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'Gay marriage' is wrong
First, a embracing homosexual unions is more likely to undermine the institution of marriage and produce other negative effects than it is to make fidelity and longevity the norm for homosexual unions. Second, homosexual unions are not wrong primarily because of their disproportionately high rate of promiscuity and breakups. They are wrong because "gay marriage" is a contradiction in terms. As with consensual adult incest and polyamory, considerations of commitment and fidelity factor only after certain structural prerequisites are met.
The vision of marriage found in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures is one of reuniting male and female into an integrated sexual whole. Marriage is not just about more intimacy and sharing one's life with another. It is about sexual merger -- or, in Scripture's understanding, "remerger" -- of essential maleness and femaleness.
Genesis 2:18-24 illustrates this point beautifully. An originally binary, or sexually undifferentiated, adam ("earthling") is split down the "side" (a better translation than "rib") to form two sexually
differentiated persons. Marriage is pictured as the reunion of the two constituent halves, man and woman. A same-sex erotic relationship can never constitute a marriage because it will always lack the requisite sexual counterparts. Both Jesus and St. Paul picked up this vision of marriage in Genesis 1-2 as normative.
By definition homosexual desire is sexual narcissism or sexual self-deception.
Troubling history
Data to date does not encourage the notion that validating homosexual unions is a win-win situation. A series of articles by Stanley Kurtz in 2004 show that the introduction of same-sex
registered partnerships in Scandinavia has coincided with a sharp rise in out-of-wedlock births. Moreover, a 2004 study of divorce rates for same-sex registered partnerships in Sweden from 1995 to 2002 indicates that, compared to opposite-sex married couples, male homosexual couples were 1.5 times more likely to divorce and female homosexual couples three times more likely.
Studies have also shown that, while male homosexual unions have greater likelihood of longevity than female homosexual unions, they also have a much greater likelihood of being "open" to
outside sex partners. When society continually calls "marriages" unions that almost invariably end in divorce in one to 10 years or turn into "open relationships," the cheapening effect on the institution of marriage will be inevitable.
Other effects
Besides severing the institution of marriage from the values of child-rearing, monogamy, and longevity, "gay marriage" will have at least three other catastrophic effects:
The idea of "gay marriage" is an oxymoron.
Robert A. J. Gagnon, Ph.D., an associate professor of the New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, is author of "The Bible and Homosexual Practice" and co-author of "Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views."
