Don’t fall for the ‘marriage equality’ sales pitch. It’s a deception.

Source: The Federalist

By Stella Morabito

Same-sex marriage is a notion that contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. I doubt many have thought this through, with the ironic exception of the elites who have been pushing the agenda the hardest.

Most people are weary of it all and going along to get along, especially since dissent has become such a socially expensive proposition, almost overnight. That in itself should deeply concern anyone who values freedom of expression.

Sure, true believers scattered across the land really do think the entire project ends with allowing same-sex couples to marry. Most persist in the blind faith that a federal ban on the standard definition of marriage will have no negative effect on family autonomy and privacy. That’s a pipe dream.

The same-sex marriage agenda is more like a magic bullet with a trajectory that will abolish civil marriage for everyone, and in doing so, will embed central planning into American life. And that, my friends, is the whole point of it. Along with Obamacare, net neutrality, and Common Core, genderless marriage is a blueprint for regulating life, particularly family life.

The Rainbow’s Arc

Unintended consequences usually come about when we are ignorant or maybe lazy about a course of action. But we usually crash land after following an arc of logic, which in this case has gone largely undiscerned and unaddressed in the public square.

Americans are in a fog about how marriage equality will lead to more central planning and thought policing. This is partly because the media and Hollywood only provide slogans to regurgitate while academics and judges push politically correct speech codes to obey.

Let’s explore the fallout of that arc of faulty logic. Included below are some 15 of the gaping holes in the “marriage equality” reasoning that Americans have not thought through.

1. The Kids Are Not Alright

In March, six adult children from LGBT households filed amicus briefs opposing genderless marriage: see here, here, and here. You can read testimonials of many such children in a newly released anthology by Robert Oscar Lopez and Rivka Edelman, “Jephthah’s Daughters: Innocent Casualties in the War for Family ‘Equality.’”

Whenever a parent is missing—for whatever reason—a child feels a primal wound. In this respect, parents belong to their children more than children belong to their parents. We ought to recognize that privileges of civil marriage should ultimately exist for children, not for adults. Children have the right to know their origins and not to be treated as commodities. Same-sex parenting—which increasingly involves human trafficking, particularly with artificial reproductive technologies (see number eight)—deliberately deprives a child of a mother and/or a father. The “marriage equality” agenda requires that such children bear that burden alone and repress their primal wound in silence.

2. Love’s Got Nothing to Do with State Interest in Marriage

“Love is love” is an empty slogan when it comes to state interest in marriage. How two people feel about one another is none of the state’s business. The state’s interest is limited to the heterosexual union because that’s the only union that produces the state’s citizenry.

And it still is, whether the union happens traditionally or in a petri dish. Each and every one of us—equally and without exception—only exists through the heterosexual union. In any free and functioning society, there is a state interest in encouraging as much as possible those who sire and bear us to be responsible for raising us.

3. The Infertility Canard

Just as the state has no litmus test for feelings or motives, it has no litmus test for any heterosexual couple who do not produce children because of intent, infertility, or age. Conflating same-sex couples with childless or elderly heterosexual couples seems to be the fallacy of composition: claiming something must be true of the whole because it’s true of some part of the whole.

Sorry, but the heterosexual union, no matter how it takes place, is the only way any citizen exists, including intersex and transgender citizens. So recognizing that union without prejudice remains the only reason for state interest in marriage.

4. Same-Sex Marriage Will Settle Nothing

It’s only the starting point for a glut of philosophically related demands for state recognition and approval of many other types of relationships, including polygamy and incest. This will mark the sudden beginning of an even more sudden end for same-sex marriage, not so much because those other types of relationships prove immoral, but because they serve as exhibits for the argument that all civil marriage—including same-sex marriage—is unsustainable and discriminatory.

5. ‘Marriage Equality’ Opens the Path for ‘Unmarried Equality’

There’s a movement waiting in the wings called “unmarried equality,” which argues that all civil marriage should be abolished because it privileges married people over singles. If same-sex marriage becomes the law of the land, it will set the precedent for abolishing marriage. Far from getting the state out of the marriage business, it will invite the state to regulate all familial relationships, particularly those with children. Once the state doesn’t have to recognize your marriage, it is freer to treat your spouse and children as strangers to you.

6. Transgenderism Is a Big Part of This Package

Americans have not thought through the implications of same-sex marriage and how it is logically a big step to erasing all sex distinctions in law. If we become legally sexless, the implications are vast when it comes to how or whether the state will recognize family relationships such as mother, father, son, or daughter. There’s already a push to eliminate sex identification at birth, which could mean removing sex distinctions on birth certificates. This will seem logical because all gender identity non-discrimination laws already presume that everybody’s sex is something arbitrarily “assigned” to them at birth.

7. It’s an Open Invitation for State Licensing of Parents

If we allow the abolition of sex distinctions and civil marriage—both of which are written into the social DNA of same-sex marriage—we logically allow the state to gain greater control over deciding familial relationships. Civil marriage so far has presumed that a child born into a heterosexual union has the default right to be raised by his biological parents together. How can the presumption of maternity or paternity survive in a legal system that recognizes neither sex distinctions nor a marriage relationship?

