 | STOP TRYING TO If you think it is important to protect marriage, protect your marriage. |
Institutions don't need "protection." They need investment, nurture and "tender loving care" (TLC)!
Think of marriage as a garden. You can build a wall around a garden, but it can still die. If you want to protect a garden, cultivate it, water it, fertilize it. If it is barren, plant the garden. Get your hands dirty and put seeds and seedlings in the ground. Then you will have a garden that will thrive.
And yes, you should try to keep predators out. Animals, insects and diseases destroy gardens. But are predators trying to destroy marriage? Is it really true that if two people of the same gender get married, they are destroying the marriage of any other heterosexual people who are married?
| The surest way to destroy something is to blame the wrong thing for its endangered condition or its demise. For example, the surest way to destroy this planet through global warming would be to blame global warming on the Communists and then put all the energy into fighting Communists in order to "save" the environment! But, as cartoon character Pogo famously said once, "We have met the enemy and he is us." If the current sad state of marriages in America shocks and worries people then we ought to be asking, as a society and a church, why marriages are falling apart, and what we can all do to nurture, care for and invest in marriages, rather than trying to build a wall around the institution, or blaming the wrong thing. And Christian ethics always begins with oneself. So if you are concerned for marriage in general you ought to begin by being concerned for your own marriage. "You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye." ---Jesus (Matthew 7:5) | Pogo's 1971 Earth Day poster |
- The highest divorce rate in America is found in the so-called Bible Belt. Could it be that people there are being pressured by their culture and the high religiosity to enter into marriage when they are unprepared, immature, or simply not meant for marriage? Do you want to "protect marriage"? Then don't push people into a marriage that they don't belong in.
- Lesbian and gay people have long felt pressure to be married heterosexually. In generations past, a "marriage of convenience" was the only way to survive, to hide and hopefully to avoid blackmail. Aside from the secret emotional pain this has caused, such marriages are not healthy. If the truth comes to light, spouses feel like they were used as lab animals in a cruel experiment. Do you want to "protect marriage"? Then promote honesty and truthfulness for lesbian and gay people. Let them form honest relationships with partners they love instead of forming marriages based on appearances or "convenience."
- Spousal abuse threatens millions of marriages. As it is, many churches are no help in stopping abuse because (a) fundamentalists insist on the authority of the husband over the wife based on a simplistic interpretation of one passage of the Bible; (b) the phony and inappropriate "appearance of righteousness" prevents many abused spouses from speaking up or seeking help because of stigma and embarrassment that one's home life is not perfect. Do you want to "protect marriage"? Then help do something about the appalling rate of spousal abuse and violence against women in our society. Individual pretense and a community "holier-than-thou" atmosphere actually gives aid and comfort to spouse abusers.
- Some times relationships fail and the partners in them need to get out of them before those marriages become a toxic environment. The real toxic environment of relentless lawyers who see every situation as adversarial (and therefore lucrative) runs amok, and divorce becomes a raging battle to seize as many assets as possible and to screw the other side. It would actually help many marriages if the spouses who feel they need to exit a marriage could do so with dignity, sanity, access to their children, and a fair share of "community property" assets. Mediation is a better alternative than divorce court. Do you want to "protect marriage"? Then be a part of the solution to America's terrible divorce procedures.
- Millions of people who have divorced decide that they will neve marry again, even if they meet the right person. Why? Because legal marriage is so easy to get into and so messy to get out of, they have concluded it is just not worth the risk. Do you want to "protect marriage"? Then maybe our society should make all marriages a bit more serious to enter into.
- Millions more people simply ignore marriage as an important public declaration and a personal commitment to "be there" for the person you love and receive favors from. Do you want to "protect marriage"? Then teach people to make and keep serious commitments in their lives. Teach them to live in ethical relationships.
The recent, ugly fight to pass Proposition 8 in California relied heavily on fiction and fear, the telling of outright lies and the spreading of stereotypes and innuendos that are not supported by any facts. Not only were gay and lesbian people, who sought marriage to establish their own civil rights and to gain some mutual protections, blamed for the sad state of marriage. They were "beaten up" by blatantly false advertising that pretended to want to protect children!
"Protecting children" is a bogus issue. Every responsible study and professional authority has said that children are not harmed, and not recruited to homosexuality, by being raised by two moms or two dads. There is no higher incidience of homosexual orientation in children raised by a gay men or men, or a lesbian mom or moms. Even more,
- Heterosexual marriage is no guarantee that a child will be raised by loving, responsible parents. The greatest percentage of child abuse takes place inside of heterosexual nuclear families. The greatest percentage of child abuse is a daughter being abused by her own father or another adult male in the family. Do you want to protect children from child abuse? Then teach males to respect other people, instead of teaching them that "acting out" every form of masculine privilege and power is still acceptable in our society. It is a phony and malicious pattern to say "boys will be boys" to excuse the aggressive and violent behavior of too many boys and men in our society.
