Ohio Senator Portman, a supporter of DOMA, has come out in favor of gay marriage. This reversal of principle about marriage is apparently rooted in the relative in that his change of mind comes about because of a relative: his son. He also suggests that Republicans cannot hope to attract the votes of the young unless they cave on principle in this matter. He offers this salve to conservative conscience:
We conservatives believe in personal liberty and minimal government interference in people’s lives. We also consider the family unit to be the fundamental building block of society. We should encourage people to make long-term commitments to each other and build families, so as to foster strong, stable communities and promote personal responsibility.
That begs the question that homosexual unions are family-building entities. Do we have to accept the premise because it is popular? The young have experienced considerable propaganda about the goodness of homosexuality; the entertainment industry made it a verity that there was great wisdom in same-sex unions, despite sociological and medical evidence to the contrary. Portman offers this,
It is understandable to feel cautious about making a major change to such an important social institution, but the experience of the past decade shows us that marriage for same-sex couples has not undercut traditional marriage. In fact, over the past 10 years, the national divorce rate has declined.
Hooray for a declining divorce rate, but it exists mainly because of a decline in marriage, not because marriage has been strengthened. There are many factors in the decline of marriage and the arguments for gay marriage can certainly be factored into the decline. We do not ensure social stability by saying that anything goes.
What is important about morality is that things are moral because they have been proven better over generations, not simply by the fiat of tradition. Especially true is that behaviors are not right simply because people we love do them. The state of Portman’s son’s sexuality has nothing to do with what is right for society. If his son were a womanizer who had many children by many different women, do you suppose Portman would promote polygamy so his son could marry all of those women and make “honest women” of them and save his grandchildren from the stigma of illegitimacy? I don’t think so. Anyone following his heart when it means ignoring his head becomes muddled; we want to love our children whatever they do. We do love, despite what they do, but that does not mean we must condone what they do. Portman has fallen prey to relativism, as the word can be variously understood.
March 15th, 2013 | 10:32 am
[...] Ohio Senator Portman, a supporter of DOMA, has come out in favor of gay marriage. This reversal of principle about marriage is apparently rooted in the relative in that his change of mind comes about because of a relative: his son. He also suggests that Republicans Go to the Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
March 15th, 2013 | 10:58 am
Kate, you’ve done infinitely more thinking in your short post than Portman shows having done at all. You’ve hit pretty much all the high points needed to demolish his “argument.”
But of course it won’t matter. Because you can’t “argue” with the inevitable response that typifies modern times: “Yeah, well, that’s just your opinion, man, and I’m just telling you my own opinion. Don’t be so closed-minded.”
March 15th, 2013 | 2:40 pm
For all the confidence with which many hold forth on this topic, I for one, am less clear on exactly what Christ would have us do as His Church on earth regarding this issue. As with many of the social, moral issues that seem to so motivate conservatives today, Jesus was conspicuously silent, even though many of these practices were present in His world. Intentional? Just didn’t seem relevant to the authors of the Gospels? Not core to his Message? While I am not a libertarian, I confess to some ambivilance towards State involvement with issues that didn’t seem to move our Lord to comment. At least on moral or theological grounds alone.
March 15th, 2013 | 3:53 pm
Who was calling for gay marriage in Jesus’ time on Earth? Was marriage otherwise defined than as man and woman? Maybe you would prefer to discuss homosexuality as sin? Then I have to ask, was it not sin because Jesus did not specifically speak against it? Did he mention every other sin? We know what he instructed us to do with sinners. The way to deal with our own sin is with repentance. The way we deal with sinners is to remember we are, none of us, without sin. Prevalence doesn’t make sin not sin; it just gives us sympathy with other sinners.
March 15th, 2013 | 10:19 pm
Portman is more perverted than his son! It’ll be a cold day in Hell before I ever vote for this degenerate.
March 16th, 2013 | 9:54 am
Tim, Jesus was also silent on necrophilia. The criterion that Jesus must explicitly address a topic in order for it to come under Christian assessment is a criterion that Jesus himself never offered. So, on your own grounds, your view self-destructs.
But more to the point: the command to honor one’s father and mother, that the Church is the bride of Christ, that Jesus speaks explicitly on marriage being exclusively male and female in terms that are unmistakably complementary (Matthew 19), and that the sacramentality of marriage was universally accepted in the Christian world very early on, pretty much settles the “biblical question.” If SSM were not getting popular, and if opposing it were not attracting ridicule and persecution, you would not even be entertaining it.
March 16th, 2013 | 1:18 pm
Portman’s statement is that of a man quite devoid of seriousness. Sadly, that is one might wage modal among the contemporary professional-managerial class.
March 16th, 2013 | 2:04 pm
To Kate’s point, Jesus never mentioned homophobia and gay-bashing as wrongs So, apparently, they’re right.
The belief that something not specifically condemned by name by Jesus is all of a sudden permissible may very well be the dumbest theological idea ever to be penned (with young earth creationism coming in a close second). It’s worse than sola scripture. It’s sola Christus scriptura. Just plain dumb.
March 17th, 2013 | 9:45 am
It is the conceit for those advocating the homosexual “agenda” that if one had a family member who was homosexual then our attitudes would be much different. Often times, during discussions about MSM, advocates feel confident to get right in my face. Well, I have a son is a homosexual. Once I inform them of this fact, their immediate retort is that I must hate my son or at least have a distant relationship with him. This is most certainly not the case. In fact, in many ways, we are more alike than my other two children are with me. (Most of the time, they do not believe me) We talk with each other a lot–often for hours.
My son knows where I stand on the matter and I know his thoughts on the matter as well. We just let it be and get on with other things important to our concerns.
