Sunday, October 3, 2010

Marriage is God’s idea.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway explains in a new article in Christianity Today, “Consider changes in divorce laws. The spread of no-fault divorce in the 1970s didn’t just make it easier for men and women to get out of troubled marriages. It also changed people's ideas about the permanence of the institution and the responsibility parents have to their children.”
Hemingway then points out that marriage rates fell and cohabitation rates increased “as men and women lost confidence in the institution.” And Hemingway concludes, quite rightly, that “legal changes have consequences.”
Ziegler Hemingway sees into the core of the issue when she writes:
To be sure, some advocates of same-sex marriage hope that heterosexual marital norms of monogamy and fidelity would be transferred to same-sex unions. But since these norms are based on the ideal that marriage is the union of a man and a woman making a permanent and exclusive commitment for the purpose of bearing and rearing children, it would be irrational to expect same-sex - whose sexual relations bear no risk of procreation - to share the same norms.
We should note the word "irrational" in that quotation. That is the crucial point. There is a logic in traditional marriage that points toward monogamy that is missing in same-sex relationships. That logic is built into the structure of the human person as male and female. We are essentially (not accidentally or by preference or choice) relational and the core of our being is our maleness and our femaleness. To be human is to be one or the other and to be male or female is to be oriented toward a certain vocation in terms of roles and duties.
Modernity hates talk of fixed roles and duties because it is essentially a rebellion against human nature itself. But Christianity is a joyful "Yes" to our having been created in this way - as male and female in the image of God. Marriage is God’s idea and Marriage is guided and protected by the Law.



Endnote
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, “Same Sex, different Marriage”
Chuck Colson, “Homosexuality, Marriage & Family”
Craig Carter, “Homosexuality, Marriage”

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