Why I Fight Against Same-Sex Marriage

(Getty/Tom Williams)

Rich Stearns is a servant, a Wharton grad who leapt from the top of corporate America and landed in a stream, knees bent bracing. Arms outstretched, he is a fisher of men, desperate to save the poor, sick and suffering. Stearns’ talent has transformed World Vision into the eighth largest charity in America, with annual revenues of more than $1 billion. Some 40,000 employees are active worldwide doing disaster relief, providing food, and assisting refugees. 

According to a 2009 interview, Stearns intends to reduce by half the number of children who die daily from poverty-related causes. If he succeeds (count me among those who believe he will) that number will still be 13,000 dead children daily.

At a recent gathering in Los Angeles, Stearns privileged the work he and others do around poverty issues and criticized Christians who he sees as preoccupied by work focused on the meaning and purpose of marriage. “No one ever died of gay marriage,” he argued.

It is unlikely that “number of deaths prevented” is actually Stearns’ metric for determining the legitimacy of a vocation. Surely he recognizes the mundane contributions of faithful Christians in education, law, engineering, art, and a thousand other fields as legitimate whether or not life hangs in the balance.

No, the comment tells us that Stearns finds marriage a trivial issue. Nero fiddled as Rome burned; meanwhile, Teetsel blogged about same-sex marriage. And so he pleads, “Why don’t you do something that matters?”

Stearns is not alone. As the 29 year-old director of the Manhattan Declaration I am often asked that question. 

Founded in 2009 by Charles Colson and more than 100 religious leaders from the three historic Christian traditions, the Manhattan Declaration defines life, marriage, and religious liberty as foundational principles necessary for the common good. The Declaration asks Christians to prioritize these concerns and refuse to “render unto Caesar” when the laws of man contradict moral obligations to God. Why be involved in such work? 

Life, marriage, and religious liberty are not arbitrary choices; they are inextricable. The ethic of life is premised on the doctrine of Imago Dei, the inherent dignity of every human being as a creature uniquely crafted in the image of God himself. Why do we care about the poor, oppressed, and suffering? Because they are human beings.

Read more at Religion and Politics.

What is a mother to do? Questions for same-sex ‘marriage’ advocates

June 25, 2013 (thePublicDiscourse) - The speed at which marriage was redefined last month in the state of Minnesota has left me with a sense of vertigo. My head is still spinning. And though the war wages on, one thing seems clear: Those of us for whom same-sex marriage has been, until now, almost impossible to contemplate, have some things to figure out. Of those, the most urgent is the question of what we are to tell our children.

I am the mother of a ten-year-old girl, a beautiful child, more precious to me than anything you can imagine. When, on June 1, same-sex marriage became legal in the state of Minnesota, I needed to know what to tell her. How is this supposed to work—actually—in the concrete world of a ten-year-old child and her mother? Her father is wondering too, of course, but he is rather speechless at the moment. And the way it works in our house, though he is really good at protecting her from possible physical threats, it usually falls to me to protect her from the more psychological threats she encounters occasionally in her young life. But this is a new one. So I need some advice.

When you ask my daughter to accept that a man may marry another man, that a woman may marry another woman, you are requiring her to declare that 2 + 2 = 5.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should state that, as a philosopher, I have gotten fairly skilled at treating the philosophical errors of our age in the classroom setting. But a ten-year-old is at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to the arguments I have developed against relativism, nominalism, dualism, materialism, and so on. And then of course, parenting comes with its own specific challenges. So I am hoping those who advocate same-sex marriage have given some thought to this, eager as they seem to be to take on the task of parenting themselves.

For starters, can we agree that, along with her father of course, I am still responsible to her for doing my part to raise her to be the intelligent, responsible young woman she is destined to be? If so, how should I help her grapple with what it means to know the truth about something? Doesn’t any claim to the truth have to begin with a grasp of what is actually so? Should there not be some sort of correspondence between what is so and what she thinks is so? At least, that is what I have been trying to teach her.

Read more at Life Site News.

The False Narrative of Gay ‘Marriage’: It Is Not Inevitable

June 25, 2013 (Breakpoint.org) - In his book, “The Black Swan,” Nicholas Nassim Taleb discussed what he calls the “narrative fallacy.” This refers to our “limited ability” to look at a sequence of facts “without weaving an explanation into them.”

While this tendency helps us make sense of the world around us, it can and often does mislead us. It creates a mistaken impression that we understand things better than we really do. And, it often causes us to view the facts in ways that are consistent with the narrative we ourselves have created.

Or is it?

Case in point: the recent news – or in this case, news blackout – out of Illinois.

