Feedback archive → Feedback 2017
How gay marriage harms people
Three reasons that abandoning God’s design for marriage is bad for society.
Published: 24 June 2017 (GMT+10)
Even now that same-sex marriage has become widely accepted in many countries, Christians cannot surrender. We must continue to lovingly and graciously stand for the truth. Also, if we want to be effective, we must learn to articulate the reasons why gay marriage not only violates God’s moral standard, but actually harms society. Indeed, a faulty view of marriage will create many victims, as we highlight in response to today’s question.
G.P. from the U.S. asked:
[M]y question is what do you think about gay marriage and adoption?
CMI’s Keaton Halley responds.
Hi G.P.,
We have addressed this topic in a short booklet called Gay Marriage: right or wrong? You might want to pick that up from our webstore to read more details about some of the things that I’ll touch on below. Also, I’ll be drawing on a book called Truth Overruled by Ryan T. Anderson, which I’d recommend if you want another helpful resource.
The debate over same sex marriage is not fundamentally a disagreement about who can get married, but about what marriage is. Is marriage an arbitrary custom that people invented, one which they can define however they please? Or is marriage an institution established by God, well-matched to His design of human beings?
The Bible says that marriage is rooted in God’s creation of mankind (Matthew 19:4–8). In Genesis, we read how God made Eve out of Adam’s own flesh as a helper suited to him, and then the text says, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24).
Throughout Scripture, it is clear that marriage is a lifelong, exclusive covenantal union of two people—a husband and a wife—which forms the foundation for the family. That is, marriage is oriented toward producing and raising children, if God so blesses (Genesis 1:28; Malachi 2:15). God created us male and female to complement one another, and the production of children requires both a man and a woman. So there cannot be any such thing as gay marriage, because marriage requires husband and wife.
The reason, then, that the Bible opposes the homosexual lifestyle is that it violates God’s design for marriage and family. Two people of the same gender do not complement one another as husband and wife do. Their union cannot produce children. And homosexual activity is harmful and destructive to oneself and others. So there are good reasons why the Bible explicitly condemns homosexual relationships. See Does the Bible really forbid homosexual relationships? and What does the Bible really say about homosexuality?
Let me mention just a few of the problems with gay marriage and gay adoption, in particular.
Same-sex marriage debases true marriage, and thereby weakens society
If we abandon the Bible’s teaching on marriage and just make up new definitions as we go, then why couldn’t marriage be redefined in other ways? Why couldn't it be more than two people, for example? Why couldn't it be a temporary rather than a lifelong commitment? There’s a logical slippery slope from same sex marriage to polygamy, temporary marriages, and other corrupt practices, because the same wrong thinking underlies these ideas—that people rather than the Creator have the authority to decide what marriage is. Sadly, once the definition of marriage is separated from the Creator’s design, it becomes so flexible that it begins to lose any significant meaning. Indeed, many homosexual activists have admitted that their real goal is to destroy the institution of marriage altogether. They realize that championing same-sex marriage works toward undermining the norms of marriage (like monogamy, permanence and exclusivity) and ultimately even the very concept of marriage itself.
But healthy societies are built on healthy families. The more we move away from the biblical teaching on marriage, the more we’ll have broken homes, because other arrangements simply do not work as well as God’s design. Logic indicates that the undermining of marriage will lead to an increase in cohabitation, divorce, single parenting, abortion, etc., and various studies help to confirm this. The weakening of marriage will place a burden on society as a whole, because others will have to step in with time, energy, and money to try to repair the damage. They will have to minister to hurting adults and help to raise the children of broken homes, and those children will be more likely to get into trouble, causing further problems. This leads to my next point.
Same-sex marriage harms children
What’s wrong with same-sex couples producing children through a surrogate or adopting children?
The fact that many children require adoption means they are already in a less-than-ideal situation. The ideal is that children would be raised by their own parents. Children long for and tend to be healthier when raised by their biological mother and father.
The next best thing, though, would be for children to be raised by a married, opposite-sex couple, as opposed to a single parent or a same-sex couple. Adoption by a same-sex couple would give children additional difficulties to overcome instead of giving them the best chance for success. This is because same-sex parenting would deny children the ability to have a parent of each gender (both a mom and a dad). This isn’t good, because men and women parent differently. They bring different strengths and weaknesses to the table, so children learn different lessons from mom than they do from dad, and vice versa.
If a same-sex couple brought children into the world through a surrogate, that would be even worse, because they would be creating children with the intention up front of separating them from at least one of their biological parents. Studies show that children do better if they are raised by their actual parents rather than one parent and one step parent, but same-sex parenting necessarily involves a step parent.
