The Truth About Same-Sex Marriage by Erwin W. Lutzer (Moody Publishers, 2004, 115 pp.).
“Love Supreme: Gay nuptials and the making of modern marriage” by Adam Haslett, The New Yorker, May 31, 2004.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Angry traditionalists in Massachusetts launched an effort to stop what they said was a fatal blow to marriage, the family and childrearing – “wrong in theory and bad in practice.” They warned of increased divorce and polygamy. That was in 1915 – a campaign against extending the right to vote to women. These same dire warnings were raised against interracial marriage. And Bible verses were abused in both issues.
Again, as Lutzer’s publisher warns, there’s “a battle raging for marriage [and] the implications for society are profound.” It’s said that this fight for “traditional marriage [is] the single greatest threat to religious freedom today.” One blurb claims that Lutzer “avoids emotional, reactionary solutions” but goes on, rather breathlessly, to assert that, “if not corrected – [marriage for same-sex couples] will cause our nation to implode.” Lutzer, we’re told, “sorts truth from spin.” Of course, this is a book of spin. To pretend it’s not is, itself, spin.
Lutzer’s misreading of the Bible takes too much for granted and neglects too much. He speaks only of “marriage as we know it” and then assumes that “the Bible condemns homosexuality,” meaning, of course, homosexuality as we know it. That’s anachronistic. He says he tries to be “loving,” to all, including “communities of … ‘gender orientation,’” – a designation that is both a mislabeling and a dismissing and illustrates his ignorance and disdain. He mistakenly thinks that homosexuality is the result of molestation and that it is but “compulsively acting out.” He says that “several years ago” he spoke at an “ex-gay” conference. If that was “several years ago,” he should know that, by now, most of those who heard him have “fallen” out of the movement and are still as gay as ever. In fact, his wishful thinking – that homosexuals can change – isn’t what’s in the fine print of the “ex-gay” movement these days. He pushes the Religious Right’s figure of 2 percent for the population at issue and yet insists that if some of them get legally married it will be disastrous for everybody else. He pushes the false assertion that the American Psychiatric Association’s declassification of homosexuality was due to disruptive radical activists. Actually, it was a scientific decision. Had the DSM not dropped it as a mental disorder, homosexuality would have been the only entry not meeting the DSM’s two-pronged scientific criterion.
Lutzer decries the “push to ‘reinvent’ the family” but fails to note that Jesus reinvented the family, placing the family of faith over the blood relations Lutzer pushes. He warns that if marriage for gay couples is permitted, “who is to say that it must be limited to two people?” He mocks: “Why not one man with two wives?” – as with Abraham, Sarah and Hagar?
It’s ironic that Moody Publishers is this Moody Church pastor’s publisher, for D. L. Moody used to warn that Christians make a big mistake when they take wrong positions on social issues and thus turn people off to the gospel. In his day, Moody stood up for a fellow evangelical’s stance for evolution over against the majority who raged against it. These days, gay people cannot hear the Good News above the din against their having the right to marry – a right Lutzer reserves for people resembling himself and his wife. He does admit that “we have failed to properly represent Christ and the gospel in the wider world, including the gay world.” He knows that “for reasons, some of which may be of our own making, [gay people] have turned a deaf ear to the church.” That’s because the Lutzers in the churches have turned a deaf ear to them.
In regards to “the truth” and “the traditional view of marriage,” Haslett’s New Yorker essay gives some helpful historical perspective. He doesn’t go back as far as the Bible days – and neither, of course, does Lutzer. The common traditions of Bible days include parental selection of the spouses for children, polygamous marriages, the duty of a man to have sex with the widows of all his brothers who die without having fathered a child, and so on. But Fundamentalists today reject these biblical traditions for marriage and family.
Haslett takes note of the long tradition of families marrying other families through arranged marriages of political alliance and economic advantage rather than romance. He sees the Protestant Reformation’s idea of “companionate marriage” as a significant turning from this as well as from Catholicism’s “ideal of chastity, which considered earthly marriage a more or less unfortunate necessity meant to accommodate human weakness.” In pointing out the Puritan Milton’s advocacy of divorce, he does not mention Luther’s advice to Henry VIII – that, rather than divorce, the king should do as the biblical patriarchs and take an additional wife.
Haslett notes the fact that Catholicism, even in Luther’s day, “had no requirement that a priest be present at the wedding ceremony; vows spoken in private were sufficient to create a binding marriage.” He points out that the tradition of banns arose because of the need to determine if the prospective bride and groom might already be committed elsewhere. He mentions the long struggle with miscegenation laws and the expansion of the marriage franchise to the poor, the sterile and slaves
With some exaggeration, Hazlett writes: “Not until the confessional diaries and novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries started to influence bourgeois notions of what Jane Austen called ‘connubial felicity’ did romance begin its steady ascent to the marital realm.” He adds: “Today, needless to say, the most respectable reason you can give for getting married is that you have fallen in love.” Alluding to “the decline of the patriarchal legal structure and the rise of the goal of self-fulfillment,” Haslett says: “Gay marriage is unsettling, to many, not because it departs from modern meanings of matrimony but because it embodies them.”
The value of this essay lies in Haslett’s examples of the diversity of “traditional marriage” and in his calling for historical perspective. Given the evolution in what has passed for “traditional marriage,” Haslett says we’ve arrived at a juncture that “is a historically peculiar state of affairs, one that would be alien to our ancestors and to most traditional cultures today. And it makes the push for gay marriage inevitable.”