Chattanooga city council member Chris Anderson says workers in city government can be fired simply for being homosexual, a statement that’s gone unchallenged in local media. (Photo WDEF News 12)
By David Tulis
The arguments in Chattanooga to keep its gay benefits ordinance are premised on a sleight of hand. It is said that the benefits are of slight cost, are not an attack on your marriage or anyone elses’, simply recognize an expansion of the definition and blessings of marriage and you and I enjoy.
What homosexuals are really trying to do is redefine marriage. Their arguments appealing to equal treatment and justice and an end to hateful discrimination are effective upon anyone who doesn’t realize that these claims presume a priori a redefinition. And the definition of marriage is at issue in the first place.
Homosexuals want a subjective definition of marriage without a civic and identifiable interest of a public nature. They reject a rational and accessible definition that stands upon the physical distinction of sex between man and woman.
Rather, they want marriage as a legal and social concept to ingest something entirely subjective, random, arbitrary and private. Gays seek to redefine marriage to make it based on a totally private sexual license. They share in the premise of Facebook which in February imposed the prospect of people defining themselves as any among male, female and 50 imaginary sexes and trans-sexes.
A theory highly wanting
Homosexuals want Chattanoogans to yield on the ordinance because it is reasonable, fair, just and equitable. Similarly, they want Chattanoogans to yield on recognizing gay combinations as marriage because they are fair and just. How would the ordinance hurt you? How would you lose if we are married? You still have marriage. Let me have you what you have. Let me unite in marriage with my committed love partner, as you have with yours. You keep what you have. If I get it, it’s no loss to you. I want justice. I want to be out from under a godless ban on my being married. Why would you be so selfish to keep marriage, but deny it to me?
One must smile wryly at the art of such arguments. But the effort to redefine marriage to include homosexual partnership is effectively to de-define it, to deconstruct it.
Not being selfish
No, defenders of marriage are not being selfish. If would be selfish of them to say nothing against the gay lobby and let its operatives overturn by litigation, media and culture the distinct place marriage has in local economy and in human history. Because marriage is a public matter, it would be selfish for Chattanoogans to consider the conflict myopically, with only your personal interest in view. We must not be narcissistic, but have a civic interest in a divinely ordained social structure that benefits everyone, even self-styled gays. It would be irresponsible to consider only ourselves and our own marriages in voting to reject Chattanooga’s pro-gay ordinance.
A Christian, particularly, must fight for what is right, not what is expedient.
Revising marriage of sight consequence?
Gays say that “including” them in marriage has a slight consequence to our interest in it.
But the first redefinition of marriage came in the 1970s with the arrival of no-fault divorce, passed first in 1970 in California and infecting eventually every state. No-fault divorce removed the need for troubled couples to cite a legal cause of action in filing for divorce — adultery, abuse, nonsupport. Proponents argued points of sympathy to get the revision passed, as they granted relief to hurting couples by allowing them to divorce without legal warrant. No longer do couples have to prove breach of marital vows to obtain legal separation and divorce, and have no legal duty to work out differences to attain once more the harmony that united them. No-fault divorce is shown in many studies to underlie a variety of cultural injuries, including single women with children living in poverty and a lofty divorce rate.
A homosexual redefinition of marriage will have grievous and far-reaching consequences in like fashion. As marriage is the foundation of local economy, capital, liberty, family and education, destroying what remains of the lifelong promise legally enacted will devastate culture and canker the future.
A pro-gay unitary redefinition of marriage by the high court will sharply advance the national government’s loss of legitimacy.
Gays want marriage to be defined emotionally. No-fault divorce allows for a similar operating theory, to define the substance of marriage as emotional; a lack of affection is often sufficient to warrant a filing for divorce.
Marriage is not a subjective state that allows the partners total sexual license, as the gays suppose. Marriage is an objective and legal state of being based upon the physical distinctions of the sexes. Upon marriage, culture and society are built. Chattanooga’s domestic partnership ordinance, aside from its many improvident claims and its questionable legal status, is a claim by city council in favor of the further atomization of American life.
— David Tulis hosts Nooganomics.com at Hot News Talk Radio 910 1190 and 1240 AM, a show 1 to 3 p.m. that covers local economy and free markets in Chattanooga and beyond. Married and the father of four home educated children, he is at Brainerd Hills Presbyterian Church in Chattanooga.
As a preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I am not allowed to snip out the parts of the Bible which offend me. Scripture must be accepted in its entirety or nothing at all. I praise God for His Word is true. He made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. For even their women exchanged the natural use for what is against nature. Likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust for one another, men with men committing what is shameful, and receiving in themselves the penalty of their error which was due. (Romans 1:18-19, 26-27)