Was marriage \u201cequality\u201d the real goal of the gay marriage movement? Or was it something else?<\/p>\n
Both before and after the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges , some Christians argued that allowing same-sex couples to marry is not inconsistent with traditional Christian teaching on marriage.<\/p>\n
At the heart of these arguments is the assertion that same-sex relationships are, to borrow a phrase from gay writer Andrew Sullivan, \u201cvirtually normal.\u201d That is, same-sex relationships are, with one very obvious exception, not all that different from traditional marriages. Thus, just as the Supreme Court held that similarly-situated couples should be treated equally under law, similarly-situated couples should be treated equally in our churches.<\/p>\n
The problem is that same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples are not nearly as alike as those making these arguments would have us believe.<\/p>\n
This reality was amply demonstrated in a recent broadcast of \u201cWeekend All Things Considered.\u201d Host Arun Rath spoke to J. Bryan Lowder of Slate, who worried about the impact of the Court\u2019s decision on gay culture.<\/p>\n
By \u201cgay culture,\u201d Lowder wasn\u2019t talking about a particular fashion sense and a fondness for Judy Garland. What he had in mind was the ability to \u201cimagine different ways of being in romantic relationships and loving.\u201d For some gays and lesbians, this \u201cmeant monogamous relationships that looked exactly like a married couple … [without] the legal imprimatur of the state. But for other people, they had many different kinds of arrangements.\u201d Emphasis on many.<\/p>\n
Lowder was concerned about losing \u201csome of that imagination that the gay community has had in the past to think about how to live in different ways and … offer a critique to straight culture of how we can arrange our romantic lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
In other words, LGBT folks are just like straight folks except when they\u2019re not. They want to be married like everyone else, except when they don\u2019t want to be. They want to embrace bourgeois domesticity, except when they don\u2019t and, instead, prefer to use their imagination, as he put it.<\/p>\n
Lowder is hardly an outlier. Last year, in a Daily Beast article provocatively entitled \u201cWere Christians Right About Gay Marriage All Along?\u201d gay activist Jay Michaelson acknowledged that there \u201cis some truth to the conservative claim that gay marriage is changing, not just expanding, marriage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michaelson cited a 2013 study finding that \u201cabout half of gay marriages surveyed … [are] not strictly monogamous.\u201d He called this fact \u201cwell-known in the gay community,\u201d adding that \u201cwe assume it\u2019s more like three-quarters\u201d that are not monogamous. They are, to cite a now-popular phrase, \u201cmonagam-ish.\u201d<\/p>\n
Michaelson admitted that his straight friends who believed that they \u201cwere fighting for marriage equality, not marriage redefinition,\u201d felt \u201cduped.\u201d But he was unapologetic. In his words, \u201cactual monogamy has never been an actual norm,\u201d as opposed to an ideal.<\/p>\n
Michaelson seems to think that because some men have been unfaithful, monogamy should not be an expectation of marriage. The vast majority of women, by the way, would undoubtedly disagree.<\/p>\n
This brings to mind an exchange between Andrew Sullivan and conservative columnist Mona Charen more than 20 years ago. In response to Sullivan\u2019s claim that marriage would domesticate gay men\u2019s sex drives, Charen replied that marriage doesn\u2019t domesticate men, women do.<\/p>\n
This, my friends, is sexual complementarity in a pithy nutshell. The sexes are different, and each promises the other something different that will contribute to their union and the wellbeing of their offspring.<\/p>\n
Frankly, Christians who support same-sex marriage have been had. The question is: Now that they know what\u2019s really going on, will they change their minds?<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
Copyright (c) 2015 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. “BreakPoint” is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Was marriage \u201cequality\u201d the real goal of the gay marriage movement? Or was it something else? Both before and after the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges , some Christians argued that allowing same-sex couples to marry is not inconsistent with traditional Christian teaching on marriage. At the heart of these arguments is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[215,594,68,2521],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6137"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}