As you’re likely aware, gay marriage is, according to the federal government, a human right enshrined in the Constitution. If you’re like the average American, you probably think that the Supreme Court, after about 226 years, finally found this right in the Marriage Clause of the Other Stuff You Have a Right To Amendment, which is maybe the twenty-eighth or thirtieth or somewhere around there. If you’re slightly more informed than the average American, you know that the Supreme Court actually located gay marriage in the Fourteenth Amendment, which says nothing at all about gays or marriage.
But no matter how it came to be or where they found it, here it is and here we are. A thing called gay marriage exists and, if you take society’s temperature on the subject, it’s apparent that this new form of “marriage” is quite lauded and celebrated in the mainstream.
The acceptance of gay marriage gives us another indication of our culture’s slide back into paganism. It’s often said, by both sides of the debate, that gay marriage would have seemed utterly fantastic and absurd to everyone on the planet up until very recently. That isn’t exactly true. Sorry to disappoint the gay lobby, but it hasn’t invented a new evil here.
Homosexuality was rife in pagan cultures, especially in ancient Greece and Rome. “Marriage” between men wasn’t unheard of, either, particularly among the higher classes. The Roman emperor Nero, a murderous maniac and the first emperor to carry out the widespread persecution of Christians, “married” several members of his own sex. He would hold lavish ceremonies where he sometimes played the part of the bride. But this historical reality is not exactly helpful to the gay rights cause. Liberals using this kind of precedent to prove the legitimacy of gay marriage is like using homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom to prove the legitimacy of gay sex. Do we really want to make goats and dogs the arbiters of sexual morality? And do we really want to use the decaying pagan culture of ancient Rome as a model for ours?
The interesting thing is that the Romans lumped pederasty and homosexuality together. Homosexuality was perfectly acceptable, yes, but much of it would have been between men and their slave boys. Indeed, one of Nero’s “brides” was a young boy. A look at history shows only that homosexual acceptance coincides with the rise of decadence and moral chaos. I don’t think that’s the point liberals really want to make, which is why they often do not protest when conservatives erroneously claim that gay marriage is unprecedented. It’s not. A look at Rome is a look at our present—and our future.
A RAPID EVOLUTION
While gay marriage is not unprecedented, it has been completely rejected by Christian civilization. As the West flees Christianity and plummets back into paganism, gay marriage finds renewed favor.
This descent has been incredibly rapid. Only a few years ago, the vast majority of Americans opposed it. Gay marriage was seen in such an unfavorable light as recently as 2008 that the most liberal presidential candidate in history had to run as an advocate of “traditional marriage.” He came out of the pro–gay marriage closet not long after being elected, but the fact remains that a Democrat, only a few short years ago, could not get elected to the presidency unless he affirmed man-woman marriage. Now even the most conservative Democrat would be drawn and quartered in the town square if he so much as said the phrase “traditional marriage” without the appropriate level of sneering condescension in his voice.
Many of those who identify as conservative have also reversed themselves on the issue. A 2015 Pew survey found that the number of self-described conservatives who support gay marriage had almost doubled since 2001.
Among members of my generation, Millennials, there is a virtual consensus. Those of us under the age of thirty-five who still stand for so-called traditional marriage are practically mythical creatures at this point.
The same Pew poll revealed that many mainline Protestants and Catholics have abandoned biblical notions of marriage. And for those religious groups who don’t yet have a majority in favor of gay marriage, most are trending in that direction. Again, not long ago you would have been hard-pressed to find a church or religion in America whose adherents predominantly favored gay marriage. Now it’s perfectly common. Seen from a historical perspective, these are shifts that happened practically overnight. Western civilization accepting gay marriage so quickly is akin to you being convinced that the moon is made of cheese after listening to someone argue the case for fourteen seconds. You now believe something that, less than half a minute ago, you would have thought mad.
Note: I use this analogy to illustrate how dramatic and sudden this transformation has been, but I realize that, in fact, a person these days probably could be convinced that the moon is made of cheese in under a minute if he saw it in a YouTube video with eerie music, and it was somehow tied in to an Illuminati conspiracy.