The bellwethers are out there. MSNBC anchor Melissa Harris-Perry did a “Forward” spot for the Obama administration in which she stated that all children “belong” to communities, not families. Another friend of the Obama administration, gender legal theorist Martha Fineman, calls for state-subsidized care-giving units to replace marriage and the family.

8. Same-Sex Marriage Commodifies Children

You may think artificial reproductive technologies (ART) are fine as an avenue to obtain children for those unable to conceive. But in the context of genderless marriage, ART ramps up the potential for human trafficking. Check anonymousus.com to read testimonies of grief and loss felt by children who were conceived in this manner. Check the movies “Eggsploitation” and “Breeders” by the Center for Bioethics and Culture to hear stories of the exploitation of women in the industry. There is definitely an element of human bondage in all of this, particularly because human beings are being deliberately separated from their mothers and fathers, in a way that echoes the wounds of slavery’s separations and the search for one’s roots.

9. It Sets a Head-On Collision Course with Freedom of Religion

The handwriting is on the wall. You need only reflect on how a screaming mob managed to conjure up total surrender from Indiana Gov. Mike Pence so he would reject that state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Catholic Charities is closing its adoption services where same-sex marriage laws pressure them to reject their church’s teachings about marriage and family. Owners of businesses that serve the wedding industry are being forced to either scrap their consciences or shut their doors. Anti-discrimination lawsuits against churches that don’t perform same-sex marriages will undoubtedly increase.

10. It Sets a Collision Course for Freedom of Speech and Press

Campus speech codes. Social punishment. Firing Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla for discovering his thought crime of privately believing in marriage six years prior. The utter compliance of virtually every big business in America, every media outlet, every pundit who is permitted to have a voice in the public square.

11. It’s Especially On a Collision Course with Freedom of Association

I already mentioned that abolishing civil marriage, along with legal sex distinctions, puts the government in a better position to regulate familial relationships, and probably to license parents. If we think deeply about these things, it’s hard to avoid the fact that freedom of association begins with family autonomy, a place where the state is supposed to leave you alone in your most intimate relationships. It’s hard to see how freedom of association is not affected, especially when PC speech codes have everyone constantly checking their chit chat with neighbors, co-workers, and classmates. At Marquette University, staff were told that any conversation or remarks construed to be against same-sex marriage were to be reported to Human Resources, even if just inadvertently overheard.

12. Same-Sex Kills Privacy by Growing Bureaucracy

With the erosion of family autonomy practically guaranteed by the rainbow arc of same-sex marriage, private life will tend to evaporate, just as it always does in centrally planned societies. Distrust grows because people fear punishment for expressing dissenting views. The emphasis on political correctness in the name of equality, coupled with an ever-growing bureaucracy, is a perfect environment in which to percolate a surveillance society.

13. It’s Meant to Be a Global Agenda

The United States is already punishing countries and threatening to cut off aid if they don’t accept the LGBT agenda. This is especially true of developing countries, in which the whole idea is foreign to over 95 percent of the population. According to a report by Rep. Steve Stockman, corroborated by a Pentagon official, the administration held back critical intelligence from Nigeria which would have aided in locating girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. The new National Security Strategy recently released by the White House makes clear that the LGBT agenda is a global agenda. And it looks a lot like cultural imperialism of the worst kind.

14. It Promises a Monolithic Society of Conformity

In the past year or two, everyone with something to lose by opposing same-sex marriage—with the honorable exception of Eich—seems to have scuttled their principles. Five years ago, the American Psychological Association voted 157-0—that’s right, ZERO—to support genderless marriage. For an excellent assessment of what this sort of conformity means for a free society, read Brendan O’Neill’s article in Spiked, entitled “Gay Marriage: A Case Study in Conformism.” The agenda was imposed by elites, entirely due to a methodical blitzkrieg of programs and enforcement dictated from above. Same-sex marriage simply could not come about without suppressing dissent in all of our institutions.

15. Expect More Severe Punishment for Dissent

If you think the bullying of businesses, churches, and individuals who don’t get with the LGBT program now is bad, it promises to get much worse once codified. Is this really the sort of society you wish to live in? Where expressing an opinion from your heart on faith, family, marriage, relationships, love, or the very nature of reality—is routinely attacked as hate speech? Because that is exactly what you need to expect.

Justice Anthony Kennedy made it very clear in his words of the Windsor decision that any dissent on same-sex marriage was tantamount to animus. It is but a short step from presuming animus to punishing dissent.

So perhaps the biggest question hanging in the air is this: What will the authorities decide to do to dissenters?

The Rev. Patrick Henry Reardon of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago says the government can define and sanction marriage on its terms but that he’ll no longer act as an agent of the government by signing civil licenses. (Phil Velasquez, Chicago Tribune)

By Manya Brachear Pashman
Chicago Tribune

Source: The Chicago Tribune

The Rev. Patrick Henry Reardon is getting out of the civil marriage business.

The Orthodox Christian priest on Chicago’s North Side says the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalizes same-sex matrimony reinforces his recent decision to no longer sign licenses that make marriages valid in the eyes of the state and now the nation.

