Gay Marriage

A week ago, Dr. Bob encouraged the student body to join a national calling campaign to the mayor's office of San Francisco to protest the illegal marriage licenses it was issuing to gay and lesbian couples. A 2-page instruction sheet was handed out in chapel and a bank of telephones was set up to allow the students to call for free. Although I'm not entirely certain what good it's going to do, it did get me thinking about the gay marriage issue.

Let me start by saying the only legitimate Christian position is that homosexuality is wrong. How else can you interpret verses like 1Cor 6:9-10?

Tell me, what else could that passage mean other than that homosexuality is immoral?

But look again: it also says the greedy and the verbally abusive will not inherit the kingdom either. As near as I can tell, the sins are the equal in God's eyes.

The next verse goes on to say "Some of you once lived this way. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God."

Since Jesus came to save sinners--as the songwriter wrote, "Christ redeemeth sinful men"--then God cannot hate gays, as some who are "verbally abusive" will tell you; why would Jesus die for someone He hated? They say that gays will burn in hell--but so will we all, unless we repent of our sin and come to Christ for salvation.

/Sermon Mode

All that to say, if the Bible is the foundation of our moral code, then we must call homosexuality immoral. Now, the question becomes, should homosexual marriages be illegal? Is immorality sufficient cause for illegality?

My answer to that is, do you want laws against greed? After all, it's in the same list as homosexuality.

No, I think that to become illegal, an act must first cause actual physical or financial harm to another person. An Ebenezer Scrooge causes me no harm, so long as he doesn't steal from me. He might not do me any good, but his greed doesn't hurt me. In the same way, if Ben and Steve want to get married, how does that hurt anyone physically or financially?

(As a matter of fact, it's more likely to be helpful, both physically and financially, to allow gay marriage! Think about it: financially, marriages boost the economy. (You know this if you've ever had to pay for one) Physically, by locking homosexuals to one partner, it might help stop the spread of AIDS.)

I understand the position that some take that we don't want the government giving its stamp of approval on immoral behaviors. But to be perfectly frank, it already has. If marriage is supposed to be the time-honored, sacred tradition that those against gay marriage make it out to be, how do they explain Brittney Spears' drunken marriage and divorce in less than a week? I don't mean to imply that her behavior is acceptable, but rather to say that she and others like her have done immeasurably more damage to marriage than allowing gays and lesbians to marry will.

So then, to address the stamp-of-appoval concern, I think that the government should not give marriage licenses to gays. Furthermore, the government should not give marriage licenses to heterosexual couples either. My inner minarchist asks, "Why should the government know or care whether I'm married or not? And why should I pay them a fee for that privilege? How does this knowledge help the government perform its central function, which is to protect me from those who would do me harm?"

Why does the government care if I'm married? Aren't the citizens of this country supposed to be equal under the law?

Besides not having a legitimate reason for knowing my marital status, the government has no right to know it. Under our current interpretation of the first ammendment, we are supposed to have separation of church and state. Why then has the government taken on a fundamentally religious issue like marriage?

So, if the government has neither right nor reason to know if I'm married, why should it be the government's right to decide whether or not gays can marry? As I said before, marriage is a fundamentally religious issue. Then let the churches decide this issue ! Let people swear their marriage vows according to the rules their religious/personal moral beliefs set for them.

Minor edit for clarity, 5/17/04

Posted by Blog Jones at April 26, 2004 11:04 PM | Category: Politics