DIVORCED FROM OUR PRINCIPLES
Before we get into explaining why gay marriage is not real, why the definition of marriage should be protected, and why marriage serves as the foundation for the family (a lot to cover), we should first examine why we have to examine any of this to begin with. If I could travel back in time and publish this book two centuries ago, the reader would be flabbergasted that I spent page upon page explaining why marriage is between a man and a woman. In their minds, I might as well explain that fire is hot and ice is cold and marshmallows are tasty (if they had marshmallows back then, which is a subject I have not yet studied). They would consider the whole discussion a symptom of my psychosis. So why, today, has that dynamic been entirely reversed?
The broader picture is the one this book is written to address. The corrosive effects of relativism, hedonism, and secularism, advanced by the American Left through the media, Hollywood, the education system, and government, have weakened the moral fiber of our civilization and left us susceptible to attacks on our most fundamental institutions. As I’ve argued in previous chapters, once they were able to knock down the first pillar and redefine human life, all the rest was, absent a miraculous conservative Christian resurgence, doomed to fall with it.
Which brings us to a less comfortable reality: the lack of resistance from conservatives and Christians may have been most immediately responsible for our current situation as it pertains to marriage. That lack of resistance, the eagerness with which many Christians ceded marriage to the homosexual lobby, has its roots in many deadly trends that infiltrated the Church in the West long ago.
Let’s start with divorce.
It should indeed be noted that before gay marriage was decreed by the Supreme Court, the institution of marriage had for decades already been, from a legal perspective, the least meaningful, least stable, and least protected contract in existence.
Many Christian churches gave up on the sacrament long ago, allowing their flock to divorce and remarry and divorce and remarry and divorce and remarry, and each time permitting the charade of “vows” to take place on their altars. Churches can lower the divorce rate simply by taking a consistent position on it—which is why practicing Catholics are significantly less likely to break up—but many refuse because they are cowards begging for the world’s approval.
Before gay marriage, over 40 percent of America’s children were already growing up without a father in the home. Statistics show that close to half of all children will witness the breakdown of their parents’ marriage. Half of those half will also have the pleasure of watching a second marriage fall apart.
Most disturbing—and this, again, was happening before gay marriage—more and more young people are opting out of marriage because the previous generation was so bad at it that they’ve scared their kids away from the institution entirely.
Rampant divorce and remarriage eroded the institution decades before Obergefell. Gay marriage is perverse because, among other reasons, it removes from marriage its procreative characteristic, but the divorce epidemic takes away its permanence. Marriage is a multidimensional thing, and once you let one dimension collapse, the others are all the more vulnerable.
I should mention that there are, obviously, times when a couple has no choice but to go their separate ways. Not every divorce is an attack on the sanctity of marriage. What else can you do in cases of serial abuse or serial adultery, or when one party simply abandons the other? But infidelity and abuse do not explain the majority of divorces in this country, and they are not the leading causes of breakups.
A survey done by the National Fatherhood Initiative found finances and lack of communication to be the leading culprits. An article in the Washington Examiner also cites finances as the most potent divorce fuel. According to any survey on the subject, other top causes of divorce are a lack of individual identity, getting into it for the wrong reasons, and becoming lost in the roles.
In other words, these days, marriages can be blown apart by the slightest gust of wind, coming from any direction, and for any reason. It’s no wonder gay marriage became such a hit so fast. Divorce and gay marriage are not the same thing, and the former is not as direct an attack on the sanctity of marriage because it can be necessary in some circumstances, whereas the latter is not necessary, and, as I’ll explain, not even possible under any circumstance. But once we accept that a person can enter into a succession of permanent and indissoluble bonds with different partners, and that each successive “permanent” bond can be forged while the previous partner is still alive, despite the “until death do us part” maxim we spoke so confidently in our vows, we certainly have compromised our ability to credibly stand for “one man, one woman” marriage.