- Even more wickedly, aggressive and violent males not only abuse children, they attack, hurt, abuse and kill lesbians, gay men and boys, and transgender persons. It is a cruel and evil manipulation of prejudice to claim that children must be protected from homosexuals when both children and homosexuals suffer the aggression and violence of adolescent and adult males who are overwhelmingly heterosexual.
- More important to the discussion of Proposition 8 in California, the right of same-gender couples to marry does not mean that all or even a majority of such couples want to raise children. The first same-sex wedding performed in California on the evening of June 16, 2008, was between Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon in San Francisco. These elderly women have been courageous champions for lesbian and gay rights for more than half a century. But their marriage essentially had nothing to do with the parenting of children.
Liz Mangelsdorf Photo: www.sanfranciscosentinel.com
The "slippery slope" argument is also bogus. Scare tactics are constantly used not only to belittle strong and healthy same-sex relationships and marriages, but to suggest that in the so-called "gay agenda" marriage there is a slippery slope over which society will tumble if it doesn't dig in its heels hard. Here is a typical line of scare tactic published by the Christian Civic League of Maine in 2005: Gay marriage, it was said "will lead to the acceptance of other undesirable sexual unions including polygamy, transgenerational sex, and incest simply on the basis that they are consensual and protected as civil rights." Let's look at these rationally:
- Polygamy is not our fight. It is not legal, and for very good reasons. But simply stated, the struggle to have same-gender marriage legalized does nothing to legalize anything else. If same-sex marriage stands (or is restored by the Supreme Court of California), polygamy remains unlawful, and any polygamist wanna-bees would have to mount their own agenda. I don't see tens of thousands of trios or four-ways standing in line or hiring attorneys to gain their rights.
- Transgenerational sex is code language for sex with children. A moderate search with Google or any search engine of the internet turns up a lot of child pornography, for example---and most of it is heterosexual, not homosexual. There is no slippery slope for allowing adults to have sex with children, because the struggle for same-sex marriage has no one calling for a change in the laws defining "consenting adult." There are some organizations out there who argue for lowering the age of consent, but they are not us, and we are not fighting for them. No responsible LGBT organization in the country is arguing for that point of view, and to imply otherwise is a calculated misrepresentation of the truth--- a lie!
- Incest is not our fight either. In fact, it is a non-issue. Every culture in the world has had strong taboos against incest, but incest is defined differently in many societies. The Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament of the Christian Bible), incidentally, encourages marriage within the extended family, including the marriage of close cousins. It also makes role models of men who took two sisters as wives (bigamy), such as the patriarch Jacob (who later was given the name Israel). For a "Christian League," that waves the Bible, to cry about incest is not only bogus, it is hypocritical.
- Polygyny, bestiality, transgenerational sex and incest, as well as prostitution, sexual slavery, rape and violent sex all occur at an alarming rate in our society. But depriving lesbian or gay couples of the basic civil rights to protect their own relationship does absolutely nothing to stop these behaviors. While polygamy may be illegal in all 50 states, it doesn't prevent a man simply living with two or more women. And passing Proposition 8 doesn't change that!
Protect Your Marriage!
Recently, I was interviewed by a young journalism student. Here is part of the exchange we've had by e-mail after the formal interview was over. (This is an excerpt from my blog entry just before Election Day.
Q. How do you feel about heterosexual couples? You said some things about them like buying wives flowers and how men never listen to their wives. Is this stereotyping?
A. I made that remark in the context of the discussion of “protecting marriage,” which the promoters of Proposition 8 claim they were doing. I believe that marriage as an institution has all the protection it needs. No one, least of all lesbian or gay people, are trying to destroy marriage for heterosexual couples. But marriage seems to be “under siege” by our secular, materialist culture. Millions of people just don’t bother to get married, or if they have had an unhappy marriage–rather than trying to improve their relationship–they simply divorce and never re-marry. My view is that marriage as a broad social concept is best protected when individuals do all they can to care for and nurture their own marital relationship. Marriage in America will be honored and well cared for when there are tens of millions of couples who make and keep lifelong commitments of honesty and integrity, intimacy and love. So like all other ethical choices and decisions, the best efforts to “protect marriage” are personal efforts. That’s why I had said – to men, especially – "protect your marriage by doing things to show your wife that you love her, honor her and respect her." And flowers are always a nice touch, aren’t they?
Background to this last Q&A: In my interview by this young journalist, I had talked about the first day same-sex weddings were legal in California, June 17, 2008. I was present that day with other clergy In West Hollywood Park. I rang handbells and talked to the media. I was interviewed eight times that day (see this article in the Washington Post), but only officiated for the marriage of one couple. One reporter asked me about the nay-sayers who feel that marriage has to be protected from homosexuals who are out to destroy it. “If you want to protect marriage,” I told the reporter, “I suggest that you protect your marriage. Buy your wife flowers, and listen to her when she talks to you.”--- Dan Hooper, Pastor, Hollywood Lutheran Church, the No on 8 Church. November 19, 2008