A Young Person's Defense of Traditional Marriage

For those of you who don’t know, in college I was an education major which admittedly (and to my complete delight) requires more coloring than most. One day a passionate education professor of mine asked us to draw our image of “the perfect global citizen.” My table group of four had some interesting discussions as we were deciding on what to draw. When it came to the externals of what symbols to use to represent this global citizen, we all knew exactly what to put. A tree for environmental activism, a dollar sign for the global economy and materialism, an apple for apple products and technological innovation, words like health, organic, and fitness. But as you got closer to the citizen things became more difficult. We tentatively agreed to add a briefcase on one side and a baby on the other to represent how the perfect citizen is expected to work and raise a family. But we couldn’t decide whether we should make the actual citizen a man or a woman and we certainly did not know what race to make this person. So we, being four intelligent women not knowing what answer our professor was looking for and not wanting to offend anyone, literally decided to make no decision. A gender neutral character with a combination of different races emerged. Not everyone was this vague but for the most part we had all put the same type of stuff. Our discussion was pretty bland. This was the consensus of what it meant to be successful (after all they don’t bestow the label of perfect on just anyone) and it thoroughly freaked me out how similar it was. And for the first time (second semester junior year - not the time you want to be thinking the kind of thoughts I’m about to admit to thinking) I started to think, rather cynically, that national education had done a remarkable job achieving its objective and the proof was sitting all around me. I and all other girls in that room (because let’s face it in elementary education the males you encounter are usually the professors) were born in either 1990 or 1991, and we’d gone through school together, experienced the same generic school systems, and were exposed to the same culture through more mediums than ever before. And we were homogenous. We were not taught to navigate or discern what we were seeing and absorbing. We were taught to fit in, not only in what we were wearing, but in what opinions to hold, what image of success to aspire to. We were absolutely bombarded in the midst of one great lie: that there is no truth. So when we stumble across something that’s incompatible with a conviction that we have, something we feel, or two things that are competing to be declared true we are taught not to think about it much at all. What we do is the same thing my group and I did when we were trying to create the perfect global citizens: nothing. We used words and pictures to communicate nothing beyond the vague and inoffensive, things we knew that no one would be able to dispute without drawing attention to the fact that they just weren’t with the program (which would cause them to lose status). Turns out you can’t argue with nothing. Attempt to arrive at truth when no one makes the attempt to put forward a belief.

The recent Supreme Court ruling (I refuse to use SCOTUS that sounds like some weird body part or a bad joke started by Parks and Recreation’s Tom Haverford that everyone took too seriously) that redefined marriage, making it available to all in the LGBT community and overturning the states’ right to define marriage as something that consists exclusively of one man and one woman, took me back to that college classroom. Because all of the sudden on my Facebook page I saw two things: 1) The incredible outpouring of the hashtag #lovewins and 2) the following quote from one of my favorite writers, G.K. Chesterton:

"The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists… but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery [Catholicism] nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back. The thin theory of Collectivism never had any real roots in human nature; but the roots of the new heresy, God knows, are as deep as nature itself, whose flower is the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life. I say that the man who cannot see this cannot see the signs of the times; cannot see even the sky-signs in the street, that are the new sort of signs in heaven. The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, but much more in Manhattan -- but most of what was in Broadway is already in Piccadilly."
--G.K.'s Weekly, June 19, 1926

And I was sad because not only are the attacks coming, but they were hailed as a victory for love. And as someone who truly loves irony, this time I didn’t. Because love did not win that day, as the Biblical definition was laughed away as bigoted and dated. Love lost big time. Because love cannot be reduced to sex or even tender feelings. Love longs to be expressed, to participate in a total giving of self, mind, body and soul. The model that God gives us of His perfect love is the marital union not to limit people, but because marriage is a sacrament and the type of love this sacrament requires is not possible without His constant graces (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, etc.). The fruits of this love are ultimately life-giving and result in children, which gives you what is, in my opinion, God’s greatest gift of all: family. And it is sad how many broken families there are today because an experience like that can make the type of love and marriage I’ve described seem not only unlikely but impossible. Yet God loves you so much, He is love itself, and this is what He wishes for you, what He desires to see fulfilled in you.

But in sharing this view, I have not forgotten about the LGBT community. I love and participated in both choir and musical theater (which as clichéd as it sounds means that I have a lot of LGBT friends). And it is not my intention to claim that they are not capable of those tender feelings for a person of the same gender. For being caring and compassionate people rich in generosity. In fact, they have typically been some of the most sensitive souls I have ever met, with a gift for bolstering others and often sharing in my love of music (even sacred high church music- and obviously who can blame them that stuff is awesome) But while I like to believe they will always remain my friends, I cannot call any union between them a marriage. And I hope they can respect my opinion as I respect theirs. Because I also cannot ignore that the decision to redefine marriage was not made overnight. It was made possible slowly over time by shifting cultural trends and attitudes, most notably the destruction of families, the redefinition of the roles of men, women, and children within those families, a decline in sexual morality, and what is perhaps worst of all- a general hardening of the heart. And it’s funny, as defiant and energetic as everyone is about breaking old rules, thinking that they don’t need God or just denying His existence altogether, the truth will remain whether or not the popular opinion pieces will. And when He looks down on us I do not believe for a second that it is with wrath, only pain. Because I think He sees His little children searching more desperately than ever before for the truth, love, peace, purpose and security that He longs to lavish on them, but He cannot because they are too proud to accept it, hindered by the belief that they can do it themselves. And can you imagine what that must be like? God with the heart of a mother, seeing the pain of His children but unable to help simply because He is bound to respect free will, and they will not beg.

Because my support of traditional marriage does not negate my love for my LGBT neighbors (as most major media outlets would have you believe). It only means that in the world Chesterton describes, the world gone mad, the world I see traces of in the hectic waters of modernity, we have forgotten that it’s all sandcastles- here one day and gone the next. We live in vague, bland, soul-crushing homogeny. We are kept in fear and brokenness as we pursue the wealth and pleasures of this world. But I tell ya, friends, even the best of this world is just a sandcastle, here one day and gone the next. Because I think the very best of Earth is at best a crumb from Heaven’s table, and Heaven is something I wish absolutely for everyone.