84 Sermon Illustrations on Homosexual Marriage

The state of Hawaii is debating sanctioning homosexual marriage. If one state does, then others would have to accept it automatically, though Utah has passed a law that forbids acceptance. Many business are giving homosexual couples legal and financial benefits.

“It’s not surprising that the issue should have arisen at a time when many gay couples face illness and the possibility of early death. Just a few years ago, the situation was different: many gay leaders considered marriage an institution somehow alien to gay culture, or a cause that would distract from more important issues. Now, though, most gay organizations endorse legalized marriage.”

[In 1998 Hawaiian voters turned down homosexual marriage, as did other states.]

The moment she was engaged, Michelle Meako told her intended, "I want a big wedding," and that's what they had. The couple wrote their own vows, picked out a cake, and planned a Canadian honeymoon after a lavish reception. The couple only omitted one detail: a marriage license. They couldn't get one because Michelle and her "spouse" are both women.

Is it unjust for government to refuse to authorize same-sex "marriages"? A growing number of secular commentators think so. How do we respond? First, we have to explain the meaning and purpose of marriage.

In his book, THE CLASH OF ORTHODOXIES, Princeton philosopher Robert George writes that the matrimonial law reflects a moral judgment. That judgment is that marriage is inherently heterosexual, monogamous, and permanent -- a union of one man and one woman. This judgment is based on both the biblical and natural law understandings that marriage is a two-in-one-flesh communion of persons. This communion is consummated and actualized sexually -- that is, by acts that are reproductive, whether or not they result in children. They unite the spouses as a single procreative unit -- an organic unity achieved even by infertile couples. Only a mated pair can be a complete organism capable of human procreation.

By contrast, homosexual acts have no relationship to procreation and can't unite persons organically. As a result, these acts can't be marital -- which means relationships integrated around them can't be marriages. Same-sex partners are physically incapable of marriage. It takes a man and a woman to become "one flesh."

I can already hear the arguments your secular neighbors are making. "Okay," they say. "That's your definition of marriage. But why should your views be imposed on everyone else?"

That's why we have to be ready with additional, non-religious arguments for traditional marriage. For instance, if we expand the meaning of marriage to include same-sex unions, on what grounds could we legitimately oppose marriages between three or more people, or weddings between siblings?

Another argument made by my friend Bill Bennett is the impact it would have on the shaping of human sexuality, especially among the young. "Societal indifference," he writes, "about heterosexuality and homosexuality would cause a lot of [sexual] confusion."

When we defend traditional marriage, we're upholding far more than just the Christian definition of matrimony. Since the beginning of recorded history, virtually every society and every major religion has revered and protected traditional marriage. It's the institution that nurtures, protects, and civilizes children. Marriage forms the framework of society's most basic institution: the family.

If supporters of same-sex marriage succeed, marriage would be reduced to nothing more than a legal contract between any two people based solely on feelings. True marriage would be abolished, and the damage to our society would be irreparable.

That's why it's so important for Christians to understand the prudential arguments in support of a traditional view of marriage and why it deserves special protection under the law. George's book, THE CLASH OF ORTHODOXIES, will help you do this. You'll learn why even the most elaborate wedding cannot a marriage make -- unless it's between one man and one woman.

For further reading:

Robert George, CLASH OF ORTHODOXIES: LAW, RELIGION AND MORALITY IN CRISIS (ISI Books, 2001).

William Bennett, THE BROKEN HEARTH: REVERSING THE MORAL COLLAPSE OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY (Waterbrook Press, 2001).

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Copyright © 2002 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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This summer, the Supreme Court struck down Texas's sodomy law in what columnist Jeffrey Rosen called “a particularly expansive way,” giving hope to “same-sex marriage” advocates. In light of this decision, can Christians and other social conservatives still influence the culture?

Rosen raised that question in a New York Times article titled, “How to Reignite the Culture Wars.” Rosen takes note of signs of a cultural backlash ever since the Supreme Court case. A major Gallup poll showed that the number of Americans supporting same-sex unions dropped sharply after the Court struck down the Texas law.

As Rosen recalls, another Supreme Court decision thirty years ago — Roe V. Wade — had a similar effect. He writes, “A series of conservative interest groups ... arose in response to Roe in the 1970s and '80s, and they were initially effective. While states had been liberalizing their abortion laws before 1973, they increasingly limited access to abortion after Roe came down.”

So, paradoxically, the unfavorable decision in Lawrence V. Texas could work in our favor after all. But the Supreme Court isn't the biggest foe we have to fight.

It's true that many Americans are coming around to the traditional point of view on marriage and gay rights. But at the same time, many social conservatives are beginning to come around to the other side's point of view on homosexuality. The attitude of the larger culture is starting to rub off on us.

Even if fewer Americans support gay unions today, the laissez-faire attitude toward sexual morality still prevails. Many people see any attempt to encourage moral behavior as an unwarranted intrusion on their privacy. For decades, educators, media, and many of our government leaders have drilled into us that the most “compassionate” attitude on any such issue is “I wouldn't do it myself, but I wouldn't try to stop anyone else from doing it.” And Christians fall for this.

This is why, as Jeffrey Rosen writes, “Even among evangelical and social conservatives, there is a general sense that the effort to stigmatize consensual sexual behavior as immoral has been lost among the younger generation.” And this is why he's wondering just how effective social conservatives can be at this time. He quotes sociologist James Davison Hunter's book Culture Wars: “There is the distinct possibility,” Hunter writes, “that orthodox communities may become so assimilated to a progressive political ... culture that they will not be capable of offering any effective opposition to the worldview that currently plagues them.”

How can Christians keep from getting sucked into a culture that strikes at the very heart of our beliefs? The key is the word worldview: seeing all of life from the perspective of our Christian faith. When we do this, we realize it is never “compassionate” to encourage people to act against God's laws or the natural design of humans.

We will never influence the world for Christ when we're letting the world influence us. Learning to think like Jesus, as pollster George Barna argues in his new book by that title, is the best way to keep from becoming our own worst enemies.

FOR FURTHER READING:

• Jeffrey Rosen, “How to Reignite the Culture Wars,” New York Times, 7 September 2003. (Article costs $2.95 to retrieve.)

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030807, “The Struggle for Marriage.”

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030729, “The 'Love' That Won't Keep Quiet.”

• James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Control the Family, Art, Education, Law, and Politics in America (Basic Books, 1992).

• Rebecca Hagelin, “Jolted!” The Heritage Foundation, 12 August 2003.

• “Chuck Colson's Response to the Texas Sodomy Law Decision,” BreakPoint Online, 26 June 2003.

• George Barna, Think Like Jesus (Integrity, 2003). Read this interview with George Barna discussing his new book.

• Peter Kreeft, How to Win the Culture War (InterVarsity, 2002).

• “Why the Laissez-Faire Family Doesn't Work” — At the April 4-6, 2003, BreakPoint conference, “Christians in the Marketplace,” held in Colorado Springs, CO, Jennifer Roback Morse spoke about the “laissez-faire family” and the new definition of freedom: “To be free is to be unencumbered by human relationships.”

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Copyright (c) 2003 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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President Bush took a bold stance in voicing his backing of traditional marriage in America on July 30.

“I think it's very important,” the president said, “for our society to respect each individual, to welcome those with good hearts, to be a welcoming country. On the other hand, that does not mean that somebody like me needs to compromise on an issue such as marriage. And that's really where the issue is headed here in Washington, and that is the definition of marriage. I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe a marriage is between a man and a woman. And I think we ought to codify that one way or the other. And we've got lawyers looking at the best way to do that.”

Following that statement, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), a national homosexual-rights organization, called into question President Bush's “invocation of personal religious beliefs” in his comments opposing “marriage” for same-sex couples.

What this means is that GLAAD officials believe that personal religious beliefs should have no place in the public arena. They know that by eliminating religious ethics they can make further social inroads. Never mind that these moral guidelines have preserved the nation's moral heritage since its inception.

This reproach of traditional religious values has brought us to a turning point. Conservative people of faith -- those who embrace the Judeo-Christian doctrines of the Bible -- are considered illegitimate in the important social/political debate on homosexual marriage (and other key issues, for that matter) solely because our beliefs are founded in historic sacred teachings.

Listen to the comments of John Sonego, GLAAD's director of communications:

It is equally important that the media carefully scrutinize and

hold up for debate President Bush's invocation of religion as the

fundamental rationale for his policy of excluding same-sex

couples and families from the protections of marriage. By saying

he has charged government attorneys to explore ways to 'codify'

the 'sanctity of marriage,' and through numerous biblical

references in his discussion about this issue, the president is

clearly signaling his conviction that his personal religious

beliefs should be the basis for governing law. In a country

where the separation of church and state is a founding principle,

this mix of personal beliefs and his administration's public

policy needs to be examined critically by the media.

I find this statement quite alarming because Mr. Sonego is essentially calling on the nation's mainstream media to publicly censure President Bush for daring to invoke his sincerely held religious beliefs in supporting traditional marriage. Even President Clinton supported traditional marriage, signing the federal Defense of Marriage Act. In addition, 37 states have Defense of Marriage Acts that define marriage as a union exclusively between one man and one woman.

Someone should also give Mr. Sonego a history lesson to instruct him that the so-called separation of church and state is not a “founding principle” of this nation and can be found nowhere in the U.S. Constitution (the document reflecting the founding principles of our founders).

Manipulating and rewriting history has become quite fashionable these days as those who define the Constitution as a “living” document attempt to diabolically mold it so that it sanctions their ever-changing moral “standards.”

Understanding their willingness to shamelessly amend our history, it's really no surprise that these careless revisionists also would stoop to aggressively disparage those who utilize religious teachings in forming their political beliefs.

It is becoming ever more clear that evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics in America are going to be further ridiculed and portrayed as dangerous “homophobes” simply because we wish to hold forth the Judeo-Christian teachings that shaped the beliefs of Washington, Madison, Franklin and most of our founders.

The 200,000 pastors of evangelical churches in this nation need to ensure that their congregants are aware of the fact that we are public enemy number one in this escalating cultural battle. And these pastors need to fervently instruct their flocks to remain socially active and politically astute as we fight together to retain moral sanity in America.

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Falwell is pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Va., and chancellor of Liberty University.

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As you heard Mark Earley report on this broadcast last week, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court called for the state legislature to endorse same-sex “marriages,” the judges claimed that they were doing this in the interest of family stability. The court's decision reads, in part, “Civil marriage anchors an ordered society by encouraging stable relationships over transient ones. It is central to the way the Commonwealth identifies individuals, provides for the orderly distribution of property, [and] insures that children and adults are cared for and supported whenever possible from private rather than public funds.” In other words, the court has equated gay “marriage” and traditional marriage by implying that both of them can do all of these things equally well.

The fact is that the court's decision undermines family stability rather than strengthening it. As Maggie Gallagher, author of several books on marriage, points out, “For thirty years, the sexual revolutionaries have said, 'Heck, kids are resilient; the important thing is that you do what makes you happy.’ By rewriting the laws of marriage, the courts have essentially carried this logic to the ultimate conclusion: Marriage is whatever the adults want. People have a right to conduct a great social experiment on children because, well, adults want to do it, and doing your own thing is the new law of the land.”

Gallagher is right. If we define MARRIAGE as “whatever the adults want,” the result is harm for children, society, and for the consenting adults. This the advocates of gay “marriage” refuse to concede.

They ignore two things: the fundamental differences between heterosexual and homosexual relationships and the nature of marriage itself. Same-sex “marriage” advocates often conveniently fail to mention the high rates of promiscuity in even the most “committed,” so-called, homosexual relationships. Numerous studies have shown that homosexuals simply look at their relationships differently — one well-known study discovered that only 4.5 percent of homosexual respondents in “committed” relationships had been faithful. The redefinition of marriage to include relationships with such high rates of infidelity will reshape the way we see all marriages.

And this leads directly to the other point: Same-sex “marriage” advocates fail to understand marriage. It is not simply a union of two people. It is the union of one man and one woman, who by nature complement and help to fulfill each other, and who in most cases are capable of having children without resorting to a third party.

Marriage is not something that can be made to look like whatever we want. To play around with the definition of MARRIAGE is to risk grievous consequences to families and society. It also poses a risk to religious believers who cannot condone same-sex “marriage.” Already some local councils in the Netherlands are insisting that government officials perform same-sex “marriage” ceremonies, regardless of the officials' religious beliefs.

This battle is, in my opinion, the Armageddon of the culture war. This is the time for Christians to be heard.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Read the decision in Goodridge V. Massachusetts here.

• William F. Buckley, Jr., “Does Marriage Matter?“ National Review Online, 25 November 2003.

• Maggie Gallagher, “Goodridge decision comes down hard,” Townhall.com, 19 November 2003.

• MarriageDebate.com, edited by Maggie Gallagher, provides a forum for arguments about marriage.

• MarriageMovement.org is a pro-marriage website that provides useful links and commentary on the debate over marriage.

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 031119, “Leave It to the Courts.”

• Read President George W. Bush's statement on the Massachusetts decision.

• Visit BreakPoint's Sanctity of Marriage resource page.

• Read the text of the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment.

• The goal of One Hundred Thousand Ministers is to enlist at least 100,000 ministers of the Gospel nationwide to affirm: Yes to Man and Woman in Marriage: No to Same-Sex “Marriage.” We only say “no” to something because of the prior “yes” rooted in the Gospel. Learn more about this effort.

• Dr. Michael Easley, “The Wrath of God,” sermon delivered November 9, 2003, at Immanuel Bible Church. (An audio version is available here.)

• Tony Perkins, “Protect traditional marriage,” USA Today, 18 November 2003.

• Stanley Kurtz, “Who Is Goodridge Good For?“ National Review Online, 19 November 2003.

• “The Left at the Altar,” editorial, National Review Online, 19 November 2003.

• Hugh Hewitt, “Just Say 'No,'“ Daily Standard, 20 November 2003.

• Cal Thomas, “Marriage redefined,” Townhall.com, 18 November 2003.

• Marilyn Gardner, “Where gay unions are legal, what lessons?“ Christian Science Monitor, 20 November 2003. This is the article that talks about the experience of government officials in the Netherlands.

• Steven Waldman, “A Common Missed Conception,” Slate.com, 19 November 2003. The editor of Beliefnet.com examines religious believers' perceptions of same-sex “marriage.” A few of Waldman's statements are problematic, but he does make some important points about the marriage debate.

• Charles A. Donovan, “The Dogcatcher's Coat,” BreakPoint Online, 17 July 2003.

• Roberto Rivera, “No Other Kind,” BreakPoint Online, 22 October 2002.

• Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage (Doubleday, 2000). Call 1-877-322-5527 to order ($25).

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Copyright (c) 2003 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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The events of our nation and the episodes happening in the courts and churches of our land have caused me to stand and speak to you about “The Gay Agenda: A Biblical Response to Unholy Matrimony.”

I do not rise to speak on this issue with my own agenda, but I do rise to speak on this issue with God's agenda. I do rise to speak on this issue out of brokenness, realizing the many families in our own church who have lost family members to the homosexual lifestyle. I have seen them weep, grope and beg God for divine intervention. I have sat in a circle with them, their faces drooped, so burdened with something that is beyond words. I have had some say to me, “Pastor Floyd, it would have been easier to have lost my child to death than to homosexuality. It is killing me.” With this same burden, I have attempted to assist those who are in that lifestyle who want out but are so blinded by their sin they do not think there is a way out.

This burden translated into challenging one of our families to begin a ministry that would assist and minister support to other families who have lost sons, daughters, moms, dads, brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts to the homosexual lifestyle. This ministry is called “HOPE,” meaning, Heal Our Pain El Shaddai. Due to our commitment to helping these families receive assistance, our own church and this ministry has come under attack from other churches and Christians because we even minister to these families. Well, we do believe there is hope. Through the years our ministry has also ministered to those in the gay lifestyle, attempting to see them receive what they want so desperately -- deliverance.

So for any media that may be represented here due to the sensitivity of the issue, please balance what I say in relationship to my heart and actions to help those in a practical way be released from the bondage of the gay lifestyle and help their families who wait in hope for them to be set free.

It is interesting to see how the word “gay” became so distorted. It has gone through quite a journey. The root of the word can be traced back all the way to the 12th century in Germany. Its root meant “hurried or imperious.” In the 13th or 14th century, the German root of the word then evolved and eventually came to mean “full of joy or mirth” in the Old French language. In the 13th and 14th centuries, it began to be used around the French city of Provence in reference to courtly love. Provence was an area that was apparently known for activity by homosexuals. In a master's dissertation by Ken Cage at Rand Afrikaans University, he writes, “gay people throughout the Western world have, for a long time, used a secret form of language to communicate among themselves.”

So the term, “gay,” came into use by the homosexual community in reference to themselves long before the word came into common usage. In 1938, a very public use of the word occurred in a movie starring Cary Grant. In this movie he was dressed in a woman's lace nightgown and he was asked if he always dressed this way. His reply is, “No, I've just gone gay all of a sudden.” In 1941, the term “gay” was used as a slang term for a homosexual in a book entitled, “Sexual Variations.” In 1969, New York City police raided a bar at Greenwich Village that was frequented by homosexuals. Through that ordeal and the ensuing protests, the word, “gay,” took on its modern usage in our world.

It appears now that everywhere you look, everything you read and everything you hear is about the gay lifestyle. Satan has taken his tool of homosexuality, a gross and evil sin, and done a con job on the American culture, making it seem like all is okay when you are gay. I hope you are aware that what was once subtle has now turned into the rage of a lion as brazen and threatening as anything in our culture. I must sound the trumpet loud and clear, praying that we do not run in retreat, but march in the truth of God valiantly. This is not a skirmish or a conflict or a disagreement, but it is a war. The war they have declared against our culture has an agenda and we need to be aware of it. Let me address it because:

1. The gay agenda is beginning to win some major battles.

(1) Legally.

