Gay Marriage: Should it Be Legal?

This article began as a reaction to the announcement of Ellen Degeneres and Portia de Rossi to get married under the new California law which has deemed same-sex marriage to be worthy of state recognition.

As such, the beginning is a short comment on that news story, but then I decided I had more to say...

A lot of attention has been paid to promoting male homosexuality as normal, but the female equivalent is still, I suspect misunderstood, Mariel Hemingway and Rosanne (or was that Woody Allen ) notwithstanding (yes Madonna, it had been done --- OOOh, get you! mieow (etc.)) and associated either with soft-porn fantasies or crewcuts, square body frames, bov-ver boots (read Doc Martens) and lumberjack shirts ("and I'm okay" ).

Seeing two very normal looking women in such a high profile relationship can only be good for the normalization of being gay and female.

It seems to me that there is a lot of confusion around this issue.

First, there seems to be confusion about whether the Church should be striving to affect state and federal politics.

It seems odd to me that an organization that claims to recognize just how corrupt and sinful the larger society is (certainly there is an enormous amount of evil in the world, and secular authorities often either do nothing or actually make things worse in the face of this), and therefore to be heeding the call to "come out from among them", i.e., to separate off and recognize that, after all is said and done, there is nothing particularly "Christian" about modern governments, is so vocal about what the secular state does.

This, to me, is different from the issue of abortion, for example.

In that case, if you believe that abortion is murder it seems reasonable the try and stop abortion, either by influencing legislatures or by other means.

But whether or not gay marriage is recognized by the State, or whether gay people have rights or protections according to the government, should have no effect on what you personally believe.

In other words, if you disagree with the State's definition of marriage, then go ahead and disagree! This is your right.

But to protest what a state or national government chooses to recognize, or how it defines certain things, is to imply that the government in question is to imply that you think that it would be seen as legitimate by Jesus, or by the Christian God -- which certainly it would not, for any case of any modern government today (don't forget that certain of these governments have nuclear weapons!). In other words, I don't see how any Christian would want to be seen implying that the Government of California, or the federal US government, was in any sense a Christian entity anyway.

The same goes for the word "marriage."

The problem, again, is that there is already a difference between how the larger Western society defines marriage and how Christianity, Islam or Hindu culture define it.

Marriage in Western society is something that can be disposed of through divorce, can be tried out in pseudo fashion before actually tying the knot by the couple living together, frequently involves adultery, and is at times hardly ruled over by a Christian spirit in any case...

In other words, again, what the larger society calls "marriage" is not exactly the same as what Christianity defines as marriage, so it is already a different entity from the Christian or the Muslim one.

If you belong to a religion that believes that homosexuality is wrong, or that has a specific definition of the word "marriage," then naturally you have the right to hold the opinions of that religion.

Where the confusion comes in is in expecting a secular organ like a State legislature, which is already, from the outset, a non-Christian entity, to follow Christian precepts.

In short, although American politics is often painted as heavily caught up in Christian doctrine, in the end America is not, by definition a Christian country, and does not have a Christian government.

What is more, Christianity in its original form seems to have been all about distinguishing itself from the larger world.

It is right and proper that the State does not follow the dictates of a particular religion - but this should also be the way Christians expect life here on the sinful Earth to be.