The Illinois Family Institute are Dolts

The Illinois Family Institute wants you, as good Christians (assuming you are, and if you aren’t, you’re probably burning in Hell sooner or later anyway, so who cares what you think), to continue vigorously opposing gay marriage.

Now, they could simply say, “Because that’s what God wants,” and that should be the end of it.  But they have to actually come up with practical, pragmatic reasons, so as to demonstrate why being street-smart is also being holy.  Or something like that.  And, to hear them talk, they’ve come up with five such reasons:

1. Every time the issue of gay marriage has been put to a vote by the people, the people have voted to uphold traditional marriage. Even in California. In fact, the amendment passed in North Carolina on Tuesday by a wider margin (61-39) than a similar measure passed six years ago in Virginia (57-42). The amendment passed in North Carolina, a swing state Obama carried in 2008, by 22 percentage points. We should not think that gay marriage in all the land is a foregone conclusion. To date 30 states have constitutionally defined marriage as between a man and a woman.

Polling on public acceptance of gay marriage has shown increased rates of acceptance in a very short period of time.  So pointing at too many past states as proof of the matter is hardly conclusive.

Secondly, when asked in a relative vacuum, people have a tendency to say one thing, but in the midst of Apocalyptic Rhetoric a certain number of voters are swayed.

Third, it helps if you’re being deceptive at the same time.  If gay marriage is drawing a narrow majority of support, civil unions are much more popular.  But NC’s Amendment 1 was advertised primarily as a way to keep those icky gays from getting their gayness all over marriage.  That it also forbids the state to allow civil unions, or that it similarly prevents the state from recognizing any relationship between heterosexual couples who are not formally married, got far too little play, and certainly wasn’t what the Amendment ran on.

Why, by the way, if there are such firm majorities in favor of keeping gays out of marriage, do groups like the IFI insist on state constitutional measures? They would argue that it’s to keep state courts from doing silly things like ruling that state provisions for equal treatment under the law should trump statutes that say otherwise.  I suggest that it’s more than that — a fear that their demographic majority has a limited life span (literally), and so to make it more difficult for shifting tides to erode those constitutional barriers for some time to come.

2. The promotion and legal recognition of homosexual unions is not in the interest of the common good. That may sound benighted, if not bigoted. But we must say it in love: codifying the indistinguishability of gender will not make for the “peace of the city.” It rubs against the grain of the universe, and when you rub against the grain of divine design you’re bound to get splinters. Or worse. The society which says sex is up to your own definition and the family unit is utterly fungible is not a society that serves its children, its women, or its own long term well being.

Which is kind of a “sez you” argument. “We think gay marriage causes metaphysical splinters, so it should be opposed because that’s what we think.”  Which I guess is a version of the “Because that’s what God wants” argument, and it’s equally unassailable, since it’s all wrapped in metaphorical twaddle about the “grain of divine design.”

3. Marriage is not simply the term we use to describe those relationships most precious to us. The word means something and has meant something throughout history. Marriage is more than a union of hearts and minds.

Yes, it’s a union of family assets, as agreed to by the fathers of both households, giving away the woman as child-bearing chattel along with certain properties, to the benefit of the husband’s household through the production of future male heirs.

What’s that? That’s not what you mean?  Funny … in many “traditional” cultures down over the centuries, that’s precisely what marriage has practically (and “traditionally”) meant.

It involves a union of bodies–and not bodies in any old way we please, as if giving your cousin a wet willy in the ear makes you married.

Yes, let’s reduce sexual behavior in the context of committed and loving adults to a childhood prank. Classy.

Marriage, to quote one set of scholars, …

Whose ideological and political bent can be seen through a brief skimming of their recent articles.

…is a” comprehensive union of two sexually complementary persons who seal (consummate or complete) their relationship by the generative act—by the kind of activity that is by its nature fulfilled by the conception of a child. So marriage itself is oriented to and fulfilled by the bearing, rearing, and education of children.” This conjugal view of marriage states in complex language what would have been a truism until a couple generations ago. Marriage is what children (can) come from. Where that element is not present (at the level of sheer design and function, even if not always in fulfillment), marriage is not a reality.