In the court case, Lawrence V. Texas, John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner were engaging in homosexual acts in Houston, therefore, fined due to a Texas sodomy law. This occurred five years ago. After legal battles, it ended up in the United States Supreme Court. On June 26, 2003, a legal and moral earthquake occurred when the United States Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Texas' law against private consensual sex between adults of the same sex is unconstitutional. This is the case that has catapulted the gay issue since June 26. This is why you are hearing and seeing it everywhere. Some believe it is as profound of a case as Roe V. Wade that permitted abortion in this nation.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in sharp dissent of the decision. He accused the court, of which he is a part, as having “largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda,” forecasting that “same-sex marriage” would be the logical next step.

Three years ago the state of Vermont became the first state to enact a law allowing same-sex civil unions. Massachusetts and New Jersey are expected to rule on cases of like manner very soon.

The Netherlands and Belgium already extend marriage rights to gay couples. Germany, France, Sweden and Denmark also have “civil union” laws. Canada is in the middle of it right now. The Canadian government appears to be heading for a showdown on this issue as they are leading the way to same-sex marriage. However, the opposition is ferocious. One of the members of the Parliament stated, “I've never seen an issue like this.” Pray for Canada to not take the action of sanctioning same-sex marriage.

The gay agenda is winning some major battles legally.

(2) Politically.

In our whimsy, flimsy, non-courageous poll-driven political world, the gay agenda is winning some battles. Politicians are all over the map on this issue, not certain where they will land.

USA Today reported on July 28th that something interesting has occurred. In early May, the polls showed that support for legal relations between gay couples was as high as 60 percent favoring that action. At the same time, only 35 percent of Americans said no.However, since the Supreme Court made their decision, this has changed dramatically. Now the polls are showing many less people in favor of it and the opposition to it has risen to almost 60 percent. What has happened now is people are seeing the reality of this gay agenda about to take over our culture and they are just now becoming aware of the issue. It takes time for the American public to wake up on these issues.

President George W. Bush has been caught in a major challenge in this issue. Yet, he stated courageously on July 30 to the American people, “I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and I think we need to codify that one way or the other.” The White House is considering supporting an amendment to the Constitution limiting marriage to being between a woman and a man.

Personally, I do not see any way to keep marriage sanctified between a man and woman only in this nation unless major spiritual revival occurs or a constitutional amendment is adopted limiting marriage as being between a man and a woman. This action alone will take a miracle and at least at this point in time I would support it. However, if they attempt to tag on to the legislation other matters, such as recognizing the gay lifestyle as an alternative lifestyle, then I would have to reconsider my support. The war wages on because the gay agenda is also winning some major battles.

(3) Educationally.

The University of Michigan is offering a course called, “How To Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation.” Professor David M. Halperin says the course does not teach students to be homosexuals but does teach them there are right and wrong ways to be gay.

New York City has created the nation's first public high school for gays, bisexuals and transgender students. It will have 170 students in September, tripling its enrollment from the year before.

Do you remember the words, “this little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine”? In The Cambridge Friends School in Cambridge, Mass., the gay light is shining brightly. Children in this entire school even as young as 5 or 6 celebrate Gay and Lesbian Day. In a school-wide assembly a man named Jeff, one of its teachers, stood and said, “I can tell the truth that I'm a gay man. That gives me much more energy to be a better teacher, to be a better coworker and to be a friend.” The students applauded as if he had cancelled school for one month. Other teachers came out that day besides Jeff admitting they were gay.

One of the hot things happening in our high schools and colleges today is bisexuality, mainly occurring with girls. This means that girls enjoy being with boys sexually and also enjoy being with girls sexually. They are bi-sexual, meaning they cross over the sexes. I have been informed this is happening very much in our local schools as well. This is a very distorted view of sexuality, one that will lead to major pain for the rest of their lives.

An illustration of the perversion of bisexuality occurred in New York at the 20th Annual MTV Video Music Awards. The event that proudly defines our youth culture presented the surprise of the night when Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were performing to Madonna's “Like a Virgin.” Madonna joins them and then enjoys an “open mouth kiss” with both Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. This is an outright abomination to God.

The way that Madonna, Spears and Aguilera closed the song was they got all in a line, held up their fists and shouted together, “We're bored with the concept of right and wrong.” The crowd stood in ovation and, afterwards, the kiss and this statement has been the talk of the event.

To all of you moms who tried to dress your daughter like Britney, well, what do you think now? To all of you girls who try to look and dress like Britney, well, what do you think now? To all of you boys and young men who have lusted after her, what do you think now?

There she is telling you who she really is ... telling you what she really stands for ... telling you what is important to her. What a disgrace to God. Someone so beautiful, so gifted, but so perverted and so lost.

The gay agenda is shining brightly across the educational venues of schools, books and all other media, straight to the hearts of children and young people. Beware -- administrators, teachers, students and parents of the books, the speakers, the seminars, the emphases and in everything you participate. The gay agenda sings proudly “this little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.” To each of you parents, you are responsible before God for the education of your children. If something does not change, this gay force will take over our schools. Under God, you will have to make a decision: “Will God be pleased with me if I permit a gay teacher to instruct my children or gay material be taught my children?” At that point, you had better consider other options or you will answer to God for it. Listen: The gay agenda is focused and committed to evangelize the educational systems of this nation. Do not put your heads into the sand, thinking it is not happening or will not happen here in this region. Remember, they sing proudly, “this little light of mine, I'm going to let it shine.” Parents, watch out, your children may already be in the process of being lured into the gay lifestyle because we know the problem exists in the teenage community in this region.

(4) Visually.

Do you know what is happening on television? The newest is called “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy.” Five gay men who call themselves “The Fab Five” do a makeover on a straight guy. Another show, “Boy Meets Boy,” is where a gay bachelor chooses one man among 15 other men to be his partner. Then there is the television show, “Will and Grace”, and another one called “Queer as Folk.”

I have never seen any of these and do not intend to do so, but understand, the goal is to baptize you into their lifestyle where it becomes normal for you to hear and see it, making you accept eventually that it is a non-threatening norm in our society.

(5) Practically.

The attack everywhere in our culture is to get you to see the gay lifestyle or gay couples as being the same as you. The agenda is also trying to desensitize you to them, their verbiage and lifestyle. In other words, “if you get use to us you will eventually ignore us or accept us.” The bombardment and intentionality is already so great that the desensitization is already occurring. Of course, inclusiveness is their theme song. Their goal is to get themselves included into all of society and its benefits, including benefits economically. As they play the song of “inclusiveness,” gay couples are now adopting children. What a tragedy. As each of us desire, the homosexual and lesbian want affirmation and will do whatever it takes to receive it. The love and acceptance they have found in the homosexual community is what lured them there and will keep them there until God intervenes.

(6) Ecclesiologically.

The gay agenda is now making major advancements into the church. They are winning many battles in the church. According to USA Today, in the major denominations in America five of them ordain openly gay clergy and bless same-sex unions. These are the Evangelical Lutheran Church, Presbyterian Church USA, Episcopal Church, American Baptist Church and United Church of Christ. Remember, just because a part of these names may be on a church sign does not mean they are a part of this denomination because there are many and varied groups within some of these labels.

The recent episodes at the annual meeting of the Episcopal Church have really ignited this issue ecclesiologically. When they elected the Rev. V. Gene Robinson as bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire, rejoicing and division happened in that denomination like never before. Compromise is the only way they will not see it severed deeply. My prayer is that those who oppose it will oppose it with tenacity and with no compromise at all based on the authority of Scripture. In response to the election of Robinson to be a bishop, even though he is an active homosexual, the Rev. Sandye Wilson of the Minnesota Diocese exclaimed to The New York Times, “It's a great day for the church.”

This newly elected bishop, Rev. Robinson, with his daughter, Ella, and his sexual partner for 13 years, Mark Andrew, stated, “God has once again brought an Easter out of Good Friday.” That statement is an abomination to God! By the way, don't ever call me Reverend. It is obvious anyone can wear that label.

In an article in the Northwest Arkansas Times, Aug. 17, entitled, “All's God's People,” subtitled, “Local Episcopal Church officials react positively to appointment of church's first gay bishop,” one of the pastors of St. Paul's Episcopal Church was quoted as saying, “What God has made clean you must not call profane.” He quoted from Acts 10. He said that blessing same-sex relationships of two people who plan on a lifelong dedication should not be considered less.

Saying that Acts 10 is the justification of same-sex marriage and the ordination of gay bishops is one of the highest distortions of Holy Scripture I have ever heard of in my life.

An article in the paper from Aug. 30, 2003, entitled, “Episcopal Leader Defends Approval,” says: “The head of the Episcopal Church ... Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold says, 'I must say in the strongest possible terms that if I believed in any part of my being that the consent to this election was unfaithful to an authentic way of reading Scripture and contrary to the leading of the Holy Spirit, I could no longer serve as the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church,' Griswold wrote in the letter released Monday.”

Well, Mr. Griswold, your position is not found in the Word of God and is contrary to the Holy Spirit of God, therefore, you should resign.

The good news is that all Episcopal churches in our region do not adhere to what has happened. The press reports that meetings have already been held nationally by many Episcopal leaders wanting to change what has happened or sever from the denomination. We need to pray for these churches to be strong in their very turbulent environment.

Unquestionably, the gay agenda is beginning to win some major battles legally, politically, educationally, visually, practically and ecclesiologically, BUT the good news is that...

2. The gay agenda will never win biblically and theologically.

In Leviticus 18:22 and in Leviticus 20:13 homosexuality is referred to as being an abomination to God. An abomination is an outrage, a disgrace, and is detestable to God. This is what God says homosexuality is.

In Romans 1:26-28, the Bible says that “God gives them over,” meaning that he lets sin run its course with the homosexuals. Their rejection of God's truth has now resulted in them being given over to their vile passions, letting it run its inevitable course toward the judgment of God. This debauchery exists when women are engaged sexually with women and men are engaged sexually with men. Then God gives them over to a debased mind, which means He gives them over to the depths of their degenerate mind and lifestyle, which is not fitting to God at all. In other words, God lets their sin run its course with them.

In 1 Corinthians 6 that we read at the beginning of [today'] message, it says very strongly in verses 9-10, those who are practicing the homosexual lifestyle will not inherit the Kingdom of God. By the way, these Scriptures speak to a few other sins. The emphasis is on practicing those sins, meaning they are your habit, your lifestyle and this is what you have become.

The Word of God is saying that homosexuality is a sin that indicates strongly that there is a need for the salvation of Jesus Christ. Yet, at the same time, in verse 11 Paul reminds each one of these Christians, “And such were some of you.” Listen to how else it is used in other Scripture readings:

“A number of you know from experience what I'm talking about, for not so long ago you were on that list....” (The Message).

“There was a time when some of you were just like that” (New English Translation).

“Some of you used to be like that....” (Contemporary English Bible).

In Greek, the word translated as “such” is the word “tauta.” This is a nominative, neuter, plural form of the demonstrative pronoun. A simple translation of it is simply “these.” Because it is a neuter form, the word “things” can be supplied in English, thus it can read “these things.” This is significant because Paul is not referring to the Corinthians as people, but as things. It is as if their sin was so deep in their lives they were known specifically for it. They practiced it. It was their lifestyle. If these things are practiced or is their lifestyle and no repentance takes place, it is indicative that genuine salvation in Jesus Christ has not taken place. This should also remind us we are not against homosexuals, gays and lesbians, but we are against their sin that is blinding them even though God speaks against it so clearly.

Paul tells the people -- some of you were living in that lifestyle but now you are washed by the blood of Jesus and now have new life. You are sanctified by the Holy Spirit being transformed into a new life. You were justified, set free from your sin and now are wearing the robes of Jesus' righteousness and no longer the garments of your sinfulness. To the glory of Jesus, the Holy Spirit has done and is continuing to do this work of transformation in your life. Further, Paul was saying to them because you are washed, sanctified and justified, don't go back into these sins because if you do and stay there, it is indicative that genuine salvation has not occurred. In verses 9-10 the banner of God's truth is lifted up and in verse 11, the banner of God's grace.

Upon the authority of God's Word, the Bible, due to its inspiration being of God alone, and its infallibility as pure as God, and its impression can be made upon all of the world and even in this culture, the Bible gives no sanction to homosexuality at all. Never does God approve of it at all. He never calls it an alternate lifestyle. God is against civil unions of homosexuals. God is against same-sex “marriage.” God is against the ordination of homosexuals into the ministry. Never, never, and never does God give any credibility to any issue or act of the gay lifestyle. Therefore, same-sex “marriage” is an abomination to God and any matrimony ever performed to do it is unholy, ungodly and will receive the judgment of God. Same-sex “marriage” is nothing more than an attempt to redefine one of the holiest ordinances of God, marriage between male and female. It is an attack against marriage and family.

So, upon the authority of God's Word you need to become actively involved against any effort in the courts of our land, the political processes of our land, the educational systems in our nation, the invasion of television, the practical attacks and the liberal slants of various churches and denominations toward the gay agenda. Stand strongly, wisely and tenaciously, but with love against this gay agenda. Remember, you are not against people, but against what they are doing because it is a slap into the face of God. For example, let me remind all of us, anyone who practices homosexuality can attend our church and I pray they will because in time they will be convicted by God, see a need to change and be transformed by God's grace. Yet anyone who practices homosexuality cannot serve in a ministry or lead in any capacity in our church.

Conclusion: The Good News today for each one of us, regardless of our past, our sins, or our present, is that we can be washed by the blood and given new life in Jesus Christ. We can wear the robes of Jesus' righteousness. And we can be freed, acquitted from our sins.

All sin is wrong. Only one sin determines whether you go to heaven or hell when you die -- the sin of rejecting Jesus Christ as your Savior and not letting Him live actively and daily as the Lord of your life. Jesus died on the cross to forgive our sins and to set us free from the penalty of those sins. He became sin for us. He became sin for you.

Regardless of your past or present, Jesus wants to save you today, cleanse you from your sin and give you eternal life in heaven. Will you receive Him today? Will you ask Him to come into your life? Luke 1:37 says, “For with God, nothing will be impossible.”

If you are here today, have heard this message and you want to associate with a church that is committed to what the Bible says, I invite you to come in a moment and join in fellowship with our spiritual family. We need you and you may need us. Be bold and be courageous and come today.

If you have a friend or family member in the gay lifestyle, you might want to come to this altar and pray for them. If that is not your situation, perhaps God has given you a burden for some area of our nation concerning this gay issue, so you come and pray for that area in our nation. Let's pray together right now.

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Defense of Marriage Sunday. Hebrews 13:4

DOES MARRIAGE MATTER?

=====================

I. Troubled marriage.

II. Marriage does matter.

A. Even non-Christians acknowledge its importance.

B. A critical question.

III. God's purpose in marriage.

A. Foundation of society.

B. Ideal vs. reality.

IV. Considerations in a modern age.

A. We cannot force God's ideals on society.

B. We can make concessions based on the hard human heart.

C. We can uphold our cherished beliefs.

V. We need to uphold our own marriages first.

A. Christians need to have good marriages.

B. Biblical principles in a marriage.

VI. It begins - and continues - with redemption.

Today marks the beginning of legal same-sex “marriages” in America. It begins in Massachusetts: the result of the state Supreme Court’s ruling in the GOODRICH case which said, “barring an individual from the protections, benefits, and obligations of civil marriage solely because that person would marry a person of the same sex violates the Massachusetts Constitution.” Once again, courts are out of control.

What is happening in Massachusetts today threatens to redefine and, ultimately, permanently damage our society’s most basic institution. That being so, you would expect a huge public outcry. Unfortunately and surprisingly, that isn’t happening. Congress is seeing little evidence of public outrage — not enough calls and letters to force them to act.

It amazes me since it’s clear that the impact of same-sex “marriage” won’t be limited to same-sex couples. Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution has written that widespread acceptance of same-sex “marriage” will widen the already existing gap between parenthood and marriage and continue to break down the family. Countries, like Norway, that adopted same-sex “marriage” saw their rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births shoot up. There’s no reason to suppose that won’t happen here.

Given what’s at stake, I believe that Christians need to make stopping the spread of same-sex “marriage” their number-one cultural priority. And we have got to let Capitol Hill know that we support the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA).

The FMA provides that “marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman.” It also provides that nothing in the United States or any state constitution shall be construed to require states to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

Legal scholars tell us that this is the only way to keep other courts from following the Massachusetts Court’s lead. While activist judges can interpret statutes the way they want to, they cannot ignore straightforward language like the FMA. This is the one way we rein in activists judges and force them to conform to the will of the people.

But the time to act is now, during an election year. The entire House and one-third of the Senate are up for re-election in November. These members know that a vote against FMA can be politically damaging. So we have to push for a vote this year, not next year when the political consequences will be less grave.

There’s another reason to act now. The more marriage licenses granted to same-sex couples in Massachusetts, the more people get used to the idea of same-sex “marriage.” We begin to lose our outrage; we begin to lose our sense of perspective. If we are going to preserve traditional marriage, we must act quickly.

The Senate has announced a vote on FMA for June. House leaders have promised action this summer. Call us here at BreakPoint please (1-877-322-5527) so we can send you the materials that will help you argue this case and tell you how to contact your public officials.

At the time of our founding, Massachusetts played a critical role in defining American liberty. But no longer do we want to follow Massachusetts, not now as it is leading us into family anarchy.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Maggie Gallagher, “Traditional Marriage Will Always Prevail,” Townhall.com, 11 May 2004.

