By Voddie Baucham, pastor of Grace Family Baptist Church in Spring, Texas
It’s hard to deny that homosexual marriage appears to be a foregone conclusion in America. This is a frightening prospect not only for those of us who understand marriage to be a testimony of the relationship between Christ and his bride, the church, but also for all who value the family and its contribution to the well-being of society and human thriving. And while it’s difficult to watch a coordinated, well-funded, well-connected propaganda strategy undermine thousands of years of human history. It’s especially disconcerting to witness the use of the civil rights struggle as the vehicle for the strategy.
The idea that same-sex “marriage” is the next leg in the civil rights race is ubiquitous. Gay is not the new black!
The first problem with the idea of conflating “sexual orientation” and race is the fact that homosexuality is undetectable apart from self-identification. Determining whether or not a person is black, Native American, or female usually involves no more than visual verification. However, should doubt remain, blood tests, genetics, or a quick trip up the family tree would suffice. No so with homosexuality. There is no evidence that can confirm or deny a person’s claims regarding sexual orientation. How about men who are extremely effeminate but prefer women, or those who once were practicing homosexuals but have since come out of the lifestyle? In short, it’s impossible to identify who is or is not a homosexual. As a result, how do we know to whom the civil rights in question should be attributed? Should a man who isn’t a homosexual, assuming we could determine such a thing, but tries to enter a same-sex union be treated the same as a woman who isn’t Native American but tries to claim it to win sympathy, or casino rights, or votes?
An additional problem is the complete disconnect between same-sex “marriage” and anti-miscegenation laws. Miscegenation literally means “the interbreeding of people considered to be of different racial types.” The fact that homosexuals cannot “interbreed” shines a spotlight on the problem inherent in their logic. How can forbidding people who actually have the ability to interbreed be the same thing as acknowledging the fact that two people categorically lack that ability?
The very definition of marriage eliminates the possibility of including same-sex couples. The word marriage has a long and well-recorded history: it means “the union of a man and a woman.” Even in cultures that practice polygamy, the definition involves a man and several women. So, while anti-miscegenation laws denied people a legitimate right, the same cannot be said concerning the denial of marriage to same-sex couples. One cannot be denied a right to something that doesn’t exist!
The right to marry is one of the most frequently denied rights we have. People who are already married, minors, people too closely related are just a few categories of those routinely and/or categorically denied the right to marry. Hence, the charge that it is wrong to deny any person a “fundamental right” rings hollow. There has always been, and, by necessity, will always be discrimination in marriage laws.
The one thing that basically escapes most people in this debate is the fact that homosexuals have never been denied the right to marry. They simply haven’t had the right to redefine marriage. Yet they continue their argument that by virtue of being gay, traditional marriage discriminates against them.
You could use the same assumed logic to argue that while I have the right to join the military, as a pacifist I do not want to fight therefore, I don’t really have the right to join the military — so the military needs to establish a pacifist branch so I can fulfill both my desire to join and my desire not to fight!
The most damning aspect of the civil rights argument is logical unsustainability. If sexual orientation is the basis for classification as a minority group, and legal grounds for the redefinition of marriage, then what is to stop the “bisexual” from fighting for the ability to marry a man and a woman simultaneously since his “orientation” is, by definition, directed toward both sexes?” What about the member of NAMBLA whose orientation it toward young boys? Where do we stop and on what basis? Homosexual advocates are loath to answer this question. In fact, they are adept at avoiding it.
It is very important for those of us who oppose the idea of same-sex marriage to do so not because we wish to preserve our version of the American Dream, but because we view marriage as a living, breathing picture of the relationship between Christ and his church and because we know that God has designed the family in a particular way that promotes humans to thrive.
Silence on this issue is not an option. Unfortunately, and quite ironically, many Christians have been bullied into silence by the mere threat of censure from the homosexual lobby. “Oppose us and you’re no better than Gov. Wallace, Hitler, and those homophobes who killed Matthew Shepard.” Consequently we spend so much time trying to prove we’re not hate-filled murderers that we fail to recognize that the Emperor has no clothes.
There is no legal, logical, moral, biblical, or historical reason to support same-sex marriage. In fact, there are myriad reasons not to support it. I’ve only provided a few.
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