So heterosexual couples who cannot functionally bear children — due to biological problems, infertility, age, disability, whatever — have a marriage that “is not a reality.”  Classy.

And, of course, once the hypothetical kids are raised and on their way (assuming there’s more to it than simply conceiving children), marriages are free to fall apart because their comprehensive conjugal purpose is fulfilled. Nice.

We should not concede that “gay marriage” is really marriage.

Translation: Because the word means what we want it to mean, not what other people want it to mean. And we win because we love Jesus more than you, so there.

What’s more, as Christians we understand that the great mystery of marriage can never be captured between a relationship of Christ and Christ or church and church.

Yes! Of course! We should legislate about marriage based on a religious metaphor.  Brilliant!

4. Allowing for the legalization of gay marriage further normalizes what was until very recently, and still should be, considered deviant behavior. While it’s true that politics is downstream from culture, it’s also true that law is one of the tributaries contributing to culture. In our age of hyper-tolerance we try to avoid stigmas, but stigmas can be an expression of common grace. Who knows how many stupid sinful things I’ve been kept from doing because I knew my peers and my community would deem it shameful. Our cultural elites may never consider homosexuality shameful, but amendments that define marriage as one man and one woman serve a noble end by defining what is as what ought to be. We do not help each other in the fight for holiness when we allow for righteousness to look increasingly strange and sin to look increasingly normal.

Translation: We think gay sex is shameful, so we think that if others think it is not shameful that they are wrong and we should pass laws to make it de facto shameful.  Similarly, interracial marriages were, until very recently, considered deviant, indecent, shameful behavior, and so it would serve a noble end by defining marriage as one man and one woman of the same race.

5. We are naive if we think a laissez faire compromise would be enjoyed by all if only the conservative Christians would stop being so dogmatic. The next step after giving up the marriage fight is not a happy millennium of everyone everywhere doing marriage in his own way. The step after surrender is conquest. I’m not suggesting heterosexuals would no longer be able to get married. What I am suggesting is that the cultural pressure will not stop with allowing for some “marriages” to be homosexual. It will keep mounting until allaccept and finally celebrate that homosexuality is one of Diversity’s great gifts. The goal is not for different expressions of marriage, but for the elimination of definitions altogether. Capitulating on gay marriage may feel like giving up an inch in bad law to gain a mile in good will. But the reality will be far different. For as in all of the devil’s bargains, the good will doesn’t last nearly so long as the law.

Okay, they lose me on this one.  The argument seems to be that if we allow gays to be married, the next thing you know we’ll be treating gays as normal and, like all humans, to be celebrated for their achievements and so forth.   Egad.  Even if they hadn’t been spending the whole previous length of the article arguing that gay marriage is being discussed because more people consider homosexuality to be a normal behavior for those so inclined, the argument seems to be that the only way we can keep gays from seeming normal is to make sure they are discriminated against and treated as abnormal, excluded from fundamental social activities like marriage and, preferably, not allowed to openly be in our communities where people might grow used to them and see them as, oh, human beings.

I read something the other day that struck me as fairly wise and profound.  The person writing it said that they don’t talk about “gay marriage” because the issue isn’t about gays getting married, any more than there’s an issue about “gay parking” or “gay employment” or “gay baseball.”  The person preferred the term “marriage equality” (a phrase I’ve found a scosh PC in the past) because that’s the point — that people, regardless of sexual orientation or skin color or whatever, are seeking to be treated equally regarding marriage.  Not a special “gay” marriage, but a simple marriage.

That makes a lot of sense to me, and that may well be the dangerous paradigm shift that folks like the dolts at the Illinois Family Institute are afraid of.  As long as they can frame this matter as a small group of “deviants” looking for special treatment, then it’s easy to keep it in a rhetorical ghetto.  As soon as it becomes seen a group of people looking to be treated the same as everyone else …

… well, who knows what might happen?