A few weeks ago the state legislature took up the issue of same-sex marriage. The outcome was regarded as a foregone conclusion. Illinois is President Obama’s home state, and his party enjoys commanding majorities in both houses. Same-sex marriage enjoyed the support of both the governor and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The president had even personally lobbied state legislators.

Given all that, the vote in favor of gay “marriage” in Illinois was inevitable, right?

Well, no one bothered to tell the state’s African-American pastors. As Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage wrote in the National Review, the pastors “worked hard to reach and convince African-American legislators to stand tall for the truth of marriage.”

The pastors demanded that legislators acknowledge that marriage “is an institution created by God to bring men and women together for the benefit of children that can only be created through the union of men and women.”

Read more at Life Site News.

How Songs Like Macklemore’s “Same Love” Change the Marriage Debate

So, too, with “Same Love.” At most, it theorizes that it’s the same love, that love is love however expressed, but this is never defended so much as assumed; and since, as Macklemore asserts, “We press play, don’t press pause / Progress, march on,” with all other positions retrograde and bigoted, the millions of viewers, “ten years hence,” may remember that there was a controversy, but not why.  

As powerfully as any cultural artifact I know, “Same Love” reveals the odd imbalance or mismatch involved in the marriage dispute. On the one hand, the traditional, conjugal view held by, for instance, the Catholic Church, operates within the vocabulary of metaphysics (nature, being, cause, structure, purpose), practical reason/ethics (good, bad, right, wrong, proper, flourishing), and logos (causation, inference, syllogism, entailment). On the other hand, metaphysics is replaced with self-identity and expression (“Live on and be yourself”), ethics gives way to egalitarianism (“I might not be the same, but that’s not important / No freedom till we’re equal, damn right I support it), and logos to sentiment (“My love / She keeps me warm”).

So you have Theology of the Body or the arguments of natural law versus the word–image association of Macklemore—that’s not likely a ripe conversation—and Macklemore has a lead of 48 million views and a culture moving in his direction, not only in its beliefs but in its vocabulary.

Read more at First Things.

Less Marriage, Fewer Fathers

In this day and age, we are being told to come to terms with the fact that marriage is on the decline. What we don’t often hear about however is one huge consequence, as pointed out in an article by author and director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, Bradford Wilcox: and that’s the decrease of genuine and holistic fatherhood.

Why’s this? Wilcox points out that as society retreats from marriage, there’s a growth in fatherless families. With cohabitation, these couples are already more likely than married couples to end up on the rocks. But the institution of marriage is the only one that binds men to their children, the only one that can keep them under the same roof. Statistics make it clear that while the number of married middle-aged women in America fell from 82 per cent in 1970 to 62 per cent today, the share of children living in fatherless homes has doubled from 14 to 28 per cent.

Read more at Mercator.net.

Great Love Scenes that Could Have Never Been Homosexual

In honor of the Supreme Court's decisions on gay marriage tomorrow -- whatever those decisions are -- I want to invoke my shameless love of Hollywood musicals and share some classic dance scenes that epitomize men loving women and women loving men. These are scenes that could simply never be homosexual.

Men and women together, being themselves, in love -- nothing will ever match such chemistry. You can pass a law but gayness will just never measure up. Check these out:



If you want to pay proper tribute to male-female love, why not start with Marge and Gower Champion? Married for thirty years, they were the face of love in motion. Oozing sexuality and raw animal magnetism, the towering and slender blond boy Gower throws around the round-faced and athletic Marge but every move is tinged with seduction! Yowza!

Read more at English Manif.

More than enough love to go around

My mother Lupita is a beautiful, intelligent, charming woman, who has had eleven boys and five girls. They range from 28 to 8. She has never had a moment’s regret. Perhaps, as her daughter I am biased, but I believe that each birth has enriched my mother, making her even more attractive and allowing her heart to expand and reach each of her children in a special motherly manner. My mother is now past child-bearing age, but if she could she would have more. Adoption has crossed her mind, and my father’s mind, more than once.

There are some women out there who don’t have children because they think that having children will make them uglier. My mother is living proof that this is not the case. Just a year ago, when my grade 12 English teacher met my mother she was deeply impressed. There was even a hint of a tear. Afterwards she admitted to me: “I imagined your mother to be, well, ugly. And fat”. More than once, due to her youthful, charming, looks, people have taken her for my older sister.

There is plenty of constant hard work, but my mother has never considered herself a slave. Rather she is a living holocaust of love for her family. My mother is no superwoman and there days when she is exhausted and has not had one single moment for herself. Yet there is always a smile on her face.

Read more at Mercator.Net.