The Defense of Marriage

My friend Jim Warner made a post on Facebook several days ago, and with his permission, I'm posting it here. Jim has an exceptionally important message for those of us who love marriage and want to defend it for what God created it to be. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to share his thoughts, and I hope you won't pass up the opportunity to read them.

In watching my brothers and sisters attempt to defend marriage, I have seen arise more often than anything else, one common objection, which typically is voiced along these lines:

“You complain that the sanctity of marriage will be lost once gays can legally marry… Seriously? If marriage is supposed to be an all holy ceremony, then how do you explain TV shows like “The Bachelor” where men/women fight for the love of someone just so they can "win" the show? A heterosexual can marry and divorce more partners in a lifetime than you have fingers on your hands to count, but you don’t want gays to marry the person they love?”

And you know what?

They’re right.

The reason why arguments in defense of marriage are falling upon deaf ears today is because the entity that a lot of (dare I say most?) people are defending is a rotted, hallowed out, pruned and picked over scrap of what was once the glorious Institution upon which society is built and which society relies for its livelihood. What many today call marriage is nothing more than a legal agreement, served at the mere convenience of those involved, and instantaneously dissolvable at will, once that perceived convenience diminishes. It is certainly not the binding covenant, vowed before our Lord ‘till death do us part, which transcends the material world, and which properly constitutes the Sacrament of Matrimony in its merit and splendor.

The tides of social change in the past few years, culminating in last week’s Supreme Court decision, are only the latest step in the logical pathway that we as a society have charted for the institution that we once so highly venerated as marriage. The introduction of travesties like normalized fornication, contraception, infidelity, no-fault divorce, abortion, and pornography have eaten away at the Institution of Marriage like acid on a rock, producing a contraption so unrecognizable that it can, in all honestly, hardly be called “marriage.” To say otherwise—to try to defend the fractured institution that we have sculpted (or rather, chiseled away) these past few decades—would be tantamount to encountering a dying animal on the side of the road, and callously attempting to keep it alive with band aids before sending it on its way, instead of simply putting the poor thing out of its misery.

The *only* way to convincingly defend marriage today is to defend the Institution in its entirety. Defend the sacrament as a unique, unrepeatable expression of eternal Trinitarian Love whose inherent two-fold goal is the cultivation of spousal unity and the procreation of new life, and by whose merits a healthy society relies in order to survive. Fall short of proclaiming this great reality in your defense, and you descend into mere hypocrisy at best. But proclaim this awesome covenant in its fullness and truth, and you will have told the world of one of the greatest powers for good in our time.