I’m presenting a series here called Exposing the Religious Right.

The introduction/first installment is here.

The second installment, discussing the motivations/starting points of the RR is here.

I’m hoping that, through this series on the Religious Right (RR), I can shed some light on the RR, especially to other conservatives and Republicans who are wary of the RR.  This is not necessarily to defend the RR and every typical policy position of the RR, but to explain that there IS a logic and practicality to the positions and activism of the RR, as opposed to mere animus and ignorance, as critics allege.

Marriage Is One Man, One Woman

Yes, the RR has taken the “extreme” position – one that has been held by every major religion and all civilizations throughout all of history until the recent handful of exceptions – that marriage is inherently something between a man and a woman.  It is quite amusing to see same-sex “marriage" activists simply assume a stance that the RR is being extremist in this case, and hoping that if they repeat that enough, people will believe that the RR and others are “behind the times.”  I suppose if enough people started sticking bananas in their ears and insisted it was a perfectly normal thing to do and equivalent to eating, and portrayed it in the media over and over again, and taught it in the schools, then people would start to believe it.

Not essential to the RR position on this matter, but rather an additional reason for their opposition is the RR’s position that Homosexual Behavior is Wrong.

I could write a book on this one, but I won’t.  You can find thorough defenses of the RR position on same-sex “marriage” in plenty of places.

Even if the RR didn’t believe that homosexual behavior is wrong, they would still maintain that marriage is something that inherently involves a man and a woman.  This is because the Bible portrays marriage as something initiated directly by God.  Marriage is holy matrimony.  Christians note that the first Biblical miracle of Jesus was performed to honor a wedding.  Over and over again, marriage is cited in the Scriptures as a special relationship and as something that is sacred.  God created us male and female, and marriage brings those two different sides of humanity together as one.

The RR’s opposition to the push to use courts or legislatures to redefine marriage into something that can also be between two men or two women is not an effort to make people miserable.  Instead, they are resisting being forced to give their affirmation (marriage license, issued by counties on behalf of the state) that a single-sex coupling is marriage.  They do not believe it is marriage. Instead, they see it as a counterfeit.  Counterfeits devalue the authentic.

I’ve been trying to find a decent analogy, but marriage is something that is unique, and so it is hard to find a worthy analogy.  These will have to do for now...

Let’s say you are a dairy farmer.  Your farm produces milk for sale.  Your neighbor has no cows, but does have a water well.  He wants to sell his water as milk.  You object.  He says, “Hey, what’s the problem?  It’s liquid, it’s potable, and I like it.”  You say “But it’s not milk.”  His response is “How does that hurt you, you narrow-minded hateful bigot?  I'm not settling for labeling this as water.”  It hurts you because he is passing off his water as milk, when it isn’t, thereby devaluing your milk.  Words mean things.  Even if the legislators side with your neighbor, it doesn’t really make water milk.  It just is another example of where the law deviates from reality, which weakens law.  Well, not only does the RR think that water is not milk, but it also thinks that the water is contaminated, so they can’t support it being sold as milk.  Your neighbor says “I’m lactose intolerant.”  Doesn’t matter.  Water is still not milk.

Speaking of water, what happens when you put H2 with O?  H2O – water.  Those two elements, in the right combination, make water.  H3 is not water.  O2 is not water.  Why?  Because one of the elements is missing.

Homosexual people object that they are not attracted to people of the opposite sex, and so marriage laws unfairly keep them from the benefits of marriage.  This is like a pacifist conscientious objector asking for military veteran benefits.  He had the same rights to sign up for military service as anyone else - he just didn't want to.  The irony here, though, is that many of the benefits of marriage have nothing to do with the law, and exist specifically because marriage involves both sexes.  So even a legally recognized “marriage” between two people of the same sex would not automatically bring about the same benefits of marriage.  Current law does not require you to be heterosexual to be married, and so it does not discriminate against homosexual people.  It just means that most of them will not want to participate.  Since marriage is voluntary, there is no obligation for society to be more “affirming” to a small fraction of itself by diluting the legal definition of marriage.

As for the tangible benefits of marriage found with certain laws and employment conditions – we need not dilute the legal definition of marriage to address those.

Marriage is the one institution where the Left thinks it is perfectly okay to exclude one of the sexes.  If two men want a business license, they’d better not exclude women from participation in their business, or they'll get sued for illegal discrimination.  But it is okay for them to get a marriage license that excludes women?  If marriage is something that forms a microcosm of society, then which of the sexes is unnecessary?  The RR believes that each marriage deserves both a husband and a wife.

Some have been suggesting the solution of just doing away with government involvement in marriage altogether.  However, the RR maintains that the government has a legitimate interest in promoting, fostering, and regulating marriage that it does not have with single-sex couples.  This is primarily related to childbearing and childrearing – which is how we’ll get our next generation of citizens, voters, taxpayers, soldiers, etc.  While not all both-sex couplings will produce children, they are the only kind of relationship that can produce children without outside assistance, and the only kind that gives the child both a male/husband/father and female/wife/mother role model.  Men and women are the two basic groups that form society, and children will grow up to interact with both men and women.  The law can’t get into making criteria based on feelings and love – it operates on objective facts, such as a person’s gender.

But what about love and attraction?  If that is the criteria for marriage, then how do we limit marriage to just two people?  There are many men who would argue that they have always been, and indeed were born, polygamous.  And how could we limit bisexuals to one spouse?  How do we say “no” to a brother and sister who want to get married?  The same-sex “marriage” advocates scoff at this as a spurious slippery-slope argument, but if “love” and attraction are the criteria for marriage, how can we draw those lines?  Sure, they don’t have as strong of a lobby, but maybe someday they will.

Too many of us have allowed marriage to be so devalued that people are now able to miss that “same-sex marriage” is an oxymoron.  We have largely brought this on ourselves by doing things like:

-Marrying before we’re ready for marriage
-Marrying someone with whom we’re not fundamentally compatible or who is not prepared for marriage
-Turning marriage into a television game show/side show
-Being to quick to divorce and no-fault divorce
-Taking away legal consequences for adultery
-Separating sex, childbearing, childrearing, and cohabitation from marriage
-Trying to deny the differences between the sexes, and encouraging women to be less feminine and men to be less masculine
-Asserting that simply injecting hormones into your body, hacking off or fabricating some body parts, and dressing differently truly change you from a male to a female, or from a female to a male
-Discouraging the division of labor in marriage
-Buying into the lie that love is a feeling
-Reducing weddings to nothing more than a narcissistic party all about two people who are often already pretending to be married through their lifestyle

The RR has a strong aversion to what they see as further attacks on marriage.  Overall, people in the RR do not work to preserve marriage (in some places, restore marriage) to trample on the feelings of homosexual people.  They do it because they see it as vital to society.  The RR doesn’t work to keep anyone from living together, or having ceremonies, or in any way expressing their feelings for each other.  Law, on the other hand, is a public matter, and marriage licenses are issued by a government that represents “the people.”

For further reading:
http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5727
http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5678
http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5255
http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6800
http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6801
http://www.marriagedebate.com/
http://www.allianceformarriage.org/site/PageServer
http://www.family.org/socialissues/A000001258.cfm
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-f018.html
http://www.lc.org/Resources/same_sex_book_2004.htm
http://www.nogaymarriage.com/tenarguments.asp
http://www.familyresearchinst.org/FRI_EduPamphlet7.html
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0310/editorial.html
http://www.traditionalvalues.org/pdf_files/FMA.pdf
http://www.cwfa.org/articles/10811/CFI/family/index.htm