• Read more responses and opinions at www.townhall.com.

• Kyle Cheney, “Court divided on incest,” Daily Free Press (Boston University), 24 March 2004. Free registration required.

• Fred Bayles, “Mass. preparing for a rush of gay weddings,” USA Today, 12 May 2004.

• Fred Bayles, “Mass. to allow gay marriage Monday,” USA Today, 17 May 2004.

• Pam Belluck, “ Gays Elsewhere Eye Marriage Massachusetts Style,” New York Times, 14 May 2004. Free registration required.

• Stanley Kurtz, “The End of Marriage in Scandinavia,” Weekly Standard, 2 February 2004. See also this article responding to critics.

• Chuck Colson, et al., “Colson to NY Times: Gay Marriage Has Never Been a Constitutional Right,” BreakPoint Online, 25 February 2004.

• Fr. Hans Jacobse, “Having It Both Ways,” BreakPoint Online, 13 May 2004.

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 040413, “Is Anybody Listening?“

• See BreakPoint’s sanctity of marriage resource page.

• Visit One Hundred Thousand Ministers for information on what pastors can do.

• See Maggie Gallagher’s website, www.MarriageDebate.com.

• Call 1-877-3-CALLBP to request the complimentary Marriage Amendment information packet.

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate in KeruxID 25837-26027]

Stop the presses. Some new research has been released, with shocking results. Here's the conclusion the researchers came to: “Dads make a difference in a child's life.” As the father of six children I can't tell you how relieved this makes me feel — especially on Father's Day.

What's the point, you may ask, of researchers telling us what most humans throughout history have already known?

Well, some people have known it. But many people today seem to need frequent reminders about the importance of fathers. As if it weren't bad enough that decades of no-fault divorce have caused millions of kids to grow up in broken homes, the shapers of our culture are pushing for yet another marital experiment. Same-sex “marriage” advocates assure us that children will be fine with two moms or two dads. The important thing, they say, is having two parents in the home who love each other.

That's why this new research from the Yale School of Medicine is more important than you might think. Kathleen Fackelmann of USA TODAY summarizes it this way: “Fathers bring a different parenting style to everyday activities. ... Dads often take an active approach that encourages children to solve problems on their own rather than asking for help.”

This approach is needed to help balance the family, since mothers, on the whole, tend to be more nurturing than challenging. As Fackelmann writes, “Kids need both parenting styles, but the father's contribution can be crucial: It helps kids develop a can-do attitude and helps hone their problem-solving skills. ... Fathers often adopt parenting methods to help prepare kids for the real world.”

I don't know whether the Yale researchers intended their findings to be applied to the hottest social and political battle of our day. But the implications would be too dangerous to ignore. The choice to give a child two moms and no dad or two dads and no mom is more than exercising parenting and sexual options. It denies children a basic human need.

Marriage expert Maggie Gallagher tells the story of a young man with whom she talked about same-sex “marriage.” She asked him, “Don't you think that, ideally, kids need a mom and a dad?” The young man disagreed. He'd grown up without a father, he said, and he was fine. So Maggie asked, “What about you? Do you think you'll matter to your kids?” The young man looked startled, “and then followed his train of thought to the only logical conclusion — a train wreck: 'No,' he said. 'Not really.'“

This young man, Gallagher tells us, “has absorbed the message of [same-sex “marriage”] very well. Fathers are optional. Children are resilient. Adults are fragile, and their emotional needs come first.”

This Father's Day, as those lucky enough to have a father as I do celebrate one of the most influential people in their lives, we need to think seriously about that message and its destructive potential. If we don't want these lies to undermine our society as a whole, then, like the Yale researchers, we need to keep stating the obvious: Male dads (and female moms) make all the difference in the world.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Kathleen Fackelmann, “For problem-solving, he really might know best,” USA Today, 13 June 2004.

• See Dr. Pruett's website: http://www.drkylepruett.com/home.htm

• Kyle Pruett, Fatherneed (Broadway Books, 2001).

• Julia Neyman, “Do evangelical Protestant fathers really know best?“ USA Today, 16 June 2004.

• Charles Colson, “Faith — and Our Fathers,” Jubilee.

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 040218, “Ward and Ward Cleaver: The New Stay-at-Home Parent.”

• Maggie Gallagher, “The message of same-sex marriage,” Townhall.com, 8 January 2004.

• Maggie Gallagher, “The Stakes: Why We Need Marriage,” National Review Online, 14 July 2003.

• Roberto Rivera, “Patriarchy,” BreakPoint Online, 7 July 2003.

• Alex Wainer, “Superdad,” BreakPoint Online, 24 October 2002.

• Sara Eggers, “Finding a Father,” Boundless, 27 June 2002.

• Jeremy Deck, “My Father's Closet,” Boundless, 5 April 2001.

• Marshall Allen, “Forgotten Fathers,” Boundless, 25 July 2002.

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

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[Original illustration here was a duplicate in HolwickID 25837-26027]

The issue of same-sex “marriage” and the Federal Marriage Amendment will come to the fore in American political debate this year—and, I believe, soon. Congressional leaders are strategizing right now. But there's one objection to our position that many of us have had to face, and we don't often have a good answer. Our opponents say, “What's the big deal? So what if gays and lesbians want to marry? This doesn't do anything to your marriage.” Well, our answer has always been that it would weaken marriage. Why? Because it would take away the unique status and benefits enjoyed by heterosexual couples granted by society, in society's own interest, to encourage the family and propagation of the race. But that's an abstract argument.

Well, in this week's WEEKLY STANDARD [see bottom] Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution supplies us with both the best argument and evidence to make our case. In his article “The End of Marriage in Scandinavia,” Kurtz asks, “Will same-sex marriage undermine the institution of marriage?” His answer: “It already has.” How? By taking the gap that exists between marriage and parenthood and making it even wider.

“If marriage is only about a relationship between two people,” writes Kurtz, “and is not intrinsically connected to parenthood, why shouldn't same-sex couples be allowed to marry?” He goes on to say, “It follows that once marriage is redefined to accommodate same-sex couples, that change cannot help but lock in and reinforce the very cultural separation between marriage and parenthood that makes gay marriage conceivable to begin with.”

He offers Norway, the most conservative of the Scandinavian countries, as exhibit A. Prior to 1993 when same-sex “marriage” was imposed there by courts, not by democratic vote — sound familiar? — Norway had a low out-of-wedlock birth rate. The traditional link between marriage and parenthood was still in place.

But once same-sex “marriage” was legalized, Norway's out-of-wedlock birth rate shot up as the link was broken and cohabitation became normal. Gay “marriage” wasn't the only factor, but it appears to have been the decisive one.

And as it turns out, that was the plan. Kurtz cites Kari Moxnes, a Norwegian feminist, sociologist, and vocal enemy of marriage. She says “that Norwegian gay marriage was a sign of marriage's growing emptiness, not its strength.” And, according to Kurtz, Henning Beck, the gay Danish social theorist, “dismisses as an 'implausible' claim the idea that gay marriage promotes monogamy.” According to Beck and Norwegian sociologist Rune Halvorsen, “The goal of the gay marriage movements in both Norway and Denmark ... was not marriage but social approval for homosexuality.” And let me add emphatically, the same is true in this country.

“If, as in Norway,” writes Kurtz, “gay marriage were imposed here by a socially liberal cultural elite, it would likely speed us on the way toward the classic Nordic pattern of less frequent marriage, more frequent out-of-wedlock birth, and skyrocketing family dissolution.” This would be a disaster — more broken families, more crime.

Stanley Kurtz concludes, “In effect, Scandinavia has run our experiment for us. The results are in.” The verdict: against gay “marriage.”

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Stanley Kurtz, “The End of Marriage in Scandinavia,” Weekly Standard, 2 February 2004. [full article below] http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/660zypwj.asp

• The BreakPoint “Speak the Truth in Love“ kit is filled with useful resources to help you talk about the highly charged issue of homosexuality with your friends and neighbors, including the Evangelicals and Catholics Together statement on marriage, CDs addressing same-sex “marriage” and how to talk to homosexual friends, and more.

• See the BreakPoint commentaries: “Funny Things,” “Unequal Rights,” “The 'Love' That Won't Keep Quiet,” and “Everybody Loses.”

• Visit One Hundred Thousand Ministers for ideas that churches and pastors may use in addressing the issue of homosexuality and same-sex “marriage.”

• Rev. John C. Rankin, “A Conversation with Homosexual Advocates,” BreakPoint Online, 27 October 2003.

• Roberto Rivera, “No Other Kind,” BreakPoint Online, 22 October 2002.

• Gina Dalfonzo, “Speaking Different Languages,” BreakPoint Online, 31 July 2003.

• Bill Murchison, “Of marriage and politicians,” Townhall.com, 27 January 2004.

• John Witte, Jr., “The Meanings of Marriage,” First Things, October 2002.

• Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher, The Case for Marriage (Doubleday, 2000).

• Visit Maggie Gallagher's website on the marriage debate.

• Also visit BreakPoint's Sanctity of Marriage resource page.

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

=======================

The End of Marriage in Scandinavia

The “conservative case” for same-sex marriage collapses.

by Stanley Kurtz

The Weekly Standard

02/02/2004, Volume 009, Issue 20

MARRIAGE IS SLOWLY DYING IN SCANDINAVIA. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents. Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood. The Nordic family pattern -- including gay marriage -- is spreading across Europe. And by looking closely at it we can answer the key empirical question underlying the gay marriage debate. Will same-sex marriage undermine the institution of marriage? It already has.

More precisely, it has further undermined the institution. The separation of marriage from parenthood was increasing; gay marriage has widened the separation. Out-of-wedlock birthrates were rising; gay marriage has added to the factors pushing those rates higher. Instead of encouraging a society-wide return to marriage, Scandinavian gay marriage has driven home the message that marriage itself is outdated, and that virtually any family form, including out-of-wedlock parenthood, is acceptable.

This is not how the situation has been portrayed by prominent gay marriage advocates journalist Andrew Sullivan and Yale law professor William Eskridge Jr. Sullivan and Eskridge have made much of an unpublished study of Danish same-sex registered partnerships by Darren Spedale, an independent researcher with an undergraduate degree who visited Denmark in 1996 on a Fulbright scholarship. In 1989, Denmark had legalized de facto gay marriage (Norway followed in 1993 and Sweden in 1994). Drawing on Spedale, Sullivan and Eskridge cite evidence that since then, marriage has strengthened. Spedale reported that in the six years following the establishment of registered partnerships in Denmark (1990-1996), heterosexual marriage rates climbed by 10 percent, while heterosexual divorce rates declined by 12 percent. Writing in the McGeorge Law Review, Eskridge claimed that Spedale's study had exposed the “hysteria and irresponsibility” of those who predicted gay marriage would undermine marriage. Andrew Sullivan's Spedale-inspired piece was subtitled, “The case against same-sex marriage crumbles.”

Yet the half-page statistical analysis of heterosexual marriage in Darren Spedale's unpublished paper doesn't begin to get at the truth about the decline of marriage in Scandinavia during the nineties. Scandinavian marriage is now so weak that statistics on marriage and divorce no longer mean what they used to.

Take divorce. It's true that in Denmark, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, divorce numbers looked better in the nineties. But that's because the pool of married people has been shrinking for some time. You can't divorce without first getting married. Moreover, a closer look at Danish divorce in the post-gay marriage decade reveals disturbing trends. Many Danes have stopped holding off divorce until their kids are grown. And Denmark in the nineties saw a 25 percent increase in cohabiting couples with children. With fewer parents marrying, what used to show up in statistical tables as early divorce is now the unrecorded breakup of a cohabiting couple with children.

What about Spedale's report that the Danish marriage rate increased 10 percent from 1990 to 1996? Again, the news only appears to be good. First, there is no trend. Eurostat's just-released marriage rates for 2001 show declines in Sweden and Denmark (Norway hasn't reported). Second, marriage statistics in societies with very low rates (Sweden registered the lowest marriage rate in recorded history in 1997) must be carefully parsed. In his study of the Norwegian family in the nineties, for example, Christer Hyggen shows that a small increase in Norway's marriage rate over the past decade has more to do with the institution's decline than with any renaissance. Much of the increase in Norway's marriage rate is driven by older couples “catching up.” These couples belong to the first generation that accepts rearing the first born child out of wedlock. As they bear second children, some finally get married. (And even this tendency to marry at the birth of a second child is weakening.) As for the rest of the increase in the Norwegian marriage rate, it is largely attributable to remarriage among the large number of divorced.

Spedale's report of lower divorce rates and higher marriage rates in post-gay marriage Denmark is thus misleading. Marriage is now so weak in Scandinavia that shifts in these rates no longer mean what they would in America. In Scandinavian demography, what counts is the out-of-wedlock birthrate, and the family dissolution rate.

The family dissolution rate is different from the divorce rate. Because so many Scandinavians now rear children outside of marriage, divorce rates are unreliable measures of family weakness. Instead, we need to know the rate at which parents (married or not) split up. Precise statistics on family dissolution are unfortunately rare. Yet the studies that have been done show that throughout Scandinavia (and the West) cohabiting couples with children break up at two to three times the rate of married parents. So rising rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth stand as proxy for rising rates of family dissolution.

By that measure, Scandinavian family dissolution has only been worsening. Between 1990 and 2000, Norway's out-of-wedlock birthrate rose from 39 to 50 percent, while Sweden's rose from 47 to 55 percent. In Denmark out-of-wedlock births stayed level during the nineties (beginning at 46 percent and ending at 45 percent). But the leveling off seems to be a function of a slight increase in fertility among older couples, who marry only after multiple births (if they don't break up first). That shift masks the 25 percent increase during the nineties in cohabitation and unmarried parenthood among Danish couples (many of them young). About 60 percent of first born children in Denmark now have unmarried parents. The rise of fragile families based on cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing means that during the nineties, the total rate of family dissolution in Scandinavia significantly increased.

Scandinavia's out-of-wedlock birthrates may have risen more rapidly in the seventies, when marriage began its slide. But the push of that rate past the 50 percent mark during the nineties was in many ways more disturbing. Growth in the out-of-wedlock birthrate is limited by the tendency of parents to marry after a couple of births, and also by the persistence of relatively conservative and religious districts. So as out-of-wedlock childbearing pushes beyond 50 percent, it is reaching the toughest areas of cultural resistance. The most important trend of the post-gay marriage decade may be the erosion of the tendency to marry at the birth of a second child. Once even that marker disappears, the path to the complete disappearance of marriage is open.

And now that married parenthood has become a minority phenomenon, it has lost the critical mass required to have socially normative force. As Danish sociologists Wehner, Kambskard, and Abrahamson describe it, in the wake of the changes of the nineties, “Marriage is no longer a precondition for settling a family -- neither legally nor normatively.... What defines and makes the foundation of the Danish family can be said to have moved from marriage to parenthood.”

So the highly touted half-page of analysis from an unpublished paper that supposedly helps validate the “conservative case” for gay marriage -- i.e., that it will encourage stable marriage for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike -- does no such thing. Marriage in Scandinavia is in deep decline, with children shouldering the burden of rising rates of family dissolution. And the mainspring of the decline -- an increasingly sharp separation between marriage and parenthood -- can be linked to gay marriage. To see this, we need to understand why marriage is in trouble in Scandinavia to begin with.

Scandinavia has long been a bellwether of family change. Scholars take the Swedish experience as a prototype for family developments that will, or could, spread throughout the world. So let's have a look at the decline of Swedish marriage.

In Sweden, as elsewhere, the sixties brought contraception, abortion, and growing individualism. Sex was separated from procreation, reducing the need for “shotgun weddings.” These changes, along with the movement of women into the workforce, enabled and encouraged people to marry at later ages. With married couples putting off parenthood, early divorce had fewer consequences for children. That weakened the taboo against divorce. Since young couples were putting off children, the next step was to dispense with marriage and cohabit until children were desired. Americans have lived through this transformation. The Swedes have simply drawn the final conclusion: If we've come so far without marriage, why marry at all? Our love is what matters, not a piece of paper. Why should children change that?

Two things prompted the Swedes to take this extra step -- the welfare state and cultural attitudes. No Western economy has a higher percentage of public employees, public expenditures -- or higher tax rates -- than Sweden. The massive Swedish welfare state has largely displaced the family as provider. By guaranteeing jobs and income to every citizen (even children), the welfare state renders each individual independent. It's easier to divorce your spouse when the state will support you instead.

The taxes necessary to support the welfare state have had an enormous impact on the family. With taxes so high, women must work. This reduces the time available for child rearing, thus encouraging the expansion of a day-care system that takes a large part in raising nearly all Swedish children over age one. Here is at least a partial realization of Simone de Beauvoir's dream of an enforced androgyny that pushes women from the home by turning children over to the state.

Yet the Swedish welfare state may encourage traditionalism in one respect. The lone teen pregnancies common in the British and American underclass are rare in Sweden, which has no underclass to speak of. Even when Swedish couples bear a child out of wedlock, they tend to reside together when the child is born. Strong state enforcement of child support is another factor discouraging single motherhood by teens. Whatever the causes, the discouragement of lone motherhood is a short-term effect. Ultimately, mothers and fathers can get along financially alone. So children born out of wedlock are raised, initially, by two cohabiting parents, many of whom later break up.

