We can’t stop homosexual “marriage” with a Marriage Amendment. This isn’t pessimism, it’s reality. Moreover, I am not going the route of libertarian-infatuated Glenn Beck and giving up, or conceding the point that this whole debate is irrelevant.
However, It has become clear in recent months that feminist proponents of homosexual “marriage” in America aren’t about to let a little thing called a Constitutional Amendment slow down their assault upon the world as God made it.
Suppose we pass this Vitter sponsored Marriage Amendment (HJ 56):
SECTION 1. Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.
Stephen Baskersville of The American Conservative pointed out that what is happening across the pond is likely to happen here:
Britain’s Gender Recognition Act allows transsexuals to falsify their birth certificates retroactively to indicate they were born the gender of their choice. “The practical effect C9 will inevitably be same-sex ‘marriage’,” writes Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail. “Marriage as a union between a man and a woman will be destroyed, because ‘man’ and ‘woman’ will no longer mean anything other than whether someone feels like a man or a woman.
What must we do then? Define, have a constitutional amendment defining male and female? The founders of our country recognized that certain things are self-evident. But those who are hell-bent on throwing off God’s standards are willing to redefine reality in order to promote their agenda. Law can no more save a country, than it can save an individual. These are first of all, moral issues, secondarily, legal issues.
But how did we get to this place? Baskerville of Patrick Henry College also observes:
Homosexuals did not destroy marriage, heterosexuals did. The demand for same-sex marriage is a symptom, not a cause, of the deterioration of marriage. By far the most direct threat to the family is heterosexual divorce.
It is the decline of marriage, not an ascendancy of reason that has brought us here. Baskerville lays the fault at the practice of no-fault divorce. Anytime a couple gets divorced because “they don’t love each other” a new false foundation for marriage has been laid down. The same would be true for such things as incompatibility, or divorce for the sake of children (which mirrors the reason often given for staying together).
But marriage, as I have pointed out elsewhere is a God-ordained institution. Wholesale abandonment of God’s Word and standards for marriage, as well as a dearth of true gospel preaching have doomed our nation to godless laws. And it is only a revival that will rescue us from the judgment of God.
Baskerville added this lament: “No American politician of national stature has seriously challenged unilateral divorce”. Perhaps he doesn’t consider Mike Huckabee of “national stature”, but Huckabee has continued to speak out against divorce:
I think America has got to sort of brace itself and say, “How good is this?” For example, on the issue of marriage, no-fault divorce became the vogue in the early ’60s. When states first introduced it, then everybody got on the bandwagon, and the result is now one in two marriages virtually ends in divorce in the country.
Divorce is one of the key predictors of poverty for a child growing up in a home that’s broken. Without making any judgments about the value or rightness or wrongness of it, it’s an economic fact that when children are involved in a divorce they are more likely to end up spending part of their childhood in poverty than if they have a two-parent household.
In an article entitled “Ark. Governor Embraces Covenant Marriage: Movement Seeks to Make it Harder to Get Divorced” Huckabee’s credentials on this perspective are legitimized.
But let’s not be fooled. Electing the right leaders won’t get the job done. There must be a revival of not only marriage, but Biblical standards due to conversions resulting from the gospel of Jesus Christ. Otherwise, we can only slow down the retreat into “homosexual marriage”, which is one unnatural consequence to our failure to uphold God’s standards.