[Apologetics] The Pill made same-sex nuptials inevitable

[Stuart D. Gathman]

One result of the apostasy is that confessing United Methodists have
become yet more Catholic.  Witness the following denunciation of
birth control along Natural Law lines.

An article in the Wall Street Journal:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110004760

Save Marriage? It's Too Late.
The Pill made same-sex nuptials inevitable.

BY DONALD SENSING
Monday, March 15, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

Opponents of legalized same-sex marriage say they're trying to protect a 
beleaguered institution, but they're a little late. The walls of traditional 
marriage were breached 40 years ago; what we are witnessing now is the 
storming of the last bastion.

Marriage is primarily a social institution, not a religious one. That is, 
marriage is a universal phenomenon of human cultures in all times and 
places, regardless of the religion of the people concerned, and has taken 
the same basic form in all those cultures. Marriage existed long before 
Abraham, Jesus or any other religious figure. The institution of marriage is 
literally prehistoric.

The three monotheistic faiths (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) actually 
recognize this explicitly in their holy writings. The book of Genesis 
ascribes the foundation of marriage in the very acts of God himself in the 
creation of the world: "It is not good that man should be alone; I will make 
him a helper comparable to him. . . . A man shall leave his father and 
mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Genesis 
2:18, 24).

The three great religions base their definition of marriage on these verses 
and others that echo them. In Christian theological terms, the definition of 
marriage is part of the natural law of the creation; therefore, the 
definition may not be changed by human will except in peril to the health of 
human community.


Psychobiologists argue that marriage evolved as a way of mediating the 
conflicting reproductive interests of men and women. It was the means by 
which a woman could guarantee to a specific man that the children she bore 
were his. In biological terms, men can sire hundreds of children in their 
lives, but this biological ability is limited by the fact that no one woman 
can keep pace.
Siring kids by multiple women is the only way men can achieve high levels of 
reproduction, but there is no adaptive advantage for women in bearing 
children by men who are simply trying to sire as many children as possible. 
For a mother, carrying and raising a child is a resource-intensive, 
years-long business. Doing it alone is a marked adaptive disadvantage for 
single mothers and their children.

So the economics of sex evolved into a win-win deal. Women agreed to give 
men exclusive sexual rights and guaranteed paternity in exchange for their 
sexual loyalty and enduring assistance with childbearing and -rearing. The 
man's promise of sexual loyalty meant that he would expend his labor and 
resources supporting her children, not another woman's. For the man, this 
arrangement lessens the number of potential children he can sire, but it 
ensures that her kids are his kids. Guaranteed sex with one woman also 
enabled him to conserve his resources and energies for other pursuits than 
repetitive courtship, which consumes both greatly.

Weddings ceremoniously legitimated the sexual union of a particular man and 
woman under the guidance of the greater community. In granting this license, 
society also promised structures beneficial to children arising from the 
marriage and ensuring their well-being.


Society's stake in marriage as an institution is nothing less than the 
perpetuation of the society itself, a matter of much greater than merely 
private concern. Yet society cannot compel men and women to bring forth 
their replacements. Marriage as conventionally defined is still the ordinary 
practice in Europe, yet the birthrate in most of Europe is now less than the 
replacement rate, which will have all sorts of dire consequences for its 
future.

Today, though, sexual intercourse is delinked from procreation. Since the 
invention of the Pill some 40 years ago, human beings have for the first 
time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. 
That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The 
causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage were severed in a 
fundamental way. The impulse toward premarital chastity for women was always 
the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it 
went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order 
to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the past four decades, women have 
trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have 
also sadly discovered that they can't reliably gain men's sexual and 
emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage.

Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43% since 1960. Instead of getting 
married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having 
increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago 
study, cohabitation has become the norm. More than half the men and women 
who do get married have already lived together.

The widespread social acceptance of these changes is impelling the move 
toward homosexual marriage. Men and women living together and having sexual 
relations "without benefit of clergy," as the old phrasing goes, became not 
merely an accepted lifestyle, but the dominant lifestyle in the under-30 
demographic within the past few years. Because they are able to control 
their reproductive abilities--that is, have sex without sex's results--the 
arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt.

When society decided--and we have decided, this fight is over--that society 
would no longer decide the legitimacy of sexual relations between particular 
men and women, weddings became basically symbolic rather than substantive, 
and have come for most couples the shortcut way to make the legal compact 
regarding property rights, inheritance and certain other regulatory 
benefits. But what weddings do not do any longer is give to a man and a 
woman society's permission to have sex and procreate.



Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one 
another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is 
controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been 
technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce 
without social stigma, and talk in 2004 of "saving marriage" is pretty 
specious. There's little there left to save. Men and women today who have 
successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of 
society, not because of it.

If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, 
what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the 
regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to 
mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?

I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God. But 
traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I 
include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and 
face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the 
degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.

Rev. Sensing is pastor of the Trinity United Methodist Church in Franklin, 
Tenn. He writes at DonaldSensing.com.

-- 
			Stuart D. Gathman <stuart at bmsi.com>
      Business Management Systems Inc.  Phone: 703 591-0911 Fax: 703 591-6154
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