In fact, numerous testimonies from people who spent their childhood in a same sex household bear out these truths. For example, Heather Barwick was raised by her mother and her mother's lesbian partner. Although Heather loves them both dearly, she writes about how the lack of a father in her home negatively affected her. She says, “My father’s absence created a huge hole in me, and I ached every day for a dad. I loved my mom’s partner, but another mom could never have replaced the father I lost” (Truth Overruled, 2015, p. 170).
According to the champions of same-sex marriage, though, two parents of the same gender should be just as good as having one’s own mother and father. This simply isn’t true. Advocates of same-sex marriage are primarily concerned about the desires of adults, but they largely ignore the fact that, in the process, they trample on the best interests of children.
Same-sex marriage undermines religious freedom
It should not be surprising that, once gay marriage is declared legal, those who oppose it are seen as enemies of the law. This is why, especially since the US Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, those with moral and religious objections to same-sex marriage are increasingly being persecuted for simply following their deeply held religious convictions. See Gay Marriage—a big stick to beat the church with.
Religious adoption agencies are being forced to close if they will not place children into same-sex households. Christian schools are being threatened with loss of funding and accreditation if they do not allow their students to actively engage in homosexual practices. Professionals in the wedding industry and even pizza shops are being forced to participate in same-sex ceremonies, or face financial ruin. Even individuals like former Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran and former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich are being hounded out of their careers for simply opposing gay marriage in their private lives. Kim Davis was sent to jail because her convictions would not allow her to sign a same-sex marriage license. And we’ve only seen the beginning of this tidal wave. All of the transgender lunacy we’re now facing is a result of this moral revolution as well.
Clearly, gay marriage advocates want more than the freedom to do as they please. The movement includes many bullies who want to force everyone to either join them or be destroyed. They talk a lot about love, but they don’t really understand it. True love “does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor. 13:6). Amazingly, in the name of ‘love’, the freedom to think and act like a Christian is being taken away.
Christians, on the other hand, are called to love our enemies. So we must continue to show love even to those who persecute us. We do not return evil for evil, but neither do we capitulate to their demands. "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). And, because it violates God’s expressed will, Christians must continue to oppose same-sex marriage.
Reader’s comments
The United States has made laws contrary to God's laws and is causing great harm to all the citizens: abortion murders the innocent and their blood is on all the citizens of a Republic, not just those that commit these acts. Homosexual marriage, along with rejection of sodomy laws has brought this country down the same road as Sodom and Gomorrah whom God judged by raining down fire and brimstone.
The judgment of God against these and all other sins of this nation is real. Every Christian church should cry out against this wickedness within our country. But instead, we have churches and pastors who agree with this abomination and promote it. All such churches should be denounced and all people who support such evil should be put on notice that they are bringing the judgment of God upon themselves and all around them.
But instead we have apologists, afraid to tell the truth and to warn Americans and other nations of this great evil that destroys societies, not just individual lives. Why? Because they fear persecution and being called "judgmental," when it is the sinners who are bringing the righteous wrath of God upon the entire world, not those that expose them. The world will always hate Christians because the real ones testify that their deeds are evil.
This is not the message that most people these days want to hear – the bible, and the Creator God have been replaced by Gaia, (Mother) nature, or evolution, and your appeal to Genesis falls on deaf ears.
There is, however, another mode of attack, that of appealing to nature.
I have three dictionaries, a British, an American and an Australian, and they all define marriage as “a civil union between a man and a woman”; and one of them mentions the usual outcome of producing children.
And in fact, even if you have a church wedding, the first thing you do is the sign the civil register so that the State recognises your union. (The church register comes later!)
That this is often/usually the outcome of male and female coming together is attested in the whole of nature – the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees, as well as the other animals, including Man.
Any other “coming together” is thus seen to be contrary to nature – it is, dare we say it? – unnatural.
Whether it is the transfer of sperm or of pollon, nature provides for the reproduction of life in a grand design, a fact that cannot be denied.
Evolutionists are at a complete loss to explain how this happened – it can hardly be the result of chance, even assuming millions of years – the first living cell did not have that much time.
So by definition, marriage is the coming together of male and female, with reproduction in mind (Genesis 1:28),
Gay marriage is therefore a misnomer = two men will never reproduce, and one or both of a two woman union will only do so by the injection of donor sperm, so the use of the word “marriage” is completely contrary to definition, even in non religious terms. (more to come)
But you didn't provide any reason to accept your arbitrary standard of morality. Why is commitment important? Why would moral sexual relationships be limited to adults? Or two people? Or human-human pairings? If the true and living God does not give us the standard for love, then what does? It seems that you want to replace God as Lawgiver and write your own rules, even though you acknowledge that your rules would harm children.
