The Creator of marriage ALONE has the right to determine the definition and parameters of marriage

As we approach the inauguration of gay marriage in Minnesota, let’s think about why this is a very bad idea.  First, on a purely practical level, changes impacting the culture as profoundly as this one should never be made in a hurry.  It’s difficult to miss the obvious irony of people’s deeply held and dogmatic support of gay marriage today when it was in fact, hotly debated—even among social liberals less than two years ago. 

The rectitude of gay marriage has mysteriously and nearly overnight somehow become a patently obvious fact worthy to be held with the same level of certainty as the law of gravity and potholes in Duluth. 

It now seems that those who fail to recognize the self-evident nature of the propriety of homosexual marriage are cultural Neanderthals when compared to their very recently “enlightened” contemporaries.  In what is (historically speaking) the blink of an eye, a state of five and a half million people has permanently and radically changed the definition of what is arguably society’s most well-established and important institution--one which for the last 6000 years has been defined exclusively as a purely male-female relationship. This rapid change of worldview is the moral and spiritual equivalent of a handful of physicians attending a weekend medical symposium and thereupon boldly declaring that diet and exercise are irrelevant to bodily health.

The more fundamental a societal change, the more unintended consequences accrue from it because more people across countless contexts are eventually impacted by the change.  Africanizing the honey bee, the prohibition of alcohol in the 20’s and bringing democracy to nations clearly not prepared for it are only a few examples of decisions carrying negative, unintended consequences.  And none of those decisions has produced anything like the kind of broad and far-reaching impact gay marriage will bring us.  There are those today who scoff at concerns voiced about legalized polygamy, martially-enshrined pedophilia or a further erosion of first amendment rights as possible unintended consequences of gay marriage.  Such suggestions are stridently dismissed as “fear tactics” generated by uninformed, narrow-minded people.   Ironically, many of the same people who scoff today would have sneered in unbelief if—a decade ago, someone suggested to them that gay marriage would within ten years be legalized in Minnesota.

An even more basic objection to this very bad idea is:  Homosexual “marriage” is simply not marriage.  That seems harsh in today’s context, but let’s think about it.  God created marriage as a profoundly spiritual union established by a sacred, one-flesh sexual relationship possible only between heterosexual couples.  It’s certainly appropriate for the state to legally marry people who desire a civil ceremony and to require all married couples to acquire a license and file proper documentation with the county.   However, the Creator of marriage ALONE has the right to determine the definition and parameters of marriage. 

Our own legal system recognizes this “right of the Creator” whenever an inventor is granted a patent for his/her invention, thereby restricting others from replicating it or calling an allegedly similar invention by the same name.  You can’t design an electric boomerang and call it a Frisbee.  The new invention is fundamentally different from the original and the inventor has the right to protect the name of his/her brand.  It’s the right of the inventor to protect against potential abuses of his/her intellectual property.  Marriage is God’s “intellectual property,” not the states’.  He tells us the purpose of marriage is to point to the larger relationship between the heavenly Bridegroom, Jesus Christ and his bride, the church (Eph. 5:22-33).  No same-sex relationship can fulfill his purpose for marriage and therefore cannot justifiably use his chosen terminology to describe it. 

In the days and weeks to come, many homosexual couples in Minnesota will doubtless participate in “marriage” ceremonies that will in God’s sight accomplish little more than shoot fiery darts into an institution that has in our culture been steadily degraded for decades.   The traditional church will be watching and praying and…nursing our grief.  A grief rooted, not only in this latest attack on God’s sacred institution, but also on behalf of those who mistakenly believe that enduring happiness is found in being “wed” to any person, much less one of their own gender.  We want to lovingly warn these people that they are destined for grave, enduring disappointment because lasting joy is found only in being rightly related to God through his Son, Jesus Christ.