A BITTER PILL
While gay marriage, as I mentioned, removes the procreative characteristic from marriage, we must address the giant, barren elephant in the room and acknowledge that many married heterosexual couples choose to remove that characteristic on their own. Along with divorce, contraception gained mainstream acceptance in the Christian community decades ago, and paved the way for gay activists to eventually make their move.
The first birth control pill was approved by the FDA in 1960, and no drug—not heroin, not crack cocaine, not anything—has had a more devastating impact on our society. You could write a book—and plenty of people have—on how the pill helped precipitate our cultural decline, but for the purposes of this discussion we should concentrate on its deteriorating effects on marriage.
There’s been a lot of research done on how hormonal birth control has changed women’s taste in men. A paper published in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution detailed how women on the pill tend to gravitate toward men who are more feminine. This explains, in part, the pop-culture devolution from Frank Sinatra to Justin Bieber, Clint Eastwood to Zac Efron, and so forth. The pill, being a chemical substance that so profoundly messes with a woman’s biology, creates confusion and pulls her toward men she wouldn’t otherwise find attractive. This has been a great boon for effeminate men who wear skinny jeans and drink low-fat lattes, but the rest have found the dating scene much more difficult because of it.
A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that a woman’s physical attraction to her husband may suddenly diminish or disappear if she meets him while on the pill and then goes off it at some point during their marriage. From the Time article about the study:
Whether a woman’s attraction to her mate shifted post-Pill seemed to be determined by how objectively good-looking he was by evolutionary standards, which means his attractiveness is an indicator of genetic fitness. Some women with partners who were not conventionally attractive reported being less attracted to him after stopping oral contraceptives, whereas a decrease was not seen in women whose partners were conventionally handsome.
On the flip side, a woman on the pill may not be as attracted to her strikingly handsome and masculine husband as she would be if she stopped taking the pill. (Luckily, my wife is not on birth control, so she is able to admire my beauty unimpeded by chemical interference.)
Additionally, a 2008 article in Scientific American reported on the results of multiple studies finding that women on birth control prefer men who are genetically similar to them:
Hidden in a man’s smell are clues about his major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, which play an important role in immune system surveillance. Studies suggest that females prefer the scent of males whose MHC genes differ from their own, a preference that has probably evolved because it helps offspring survive…
A study published in August in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, however, suggests that women on the pill undergo a shift in preference toward men who share similar MHC genes.
It’s no surprise that birth control has such a profound and confounding impact on a woman’s psyche. The primary function of the pill is to essentially trick her body into believing she’s pregnant all the time. It doesn’t take a scientist to surmise that perhaps a woman’s body is not meant to be, or to believe itself to be, perpetually pregnant for thirty years. And, as a married man with three children, I can attest that pregnancy can be, at times—and I say this cautiously—a rather emotionally tumultuous time for a lady. And that’s just over the course of a nine-month pregnancy. I tremble with fear at the thought of what effect a 360-month pregnancy could have on my wonderful wife.
This is one, though not the only, reason why the rates of birth control usage and divorce track almost identically. As the pill gained prevalence, so did divorce. That doesn’t necessarily prove anything, and you certainly can’t blame a pill for your decision to get divorced, but it’s a correlation that no honest person can ignore. It’s hard to see it as a complete coincidence that the sexual revolution and the divorce epidemic took hold in the 1960s, the decade that began with FDA approval of the pill.
It’s true that, although birth control usage is near ubiquitous today, the divorce rate has actually been declining for some time. According to an article in the New York Times in 2014, if current trends continue, about two-thirds of marriages that began in the 2000s will not end in divorce. Of course, that means a third of marriages will dissolve—hardly a reason to pop the champagne and pat ourselves on the back—but at least a third is less than the erroneous “half of all marriages will end in divorce” statistic that many people still cite.
But this can hardly be seen as a vindication of the pill or an indication that the marriage crisis in America is over. Perhaps there are fewer (but still a great many) people getting divorced, yet at the same time there are far fewer adults choosing marriage to begin with. Today, there are twice as many unmarried adults as there were in 1960. A recent Pew report estimated that a quarter of Millennials will never get married at all. It seems we’ve figured out a way to avoid divorce: avoid marriage. It’s like we’re bragging that we figured out how to avoid spraining our ankles by simply staying in bed and watching Netflix all day. Hardly an inspiring victory.
