Almost five years ago I wrote a little humor piece in which I tried to demonstrate how absurd the idea of "Gay Marriage" was, titled Tuesday-Saturday
Like the description of the website confesses, I am no smarty, I don't have any degrees and only recently have discovered the concept of "Christian Philosophy", which at first I viewed with an eye of suspicion. I am an average guy with a healthy dose of curiosity, and it seems to me that it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that the idea of redefining marriage is about as dumb as slurpee drinking race.
I didn't know the terms Univocal, Equivocal and Analogical five years ago, but in my tongue in cheek way I was trying to make the point that Marriage is, always has been and always will be Univocal. It has been created by nature's God and is therefore absolutely unassailable.
In essence, Marriage is "the contractual union of one man and one woman". What defenders of marriage have been trying to say is that you can't have "gay marriage" because it wouldn't be marriage. If you redefine marriage it ceases to be what it now is.
As badly as a man may want to be a woman, he simply cannot. His gender is fixed by God, down to his very chromosomes. That man can pretend he is a woman, dress like a woman, mutilate himself and have surgeries done to appear as a woman, but it simply is not so. Take his blood and look and examine the results. He still has X and Y chromosomes and he always will. Similarly, homosexuals may want so very badly to be married to each other, but it is impossible. They can have a little ceremony, get a marriage license, look and act like married people, but they are not, it is all pretend. God has fixed in his creation what marriage is and decreed it. It is a universal.
For some reason our world is ga-ga about destroying everything and anything that looks like a universal truth. The basic, foundational, common-sense institutions and conventions are all in the cross-hairs of postmoderns. Marriage, Man, Woman, Husband, Wife, God, good, evil, truth, etc. these are all being challenged. It occurred to me, in a consistently post-modern world there would be no dictionaries.
What is a bachelor? what is a widow? What is a male?
After some thought I selected BACHELOR as my new example to contrast MARRIAGE.
A bachelor is a male who is not currently married.
As a side note, I do realize that the domino affect of a redefinition of marriage and male/female does affect the definition of bachelor.
If a bunch of married men started a campaign to be able to be bachelors too, we would be in similar situation that we are with gay men wanting to be "married". The married man wants to be a bachelor, even though the very essence and definition of bachelorhood is NOT being married. The homosexual man wants to be married to a man, even though the very essence and definition of marriage is a man joined with a woman.
Of course both men can have what they want, but not at the same time and in the same relationship.
The law of non-contradiction reminds us that something cannot be true and not true at the same time and in the same relationship.
The married man who wants to be a bachelor can be one... if he ceases being married. But he cannot be both married and a bachelor at the same time and in the same relationship.
The homosexual man who wants to be married can be... if he finds a woman and marries her. But he cannot be married and joined to a man at the same time in the same relationship.
Those who want to change marriage to accommodate homosexuals are not expanding or including, they are destroying. There are homosexuals out there and sympathetic supporters who just don't get it. They wonder why people would want to exclude them and why Christians and others are so mean and non-inclusive. People ask, "How does it affect you, or what does it matter to you if my homosexual partner and I get married?", and perhaps they are sincerely curious. What these homosexuals must not realize is that they have to destroy traditional heterosexual marriage in order to create homosexual marriage. The new "marriage" is now different than the old "marriage". It ceases being Univocal and becomes Analogical.
Univocal means something is named the same and is the same. Equivocal means named the same but different. Analogical means named the same but similar.
If farmer Jones has a pig pen and farmer Smith has a pig pen I can call them both "pen" univocally. They are the same in name and the same in reality. They are both the same kind of pen.
If I have a red writing pen and live on a farm with a pig pen the "pen" is the same name but different in reality.
If I have a bull pen and a pig pen then "pen" would be Analogical, the pens are named the same but are different, although similar in reality.
The bull pen and the pig pen are similar in that they both keep their respective animals penned in, but the nature of the animal is different for each. The distinction describes the reality. What would you call the pen if you put a bull and a pig in the same pen? Would it be a bull pen or a pig pen or something altogether new that is neither a bull pen nor a pig pen. Like marriage, add homosexual couples and it becomes something new.
Homosexuals want to put the bull in the pig pen and call both the bull and the pig "pigs" and the pen a "pig pen". But it is not a pig pen and the bull is not a pig. You can't call two lesbians "married" because in reality they are not, a marriage is still a man and a woman even if you try to play games with terms. It does't change the reality to call one lesbian the "husband" because she is still a woman and in reality there is no husband.
If you were to redefine the word bachelor to include both married men and unmarried men then the name would be the same but the reality would be different. What would you call an unmarried man then to distinguish him from a married man? Some other name or term would come about an you would be right back where you started. At that point you are just playing a shell game with monikers. If the new term for unmarried man was 'flobexters' then it would only be a matter of time until these same married men who wanted to be known as bachelors would be upset about the single men being called flobexters.
