Concerns About Same-Sex Marriage

SOURCE:  Taken from Eternal Perspective Ministries/Randy Alcorn

Expressing Our Concerns about Same Sex Marriage in a Pluralistic Culture

These are mostly (with a few exceptions) extrabiblical reasons for the social and spiritual importance of marriage continuing to be the church and state blessed union of one man and one woman:

· Men and women fulfill different roles in society and the family; children need to see and experience those roles to understand and emulate them.

· A male father and a female mother nurture and protect children in different and equally important ways; children need both forms of nurture and protection.

· Society has flourished on the one man, one woman model of marriage for thousands of years; to change it will introduce change, some of which will produce negative social issues we cannot foresee.

· The mother, besides giving birth, fulfills the important role of nourishing the children, which creates a bond between mother and child that lasts throughout life.

· Men and women see the world differently, and a child must have the benefit of both perspectives in order to live a balanced life.

· Children learn about their opposite gender from the parent of the opposite gender.

· Maintaining hearth and home requires skills dominant in both men and women: women are better suited to multitasking, the very requirement for raising multiple children, while men are more project oriented, the quality needed by the hunter/gather.

· God, who arranged the command structure in the home to minimize conflict and maximize nurture, has stated that the husband (man) is the head of the home.

· Marriage has been the societal building block for millennia; it has developed as the method by which cultures pass on, from generation to generation, who and what they are. Since cultures are made up of men, women and children, to effectively pass on cultural values the family should reflect the cultural makeup of one man, one woman (an equal number), and their natural children where possible.

· Marriage between one man and one woman is perfectly integrated by sex. An identical number of men and women get married each year, side-by-side, hand-in-hand. The mechanism of marriage is perfectly balanced. No man may become a husband unless a woman becomes a wife at the same moment.

· As the societal building block, the family has also developed as the best gauge—the canary in the mine—that protects culture from harmful change. Since change can harm men, women, and children (and the family as a whole), the most effective harbinger of detrimental societal change is the traditional family.

· A procreative marriage, one where children are the offspring of the husband and wife, is more stable and long lasting—the husband and wife have the added incentive of keeping the relationship healthy and alive since leaving it involves leaving their natural children.

· Children have the inherent human right to expect that they will be born into a societal and spiritual norm, the best family structure their God and society has created, and not into a family structure that thousands of years of human history has deemed to be, at best, a social experiment. Children have a right to be born into intact one man, one woman families. The society should work to make sure that happens as often as humanly possible.

· Marriage encourages men to share the burdens of child rearing and binds fathers to their children.

· Marriage provides the optimal setting in which mothers and fathers can raise their own boys and girls to enter a world that consists exclusively of men and women.

· From time to time war visits a nation, and in our culture, and we suspect others, male soldiers (the predominant gender of soldiers) fight more fiercely and selflessly, sustain greater hardships, maintain more steadfast commitments, when fighting for their families—wives and natural children, or girlfriends.

“Homophobia” and discrimination have nothing to do with opposition to same-sex marriage. Opposition to it is not an attack on homosexuality or homosexuals; it is simply the belief that marriage should remain between a man and a woman, based on practical cultural and social reasons as the list above makes clear.

Also, “discrimination” necessarily involves infringement of a basic human right. A marriage license is not a basic human right. It is a privilege which has always required the government’s permission, as do many other parts of life, such as getting a driver’s license or a business license (to sell food, for example). Just as the ability to freely move about on roads and the ability to pursue the occupation of one’s choice both require certain preconditions, so it must be true of marriage. One of those preconditions for the granting of this privilege (in addition to age and health based
considerations) is that the participants must be one man and one woman . . . .