There are also cultural-ideological causes of Swedish family decline. Even more than in the United States, radical feminist and socialist ideas pervade the universities and the media. Many Scandinavian social scientists see marriage as a barrier to full equality between the sexes, and would not be sorry to see marriage replaced by unmarried cohabitation. A related cultural-ideological agent of marital decline is secularism. Sweden is probably the most secular country in the world. Secular social scientists (most of them quite radical) have largely replaced clerics as arbiters of public morality. Swedes themselves link the decline of marriage to secularism. And many studies confirm that, throughout the West, religiosity is associated with institutionally strong marriage, while heightened secularism is correlated with a weakening of marriage. Scholars have long suggested that the relatively thin Christianization of the Nordic countries explains a lot about why the decline of marriage in Scandinavia is a decade ahead of the rest of the West.

Are Scandinavians concerned about rising out-of-wedlock births, the decline of marriage, and ever-rising rates of family dissolution? No, and yes. For over 15 years, an American outsider, Rutgers University sociologist David Popenoe, has played Cassandra on these issues. Popenoe's 1988 book, “Disturbing the Nest,” is still the definitive treatment of Scandinavian family change and its meaning for the Western world. Popenoe is no toe-the-line conservative. He has praise for the Swedish welfare state, and criticizes American opposition to some child welfare programs. Yet Popenoe has documented the slow motion collapse of the Swedish family, and emphasized the link between Swedish family decline and welfare policy.

For years, Popenoe's was a lone voice. Yet by the end of the nineties, the problem was too obvious to ignore. In 2000, Danish sociologist Mai Heide Ottosen published a study, “Samboskab, Aegteskab og Foraeldrebrud” (“Cohabitation, Marriage and Parental Breakup”), which confirmed the increased risk of family dissolution to children of unmarried parents, and gently chided Scandinavian social scientists for ignoring the “quiet revolution” of out-of-wedlock parenting.

Despite the reluctance of Scandinavian social scientists to study the consequences of family dissolution for children, we do have an excellent study that followed the life experiences of all children born in Stockholm in 1953. (Not coincidentally, the research was conducted by a British scholar, Duncan W.G. Timms.) That study found that regardless of income or social status, parental breakup had negative effects on children's mental health. Boys living with single, separated, or divorced mothers had particularly high rates of impairment in adolescence. An important 2003 study by Gunilla Ringbäck Weitoft, et al. found that children of single parents in Sweden have more than double the rates of mortality, severe morbidity, and injury of children in two parent households. This held true after controlling for a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic circumstances.

The decline of marriage and the rise of unstable cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbirth are not confined to Scandinavia. The Scandinavian welfare state aggravates these problems. Yet none of the forces weakening marriage there are unique to the region. Contraception, abortion, women in the workforce, spreading secularism, ascendant individualism, and a substantial welfare state are found in every Western country. That is why the Nordic pattern is spreading.

Yet the pattern is spreading unevenly. And scholars agree that cultural tradition plays a central role in determining whether a given country moves toward the Nordic family system. Religion is a key variable. A 2002 study by the Max Planck Institute, for example, concluded that countries with the lowest rates of family dissolution and out-of-wedlock births are “strongly dominated by the Catholic confession.” The same study found that in countries with high levels of family dissolution, religion in general, and Catholicism in particular, had little influence.

British demographer Kathleen Kiernan, the acknowledged authority on the spread of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births across Europe, divides the continent into three zones. The Nordic countries are the leaders in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births. They are followed by a middle group that includes the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain, and Germany. Until recently, France was a member of this middle group, but France's rising out-of-wedlock birthrate has moved it into the Nordic category. North American rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth put the United States and Canada into this middle group. Most resistant to cohabitation, family dissolution, and out-of-wedlock births are the southern European countries of Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece, and, until recently, Switzerland and Ireland. (Ireland's rising out-of-wedlock birthrate has just pushed it into the middle group.)

These three groupings closely track the movement for gay marriage. In the early nineties, gay marriage came to the Nordic countries, where the out-of-wedlock birthrate was already high. Ten years later, out-of-wedlock birth rates have risen significantly in the middle group of nations. Not coincidentally, nearly every country in that middle group has recently either legalized some form of gay marriage, or is seriously considering doing so. Only in the group with low out-of-wedlock birthrates has the gay marriage movement achieved relatively little success.

This suggests that gay marriage is both an effect and a cause of the increasing separation between marriage and parenthood. As rising out-of-wedlock birthrates disassociate heterosexual marriage from parenting, gay marriage becomes conceivable. If marriage is only about a relationship between two people, and is not intrinsically connected to parenthood, why shouldn't same-sex couples be allowed to marry? It follows that once marriage is redefined to accommodate same-sex couples, that change cannot help but lock in and reinforce the very cultural separation between marriage and parenthood that makes gay marriage conceivable to begin with.

We see this process at work in the radical separation of marriage and parenthood that swept across Scandinavia in the nineties. If Scandinavian out-of-wedlock birthrates had not already been high in the late eighties, gay marriage would have been far more difficult to imagine. More than a decade into post-gay marriage Scandinavia, out-of-wedlock birthrates have passed 50 percent, and the effective end of marriage as a protective shield for children has become thinkable. Gay marriage hasn't blocked the separation of marriage and parenthood; it has advanced it.

We see this most clearly in Norway. In 1989, a couple of years after Sweden broke ground by offering gay couples the first domestic partnership package in Europe, Denmark legalized de facto gay marriage. This kicked off a debate in Norway (traditionally more conservative than either Sweden or Denmark), which legalized de facto gay marriage in 1993. (Sweden expanded its benefits packages into de facto gay marriage in 1994.) In liberal Denmark, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were already very high, the public favored same-sex marriage. But in Norway, where the out-of-wedlock birthrate was lower -- and religion traditionally stronger -- gay marriage was imposed, against the public will, by the political elite.

Norway's gay marriage debate, which ran most intensely from 1991 through 1993, was a culture-shifting event. And once enacted, gay marriage had a decidedly unconservative impact on Norway's cultural contests, weakening marriage's defenders, and placing a weapon in the hands of those who sought to replace marriage with cohabitation. Since its adoption, gay marriage has brought division and decline to Norway's Lutheran Church. Meanwhile, Norway's fast-rising out-of-wedlock birthrate has shot past Denmark's. Particularly in Norway -- once relatively conservative -- gay marriage has undermined marriage's institutional standing for everyone.

Norway's Lutheran state church has been riven by conflict in the decade since the approval of de facto gay marriage, with the ordination of registered partners the most divisive issue. The church's agonies have been intensively covered in the Norwegian media, which have taken every opportunity to paint the church as hidebound and divided. The nineties began with conservative churchmen control. By the end of the decade, liberals had seized the reins.

While the most public disputes of the nineties were over homosexuality, Norway's Lutheran church was also divided over the question of heterosexual cohabitation. Asked directly, liberal and conservative clerics alike voice a preference for marriage over cohabitation -- especially for couples with children. In practice, however, conservative churchmen speak out against the trend toward unmarried cohabitation and childbirth, while liberals acquiesce.

This division over heterosexual cohabitation broke into the open in 2000, at the height of the church's split over gay partnerships, when Prince Haakon, heir to Norway's throne, began to live with his lover, a single mother. From the start of the prince's controversial relationship to its eventual culmination in marriage, the future head of the Norwegian state church received tokens of public support or understanding from the very same bishops who were leading the fight to permit the ordination of homosexual partners.

So rather than strengthening Norwegian marriage against the rise of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birth, same-sex marriage had the opposite effect. Gay marriage lessened the church's authority by splitting it into warring factions and providing the secular media with occasions to mock and expose divisions. Gay marriage also elevated the church's openly rebellious minority liberal faction to national visibility, allowing Norwegians to feel that their proclivity for unmarried parenthood, if not fully approved by the church, was at least not strongly condemned. If the “conservative case” for gay marriage had been valid, clergy who were supportive of gay marriage would Spedale's have taken a strong public stand against unmarried heterosexual parenthood. This didn't happen. It was the conservative clergy who criticized the prince, while the liberal supporters of gay marriage tolerated his decisions. The message was not lost on ordinary Norwegians, who continued their flight to unmarried parenthood.

Gay marriage is both an effect and a reinforcing cause of the separation of marriage and parenthood. In states like Sweden and Denmark, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were already very high, and the public favored gay marriage, gay unions were an effect of earlier changes. Once in place, gay marriage symbolically ratified the separation of marriage and parenthood. And once established, gay marriage became one of several factors contributing to further increases in cohabitation and out-of-wedlock birthrates, as well as to early divorce. But in Norway, where out-of-wedlock birthrates were lower, religion stronger, and the public opposed same-sex unions, gay marriage had an even greater role in precipitating marital decline.

Sweden's position as the world leader in family decline is associated with a weak clergy, and the prominence of secular and left-leaning social scientists. In the post-gay marriage nineties, as Norway's once relatively low out-of-wedlock birthrate was climbing to unprecedented heights, and as the gay marriage controversy weakened and split the once respected Lutheran state church, secular social scientists took center stage.

Kari Moxnes, a feminist sociologist specializing in divorce, is one of the most prominent of Norway's newly emerging group of public social scientists. As a scholar who sees both marriage and at-home motherhood as inherently oppressive to women, Moxnes is a proponent of non-marital cohabitation and parenthood. In 1993, as the Norwegian legislature was debating gay marriage, Moxnes published an article, “Det tomme ekteskap” (“Empty Marriage”), in the influential liberal paper Dagbladet. She argued that Norwegian gay marriage was a sign of marriage's growing emptiness, not its strength. Although Moxnes spoke in favor of gay marriage, she treated its creation as a (welcome) death knell for marriage itself. Moxnes identified homosexuals -- with their experience in forging relationships unencumbered by children -- as social pioneers in the separation of marriage from parenthood. In recognizing homosexual relationships, Moxnes said, society was ratifying the division of marriage from parenthood that had spurred the rise of out-of-wedlock births to begin with.

A frequent public presence, Moxnes enjoyed her big moment in 1999, when she was embroiled in a dispute with Valgerd Svarstad Haugland, minister of children and family affairs in Norway's Christian Democrat government. Moxnes had criticized Christian marriage classes for teaching children the importance of wedding vows. This brought a sharp public rebuke from Haugland. Responding to Haugland's criticisms, Moxnes invoked homosexual families as proof that “relationships” were now more important than institutional marriage.

This is not what proponents of the conservative case for gay marriage had in mind. In Norway, gay marriage has given ammunition to those who wish to put an end to marriage. And the steady rise of Norway's out-of-wedlock birthrate during the nineties proves that the opponents of marriage are succeeding. Nor is Kari Moxnes an isolated case.

Months before Moxnes clashed with Haugland, social historian Kari Melby had a very public quarrel with a leader of the Christian Democratic party over the conduct of Norway's energy minister, Marit Arnstad. Arnstad had gotten pregnant in office and had declined to name the father. Melby defended Arnstad, and publicly challenged the claim that children do best with both a mother and a father. In making her case, Melby praised gay parenting, along with voluntary single motherhood, as equally worthy alternatives to the traditional family. So instead of noting that an expectant mother might want to follow the example of marriage that even gays were now setting, Melby invoked homosexual families as proof that a child can do as well with one parent as two.

Finally, consider a case that made even more news in Norway, that of handball star Mia Hundvin (yes, handball prowess makes for celebrity in Norway). Hundvin had been in a registered gay partnership with fellow handballer Camilla Andersen. These days, however, having publicly announced her bisexuality, Hundvin is linked with Norwegian snowboarder Terje Haakonsen. Inspired by her time with Haakonsen's son, Hundvin decided to have a child. The father of Hundvin's child may well be Haakonsen, but neither Hundvin nor Haakonsen is saying.

Did Hundvin divorce her registered partner before deciding to become a single mother by (probably) her new boyfriend? The story in Norway's premiere paper, Aftenposten, doesn't bother to mention. After noting that Hundvin and Andersen were registered partners, the paper simply says that the two women are no longer “romantically involved.” Hundvin has only been with Haakonsen about a year. She obviously decided to become a single mother without bothering to see whether she and Haakonsen might someday marry. Nor has Hundvin appeared to consider that her affection for Haakonsen's child (also apparently born out of wedlock) might better be expressed by marrying Haakonsen and becoming his son's new mother.

Certainly, you can chalk up more than a little of this saga to celebrity culture. But celebrity culture is both a product and influencer of the larger culture that gives rise to it. Clearly, the idea of parenthood here has been radically individualized, and utterly detached from marriage. Registered partnerships have reinforced existing trends. The press treats gay partnerships more as relationships than as marriages. The symbolic message of registered partnerships -- for social scientists, handball players, and bishops alike -- has been that most any nontraditional family is just fine. Gay marriage has served to validate the belief that individual choice trumps family form.

The Scandinavian experience rebuts the so-called conservative case for gay marriage in more than one way. Noteworthy, too, is the lack of a movement toward marriage and monogamy among gays. Take-up rates on gay marriage are exceedingly small. Yale's William Eskridge acknowledged this when he reported in 2000 that 2,372 couples had registered after nine years of the Danish law, 674 after four years of the Norwegian law, and 749 after four years of the Swedish law.

Danish social theorist Henning Bech and Norwegian sociologist Rune Halvorsen offer excellent accounts of the gay marriage debates in Denmark and Norway. Despite the regnant social liberalism in these countries, proposals to recognize gay unions generated tremendous controversy, and have reshaped the meaning of marriage in the years since. Both Bech and Halvorsen stress that the conservative case for gay marriage, while put forward by a few, was rejected by many in the gay community. Bech, perhaps Scandinavia's most prominent gay thinker, dismisses as an “implausible” claim the idea that gay marriage promotes monogamy. He treats the “conservative case” as something that served chiefly tactical purposes during a difficult political debate. According to Halvorsen, many of Norway's gays imposed self-censorship during the marriage debate, so as to hide their opposition to marriage itself. The goal of the gay marriage movements in both Norway and Denmark, say Halvorsen and Bech, was not marriage but social approval for homosexuality. Halvorsen suggests that the low numbers of registered gay couples may be understood as a collective protest against the expectations (presumably, monogamy) embodied in marriage.

Since liberalizing divorce in the first decades of the twentieth century, the Nordic countries have been the leading edge of marital change. Drawing on the Swedish experience, Kathleen Kiernan, the British demographer, uses a four-stage model by which to gauge a country's movement toward Swedish levels of out-of-wedlock births.

In stage one, cohabitation is seen as a deviant or avant-garde practice, and the vast majority of the population produces children within marriage. Italy is at this first stage. In the second stage, cohabitation serves as a testing period before marriage, and is generally a childless phase. Bracketing the problem of underclass single parenthood, America is largely at this second stage. In stage three, cohabitation becomes increasingly acceptable, and parenting is no longer automatically associated with marriage. Norway was at this third stage, but with recent demographic and legal changes has entered stage four. In the fourth stage (Sweden and Denmark), marriage and cohabitation become practically indistinguishable, with many, perhaps even most, children born and raised outside of marriage. According to Kiernan, these stages may vary in duration, yet once a country has reached a stage, return to an earlier phase is unlikely. (She offers no examples of stage reversal.) Yet once a stage has been reached, earlier phases coexist.

The forces pushing nations toward the Nordic model are almost universal. True, by preserving legal distinctions between marriage and cohabitation, reining in the welfare state, and preserving at least some traditional values, a given country might forestall or prevent the normalization of nonmarital parenthood. Yet every Western country is susceptible to the pull of the Nordic model. Nor does Catholicism guarantee immunity. Ireland, perhaps because of its geographic, linguistic, and cultural proximity to England, is now suffering from out-of-wedlock birthrates far in excess of the rest of Catholic Europe. Without deeming a shift inevitable, Kiernan openly wonders how long America can resist the pull of stages three and four.

Although Sweden leads the world in family decline, the United States is runner-up. Swedes marry less, and bear more children out of wedlock, than any other industrialized nation. But Americans lead the world in single parenthood and divorce. If we bracket the crisis of single parenthood among African-Americans, the picture is somewhat different. Yet even among non-Hispanic whites, the American divorce rate is extremely high by world standards.

The American mix of family traditionalism and family instability is unusual. In comparison to Europe, Americans are more religious and more likely to turn to the family than the state for a wide array of needs -- from child care, to financial support, to care for the elderly. Yet America's individualism cuts two ways. Our cultural libertarianism protects the family as a bulwark against the state, yet it also breaks individuals loose from the family. The danger we face is a combination of America's divorce rate with unstable, Scandinavian-style out-of-wedlock parenthood. With a growing tendency for cohabiting couples to have children outside of marriage, America is headed in that direction.

Young Americans are more likely to favor gay marriage than their elders. That oft-noted fact is directly related to another. Less than half of America's twentysomethings consider it wrong to bear children outside marriage. There is a growing tendency for even middle class cohabiting couples to have children without marrying.

Nonetheless, although cohabiting parenthood is growing in America, levels here are still far short of those in Europe. America's situation is not unlike Norway's in the early nineties, with religiosity relatively strong, the out-of-wedlock birthrate still relatively low (yet rising), and the public opposed to gay marriage. If, as in Norway, gay marriage were imposed here by a socially liberal cultural elite, it would likely speed us on the way toward the classic Nordic pattern of less frequent marriage, more frequent out-of-wedlock birth, and skyrocketing family dissolution.

In the American context, this would be a disaster. Beyond raising rates of middle class family dissolution, a further separation of marriage from parenthood would reverse the healthy turn away from single-parenting that we have begun to see since welfare reform. And cross-class family decline would bring intense pressure for a new expansion of the American welfare state.