If marriage is redefined as Male + Male or Female + Female or Male + Female, eventually a word will be coined that means married Man + Woman exclusively. At the very least Christians will want to have a term for the institution that matches the Biblical pattern. At the very core of the issue homosexuals don't really care about being "married", they are upset that the Bible unequivocally says that marriage is a man and a woman. They are not sincerely concerned about tolerance, their behavior and bully tactics betray that fact, they are really upset that there is a God, a Bible and millions of people who say what they are doing is a sin. That fact burns them up.
This is so basic. This is not a tolerant/intolerant issue, this is a rational/irrational issue.
Yellow added to Blue makes green. Yellow added to Yellow does not make green and Blue added to Blue does not make green now matter how badly someone wants to call her Yellow "Green" or his Blue "Green". Is it any wonder we are having this debate in our postmodern time where there is not supposed to be any absolute truth or objective standard of truth?
What is interesting to see is how those for homosexual "marriage" assail God and his revelation when his law and his created order condemn homosexuality as deviant sin (let alone the question of homosexual "marriage"), yet these same plunder his laws and ethics in that same Bible and try to appeal to their stolen ethics of Justice, Kindness, Love and Fidelity. Hold on a second, get your hands off God's property. You don't have any right to argue for the Dignity and Worth of a human. You don't get to chant and moan about things being Wrong and agitate for what you say is Right. Who says? How can you even claim something is absolutely Right or absolutely Wrong? that something is not fair? Since you have rejected the God of the Bible and his Law get your paws off his standards and absolute truths. Postmoderns always tell us that right and wrong are not absolutes and are just social constructs formulated by cultures and societies. So the majority of America wants marriage to REMAIN between one man and one woman, on what basis or what grounds would that be considered "Wrong"? Sounds like it is just your opinion. Well, like relativists all say "that may be true for you, but it is not true for me".
Homosexual "marriage" is not only illogical and incoherent, it is extremely narcissistic.
So what about polygamy?
Polygamy is having more than one spouse at a time. Some object to the formula of one Man + one Woman as a definition of marriage because of polygamy. There is no contradiction here.
When a polygamist marries a woman he has a wife. When he marries another woman then he has another wife. He is essentially participating in two marriages, but marriages all the same. Those who put forth this argument are confusing polygamy with polyamary. When a polygamist marries Susan and Betty then Susan is married to him and Betty is married to him but they are not married to each other.
The bottom line is that some people are deviant and wholly given over to lust and want no restrictions. They want to do whatever pleases them and not have anyone tell them no. They are two year olds in grown up bodies. Many of these homosexual protesters are like toddlers throwing a fit because they can't have what they demand. A reasonable person will understand that in this world that God created there are restrictions.
These homosexual activists huff and puff and cry about how they are being discriminated against because they can't get married. First of all, I already demonstrated that any homosexual man is free to marry a qualified woman and any homosexual woman is free to marry a qualified man. But leaving that aside, there are plenty of restrictions on marriage if you think about it. We don't see a lot of marching in the street because brothers can't marry their sisters, or sons can't marry their moms.
The restrictions on incest are pretty broad. Depending on where you live and the specific laws the restrictions include brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and sometimes even step relations or adoptive relations. There are also age restrictions for marrying. There have been times and cultures where the boundaries of marriage have been loosened or tightened but the essence has always remained the same. Even in the Bible, before the law of Moses brothers and sisters could and did marry, but never have we seen brothers "marry" brothers. In some cultures young children are given in marriage, but even despite their ages, the parties are still male and female.
Many of these homosexuals have won the legal status of "civil unions" but that is not good enough, they want to be "married". So these champions of tolerance, who just want to be free to live and love in their own way, want all the rest of us to cast off the institution that has been with mankind since the beginning of time for their sake? And they want the full force of government to impose others to treat them as if they are something they are not?
Are they kidding? Like two year-olds they think the world should revolve around them. Grow up.
But all this aside...
The reason Christians will not give up the traditional one man + one woman definition of marriage is that it is the biblical standard of marriage and it has huge theological implications.
The Church is called the Bride of Christ. Paul talks about presenting the church as a chaste virgin, unspotted and pure to Christ. The Bible closes with mention of the Marriage Supper of the Lamb where he marries his bride. Adam was given Eve in Genesis and it was "very good". The Lord was asked about marriage and divorce and he pointed back to Genesis where the divine ideal was instituted, one man for one woman for ever. Had not sin and death entered this world Adam and Eve would still be alive today and married to each other only.
The government may very well re-write the law to redefine "marriage", but in reality there will always be an institution that is the sacred union of one man and one woman, even if it is called by a different name and even if it is only practiced by those faithful to the Bible and God's will.
