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What Is Marriage and What Is It Not?

By totalfamilylife.com
Love & Relationships healthy marriage
AUG 16, 2014 LISTEN
healthy marriage

For millennia, all societies have viewed marriage as an exclusively heterosexual club. But in the last few years, more and more people are saying it's time to open the marriage door to homosexuals. After all, we are told, if marriage is all about love and mutual commitment, gay people can do that at least  as well as straights – who have thoroughly messed up the institution in any event. And besides, it would be discriminatory to deny homosexuals the right to marry, no?

But according to authors of a great new book, we're on the wrong track already if the marriage debate gets bogged down in the issues of love or rights, because marriage is founded on something far deeper. The book is called What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense , and it's written by Sherif Girgis, Ryan Anderson, and my friend Princeton professor Robby George. “What we have come to call the gay marriage debate,” these three scholars write, “is not directly about homosexuality, but about marriage . It's not about whom  to let marry, but about what marriage  is .”

Girgis, Anderson, and George say that on the one side is the traditional view, which they label the conjugal view. “The conjugal view of marriage has long informed the law – along with the literature, art, philosophy, religion, and social practice – of our civilization,” the authors write. “It is a vision of marriage as a bodily as well as an emotional and spiritual bond, distinguished thus by its comprehensiveness, which is, like all love, effusive: flowing out into the wide sharing of family life and ahead to lifelong fidelity.”

On the other side, they say, is what they call the revisionist view. They write, “It is a vision of marriage as, in essence, a loving emotional bond, one distinguished by its intensity – a bond that needn't point beyond the partners, in which fidelity is ultimately subject to one's own desires. In marriage, so understood, partners seek emotional fulfillment, and remain as long as they can find it.”

Friends, homosexuality is not mentioned in the authors' description of the revisionist view of marriage, nor is it necessary. In fact, many heterosexual  couples define their marriages exactly this way, summarized as, “as long as we both shall love. ” The argument is not with homosexuality, per se, but with a misunderstanding of marriage that makes supposed gay matrimony just the next step in civil rights.

The stakes for our society are high. “The health and order of society,” the authors write, “depend on the rearing of healthy, happy, and well-integrated children. That is why law, though it may take no notice of ordinary friendships, should recognize and support marriages.

 
Source: http://www.christianpost.com

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