All this is happening in Britain. With the Nordic pattern's spread across Europe, Britain's out-of-wedlock birthrate has risen to 40 percent. Most of that increase is among cohabiting couples. Yet a significant number of out-of-wedlock births in Britain are to lone teenage mothers. This a function of Britain's class divisions. Remember that although the Scandinavian welfare state encourages family dissolution in the long term, in the short term, Scandinavian parents giving birth out of wedlock tend to stay together. But given the presence of a substantial underclass in Britain, the spread of Nordic cohabitation there has sent lone teen parenting rates way up. As Britain's rates of single parenting and family dissolution have grown, so has pressure to expand the welfare state to compensate for economic help that families can no longer provide. But of course, an expansion of the welfare state would only lock the weakening of Britain's family system into place.

If America is to avoid being forced into a similar choice, we'll have to resist the separation of marriage from parenthood. Yet even now we are being pushed in the Scandinavian direction. Stimulated by rising rates of unmarried parenthood, the influential American Law Institute (ALI) has proposed a series of legal reforms (“Principles of Family Dissolution”) designed to equalize marriage and cohabitation. Adoption of the ALI principles would be a giant step toward the Scandinavian system.

AMERICANS take it for granted that, despite its recent troubles, marriage will always exist. This is a mistake. Marriage is disappearing in Scandinavia, and the forces undermining it there are active throughout the West. Perhaps the most disturbing sign for the future is the collapse of the Scandinavian tendency to marry after the second child. At the start of the nineties, 60 percent of unmarried Norwegian parents who lived together had only one child. By 2001, 56 percent of unmarried, cohabiting parents in Norway had two or more children. This suggests that someday, Scandinavian parents might simply stop getting married altogether, no matter how many children they have.

The death of marriage is not inevitable. In a given country, public policy decisions and cultural values could slow, and perhaps halt, the process of marital decline. Nor are we faced with an all-or-nothing choice between the marital system of, say, the 1950s and marriage's disappearance. Kiernan's model posits stopping points. So repealing no-fault divorce, or even eliminating premarital cohabitation, are not what's at issue. With no-fault divorce, Americans traded away some of the marital stability that protects children to gain more freedom for adults. Yet we can accept that trade-off, while still drawing a line against descent into a Nordic-style system. And cohabitation as a premarital testing phase is not the same as unmarried parenting. Potentially, a line between the two can hold.

Developments in the last half-century have surely weakened the links between American marriage and parenthood. Yet to a remarkable degree, Americans still take it for granted that parents should marry. Scandinavia shocks us. Still, who can deny that gay marriage will accustom us to a more Scandinavian-style separation of marriage and parenthood? And with our underclass, the social pathologies this produces in America are bound to be more severe than they already are in wealthy and socially homogeneous Scandinavia.

All of these considerations suggest that the gay marriage debate in America is too important to duck. Kiernan maintains that as societies progressively detach marriage from parenthood, stage reversal is impossible. That makes sense. The association between marriage and parenthood is partly a mystique. Disenchanted mystiques cannot be restored on demand.

What about a patchwork in which some American states have gay marriage while others do not? A state-by-state patchwork would practically guarantee a shift toward the Nordic family system. Movies and television, which do not respect state borders, would embrace gay marriage. The cultural effects would be national.

What about Vermont-style civil unions? Would that be a workable compromise? Clearly not. Scandinavian registered partnerships are Vermont-style civil unions. They are not called marriage, yet resemble marriage in almost every other respect. The key differences are that registered partnerships do not permit adoption or artificial insemination, and cannot be celebrated in state-affiliated churches. These limitations are gradually being repealed. The lesson of the Scandinavian experience is that even de facto same-sex marriage undermines marriage.

The Scandinavian example also proves that gay marriage is not interracial marriage in a new guise. The miscegenation analogy was never convincing. There are plenty of reasons to think that, in contrast to race, sexual orientation will have profound effects on marriage. But with Scandinavia, we are well beyond the realm of even educated speculation. The post-gay marriage changes in the Scandinavian family are significant. This is not like the fantasy about interracial birth defects. There is a serious scholarly debate about the spread of the Nordic family pattern. Since gay marriage is a part of that pattern, it needs to be part of that debate.

Conservative advocates of gay marriage want to test it in a few states. The implication is that, should the experiment go bad, we can call it off. Yet the effects, even in a few American states, will be neither containable nor revocable. It took about 15 years after the change hit Sweden and Denmark for Norway's out-of-wedlock birthrate to begin to move from “European” to “Nordic” levels. It took another 15 years (and the advent of gay marriage) for Norway's out-of-wedlock birthrate to shoot past even Denmark's. By the time we see the effects of gay marriage in America, it will be too late to do anything about it. Yet we needn't wait that long. In effect, Scandinavia has run our experiment for us. The results are in.

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Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His “Beyond Gay Marriage” appeared in our August 4, 2003, issue.

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Late last year, months after the landmark Lawrence v. Texas decision striking down anti-sodomy laws, two Utah polygamists filed suit in state court, asking that their relationships with multiple wives be validated by the government.

Laws against polygamy, they said, are unconstitutional.

“Everyone should be free unless there's a compelling state interest that you shouldn't be,” John Bucher, one of the lawyers, told The Salt Lake Tribune. “The state is not able to show that there's such an evil to polygamy that it should be prohibited.”

As the nation continues to debate same-sex “marriage,” some have begun examining the logical extension of its legalization. If the legal benefits of marriage are awarded to homosexual men, then why aren't they also given to, say, three polygamists?

“There isn't a single argument in favor of same-sex marriage that isn't also an argument in favor of polygamy –- people have a right to marry who they love, these relationships already exist ... we have no right to deny the children of their protections,” columnist Maggie Gallagher, an outspoken supporter of a federal marriage amendment, told Baptist Press.

Jennifer Marshall, director of domestic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, said she sees no “logical stopping point” if same-sex “marriage” is legalized.

“This is the dissolution of the parameters around marriage,” she said. “You'd be hard-pressed to say, 'Why not any other kind of arrangement?'“

Conservatives and traditionalists say the debate over same-sex “marriage” is the result of marriage being separated from its religious roots and from procreation. If marriage is not tied to childbearing, traditionalists warn it literally could mean anything.

In its landmark ruling on same-sex “marriage” last year, the Massachusetts high court ruled that marriage's purpose is not procreation, but instead the commitment of two people to one another for life.

That argument troubles Gallagher, who asserts that government benefits are awarded to married couples because they, in turn, benefit society by raising the next generation of adults.

“If marriage is only about private love, why is the government involved?” she asked, rhetorically. “Why does the government care? Why is the [government] involved if you have this view of marriage that's just kind of a private, emotional lover's vow? But for some reason, you record it in law and it changes your tax status.”

The issue of polygamy has been one that has frequently stumped supporters of same-sex “marriage.” During a January debate, University of Louisville law professor Sam Marcosson, a supporter of homosexual “marriage,” called the polygamy argument a “red herring.” Candice Gingrich, a homosexual activist, made the same assertion during an appearance on Sean Hannity's radio program.

Last November on ABC's “This Week,” conservative columnist George Will asked two homosexual men -- Rep. Barney Frank and columnist Andrew Sullivan -- to give him a “principle” as to why polygamy should be banned in light of the Lawrence and Massachusetts decisions.

“Some distinctions are hard to draw,” Frank answered. “But the difference between two people and three people is almost always clear. It is responsible for a society to say, 'Look, you can do what you want personally. If three people want to have sex together, that's not against the law. But when it comes to being married and institutionalizing these legal relationships with regards to the ownership of property and children, then we believe a three-way operation is likely to cause difficulty, friction with the children.'“

Sullivan responded: “I don't want the right to marry anyone. I just want the right to marry someone.”

Sociologist Glenn Stanton of Focus on the Family said one reason same-sex “marriage” has made advances is because marriage itself is viewed as a means of receiving legal benefits.

“If we have to honor the relationship that two guys have, then we have to honor the relationship that a guy and his three wives have,” Stanton said. “We have to honor the relationship that two heterosexual single moms have. If we are going to offer health benefits and government benefits to other configurations, why keep anybody from joining together and saying, 'Our relationship is significant, too,' regardless of what that relationship is?”

Gallagher said there is “no logical reason” for not awarding benefits to polygamists if they are given to same-sex couples.

The irony of the current debate is that polygamy is rooted far deeper in human history -- and is accepted in far more cultures today -- than is same-sex “marriage.” Polygamy once dominated the Mormon church, and Utah was not given statehood until it outlawed the practice. The church officially disavows it now, although estimates say that up to 100,000 people in the West still practice it. Worldwide, polygamy is legal in some countries and is common among Muslims. Islam's founder, Muhammad, had multiple wives.

The United Nations allows employees to divide their benefits among multiple wives, as long as they come from a country where polygamy is practiced, The Washington Post reported.

Seeing the logical extension from same-sex “marriage,” some in America have begun to argue for the legalization of polygamy, too. Anthropologist Robert Myers wrote in a USA Today editorial March 14 that the United States has a “narrow view” of marriage.

“[W]e will allow marriage to any number of partners, as long as it is to only one at a time,” he wrote.

Gallagher said she believes that polygamy is less of a departure from traditional marriage than is same-sex “marriage.” After all, she said, it involves procreation.

Of course, Gallagher and other traditionalists aren't arguing for polygamy's legalization. They're showing the logical inconsistency of same-sex “marriage.”

“The argument in the 19th century that Congress made is that polygamy is associated with despotic forms of government, because basically the most powerful men start hogging all the women,” Gallagher said. “There is something to be said for that. I think it's also associated with less investment by fathers in their children. Some children get subordinated in polygamous marriage systems. The attention of the father and the family tends to focus on the heir.”

Other arguments against polygamy include an increase in child and spousal abuse, welfare fraud and forced marriages.

Christians say Scripture has an answer for both polygamy and homosexual “marriage” -- in Matthew 19 Christ points to Old Testament law as limiting marriage to one man, one woman.

Marshall, of The Heritage Foundation, said the onus must be placed on same-sex “marriage” supporters as to why marriage should not include polygamy and other forms of relationships. The polygamy question is not a “red herring,” she said.

“It seems to me,” she said, “that those who are trying to argue for the redefinition of marriage should have to answer the question, 'What is the logical stopping point after this?’ It seems to me that that question should be turned around, and the ones who are answering it should be the ones who are proposing the redefinition of marriage.”

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In "De-Lovely," the new film about songwriter Cole Porter's life, Porter tells his wife, Linda, about his homosexuality. Linda, who is the inspiration behind his genius, tells him that his music comes from his talent not from his destructive behavior. But she does beg Porter to give up his scandalous behavior so as “not to put us at jeopardy,” a promise Porter isn't prepared to make.

The prospect of a marriage where children, permanence, and fidelity are in doubt is supposed to make us pity Linda Porter, even if she was complicit in her own plight. After all, who would opt for such an arrangement? Well, according to one scholar, many Americans have. And understanding how and why this is the case is crucial to understanding the push for same-sex “marriages.”

According to Bryce Christensen of Southern Utah University, homosexuals don't want marriage, at least not marriage as understood for most of the past two millennia. They want what “marriage has become” as a result of cultural changes and bad policy choices.

Historically speaking, marriage was an institution “defined by religious doctrine, moral tradition, home-centered commitments to child rearing, and gender complementarity ... “ Today, it is a “highly individualistic and egalitarian institution.” Marriage no longer “[implies] commitment to home, to Church, to childbearing, to traditional gender duties, or even (permanently) to spouse,” so writes Christensen.

Traditionally, the “husband-wife bond” was defined by “mutual sacrifice and cooperative labor.” But that has been replaced by “dual-careerist vistas of self-fulfillment and consumer satisfaction.”

According to Christensen, no one should be surprised that homosexuals want “the strange new thing marriage has become.” After all, “contemporary marriage ... certifies a certain legitimacy in the mainstream of American culture.” In addition, it “delivers tax, insurance, life-style, and governmental benefits.”

And, best of all, from the homosexual's perspective, it does all of these things “without imposing any of the obligations of traditional marriage.” If childbearing, sexual fidelity, and permanence are no longer central to our culture's understanding of marriage, but the benefits are the same, why not agitate for marriage?

Christensen says that it would be a mockery to issue marriage license to couples who, by definition, “can never have children,” “will not resist the temptations to extramarital affairs, and will not preserve their union for a lifetime.”

But, as he reminds us, this mockery of wedlock started “decades ago.” It started when hundreds of thousands of heterosexual couples started “buying basset hounds rather than bassinets; started indulging in extramarital affairs; and started fulfilling divorce attorneys' dreams of avarice.” The result was marriages that more closely resembled the one depicted in DE-LOVELY than the traditional model.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't fight the attempt to extend the marriage franchise to same-sex couples. It's still a mockery of a sacred institution. But it does mean that our efforts should be part of what Christensen calls a “broader effort to restore moral and religious integrity to marriage as a heterosexual institution.”

Until that happens, marriage, regardless of who gets a marriage license, will remain an institution in jeopardy.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Bryce Christensen, Ph.D., “Why Homosexuals Want What Marriage Has Now Become,” The Family in America, Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, April 2004.

• Roberto Rivera, “Love, Marriage, and Family,” BreakPoint Online, 24 March 2004.

• Roberto Rivera , “Fixing Marriage at the Wrong End,” Beliefnet, 20 January 2004.

• Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Popenoe, “The Marrying Kind: Which Men Marry and Why,” The State of Our Unions, The National Marriage Project, 2004.

• Alan Cooperman, “Church 'Protect Marriage Day' Is Urged,” Washington Post, 26 June 2004, A24.

• Joshua Livestro, “Dutch Decline: Losing interest in matrimony,” National Review, 29 June 2004.

• See BreakPoint's sanctity of marriage resource page.

• Visit One Hundred Thousand Ministers for information on what pastors can do.

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

After the Massachusetts Supreme Court's GOODRIDGE ruling, which created a right to same-sex “marriage,” critics, including me, warned that the next logical step was polygamy. Once you decided that marriage shouldn't be limited to one man and one woman, there was no logically consistent reason to draw a line excluding polygamy.

Same-sex “marriage” advocates and their allies predictably labeled such arguments “fear-mongering” and “implausible.” Just as predicted, events are proving them wrong.

One man who thinks that the time has come to challenge the ban on polygamy is Tom Green. Three years ago, a Utah jury found him guilty of four counts of bigamy for being married to five women at the same time. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.

Green's lawyers are preparing to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to review his case. If the Court agrees to hear his appeal, it will have to revisit an 1878 decision which allowed the states to criminalize polygamy.

Even if you dismiss Green as a crank and believe that the Court won't agree to hear his case, you are still left with growing support for Green and his position. Take this article written in USA TODAY on October 4. Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School, called laws against polygamy “hypocritical.”

Turley notes that today “individuals have a recognized constitutional right to engage in any form of consensual sexual relationship with any number of partners.” They “can live with multiple partners” and “sire children from different partners.” The only thing is that, under the law, they can't marry them all at the same time.

For Turley, “hypocrisy” is in our culture's unwillingness to take that final step. Prejudice, not a coherent principle, lies behind the criminalization of polygamy. And so, he says, it's up to the courts to protect “the least popular and least powerful,” like polygamists.

I could not disagree more with Turley, but that doesn't stop me from admitting that, in many important respects, his argument is actually STRONGER than the one for same-sex “marriage.” After all, while same-sex “marriage” is unprecedented in human history, polygamy is both ancient and, until recently, widespread. While children are, at best, an afterthought in same-sex households, countless children have been successfully raised in polygamous households.

This makes it very likely that some judge somewhere is going to conclude that, as with same-sex “marriage,” the prohibition against polygamy is discrimination and, thus, unconstitutional. Cases like GOODRIDGE and the Supreme Court's LAWRENCE decision have made traditional moral standards an unacceptable basis for legislation.

Some Christian conservatives, like Congressman Chris Cox (R-Calif.), who wrote a very publicized article in the Wall Street Journal, say that amending the Constitution is not a good idea. Please!

There is no other way to stop the deconstruction of marriage than to take the courts out of the equation. Turley is absolutely correct when he writes that the people will not vote to legalize polygamy any more than for same-sex “marriage.” Writing the principle, therefore, of “one man and one woman” into the Constitution is the only way to keep judges from stripping traditional marriage from the protection of law.

FOR FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION:

• Jonathan Turley, “Polygamy laws expose our own hypocrisy,” USA Today, 4 October 2004, 13A.

• Travis Reed, “High court rejects appeal by Tom Green,” Daily Herald, 4 September 2004.

• D. Harmon, “Does a moral slippery slope really exist? Judge for yourself,” Portland Press Herald, 11 October 2004.

• Christopher Cox, “The Marriage Amendment Is a Terrible Idea,” Wall Street Journal, 28 September 2004, A22. (This column may also be read here.)

• Carolyn Lochhead, “Gay Republican castigates party over marriage vote,” San Francisco Chronicle, 1 October 2004.

• What might happen in America?: “Italian Denied EU Post after Gay Remark,” Associated Press, 12 October 2004.

• “Chuck Colson's Response to the Texas Sodomy Law Decision,” Wilberforce Forum, 26 June 2003.

• Charles Colson with Anne Morse, “Sowing Confusion,” Christianity Today, October 2003.

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030502, “Tolerance Run Amok: Gunning for Santorum.”

• BreakPoint Commentary No. 030616, “Power Plays: Santorum and the Sex Lobby.”

• Charles Colson, “Feelings, Nothing More Than Feelings,” Wilberforce Forum.

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Copyright (c) 2004 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

Canada and Spain recently legalized same-sex “marriage,” becoming the third and fourth countries to do so. The United Church of Christ just became the first U.S. denomination to endorse same-sex “marriage.” Not long ago, Provincetown, Massachusetts, issued its one-thousandth same-sex “marriage” license.