Despite our culture’s shortcut around the divorce problem, there are ways to shield your marriage from divorce while still actually getting married in the first place. One tip may be to dump the pill. Among couples who use natural family planning instead of artificial birth control, the divorce rate is, astoundingly, less than 3 percent.
Why the stark contrast between the two methods? I’d surmise that it has something to do with the fact that natural family planning requires trust, discipline, and self-control, and marriage requires all of that, too. It turns out that we should bring into our sex lives all of the things that should be brought into our marriage as a whole. And the more we do that, it seems, the more we protect ourselves from divorce. Treating sex like something purely recreational ultimately weakens its significance, which weakens our marriage, which weakens us, which is all very fortunate for divorce attorneys.
Contraception is a mutual barrier placed between the spouses. It is a shared rejection not only of children, but of each other. It says, “I will give only so much.” But marriages cannot survive if we will give only so much. The whole point of the union, and of the sexual act that strengthens and deepens that union, is to give everything to the other, holding nothing back, and embracing whatever fruits may grow from our love for and devotion to each other. The spirit of marriage is diminished when we refuse to enthusiastically accept all that naturally comes with it. Aside from the emotional, psychological, and physical toll birth control can have on a woman, it’s the spiritual effect that is really the most devastating.
The pill also commodifies and degrades women by tying their human worth to their economic worth. Proponents of the pill essentially say that women must sterilize themselves, whether permanently or temporarily, in order to “succeed” in the business world. Her value as a woman, as a human being, is placed below her value as an employee or a consumer. Male employees may often feel the same way, but they are not expected to chemically alter themselves or to reject their own fertility in order to be a cog in the corporate system. Only women are burdened with that expectation. I am rarely one to play the “S card,” but perhaps this is where we ought to be looking in search of workplace sexism.
I can tell you this: if scientists ever develop a birth control pill for men that renders them impotent, potentially causes cancer, requires them to take a dose every day, and makes their testicles shrivel, I can guarantee that that drug would not be among Rite Aid’s best sellers. Even the men who love the female birth control pill would suddenly find the whole idea rather distasteful and degrading.
But the most relevant thing about the birth control pill is that it, of course, stops procreation.
Many people—Christians included—now believe that a woman is “liberated” when she treats her reproductive system like a disease that can only be cured by pumping her body full of chemicals that inhibit ovulation. Which is to say, she is liberated by causing her body to malfunction and preventing it from doing what it is naturally meant to do.
(Odd that these days, we won’t even eat an avocado if we find out any aspect of its harvesting and cultivation involved something inorganic, yet we rarely apply those convictions to the highly potent mix of synthetic hormones many women consume on a near-daily basis for years and years of their lives.)
At any rate, as Christians we know that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19), and we know that God’s first commandment to man was “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). But many of us became just as hooked on the drug as anyone else, so there was hardly anyone left to make these points.
Christians, in the main, decided that marriage did not have to be necessarily procreative, and at the same time they decided it did not have to be necessarily permanent, and when the gay activists came along, what argument did they have left? Granted, just because a person is a hypocrite doesn’t make him wrong about what he’s saying—a man could have five divorces under his belt and he’d still be right if he described marriage as a sacred, imperishable bond—but it’s harder to argue convincingly for a principle when you don’t believe it. And it’s even harder to defend an institution while personally rejecting most parts of it yourself.
This is a reality Christians often have trouble facing. Our culture did not slip away from us in the middle of the night. Our institutions weren’t ripped down suddenly by the barbarian hordes. Although I am writing about the Left’s assault on life, marriage, and gender, it should be made very clear that we are not victims of the assault. We are participants. Marriage is probably the best example of this. Christians were so inconsistent on the subject—our arguments purposefully incomplete so as to allow loopholes to accommodate our own extra-biblical lifestyle choices—that we’d already ensured there would be little to no chance the marriage ideal in America could survive a sustained attack from the Left.