Tag Archive for ‘“Gay Marriage”’

Calling Things By Their Right Names

The placard in the photo of a recent rally favoring gay marriage asks, bluntly, “Family. Isn’t It About Love?”

Well, hmm. You might indeed incline to such a view. Then, again, you might wish to broaden the perspective, in keeping with normative modes for understanding the foundational human structure we call family.

You’d want to begin with the acknowledgement that where norms exist, there’s generally a reason for them: the sounder the reason, the more tenacious and enduring the norm, the more deeply lodged in heart and soul and mind. You need more than a placard to uproot such norms. You need compelling reasons.

The Fourth Choice: Ending the Reign of Activist Judges

If you are looking for a reason to vote for Ralph Nader, the way both parties are handling the “gay marriage” issue should give you lots of data. John Kerry, when asked his opinion of “gay marriage,” looks like a dog getting a bath, as Chris Hitchens puts it.

Sodomy and the ELCA

“Gay marriage” may be on the political back burner for the moment, as Karl Rove is busy crafting phrases that will appease Christian-conservative Bush backers this fall while appealing to homosexual swing-voters with promises of “civil unions” (a.k.a. legalized “gay marriage”). In the Evangelical Lutheran Church of American (ELCA), however, the pot is fixing to boil.

“Gay Marriage”

Our society, for ideological reasons, has chosen to judge all human relationships according to the standard of equality and inequality, even the rapport between the sexes. Thus it was only consistent that the relationship between man and woman would be freed of its original and essential foundation in procreation, a good not precisely measurable by any standard of social equality, since, in a sense, birth and family ties are the natural foundation of any evaluation of equity and inequity within the human race.