All around us, the very nature and meaning of marriage are changing rapidly. It seems like a good time to step back and ask a very simple, basic question, a question that all too often gets overlooked: What is marriage for?

Two excellent debaters raised that very question the other night in a discussion at the Independent Women's Forum. Jonathan Rauch of National Journal and David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values and the National Fatherhood Initiative were there to talk about “The Future of Marriage.”

Rauch is a well-known and eloquent advocate for same-sex “marriage,” and he made a very strong case for it — I might even say a conservative case. Marriage, Rauch argued, is clearly a benefit to society. It creates solid families, the fundamental unit of society. All the evidence shows that married couples are healthier and happier than couples who cohabit and that their children are far better off. That being the case, Rauch asked, why shouldn't marriage be made “universal”? Why shouldn't every couple — regardless of genders — be allowed a right that would improve life for them and their children?

Because, David Blankenhorn responded, changing marriage to this extent would negate the very benefits it's supposed to bring. In fact, it's children who would be hurt most by such a step, because it's “a direct assault” on their rights. Even the problematic U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child (which Blankenhorn supports) states that every child has, “as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.” Same-sex “marriage” negates this right. It requires, for a start, that someone outside the couple participate in the conception of the child. And two men need a surrogate mother. That person usually takes him or herself out of the picture. But whether that happens or not, the structure of the family is distorted and weakened. And so Blankenhorn called same-sex “marriage” an “attack on the notion of the biological parent.”

Does that language sound too emphatic? Consider this: The bill that legalized same-sex “marriage” in Canada also included a provision that the term NATURAL PARENT be taken out of federal law, to be replaced by the term LEGAL PARENT.

Blankenhorn pointed out that rather than solidifying a family, same-sex “marriage” destabilizes it because it “de-links marriage and children.” I'm not saying that same-sex “marriage” advocates were the first to do this; heterosexuals have certainly done their part. Our high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock pregnancy are evidence of that. But same-sex “marriage” would drive us even further down that dead-end road.

I disagree with David Blankenhorn about some things, but here he hits the nail on the head. Marriage is not about giving social sanction to a loving relationship, as Jonathan Rauch argued. It's fundamentally about children. You cannot separate marriage from procreation, the central act of marriage. Attempting to do so is a sure way to hurt children — and to destroy marriage itself.

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Copyright (c) 2005 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

Does a boy need a dad? Peggy Drexler argues that a new generation of boys is being raised by a corps of “maverick moms” who are redefining parenthood, reshaping masculinity, and proving themselves to be superior to fathers in the raising of sons.

In her new book, RAISING BOYS WITHOUT MEN, Drexler claims to present findings from her research project on moms raising boys without men. An assistant professor of psychology and psychiatry at Cornell University and “a former gender scholar” at Stanford University, Drexler is an ardent advocate for the normalization of single motherhood and lesbian parenting. Her new book represents a manifesto for the redefinition of marriage, parenting, masculinity, and issues beyond. The book has been warmly received by the mainstream media and is likely to be cited long into the future.

Drexler begins by noting and celebrating the modern assumption that “the mom-dad-and-kids version of family is now less than definitive.” She gets right to the trend that has caught her interest: “More and more children in the Western world are being raised not in the traditional nuclear family but by single or divorced parents, stepparents in 'blended families,' adoptive parents, and grandparents. An increasingly large number are being raised by mothers who are single and who have not divorced a husband or been abandoned by a man; these mothers are single by choice and have made a conscious decision to have a baby and find a sperm donor to do it. Lesbian couples and single mothers by choice are pioneering new ways of getting pregnant via donor insemination.”

Following the familiar feminist line of argument, Drexler charges that, in the aftermath of Freud, “mothers have been inculcated with the idea that we need to cut our sons' cords to make them men ready to take on masculine roles in the world, from working towards worldly success to making war.” She notes that the traditional understandings “contended that mothers who reared sons without the presence of an active father -- or who were married but 'overbearing' or raising 'mama's boys' -- instill lifelong psychic disability, schizophrenia, or, worst, homosexuality in their sons.”

The phenomenon of mothers raising sons without men became Drexler's research project for her doctoral degree. As she concedes, “The idea of lesbian mothers raising America's sons causes many raucous debates.” Some readers will be startled by her claim that there may be as many as five million lesbian mothers currently raising children in the United States. Thus, Drexler focused her research project on one simple question: “Could sons prosper through the power of mothers alone?”

Drexler's research focused on single moms raising boys without husbands, and then shifted to lesbian moms and “single mothers by choice,” who conceived sons by donor insemination. Drexler spent hours interviewing the moms and their sons, and RAISING BOYS WITHOUT MEN is, at least in part, the distillation of Drexler's research.

Nevertheless, Drexler often shows her hand when it comes to the ideological bias that pervades her work. In the first place, Peggy Drexler is not a disinterested researcher. She is an advocate for homosexual marriage and the transformation of gender roles. Her “research” involved as participants women -- and lesbian couples -- who volunteered for the project and were quite willing to have Drexler “investigate” the status of their parenting and the developmental progress of their boys. Given the structure of the study, the “results” are entirely predictable. Beyond this, Drexler at times acknowledges the ideological foundation of her work. After referring to the dominant theory that the presence of a father is important to the development of his son, Drexler retorts: “While the implicit presumption governing the discourse is that healthy child development depends upon parenting by a heterosexual couple, I came to rely on a controversial literature that challenges the commonly accepted risks of fatherlessness.” This new book adds one more volume to the library of that “controversial literature.”

Drexler's book is subtitled, “How Maverick Moms Are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men.” The “maverick moms” that Drexler describes are a “new breed of mothers” who are raising children without fathers. “This new breed of mothers without fathers is likely to be financially secure, straight or gay, and of any age and any race,” she explains. “Whether these women are divorced or never married, mothering singly and in pairs has not only entered the popular culture and become acceptable; it also is now considered chic.”

Those who assume that Drexler's argument comes down to the fact that single moms CAN raise healthy boys are in for a surprise. In essence, Drexler argues that moms -- singly or in lesbian pairs -- are actually SUPERIOR to heterosexual couples in raising boys.

Early in the book, Drexler points to what she calls “the dark side of matrimony.” Pointing to married couples in conflict, she asserts: “A high-conflict marriage or a marriage that isn't working can negatively affect children in a way that might never happen in a single-mom family.” That is a ridiculous argument, of course, for a single person cannot possibly experience marital conflict. Arguing that single parents are free from the risk of marital conflict is like arguing that those who do not eat thereby reduce the risk of food allergies.

Why do so many in our society view single motherhood in a negative light? This problem is often posed with specific reference to the role of single mothers in raising sons. Drexler acknowledges that researchers often identify the absence of a father as a major statistical indicator of boys having problems. Yet, Drexler simply dismisses this entire body of research by suggesting that the researchers are “blaming the mom instead of the economic situation of the family.”

In response to the prevailing research and dominant moral understandings, Drexler makes her case: “I have found there is absolutely no reason to expect that single or gay moms cannot raise sons on their own.” Further, “They are real mothers raising real boys, boys who should not be marginalized in the least. These boys may not live with biological fathers, but they are in no way illegitimate. The families their moms have created are as real and as legitimate as any other, and have much to teach everybody who cares about children.”

No one should doubt Peggy Drexler's enthusiasm for these sons being raised without fathers. She identifies “mom-raised sons” as “avatars of a new social movement” that is producing a new and vastly improved understanding of manhood and masculinity.

These boys do understand that they are unique. Many refer to an anonymous sperm donor as their “seed daddy.” The sixteen boys she studied in her research had no father in the home. “Many of them did not even know the names of their fathers -- nor did their mothers. Thanks to the technological revolution of anonymous-donor insemination, the identity of a founding father may not even be part of the basic proposition of a two-mother family or a single-mother family.” Donor insemination now “yields many different sorts of families,” she celebrates.

The social status of her research subjects is not without importance. “The lesbians I studied were mostly white-collar workers who have succeeded as business people or in their professions,” Drexler acknowledged. She identified these women as “social saboteurs,” who have “exhibited the will and temperament to buck prevailing notions and create their own family structures, with very few models from which to work.” They see themselves as pioneers of a new social movement.

What about the boys? Drexler insists that the boys “were not sissies or mama's boys.” She rejects the argument that boys raised by mothers alone compensate for the lack of a father figure with exaggerated aggressiveness. She further insists that boys raised by lesbian mothers “are no more likely to become homosexual than they would if raised in heterosexual families.” She does acknowledge that, certainly by the time of their adolescence, “sons of gay parents will have to establish the terms of their sexuality with more self-consciousness than most other teenage boys will.”

How do these boys deal with the absence of a father? Drexler is forced to acknowledge that many of these boys “still long for a live-in father.” But is this a sign of “father hunger” as commonly assumed to be found among fatherless boys? Drexler dismisses the very idea. “As any parent will tell you,” she asserts, “children are not born asking for Daddy, nor do they have any idea what 'daddyness' means to their mother except through her own expressions. If the lack of an everyday live-in father is not an issue for a loving and attentive maverick mom or two, so-called father hunger might not be an issue for her son.” Then again, Drexler must realize that this argument is not going to get her very far.

“Will some little boys trail after men they don't even know, perk up at those lower-decibel voices, or hang on to the pant legs of the men who cross their paths? Maybe. Do they need a male to take them to the bathroom? Okay. But is that pathological father hunger? I don't think so,” she insists. Drexler actually goes so far as to argue that sons “with secure attachments to their female caretakers are no more at risk of experiencing 'father hunger' than boys in the general population.”

So, how does Drexler explain the fact that boys without fathers want a dad? “It's only natural to long for what you don't have,” she claims.

But Drexler doesn't end with this dismissive (if utterly unconvincing) assertion. She goes on to argue that boys raised by moms alone are likely to develop a superior masculinity to that of boys with fathers. “Sons have a hard time accepting those characteristics in their fathers that cannot be changed, and even into adult life spend enormous amounts of energy wishing, hoping, fantasizing, and trying to transform their fathers into the loving models they never were and most likely can't be,” she insists. Once again, Drexler's logic crosses into absurdity. She focuses on the virtues of highly motivated “maverick moms” and on the liabilities of dead-beat dads and simply chooses not to acknowledge the obvious benefit boys receive by the presence of loving, masculine, supportive, normal fathers.

Boys without fathers have “the opportunities to select role models from a myriad of sources” Drexler explains. This offers “psychological benefits and [may] even serve as an antidote to the intensity of the often strained, distant, or hostile relationships that some boys from heterosexual families have with their fathers.” Drexler actually celebrates the fact that boys without fathers never have to worry about earning “daddy's respect.”

One lesbian mom quickly pointed to the fact that her son was never pushed toward success and risk by a father. “Not having a dad has let Henry off the hook,” she explained, “since he doesn't do well if he's pushed into things.”

As Drexler sees it, boys without fathers are free to choose whatever role models in the larger society may seem most admirable and attractive. “With their mothers acting as their guides, the sons and the nonconventional families I studied actually ended up with a wider selection of male role models than the boys from the more traditional families, where the father was often the sole adult male in his son's life.”

The book does include some humorous anecdotes, sure to bring a smile to any male brave enough to read it. One lesbian mom lamented the rambunctious nature of her son's behavior. She gave him a blow-dryer so that he could pretend to be a hairdresser. “The first thing he did when he pulled this baby blue hairdryer was to hold it up like a gun and point it at me and go, 'Ooh!’ He didn't say, 'Bang, bang,' thank God, but it was like 'I'm going to get you!’ and I thought 'Oh, nooo. Where did this come from?'“ Another “single-by-choice” mom attempted to shield her sons from all notions of aggression. Nevertheless, “By age 7, despite his mother's ban on plastic toy guns, Mac and his younger brother chewed their morning toast into a pattern to make pistols and shoot each other.”

RAISING BOYS WITHOUT MEN is a sign of things to come. The utopian fantasy presented within this book is the ultimate fulfillment of the feminist dream -- the evolution of a society that transcends manhood and the need for fathers. The women Peggy Drexler celebrates in this book need and want nothing more than the use of gametes from “seed daddies” who have no further role in the lives of their sons.

Of course, the feminists would never allow this equation to be reversed, even in hypothetical form. A book arguing that young girls do not need mothers and that girls raised by homosexual men are likely to be healthier than those raised by moms because they can select their own female role models and pioneer a new paradigm of femininity would be roundly condemned and probably never published.

RAISING BOYS WITHOUT MEN is a clear indicator of the lengths to which the feminist movement is willing to push its radical vision. The ultimate realization of this vision really comes down to the last two words of this book's title -- WITHOUT MEN.

We were told it would never happen -- but it did. The evidence was on the cover of the Weekly Standard last week. It featured a photograph of a wedding. The groom and the bride on his right were holding out their hands to show off their wedding rings. But wait, there's more! There was a bride on the groom's left, and she was showing off her wedding ring, also.

The plural wedding -- which took place in Holland -- caused an uproar in the Dutch news media. The setting was the office of a notary public in the town of Roosendall. The notary validated a cohabitation contract between Victor de Bruijn, Bianca, his wife of eight years, and a woman the couple had met through an Internet chat room, Mirjam Geven. Both women consider themselves bisexual, which, their “husband” says, goes a long way toward preventing sexual jealousy. Okay.

Group marriage is, of course, one of the things conservatives warned would happen if gay “marriage” were legalized, as it has been in Holland. Here in the United States, gay “marriage” advocates are trying to put out the fire, claiming that the cohabitation contract has far less legal weight than it appears. But in truth, writes the Hoover Institution's Stanley Kurtz in the Weekly Standard, this is a huge story. Yes, it's true that Victor, Bianca, and Mirjam “are joined by a private cohabitation contract rather than a state-registered partnership or a full-fledged marriage,” he writes. Nevertheless, “their union has already made serious legal, political, and cultural waves in the Netherlands,” and is “an unmistakable step down the road to legalized group marriage.”

Now, I can well imagine your reaction. It comes at the end of a year in which Christians have been on the frontlines of half a dozen culture-war battles -- from cloning to gay “marriage” to intelligent design. This news probably makes you want to go back to bed and pull the covers over your head for the rest of 2006. The story of this triple “marriage” is evidence that we are in for more of the same this year. And we are all getting tired of it.

I have to admit, I get tired, too, but when I do, I remind myself that none of the great social battles were ever won in a day -- or a year. It took William Wilberforce, my hero, twenty years to get the slave trade abolished in England. He spent many more years -- the rest of his life, in fact -- transforming the morals of British society.

At Prison Fellowship, we know that if we want to transform the lives of prisoners, we have got to work with them all of our lives. One friend of mine understands this, and that is why he built an addition to his Virginia home to house former prisoners. Volunteers working with victims of Katrina also know that their work will not be done for years.

As we leave the old year behind, and begin a new one, Christians must remember that redeeming the culture is a never-ending obligation of the Church. God works through His people in every generation to achieve His purposes on earth. We must not lose heart, knowing that in the end, not only society, but our own lives, are being transformed.

“Do not grow weary in well-doing,” the Bible says. It is a hard teaching -- but one we must never fail to obey, even when we find ourselves fighting against something that, a little while ago, we would have thought unthinkable: group “marriage.”

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Copyright (c) 2006 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

“University of Florida employees have to pledge that they're having sex with their domestic partners before qualifying for benefits under a new health care plan at the university.”

That may sound like a joke to you — maybe something from the satirical website “The Onion.” But as a matter of fact, that sentence is straight from an actual news story in the GAINESVILLE SUN.

The paper explains, “In addition to declaring financial obligations, prospective enrollees must 'have been in a non-platonic relationship for the preceding 12 months.'” However, “[University of Florida official Kyle] Cavanaugh said he had no plans to personally enforce the sex pledge” — that's comforting. “The 'non-platonic' clause is 'increasingly standard' in domestic partnership plans, Cavanaugh said. The clause is one of several methods used to legally ensure that an employer is only obligated to cover employees in a committed relationship, not longtime roommates.”

The more you read, the more bizarre the whole business gets. So bizarre, in fact, that the SUN's article created an uproar in the community. The university was finally forced to remove the requirement. But the fact that they even tried it should really come as no surprise.

You see, one of the dangers of granting marriage benefits to domestic partners is how easily that privilege gets abused. How do you determine whether two people living together are really domestic partners? What if they are simply two friends who are living in the same house to get benefits? And once this kind of abuse gets started, what's to prevent more and more people from trying it? It's a recipe for financial disaster for the companies that are giving the benefits. And some of them are starting to realize it. Hence, the “non-platonic clause.”

But then we get to the practical side of things: How on earth are officials supposed to make sure this pledge is being kept? Hence, the non-enforcement and eventual removal of the non-platonic clause.

But it's the height of irony. For years, social conservatives have been vilified for supposedly wanting to be “bedroom police.” But now it's the social liberals who are in danger of becoming bedroom police — but such ineffective ones that they're more like Keystone Kops. They tried to create rules they had no way of enforcing, about something they had no control over.

The funny thing is, there's already a system in place to ensure that benefits go to truly committed couples who have a lifetime interest in one another's welfare. It's called MARRIAGE. Those who argued that it was too restrictive to give benefits only to married couples are now finding that it's the only way that really works.

It's just more evidence that the Christian view of love and marriage makes sense on every level, including the practical. You can set marriage apart and honor it as an institution created by God for the benefit of couples, children, and society. Or you can call it just one of many equivalent living arrangements — and end up policing people's bedrooms. Reality has a way of reinforcing the Christian worldview, whether we like it or not. And it makes all our wonderful utopian schemes look really silly.