That doesn’t mean Reardon won’t do weddings. On the contrary, he gladly will bless the union of a Christian man and woman and perform the sacrament of marriage. But those couples must go to a courthouse if they want to be legally bound. He says he can no longer in good conscience serve as an agent of the state.

“The strange situation in the United States is clergymen not only act in the name of the church, they also act in the name of the state,” said Reardon, the pastor of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago’s Irving Park community. “The clergymen wear two hats. I’m making a political statement in this sense: I’m accusing the state of usurping the role of God. What I’m saying is, ‘I don’t agree with you and I’m going to change the way I do things. I will not act in your name. … I will not render unto Caesar that which belongs to God.'”

The unusual protest has inspired other Christian clergy — Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant — to consider following his lead, a shift Reardon hopes will lead the nation to a different model of marriage, one that no longer deputizes clergy to sign marriage licenses and, in his opinion, effectively uphold the state’s definition of marriage.

In Illinois, couples typically go to the county clerk to apply for a marriage license no more than 60 days before they wed. Whoever officiates at the ceremony signs the license as a witness. The county then records the marriage. The couple also has the option of exchanging vows in front of a judge. That’s the only option now for Reardon’s parishioners if they want to be married in the eyes of the law.

Archbishop Blase Cupich, Chicago’s Roman Catholic leader, said in a recent interview that the idea has not come up among America’s Catholic bishops or Chicago priests, but he pointed out that a “two-tiered type of marriage” already exists in some places, including Europe. Regardless of who signs the license, he added, there’s already a clear distinction between the two in the U.S.

“Civil marriage doesn’t make people promise and keep the promise of permanence because of the ease of divorce,” Cupich said. “We ask people to be married until death do you part and we really mean that. … It’s important to recognize we already have a difference between civil marriage and church marriage because of the promises.”

Indeed, the government’s view of marriage as a legally binding contract already contradicts the Orthodox Christian understanding of marriage as a sacrament — blessing a union that already existed because it was created by God. And therein lies the problem, Reardon said.

“Government has no authority whatsoever to alter that,” Reardon said. “Whence a judge, magistrate or a justice of the peace does the ceremony, that’s just a legal act. As a priest I will no longer step in and serve in that function.”

Reardon, who was raised Roman Catholic and converted to the Episcopal faith, embraced Orthodox Christianity in the 1980s when Episcopalians began to change their prayer book and ordain gay clergy. He chose the Antiochian Orthodox Church because it was particularly open to converts. In fact, three-fourths of the members of the church in North America are American born, as are nearly all of Reardon’s parishioners. That’s not necessarily the case in the roughly two dozen ethnic Orthodox churches where many parishioners have immigrated to the U.S. from countries with a particular Orthodox patriarch.

But the theology of marriage is the same in all branches, said the Rev. Johannes Jacobse, president of the American Orthodox Institute. It’s considered to be much more than a partnership.

“We see the sacramental as the completion of the natural,” said Jacobse, also an Antiochian Orthodox priest. “We see marriage as a means of salvation, as a way one achieves salvation. It’s not just a contract or agreement. It certainly is that. But it’s more.”

Clergy on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate support Reardon’s boycott, though based on a slightly different rationale.

The Rev. Tony Jones, an evangelical author and proponent of same-sex marriage, has been advocating for a separation of religious and civil marriage since 2010.

“This social change happened a lot faster than anybody predicted,” said Jones, who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. “When I declared that I would no longer sign marriage licenses and encouraged other clergy to do the same, it was an attempt to actually buy the church some freedom to say we can sacralize a same-sex union and we don’t need the state to legalize it.

“The other reason I did it was on behalf of people like Father Reardon,” Jones added. “I thought it would buy conservatives some time and some latitude and they could say the government can do whatever the government wants to do regarding marriage and weddings. But in our church we’re going to have a different standard.”

He said most clergy members he has surveyed agree in principle that they should not serve as arms of the government, but signing that certificate has become so much a part of the American marriage ritual that it’s difficult for them to see an alternative.

Bishop Demetrios of Mokissos, chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, said he doesn’t foresee such a boycott in Chicago. He even questions whether it’s legal.

“I can’t imagine any of our priests doing that,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet and I don’t anticipate it happening to make a political statement,” he said.

Jacobse said Reardon is the first Orthodox priest to take such a strong a political stand. But the recent Supreme Court ruling has sparked a discussion among other brethren, he said.

“It was a bold move on Father Patrick’s part,” Jacobse said. “A lot of priests are wondering and asking the same thing. To remove all conflict between the church and the state is to go the path that Father Reardon has chosen to go on. I anticipate more priests are going to go that way.”

Reardon emphasizes that he does not discourage couples from seeking licenses and legitimacy in the eyes of the law. But having that certificate will no longer be a condition of getting married at All Saints.

“If you want the tax advantages of marriage recognized by the state, you’re going to have to do something else about it, like go down to a justice of the peace,” he said. “If you don’t want that, that’s perfectly OK. I’m not going to require that at this parish.”