Heartless
Author: Andrew Comiskey
January 26, 2015
‘All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.’
If you remove the central feature from which something derives its nature, you distort its meaning. That ‘thing’ ceases to be what it is; it loses its heart. Look at the Gospels. Cut out Christ’s resurrection and you have a teacher/healer doomed for his radical goodness. Or the film ‘Unbroken,’ in which the screenwriters omitted the hero’s watershed conversion to Christianity. Unbroken indeed.
Now we face the prospect of marriage without male and female. Last week the Supreme Court agreed to decide by June whether all 50 states must allow gay couples to marry. Following the breathless pace at which individual states have assumed gay marriage rights (36 and counting), it seems unlikely that the very court which encouraged these changes two years ago will now backtrack.
A chief activist gushed prophetically: ‘Finally gay couples will be able to share in the joys, protections and responsibilities of marriage…’ Right?
Wrong. Marriage without male and female ceases to be marriage. Why? Because marriage is fundamentally about children. Same-gender couples cannot create them and should not parent them. (Would you want to be a child trying to secure its gender self from parents evidently unsure of their own?)
Since time began, marriage has been about creating and tending to kids. Although not all couples create them, it is still the orientation of male and female to do so. And family remains the fundamental fruit of marriage, complete with the ‘joys and responsibilities’ that the modern state seeks to protect. Why? So that couples can have tax benefits and hospital visitation rights? No, so that their commitment might stabilize sexual love and give rise to children, who in turn might secure a foundation of stable love from the man and woman who made them. Period.
Remove male and female from marriage and it ceases to be marriage. It mutates; it becomes an extension of something else. In this case, marriage becomes the selfish arm of an extremely individualized, short-sighted people who refuse to recognize that marriage must answer to a call greater than the bond of two persons. Sex like marriage must answer to children.
If the Supreme Court defines marriage as free from gender restraints, then it will take the heart out of marriage. We will pass down a cruel decree on persons who have no voice and who need protection from the state. Children deserve a higher standard that will protect their formation and dignity as male and female.
It is no irony to me that the Supreme Court agreed to decide ‘gay marriage’ just days after the anniversary of ‘Roe vs. Wade’ which legalized abortion. For over 30 years now, we have lived heartlessly, in the shadow of life without protection. Do we want life without gender clarity?
Pray for the Court’s abrupt reversal of the slide into national ‘gay marriage.’
Pray for and encourage the marriages around you.
Do everything in your power to ensure that your church becomes a safe and powerful place of transformation for persons with same-sex attraction. God desires mercy and not judgment. If we do not care for willing broken hearts before they are seduced by worldly solutions, we help create a problem. We become heartless, a boney arm of judgment.
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