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Copyright (c) 2006 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

*

A few months ago, I told you about the agonizing choice facing Catholic Charities of Boston: Either serve the needy or remain faithful to Catholic teaching. Specifically, the only way it could continue to handle adoptions according to Massachusetts law was to include same-sex couples among its clientele.

While the Massachusetts law is not new, a new interpretation of the legal protection afforded sexual orientation threatens to undermine religious liberty not just in Massachusetts but also across the nation. It's important to understand the background.

In March, Catholic Charities, citing a “dilemma we cannot resolve,” announced that it would no longer facilitate adoptions in Massachusetts. That “dilemma,” as writer Maggie Gallagher recently wrote in the WEEKLY STANDARD, grew out of the Massachusetts case legalizing same-sex “marriage”: that is, the GOODRIDGE decision.

According to Gallagher, central to the GOODRIDGE decision was the finding that “only animus against gay people could explain” different treatment for opposite-sex and same-sex couples.

Thus, after GOODRIDGE, discrimination against same-sex couples in matters of adoption also became illegal. As a state-licensed agency, Catholic Charities was now obliged to serve same-sex couples in a way that it was not before GOODRIDGE.

What's more, it did not matter if Catholic Charities “ceased receiving tax support and gave up its role as a state contractor.” After GOODRIDGE, it still could not refuse to place children with same-sex couples.

So, millennia-old religious beliefs gave way to months-old, newly found “rights.” Massachusetts refused to consider even the “narrowest religious exemption.” One of the oldest adoption agencies was, therefore, forced to stop helping the people it had pledged to serve.

But that raises this question: Are the events in Boston “an aberration or a sign of things to come?” Anthony Picarello of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty believes the latter. He told Gallagher that the effects of decisions like GOODRIDGE on religious liberty will be “severe and pervasive.”

Picarello believes that these cases will “affect every aspect of church-state relations” — so much so that recent years will be looked back on as a time of relative peace between church and state.

Instead of litigating over posting the Ten Commandments in public spaces, churches in the future will be trying to keep the state from encroaching on matters of faith and morals.

This will certainly become the case if sexual orientation comes to be seen as analogous to race, which is already the view among many elites, including some in the judiciary. If that happens, as looks likely, then all the force of law unleashed by racism charges will be brought to bear against the Church.

Schools, health-care providers — even Christian camps and, yes, maybe pastors in the pulpit — will be uncertain if they can do their jobs in a way that is both legal and consistent with their beliefs.

The best way to keep the Massachusetts dilemma from spreading is to keep the logic behind the GOODRIDGE decision from spreading. The Marriage Protection Amendment, now pending before Congress, would not only protect traditional marriage, it would also protect the beliefs that underlie traditional marriage — beliefs that, as Gallagher has shown, may soon be treated as the equivalent of Jim Crowe.

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Copyright (c) 2006 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Is the battle against same-sex marriage already lost? With homosexual marriage now legal in Massachusetts and with momentum toward legalization now spreading across the nation, homosexual advocates are increasingly confident that victory is in sight. Now, some conservatives are beginning to wonder if the gay activists might be right. Christopher Caldwell, writing in THE FINANCIAL TIMES, notes the momentum of the gay rights movement as it achieved its great victory in Massachusetts. “In gaining full legal marriage rights in an important state, American gays have effected the quickest transition from pariah status to protected status in the history of civil rights movements.” Caldwell, a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD, appears certain that same-sex marriage is now an established social reality.

A similar case is made by Max Boot, senior fellow at the Counsel on Foreign Relations. A keen observer of social trends, Boot argues that opposition to same-sex marriage is “another lost cause for the social conservatives.” Also writing in THE FINANCIAL TIMES, Boot argues, “For decades, social conservatives in the U.S. have been fighting and losing culture wars. Contraception and abortion -- once taboo topics -- have been enshrined in the law. The rates of pre-marital sex, out-of-wedlock births and divorce have soared since the 1950's. In school, prayer is out, sex education is in. On television, characters used to say 'gee whiz' and sleep in twin beds; now they curse as if they had Tourette's syndrome and flash skin as if they were Gypsy Rose Lee.”

Together, both Caldwell and Boot would counsel fellow conservatives to throw in the towel on the issue of homosexual marriage. The end of this debate is already decided, concludes Boot, who argues “there is little mystery about how the latest culture war over gay marriage will turn out.” Really? “Opponents of same-sex marriages may have public opinion on their side for now, but they have all but lost this battle. How do I know? Simply by examining the arguments on both sides.”

Boot goes on to argue that the advocates of same-sex marriage “speak in the powerful language of civil rights and liken their cause to that of African Americans fighting anti-miscegenation laws in years past.”

Opposition to same-sex marriage, Boot asserts, is rooted only in theology. “At one time the case would have been open and shut: sodomy is a sin, period. Many may still believe that, but that is no longer a tenable argument in our secularized politics.”

According to Boot, conservatives are losing the same-sex marriage debate because the culture will eventually buy the argument that this is about civil rights, not about morality. Once a movement gains civil rights status in the public mind, victory is ultimately assured, he reflects. Beyond this, Boot points to a desensitization of the culture on issues of homosexuality in general. Once newspapers began carrying homosexual wedding announcements and television began featuring a plethora of homosexual characters, the homosexual lifestyle became mainstreamed and thus accepted. As Boot comments, “Same-sex kisses, once shockingly daring, are now as common on TV as commercials for Levitra or Prozac.”

Christopher Caldwell, on the other hand, traces acceptance of same-sex marriage to the AIDS crisis. According to Caldwell's analysis, AIDS functioned as a force to bring the homosexual community together into a potent political force. Furthermore, the tragedy of AIDS also transformed homosexuals into a victim group, and public sympathy quickly followed.

Are Boot and Caldwell right? Is opposition to same-sex marriage already a lost cause? We must certainly hope not, for the redefinition of marriage will effectively destroy the central organizing unit of society. In a day of rampant moral relativism and social experimentation, Americans have been engaged in a free-for-all exercise in cultural revolution. But when the experiment is directed at marriage, the fallout is sure to be uniquely tragic. The legalization and cultural acceptance of same-sex marriage will mean, ultimately, the destruction of marriage itself. Without a coherent vision of marriage, the entire society will eventually find itself completely unable to regulate sexual behavior or personal relationships.

What happens when the next “sexual lifestyle” gains civil rights status? Those who charge that even raising such a question is scare-mongering, must face the simple fact that the question is unavoidable. Intellectual honesty demands that we recognize the fact that acceptance of same-sex marriage implies -- to anyone who has even the slightest commitment to intellectual integrity -- the acceptance of any adult consensual sexual lifestyle as legitimate and ultimately deserving of legalized status.

The arguments presented by Caldwell and Boot reflect a deeper problem at the very heart of the conservative movement in America. In some sense, both writers -- associated with a generally conservative perspective -- actually celebrate the advent of same-sex marriage. “The good news from the conservative point of view, is that it is unlikely that legalizing gay marriage will make much difference to the lives of most people,” Boot claims. He also asserts that same-sex marriage “will have a considerably less corrosive effect on society than the prevalence of, say, divorce.”

Caldwell goes even further, arguing that “something admirable in the national character is pushing Americans towards gay marriage.” THE WEEKLY STANDARD identifies itself with American conservatism, and the magazine has arguably become the nation's most influential periodical presenting conservative arguments and analysis. Furthermore, it has officially endorsed the Federal Marriage Amendment. What should we make of the fact that a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD celebrates the legalization of same-sex marriage in the pages of THE FINANCIAL TIMES? What does this tell us about the future of the conservative movement?

These developments indicate something of an ideological divide within American conservatism. Increasingly, neo-conservatives committed to conservative thought on political and economic matters are divided from traditional conservatives who refuse to accept same-sex marriage, or homosexuality in general, as worthy of legalization and normalization.

To the contrary, authentic conservatives have long understood the necessity of conserving institutions and patterns of life that protect human happiness and the welfare of society. Those who argue that an institution as fundamental as marriage can be redefined to accept same-sex relationships are fooling themselves -- and they are certainly not conservatives.

For years, analysts on the left have predicted an eventual breakup of the conservative movement, with moral conservatives and economic conservatives dividing over basic issues of ideology and worldview. Though many of the economic and political conservatives appreciate President George W. Bush for his assertive foreign policy and leadership on the war on terror, they are frankly embarrassed by his embrace of Christian conservatives, his pro-life policies, and his advocacy for a Federal Marriage Amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

These same tensions were present even as the new conservative alignment came together in the campaign to elect Ronald Reagan to the presidency. For the first time, social and economic conservatives were united in one candidate who boldly cast a vision that included both wings of the conservative movement. Looking back at the Reagan administration, it is clear that two different visions of conservatism were often in conflict, even within the administration itself.

The same is now true of the conservative movement today, and any effort by economic conservatives to push social conservatives out of positions of influence and policy-making will spell disaster for American conservatism, the Republican Party, and the reelection hopes of President George W. Bush. Max Boot, Christopher Caldwell, and their colleagues may be right. Nevertheless, most of us are not willing to declare surrender yet -- not by a long shot. There is much work to be done and much ground to be gained, but we must do our very best to awaken the American conscience and reshape the debate. The cost of losing this debate is too tragic to calculate, and the moral cost of surrender is too great to bear. Throwing in the towel is just not an option.

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This article originally appeared on June 10, 2004.

“It is not controversial to contend that in the United States, constitutional law serves as a decisive battleground in the struggle over freedom's moral and political meaning,” asserts Peter Berkowitz. “It is another matter to assess the impact of the battleground on the battle, to clarify the current balance of power, and to anticipate the battles to come.”

Berkowitz, a professor of law at George Mason University School of Law and a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, addresses the future of the U.S. Supreme Court and the concept of freedom in a fascinating essay published in the current issue of POLICY REVIEW. In “The Court, the Constitution, and the Culture of Freedom,” Berkowitz argues that an expansive concept of human liberty lies behind the Supreme Court's tradition of jurisprudence. He goes on to argue that this progressive understanding of human freedom is likely to mean that the nation's high court will one day decide that access to same-sex marriage is nothing less than a right guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.

Berkowitz begins by establishing that, “To say of some law or action or institution that it is constitutional is not to offer very high praise.” After all, the constitution has been understood to guarantee an individual's right to various actions and expressions that the majority would find distasteful at the least. The U.S. Constitution is the nation's supreme law. “Because it is a liberal constitution, one whose first purpose is to protect personal freedom, the supreme law of the land avoids taking a stand on the supreme issues,” Berkowitz explains. “It does not aim to instruct people on the virtues, or the content of happiness, or the path to salvation. That's not because it supposes that virtue is irrelevant, happiness has no content, or salvation is a delusion. Rather, the Constitution presupposes that the people, as individuals and through the various associations and groups they form, will pursue these goods. And it lays down a framework within which we, as a people, can maintain a society where each has the liberty to pursue, consistent with a like liberty for others, virtue, happiness, and salvation in the way each regards as fitting.”

That said, the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in interpreting the Constitution represents an enormous power to reshape the entire culture. Berkowitz observes that the vast majority of formal written opinions handed down by the Court are of little interest to the big questions of life. Most deal with technical questions and matters of interest only to practicing lawyers and the parties directly related to the cases.

Nevertheless, many of the most divisive moral, political, and social questions of our times have been decided, at least with respect to the law, by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court has exerted a vast influence over American life, and it threatens to expand this reach even farther.

Berkowitz understands that the textual issue at stake in the Court's most controversial decisions tends to be located in “the grandest clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.” These clauses include the due process clause which declares that no state “shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Similarly, the equal protection clause declares that no state may “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The original purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to protect African Americans against denial of their rights by state governments. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court has expanded these clauses into an entire culture of freedom -- and that culture of freedom has been radically expanded over the last several decades.

Setting aside that historical context, Berkowitz argues that “there are plausible arguments for deriving substance, or particular rights, from the due process and equal protection clauses.” He acknowledges that the Supreme Court, at least at first, was reluctant to derive such rights from these clauses. He cites an 1872 case in which the Court declared that the expansion of rights through these clauses was forbidden. But, a little more than thirty years later, the Court changed its mind, setting a precedent for future courts to follow.

Berkowitz then considers the implications of this shift in the Court's decision-making by looking at the issues of abortion, affirmative action, and same-sex marriage.

Berkowitz's analysis of the Court's abortion cases is both important and insightful. He carefully traces the Court's decisions related to matters of sex and reproduction, observing that a majority of justices determined that no law could be judged constitutional “which denied individual liberties the Court regarded as fundamental or essential to the very idea of freedom under law.”

Berkowitz looks closely at the Court's 1973 decision of ROE V. WADE. Interestingly, Berkowitz asserts that both sides in the abortion debate framed their arguments in terms of freedom and liberty. Both camps are “pro-personal freedom” he asserts, and the competing arguments on the question of abortion are framed in terms of individual freedom. On the one hand, proponents of abortion argue for a woman's freedom to abort an unwanted pregnancy. Opponents of abortion argue for the freedom and liberty rights of the unborn child. Berkowitz argues that in ROE V. WADE and successive cases (especially PLANNED PARENTHOOD V. CASEY), the Court's majority has tried to strike a balance between these freedoms.

Berkowitz concedes that ROE “has been subject to devastating criticism,” but he goes on to argue that the decision still defines constitutional interpretation.

The ROE decision was an expansion of the concept of freedom the Court declared in GRISWOLD V. CONNECTICUT in 1965. In that case, Justice William O. Douglas declared that the Constitution guarantees “a zone of privacy” for married couples. Later decisions expanded that zone of privacy to individuals. But if ROE expanded GRISWOLD, CASEY expanded ROE. Berkowitz cites the oft-quoted expression found in Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion. “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” Kennedy asserted. This represented a sweeping and virtually limitless claim of individual liberty -- a claim the Court would certainly find impossible to imply in other areas of the law.

As Berkowitz explains, “For what the Court appeared to be saying was not only that each individual had the right to determine for himself or herself what constituted personhood and the meaning of life, but also that the supreme law of the land had an obligation to give legal effect to each individual's determination.” Even as Berkowitz acknowledges the impossibility of applying this principle wholesale, he asserts: “That such a notion received expression at all suggests the direction in which the justices' thinking about autonomy is headed.”

Next, Berkowitz looks at the Court's decisions in the area of affirmative action, arguing that the Court has once again attempted to expand freedom. He insightfully observes that liberals and conservatives often switch arguments depending on the issue at stake. In the Court's most recent decisions concerning affirmative action, the justices have chosen the most expansive definition of human freedom, even as other legitimate conceptions were available. “That a Court on which sit seven justices appointed by conservative presidents made these choices is testimony to the power of the progressive interpretation of liberalism,” he asserts.

Berkowitz then turns to look at the issue of same-sex marriage. As he observes, “fifteen years ago, very few gay men or lesbians, whatever other grievances they harbored, thought or felt themselves to be deprived of civil rights because the law restricted marriage to a man and a woman. Nor did it occur to their fellow citizens that such a right existed.”

Nevertheless, Berkowitz asserts that “today a substantial and growing minority of the public supports same-sex marriage, and even more favor civil unions.”

In considering the issue of same-sex marriage, Berkowitz argues that opponents are now at a unique disadvantage. As he sees it, opponents of same-sex marriage will find themselves defenseless before the U.S. Supreme Court because the case against same-sex marriage is not deeply rooted in an expansion of liberty. As Berkowitz traces the trajectory of the Court, he suggests that same-sex marriage becomes something of an inevitability, given the Court's previous decisions.

Of course, he can point directly to the Court's 2003 decision in LAWRENCE V. TEXAS. In a scathing dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia declared that the majority's decision effectively meant the end of all morals legislation in the nation. Berkowitz basically agrees with Scalia's judgment and goes on to suggest that there is no reason to believe that the Supreme Court will alter its trajectory.

As he sees it, should the issue find its way to the Supreme Court, “the ability of proponents of same-sex marriage to make their case straightforwardly in the language of freedom and the inability of opponents to frame their legitimate concerns in that language will likely result in same-sex marriage's being enshrined in the supreme law of the land.” We should note that Berkowitz blames conservatives for creating the context in which such claims for liberty can be made. He reasons that conservative acceptance of a supposed constitutional right to contraception, of cohabitation before marriage, and of no-fault divorce undermines any credible claim that marriage must be a heterosexual institution defined by the capacity for human reproduction.

“The American constitutional order speaks the language of freedom,” Berkowitz summarizes. “All of the great moral questions of the day eventually get translated into that language and partisans must turn it to their advantage, or almost certainly their cause will go down to defeat.”

At this point the Christian worldview offers a much-needed corrective. The Bible grounds human freedom not in a sweeping claim of human autonomy, but in the fact that human beings are made in the image of God. Thus, the biblical concept of freedom comes with limits set from the very beginning by our Creator. We are not given the right, as Anthony Kennedy so sweepingly expressed, to define our own concept of existence “and of the mystery of human life.”

Peter Berkowitz's analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the culture's commitment to an ever-expanding understanding of freedom should help Christians to think seriously about the true nature of freedom and its limitations. His article will certainly inform the way we understand today's cultural conflicts over issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage -- but it should also serve as a catalyst for how we should understand a Christian description of human freedom. As this article makes clear, we now face two rival visions of human freedom and its meaning. The future of our culture depends upon which vision shapes the policies of the future.

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This article was originally published on September 14, 2005.

Much of the immediate reaction to the New Jersey Supreme Court’s decision holding civil unions constitutional, but leaving the question of calling it “marriage” to the legislature, was along the lines of, “Well, it could have been worse.” I don’t think so.

The case originated in 2002 when seven same-sex couples filed suit after they had been denied marriage licenses in various municipalities. They claimed that the denial violated the equal protection clause of the New Jersey state constitution.

