be someone of the same sex. “Will you marry a boy or a girl?” will be the only non-bigoted way to ask young people about their marital plans.
Dennis Prager is a Jewish scholar – he’s not coming from a Christian perspective. And in this article, he doesn’t mention God or the Bible at all.
When it comes to any issue, my approach is to look at what the Bible says to get my basic position, to clarify it with good history and good theology, and then to find evidence from outside the Bible to confirm it and to make it practical and effective. The evidence from outside the Bible is also useful to speak about what the Bible says with people who don’t accept the Bible – and even the existence of God. If you want to influence the culture, you have to ready to speak to anyone – even people outside of church!
WINTERY KNIGHT 