The Spiritual Stakes in the Marriage Debate
by Danil Avila
Judges across the country are busy rewriting state marriage laws,overturning democratically adopted measures defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and setting the table possibly for the United States Supreme Court to complete the coup by decreeing the redefinition of marriage in every state. Consequently sexual difference is being erased from the marriage laws of more jurisdictions nationally, and perhaps soon in all of them.
To their credit, defenders of marriage’s time-honored but now imperiled definition wage their defense in secular terms. One need not be Christian or even religious to appreciate the value of upholding the institution of marriage as once universally understood, precisely because it unites as equals the two most fundamental divisions of humanity by joining husband and wife, and it affirms the natural human right of all children to be reared by both their mom and dad. Officially rendering the institution indifferent to the absence of either sex ignores these unique social dimensions, raising clear secular concerns. In a moment, however, I will argue for the need to go deeper than secular reasoning, engaging the issue morally, theologically and spiritually.
First one must acknowledge that the secular case for defining marriage as the union of the sexes is met with tremendous cultural pressure seeking to discount as irrelevant the overarching public value of bridging sexual difference and encouraging stable procreation. Same-sex marriage advocates will not countenance an exclusive sexual commitment to someone of the opposite sex, thereby refusing to treat men and women as equal. In the eyes of the same-sex couple, when it comes to romantic love, the other sex is not equal to their own sex. Marriage recognition ceases to affirm in every such commitment the equality of both sexes.
In a relationship consisting of both sexes, where each participant vows to love the other as one’s self, each then equally loves both sexes. The sexes, though not the same, are treated as equal. Yet in the same-sex situation, each participant categorically vows that only someone of his or her own sex, not the other sex, is to receive one’s utmost love. Redefining marriage thus promotes an ironic and subversive principle of inequality between the sexes.
The harm to children posed by redefining sexual difference out of marriage is associated with this preferential regard for one’s own, but not the other, sex. Every child is the offspring of both sexes. Thus nature gives children through their biological parents an opportunity and incentive to relate to and equally cherish both sexes. Nature thereby prepares every child to contribute to social harmony generally by learning human relations from parents on both sides of the sexual divide. It is from this natural reality that a child’s human right to the care of both mom and dad originates.
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