Just a week ago, the New Jersey Supreme Court unanimously agreed with them. Like the Massachusetts court three years ago, it ruled that the “unequal dispensation of rights and benefits to committed same-sex couples can no longer be tolerated under our State Constitution.”

However, unlike the Massachusetts court, the New Jersey court, by a 4-to-3 margin, declined to find “that a fundamental right to same-sex marriage exists in [New Jersey].” Instead, it left it up to the legislature to “decide” what to call the new “dispensation of rights and benefits.”

Within 180 days, legislators must write and re-write New Jersey law in areas like “tuition assistance, survivors’ benefits under workers’ compensation laws and spousal privilege in criminal trials.”

Many commentators hailed the rulings as a “compromise” that “reflected” the opinion of the people of New Jersey. But wait a minute. It’s the legislature, not the courts, that should reflect the people’s opinions. This court, like courts all across America, is simply usurping the people’s right of self-government.

Even worse than the un-democratic nature of the ruling is what it does to marriage. The process by which the court arrived at its so-called “compromise” reminded me of arguably the most famous phrase of the Vietnam era: We had to destroy the village in order to save it.

The price paid to limit the word MARRIAGE to one man and one woman was the unique and privileged status of traditional marriage in New Jersey. Gone is the recognition of traditional marriage as a “pre-political” institution that pre-dates and takes priority over the state. Now, it is just one social arrangement among many.

And gone is the notion that the preferential “dispensation of rights and benefits” under discussion is an acknowledgment of the centrality and importance of traditional marriage. Now, it is simply a kind of governmental largesse that the government must distribute equally.

After the court was through, all that was left of traditional marriage was the word itself. Now, bear this in mind as you go to the polls next Tuesday. I don’t endorse candidates or parties, but we ought to look at where candidates stand on protecting traditional marriage and, as is the role of the Senate, confirming the kind of judges who will interpret the law, not make it.

If you were even thinking of staying home, just remember what happened in New Jersey. We have a duty to vote for righteous as well as able men and women. And if you’re in a state like Virginia or Wisconsin or Colorado, where there are referendums on the ballot to protect traditional marriage, you not only need to vote, you need to take your neighbors with you to do the same.

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Copyright (c) 2006 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Does permitting same-sex marriage weaken marriage as a social institution? Or does extending to gay and lesbian couples the right to marry have little or no effect on marriage overall? Scholars and commentators have expended much effort trying in vain to wring proof of causation from the data -- all the while ignoring the meaning of some simple correlations that the numbers do indubitably show.

Much of the disagreement among scholars centers on how to interpret trends in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. Stanley Kurtz has argued, in this magazine and elsewhere, that the adoption of gay marriage or same-sex civil unions in those countries has significantly weakened customary marriage, already eroded by easy divorce and stigma-free cohabitation.

William Eskridge, a Yale Law School professor, and Darren R. Spedale, an attorney, beg to differ. In GAY MARRIAGE: FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE?, a book-length reply to Kurtz, they insist that Kurtz does not prove that gay marriage is causing anything in those nations; that Nordic marriage overall appears to be healthier than Kurtz allows; and that even if marriage IS declining in that part of the world, “the question remains whether that phenomenon is a lamentable development.”

Eskridge and Spedale want it both ways. For them, there is no proof that marriage has weakened, but if there were it wouldn’t be a problem. For people who care about marriage, this perspective inspires no confidence. Eskridge and Spedale do score one important point, however. Neither Kurtz nor anyone else can scientifically prove that allowing gay marriage CAUSES the institution of marriage to get weaker. Correlation does not imply causation. The relation between two correlated phenomena may be causal, or it may be random, or it may reflect some deeper cause producing both. Even if you could show that every last person in North Carolina eats barbecue, you would not have established that eating barbecue is a result of taking up residence in North Carolina.

When it comes to the health of marriage as an institution and the legal status of same-sex unions, there is much to be gained from giving up the search for causation and studying some recurring patterns in the data, as I did for my book THE FUTURE OF MARRIAGE. It turns out that certain clusters of beliefs about and attitudes toward marriage consistently correlate with certain institutional arrangements. The correlations crop up in a large number of countries and recur in data drawn from different surveys of opinion.

Take the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), a collaborative effort of universities in over 40 countries. It interviewed about 50,000 adults in 35 countries in 2002. What is useful for our purposes is that respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with six statements that directly relate to marriage as an institution:

1. Married people are generally happier than unmarried people.

2. People who want children ought to get married.

3. One parent can bring up a child as well as two parents

together.

4. It is all right for a couple to live together without

intending to get married.

5. Divorce is usually the best solution when a couple can’t seem

to work out their marriage problems.

6. The main purpose of marriage these days is to have children.

Let’s stipulate that for statements one, two, and six, an “agree” answer indicates support for traditional marriage as an authoritative institution. Similarly, for statements three, four, and five, let’s stipulate that agreement indicates a lack of support, or less support, for traditional marriage.

Then divide the countries surveyed into four categories: those that permit same-sex marriage; those that permit same-sex civil unions (but not same-sex marriage); those in which some regions permit same-sex marriage; and those that do not legally recognize same-sex unions.

The correlations are strong. Support for marriage is by far the weakest in countries with same-sex marriage. The countries with marriage-like civil unions show significantly more support for marriage. The two countries with only regional recognition of gay marriage (Australia and the United States) do better still on these support-for-marriage measurements, and those without either gay marriage or marriage-like civil unions do best of all.

In some instances, the differences are quite large. For example, people in nations with gay marriage are less than half as likely as people in nations without gay unions to say that married people are happier. Perhaps most important, they are significantly less likely to say that people who want children ought to get married (38 percent vs. 60 percent). They are also significantly more likely to say that cohabiting without intending to marry is all right (83 percent vs. 50 percent), and are somewhat more likely to say that divorce is usually the best solution to marital problems. Respondents in the countries with gay marriage are significantly more likely than those in Australia and the United States to say that divorce is usually the best solution.

A similar exercise using data from a different survey yields similar results. The World Values Survey, based in Stockholm, Sweden, periodically interviews nationally representative samples of the publics of some 80 countries on six continents -- over 100,000 people in all -- on a range of issues. It contains three statements directly related to marriage as an institution:

1. A child needs a home with both a father and a mother to grow

up happily.

2. It is all right for a woman to want a child but not a stable

relationship with a man.

3. Marriage is an outdated institution.

Again grouping the countries according to the legal status of same-sex unions, the data from the 1999-2001 wave of interviews yield a clear pattern. Support for marriage as an institution is weakest in those countries with same-sex marriage. Countries with same-sex civil unions show more support, and countries with regional recognition show still more. By significant margins, support for marriage is highest in countries that extend no legal recognition to same-sex unions.

So what of it? Granted that these correlations may or may not reflect causation, what exactly can be said about the fact that certain values and attitudes and legal arrangements tend to cluster?

Here’s an analogy. Find some teenagers who smoke, and you can confidently predict that they are more likely to drink than their nonsmoking peers. Why? Because teen smoking and drinking tend to hang together. What’s more, teens who engage in either of these activities are also more likely than nonsmokers or nondrinkers to engage in other risky behaviors, such as skipping school, getting insufficient sleep, and forming friendships with peers who get into trouble.

Because these behaviors correlate and tend to reinforce one another, it is virtually impossible for the researcher to pull out any one from the cluster and determine that it alone is causing or is likely to cause some personal or (even harder to measure) social result. All that can be said for sure is that these things go together. To the degree possible, parents hope that their children can avoid all of them, the entire syndrome -- drinking, smoking, skipping school, missing sleep, and making friends with other children who get into trouble -- in part because each of them increases exposure to the others.

It’s the same with marriage. Certain trends in values and attitudes tend to cluster with each other and with certain trends in behavior. A rise in unwed childbearing goes hand in hand with a weakening of the belief that people who want to have children should get married. High divorce rates are encountered where the belief in marital permanence is low. More one-parent homes are found where the belief that children need both a father and a mother is weaker. A rise in nonmarital cohabitation is linked at least partly to the belief that marriage as an institution is outmoded. The legal endorsement of gay marriage occurs where the belief prevails that marriage itself should be redefined as a private personal relationship. And all of these marriage-weakening attitudes and behaviors are linked. Around the world, the surveys show, these things go together.

Eskridge and Spedale are right. We cannot demonstrate statistically what exactly causes what, or what is likely to have what consequences in the future. But we do see in country after country that these phenomena form a pattern that recurs. They are mutually reinforcing. Socially, an advance for any of them is likely to be an advance for all of them. An individual who tends to accept any one or two of them probably accepts the others as well. And as a political and strategic matter, anyone who is fighting for any one of them should -- almost certainly already does -- support all of them, since a victory for any of them clearly coincides with the advance of the others. Which is why, for example, people who have devoted much of their professional lives to attacking marriage as an institution almost always favor gay marriage. These things do go together.

Inevitably, the pattern discernible in the statistics is borne out in the statements of the activists. Many of those who most vigorously champion same-sex marriage say that they do so precisely in the hope of dethroning once and for all the traditional “conjugal institution.”

That phrase comes from Judith Stacey, professor of sociology at New York University and a major expert witness testifying in courts and elsewhere for gay marriage. She views the fight for same-sex marriage as the “vanguard site” for rebuilding family forms. The author of journal articles like “Good Riddance to ‘The Family,’” she argues forthrightly that “if we begin to value the meaning and quality of intimate bonds over their customary forms, there are few limits to the kinds of marriage and kinship patterns people might wish to devise.”

Similarly, David L. Chambers, a law professor at the University of Michigan widely published on family issues, favors gay marriage for itself but also because it would likely “make society receptive to the further evolution of the law.” What kind of evolution? He writes, “If the deeply entrenched paradigm we are challenging is the romantically linked man-woman couple, we should respect the similar claims made against the hegemony of the two-person unit and against the romantic foundations of marriage.”

Examples could be multiplied -- the recently deceased Ellen Willis, professor of journalism at NYU and head of its Center for Cultural Reporting and Criticism, expressed the hope that gay marriage would “introduce an implicit revolt against the institution into its very heart, further promoting the democratization and secularization of personal and sexual life” -- but they can only illustrate the point already established by the large-scale international comparisons: Empirically speaking, gay marriage goes along with the erosion, not the shoring up, of the institution of marriage.

These facts have two implications. First, to the degree that it makes any sense to oppose gay marriage, it makes sense only if one also opposes with equal clarity and intensity the other main trends pushing our society toward postinstitutional marriage. After all, the big idea is not to stop gay marriage. The big idea is to stop the erosion of society’s most pro-child institution. Gay marriage is only one facet of the larger threat to the institution.

Similarly, it’s time to recognize that the beliefs about marriage that correlate with the push for gay marriage do not exist in splendid isolation, unrelated to marriage’s overall institutional prospects. Nor do those values have anything to do with strengthening the institution, notwithstanding the much-publicized but undocumented claims to the contrary from those making the “conservative case” for gay marriage.

Instead, the deep logic of same-sex marriage is clearly consistent with what scholars call deinstitutionalization -- the overturning or weakening of all of the customary forms of marriage, and the dramatic shrinking of marriage’s public meaning and institutional authority. Does deinstitutionalization necessarily require gay marriage? Apparently not. For decades heterosexuals have been doing a fine job on that front all by themselves. But gay marriage clearly presupposes and reinforces deinstitutionalization.

By itself, the “conservative case” for gay marriage might be attractive. It would be gratifying to extend the benefits of marriage to same-sex couples -- IF gay marriage and marriage renewal somehow fit together. But they do not. As individuals and as a society, we can strive to maintain and strengthen marriage as a primary social institution and society’s best welfare plan for children (some would say for men and women too). Or we can strive to implement same-sex marriage. But unless we are prepared to tear down with one hand what we are building up with the other, we cannot do both.

________

David Blankenhorn is president of the New York-based Institute for American Values and the author of The Future of Marriage (Encounter Books).

It was one of the more awkward moments in the presidential campaign. Senator John McCain was appearing on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, and she was asking why McCain did not support same-sex “marriage.” A well-prepared DeGeneres made the usual arguments about inclusiveness, and compared those who reject same-sex “marriage” to those who once refused to allow women or blacks to vote. It was all about fairness, she said.

McCain’s response? “I just believe in the status of a marriage between a man and a woman ... We just have a disagreement.”

Maybe, given the sensitivity of the situation, that was the best answer Senator McCain could come up with. But suppose the senator and Ms. DeGeneres could talk backstage, away from the glare of TV lights. What could he say to seize the moral high ground? To start, he could discuss the true meaning and purpose of marriage.

In his book, THE CLASH OF ORTHODOXIES, Princeton professor Robert George writes that matrimonial law reflects a moral judgment. That judgment is that marriage is inherently heterosexual, monogamous, and permanent — a union of one man and one woman. This judgment is based on both the biblical and natural law understandings — that marriage is a two-in-one flesh communion of persons. This communion is consummated and actualized sexually.

That is, marriage is made real by acts that are reproductive, whether or not these acts result in children. They unite the spouses as a single procreative unit. This organic unity is achieved even by infertile couples. Only a mated pair can be a complete organism capable of human procreation.

By contrast, homosexual acts cannot be procreative and cannot unite people organically. As a result, these acts cannot be marital, which means relationships integrated around them cannot be marriages. In other words, same-sex partners are physically incapable of marriage; it takes a man and a woman to become “one flesh.”

I can already hear the arguments your secular neighbors will make: “Okay,” they will say, “that’s your definition of marriage. But why should your views be imposed on everybody else?”

That is when we have to be ready with additional, non-religious arguments for traditional marriage. For instance, if we expand the meaning of marriage to include same-sex partnerships, on what grounds could we legitimately oppose marriages between three or more people? Or weddings between siblings?

Remember, we are not just defending the Christian view of marriage. Since the beginning of recorded history, virtually every society and every major religion has revered and protected traditional marriage. Why? It is the institution that produces, nurtures, protects, and civilizes children. And marriage is the cornerstone of society’s foundational institution: the family.

If the proponents of same-sex “marriage” succeed in foisting it on America, marriage itself would be reduced to nothing more than a legal contract between two (or more!) people. True marriage would be abolished, and the damage to our society would be incalculable.

These are the arguments we all need to learn to defend traditional, true marriage, particularly in those states where constitutional amendments are on the ballot this fall.

Tomorrow on “BreakPoint,” I will explain how same-sex “marriage” laws pose a threat to your religious freedom.

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Copyright (c) 2008 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

In Michigan, a homosexual man is suing two Christian publishers — Zondervan and Tyndale House — for $70 million dollars. Bradley Fowler claims they violated his constitutional rights and caused him “emotional distress” by publishing versions of the Bible that call homosexuality a sin. In my view, Fowler is suing the wrong party, but perhaps he realizes he is likely to have difficulty hauling the real author into court.

While the lawsuit may strike us as funny, we ought to take such attacks on Christian teaching seriously: We are going to see many more of them if same-sex “marriage” is foisted upon us by the courts.

As Seana Sugrue explains in The Meaning of Marriage, edited by Robert George and Jean Bethke Elshtain, marriage is a pre-political institution, rooted in biology and moral obligations. Sugrue writes, “The reality of sex differences between men and women, leading to the potential for offspring, is essential to the pre-political foundation of marriage.”

But marriage as a political form of social order, independent of the state, “is precisely what advocates of same-sex ‘marriage’ seek to change,” according to Sugrue. “Marriage rooted in procreation and sexual differences is to be replaced by marriage for the gratification of two consenting adults.”

But unlike traditional marriage, “same-sex ‘marriage’ requires a condition of soft despotism to exist,” Sugrue warns.

“In claiming for homosexuals the right to marry,” she reasons, the “state also claims for itself the ability to declare what constitutes marriage ... It transforms marriage from a pre-political obligation into its own creation.”

But as an artificial creation of the state, same-sex “marriage” is “an institution that needs to be coddled ... Its very fragility demands a culture in which it is protected.” This means, as Sugrue argues, that “once marriage becomes a statist institution for the sake of consenting adults, the state will increasingly be called upon to create the social conditions to protect these unions.”

The need for coddling means the state will use public education for this end, and align itself against churches that refuse to recognize same-sex “marriage.”

So, the state has to use its power against two of society’s civil institutions: the family and the church.

Sugrue is right: We are already seeing the courts go after institutions and people who refuse to recognize the legitimacy of same-sex “marriage” where it is imposed. State-ordered gay “marriage” is an attack, not only on legitimate marriage, but upon religious freedom and the freedom not to have one’s children indoctrinated into alien ideas about marriage.

You need to understand the reasoning here so that we can present this argument in a winsome way to our neighbors. And we better be supporting efforts to pass constitutional amendments and laws defining marriage as one man and one woman; the issue is up in Florida, Arizona, and California this year. We also need to find out what the presidential candidates want to do, because they will be choosing the next Supreme Court justices who will ultimately decide this issue.

If we do not act, lawsuits against Bible publishers will no longer be a joke, but a despotic reality.

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Copyright (c) 2008 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

On a “religion and the law” website, the widely respected UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, who favors same-sex marriage, took time out to acknowledge that the religious liberty implications of same-sex marriage are not “scaremongering.”

“It seems to me plausible that judicial decisions banning opposite-sex-only marriage rules would likewise come to be extended -- by legislatures or by courts -- to go beyond their literal boundaries (a decision about government discrimination) and instead to justify bans on private discrimination,” Volokh wrote. “It seems quite likely that they will spill over into diminishing any constitutional (or Religious Freedom Restoration Act-statutory) claims to engage in such discrimination by private entities, including Boy-Scout-like organizations, churches, religious universities and other institutions.”