Redefining marriage is undoing marriage
By Michael Neubert

Marriage is a male-female relationship. When the number of persons exceeds two, or when the persons are no longer male and female, the relationship is something else, not marriage.

Some will claim that homosexual persons are denied the right to marry. That is not true. No one seeking a marriage license in any of the 50 states is subject to a heterosexuality affidavit. But a marriage is male and female. Homosexuals who seek to marry someone of the same sex wish to enter into a different relationship, have it legally sanctioned by the state, and call it marriage.

Here lies the problem: Marriage is a male-female relationship. This has been true through all of human history, even in countries that widely accepted homosexual practice. Marriage as marriage always remained male and female. To change that changes everything. It would mean that heterosexual and homosexual relationships are the same: legally, socially and morally.

Civil unions provide legal equivalency. Few people object to civil unions, and I understand that increasing numbers of heterosexual couples are choosing civil unions where permitted. But “homosexual marriage” would use the force of law to demand social and moral equivalency, and with that we have crossed over into the area of what people feel and believe. The social structures of human history suggest that homosexuality was always “other” — sometimes welcome and sometimes repressed, but never mainstream. And all religious traditions that I am aware of teach that morality resides in traditional marriage, faithfully observed.

The human heart and mind are extraordinarily resistant to renovation by legislative fiat. The state may change the definition of marriage, but it can’t force people to believe or feel that “homosexual marriage” is right, good or moral.

Accommodate the desire of the minority if you like, but not by redefining the very nature of marriage. If you do that, you have undone marriage itself.