What is Marriage?

This is a simple question and it defines our entire debate over this issue. Some Conservatives aren’t clear due to the corruption of our culture.

Lets be clear. If marriage is only a religious rite such as baptism or communion, it belongs in the Church. The state has no interest in you being baptized or circumcised, and it has no interest in where you get married or who marries you.

If marriage is only a way to get some tax breaks and benefits and to have your emotions and sexual activity acknowledged with a tax deduction and a pat on the head, then really anybody who sleeps together should be able to get the license. If that’s what marriage is, it’s really not the business of the state at all. Why hand out these goodies that people associate with marriage to help out people, even rich people, on things like taxes and inheritance? You can fill out a durable power of attorney and get it notarized if its all that important to you and save on the 5 digit ceremony.

Julie at Red State Rebels believes it doesn’t really matter:

But is ours the only sort of family that counts? No way. My brother and his longtime partner are a family unto themselves. They’re also part of an extended family of friends, and I don’t begrudge Jeff the fact that – due to geographical proximity and shared interests – he’s closer to them than he is to me. Family means having people nearby with whom you can break bread on holidays, toast milestone birthdays, and call on when you need a hand.

When our daughter was younger, she had three main babysitters. One was from a large Mormon family with both mom and dad at home. Another was a girl being raised by her mom; she later went to live with her dad. Another was a girl being raised by two dads – in Twin Falls, Idaho. Last I heard, they were all happy and close to their respective parents.

In our daughter’s circle of friends, single parenting and blended families are common. But even where parents have split up, I see both parties doing their best to stay involved in their kids’ lives and fulfill the obligations you accept when you bring a child into this world. It’s not always easy, and I can see why social conservatives feel challenged by the rigors of raising kids today. But the fact is, there are many ways to raise a child. What happy, healthy kids have in common isn’t having one mom and one dad, but knowing that they have a strong network of people in whom they can place their trust.

Simply put, it doesn’t matter one iota, if you’re married or if you’re divorced, if you’re shacking up, or if you’re homosexual, in Julie’s world, all families are equal, and all living arrangements are equal.

But are they? This is the issue that cuts to the heart of the marriage debate. If they’re the same, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re a polygamist, homosexual, or you have 7 dads and 4 moms, the important thing is you have someone to celebrate the big “50″ with.

I differ from Julie because I believe marriage is more than an individual choice. The reason we recognize it is that its vital to society. The idea of the traditional, hetrosexual two parent family does two very important things.

First, it constrains the destructive potential of hetrosexual sexuality. Kids who don’t have fathers and mothers in their lives have problems, some more severe than others. Now, if men and women outside of marriage mess around, the result can be, and often is, babies.

Yes, we have birth control now, but the 58% of the women who had abortions were using the pill before they got pregnant will tell you its not 100% effective. Plan B, the much vaunted morning after pill, only works 8 out of 9 times.

For whatever reason, when hetrosexuals have sex, things happen, and women can become pregnant. So, that’s why there’s marriage, because if a married couple has a child, it will enjoy that security and that piece of mind that comes from having a mother and a father. If you don’t believe me about why we have marriage for as a civil society, go to Montana to get married, and they still require the bride to take a rubella test.

Why? Because a couple needs to know if it might have an impact on a pregnancy. In many cases, its not applicable, and its outdated in today’s society, but it preserves in law a clear understanding of what marriage is.

Now, of course, there’ll immediately be a long list of horrible parents listed, and, you know what, it doesn’t always turn out right. But, we give them a better shot, statistically, in life at succeeding and growing up in a safe environment.

With that idea of family, there comes some key commitments that go beyond hoisting a cold one to celebrate Hanukkah. It implies some other things.

1)Fidelity-Marriage is good for society because it gets men and women to settle down and be faithful to one another. It puts a stop to sexual adventurism. The result is again, a decreased incidence of sexual disease and avoiding out of wedlock births.

2) A married person can’t effectively drift through life, wandering about aimlessly. When you’re married, that’s over. As a married person whose going to have children, your stake is in the community and you’ve attached yourself at the hip to someone for the rest of your life. You’ve got a stake in the future. You’re going to be more responsible and you’re going to be less likely to engage in things like crime.

You’re going to do wiser things, as you enjoy that benefit of having both the male and female perspective in the relationship working together. Your lives will work better and be more productive when you’re working together as a team.

3) Sacrifice: Marriage is going to be a sacrifice. Its going to mean giving up a boat or a car, so that your kids can have a better life than you did. Its going to mean living leaner so you can have kids in the first place. It’ll mean a loss of privacy and loss or your rights to meet their needs. To be a good parent is to deny yourself.

Now, doubtless this is going to raise some responses from our liberal audience, “There are married couples who are bad parents!…That’s not the way a lot of people’s marriages work! Are you suggesting that people who don’t want this type of marriage or don’t achieve it shouldn’t be allowed to get married?”

No, that’s not what I propose at all. But, we begin to see that a lot of the benefits that marriage gives to society are things that homosexual “marriage” doesn’t. Homosexuals can do their thing from dawn to dusk, and there’ll be no baby.

As for gay monogamy, the research doesn’t back it up, so there is no benefit to society there. There’s no inate complimentary benefit of two men or two women being together.

Now, as to the point that many hetrosexual marriages don’t meet that standard. I’ll admit that. We’ve made some stupid decisions as a society. It started to a great extents back in the 1960s and ’70s when feminists glorified women who broke their marriages vows and divorced their husbands and abandonned their children to pursue a career after reading “The Feminine Mystique.”

Women are taught to expect to have it all. Men feel useless and fill their lives with work and things. Everyone indulgences their own desires. So many are driving into deep financial disaster. Marriages are breaking up under no fault divorce laws which makes marriages, families, and children disposable with no required counselling. Children are left scarred for life.

Its a mess, a big mess, but a reparable mess. Its like you have a car and its got some problems, a leaky oil gasket, a busted radiator, a broken resovoir for your Windshield wipers. Its something you can fix.

With homosexual marriage, its like someone brings you a car with the insides of a grandfather clock instead of an engine and expects you to make it run. You can’t. Its not really a car and homosexual marriage isn’t marriage.

If homosexual marriage becomes accepted, it will mean a surrender of that traditional idea of marriage. We, as a society will never be able to bring it back.

And before some liberal chimes in by asking me why gays threaten my marriage, read what I just wrote. I’m not concerned about my marriage anymore than people are concerned about their cars when they’re concerned about cars that pollute the air. They’re concerned about the environment. What liberals fail to realize is that there’s a moral environment, its called the culture. We have to live in it. And if that moral environment is destroyed, we all suffer.

If we enshrine in law the idea that homosexual marriage and natural marriage are equal, we will have chosen to abandon the bedrock of society for novelty and hedonism. We will destroy marriage as it was intended and in the process destroy our society as well.

These are the stakes in the marriage debate. And that’s why we must win.