But if you mean biological males exhibiting female behaviors, then this could cover a range of things, some of which are problematic and others not. Either way, I would not jump to the conclusion that effeminate behavior is something one is born with. It can be a combination of biological factors, socialization, and choices. In fact, now that it's no longer politically necessary, the "born this way" mantra is being abandoned. Even before it became a dogma, it was acknowledged to be a lie by homosexual activists Kirk and Madsen in 1989. In After the Ball, they wrote, “We argue that, for all practical purposes, gays should be considered to have been born gay—even though sexual orientation, for most humans, seems to be the product of a complex interaction between innate predispositions and environmental factors during childhood and early adolescence.” Less than a month after Obergefell, New Scientist published an article called "Sexuality is fluid—it's time to get past 'born this way'". And just last month USA Today published a piece entitled "'Born this way'? It's way more complicated than that."
As for animals, we've pointed out before that there are some animals who exhibit homosexual behavior, but this is explained by the Fall and is irrelevant to whether it's moral for people. People should not 'act like animals', because if we did we'd also be thieves, murderers, cannibals, rapists, etc. See Homosexual animals.
All of this is also discussed in our booklet, Gay Marriage: Right or Wrong?
But we're not saying that children raised by same-sex parents cannot be happy or turn out 'okay'. We're saying that same-sex parenting adds additional obstacles for children to overcome. Single moms can also raise well-adjusted children who succeed, yet it's still true that the absence of a father is bad for children, and those children would have been better off with a father. The question has to do with what is best, not what children can tolerate or overcome.
E.g. three studies of 44 lesbian mother families, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health claimed no disadvantage in well-being for children with same-sex parents. Considering that the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health is considered to be “representative of the U.S. adolescent population with a high degree of precision” we could consider the ‘no disadvantage’ result to be reliable. But is it?
No! D. Paul Sullins debunked the ‘no-disadvantage’ claims in his paper “The Unexpected Harm of Same-sex Marriage: A Critical Appraisal, Replication and Re-analysis of Wainright and Patterson’s Studies of Adolescents with Same-sex Parents”. Sullins showed that 27 of the 44 ‘lesbian mother families’ were misidentified heterosexual parent families. After correcting for this, he showed that on all measures (except education), children with same-sex parenting were associated with worse outcomes than were children with opposite-sex parenting. Further, children were worse off in all measures (including education) when comparing married to unmarried same-sex parenting.
Why should God, the designer of human beings, be denied that right and responsibility?
But in a quick search for Anderson's book Truth Overruled at Google, reviewers seems to dismiss it as a case of 'cherry picking' material compiled with a 'homophobic' agenda.
When it comes to issues like this, you can almost always see both sides accusing each other for 'cherry picking' or being driven by ideology. It is difficult to know which side that is most in line with scientific evidence.
In your article you mention "temporary marriages", but hasn't this been largely, or for the most part, embraced?
The Romans can be traced back to Tubal, son of Japhet, son of Noah, and it could be that their oldest rules was letters being carried with the iberians from Mesopotamia. It seems to me that it was the catholic church and their monasteries who carried the Roman habit of marriage The oldest Norwegian rules of marriage must have been based on other scriptures than the bible.
I was raised in a broken home and it has caused great mental suffering in my life. My father left when I was about four and my mother was a train wreck so I know something about this subject. I didn't feel normal growing up and my experiences produced an angry man. I never married and had kids because by God's grace I knew I couldn't make it work and didn't want to reproduce my childhood. I had a hard time relating to God because I had no good example of a father growing up but by God's grace and his teaching I've been healed, spiritually, but there will always be the memories and satin knows how to use them.
Our parents shape us for the better or for the worse and our society must decide whether it wants stable citizens or not. It is sad that in a country made great by belief in Gods principles and the family structure, we are now self destructing and WILL fail if we keep going in this direction. It also amazes me how so few 2-3% of the population can have so much power. Of course that's because the church is sick also and will not stand for what is right and correct.
I will never, never, never concede to what is wrong whether it's gay marriage, divorce, polygamy or any other form of violation of God's plan for rearing children, (they really are the ones to suffer). The gay community talks about being marginalized and having no rights but where's my right to worship and believe what I want, (hypocrisy)?
We can't become discouraged because God has a plan and we win. Just keep praying for our nation and its people and God will sort it all out.
P.S. I hope I never have to appear in court because I no longer have any confidence in our so called justice system!
Just want to tell you. It is important that we always try to be aware of the current evidence.
Comments are automatically closed 14 days after publication.