I am an orthodox Lutheran and refuse to change with the time just to “keep up”. Believe me, much of the time I wish I could be on the other side; but I couldn’t be intellectually honest I somehow talked myself into switching convictions.
I don’t quite understand the swipe at “sola scriptura” above. It is quite out of fidelity to Scripture that I am informed on these issues. Our differences with Rome do not lead confessional Lutherans to diverge with Catholic ethics on this matter. As hard as it is at times, “science” and emotional appeals cannot change that–nor should it.
P.S. Jesus said nothing about genocide either.
March 18th, 2013 | 1:40 pm
For all those commenting on the theology of SSM, you are missing the point. My ambivilance is as regards state involvement in prohibiting (or refusing to sanction) the civil unions or any other state recognized legal arrangment. My point on Jesus’ teaching isn’t to advocate a view that moral positions can only be taken if Jesus spoke directly to it. (That would be “dumb” Thomas Aquinas) It is about ordering of one’s apparent public priorities. I am just wondering out loud if we, as followers of Christ, ordered our priorities for ministry and public engagement the same way Jesus and the early Church seemed to do, what that might look like? I wonder if advocating for or against some our nation’s social issues would take as much time, energy, money and focus as it does? I wonder if we would be spending so much time defining “correct” morality (following the rules) and our attention in legally defining and defending the same?
While I am not advocating relativism, I am looking to Jesus’ ministry and confessing that much of what passes for Christian involvement in public life looks more like the Pharisee’s postures and habits, than our Lord.
March 18th, 2013 | 1:44 pm
Tim, are you saying that Jesus was in favor of same-sex unions? Where do you get that?
Or are you saying that as salt and light are dumb, we should just be quiet about what we see around us?
March 18th, 2013 | 2:17 pm
My position is that I’m not sure Jesus would care. His focus would be on bringing the good news of his Father’s love to hurting people. When challenged by the Pharisee’s of his day with specific answers to questions designed to show his allegiance and position on “hot topics”, Jesus typically deflected the question and directed the focus to where it belonged. I believe that these kinds of public battles distract us from being real salt and light to a hurting and lost world. The laws we pass or don’t pass don’t provide comfort to the afflicted or good news to the lost (in general). As citizens, yes, we can all vote when required, and vote our conscience. But the level of time, money and energy these issues seem to take from the Church and its work seem wrong. My point is not to advocate a position (such as being “for” SSM) but to challenge the many of the faithful’s seeming preoccupation with this issue. Does it feed the hungry, house the homeless, visit those in jail or sick, . . .? Does it demonstrate the love of God to a hurting world? Those should be our preoccupations. Fighting political battles feels important, but I wonder if is a distraction for the real work of the Body?
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March 18th, 2013 | 3:19 pm
I am the only person in my church who writes like this and whatever political involvement there is within my little disorganized church, far more money and time is spent by the members in the congregation doing those things you say we ought to be doing. I cannot believe (and know) that my church is not alone in those endeavors. The Church at large does those things.
Politics affects how many people are homeless, hungry, sick or in jail. If we see our political system doing harm, wherein can we sit back and say or do nothing? Morality, living moral lives, enables people to prosper, making them less likely to be homeless, hungry, sick or in jail. It is actually simple economics and is true because that is how God made the world. People cannot just do anything and unchallenged turpitude really benefits no one, Christian or otherwise.
Of course we do charitable works and contribute to charity; it is a given. However, the idea that Jesus wants us to have more people poor, homeless, sick, and criminal so that charity may abound just seems cruel to me and I do not see it in scripture. Surely it matters why the hurting world is hurting.
The degradation of marriage has increased poverty; the majority of the poor are single mothers and their children. How do Christians not speak out against this? In a democratic society, silence means condoning. How do we condone what does ill? If we do not mention to a lost world that it is lost, how will it know? This part of the real work of the Body of Christ. Speaking out is certainly not all that a Christian should do, but it is part of what a Christian should do. Jesus did not tell us to silently clean up the messes of the world, but to go make a noise.
March 27th, 2013 | 7:52 am
“What is important about morality is that things are moral because they have been proven better over generations, not simply by the fiat of tradition. Especially true is that behaviors are not right simply because people we love do them. The state of Portman’s son’s sexuality has nothing to do with what is right for society. If his son were a womanizer who had many children by many different women, do you suppose Portman would promote polygamy so his son could marry all of those women and make “honest women” of them and save his grandchildren from the stigma of illegitimacy?”
Very weak comparison. Womanizing automatically implies – by definition – dishonesty and deception and unrestrained lechery. Homosexuality doesn’t imply anything other than attraction to the same sex. Polygamy creates all kinds of harms that one needn’t be religious to see (consider the rogue Mormon’s “lost boys” for starters). Homosexual people (who may or may not engage in whatever sexual behavior that conservatives seem distressingly focused on in any of these discussions) are not harming society by trying to follow the theoretical model of lifelong love and fidelity. The secular society (which includes many Christians) fails to buy the argument from the particular strains of Christianity who insist that God/Jesus would oppose homosexuality and that therefore the state must not allow it. If you don’t like homosexuality, you and your church need not hold marriage ceremonies for gay people. That’s reasonable and fair. However, as long as the state is involved in marriage, they should allow any 2 adults who wish to make the commitment to marry.
March 27th, 2013 | 12:57 pm
The Bible has nothing good to say about homosexuality. I don’t why anyone points to the Bible as if its proscriptions against homosexuality were a matter of question. As a Christian, reading the Bible on the subject, I really have no choice but to say, “That is a sin.” Admittedly, I say that about all sorts of other things society winks at these days, from pride to divorce to abortion.
Homosexuality has harms in health and social behaviors that we all politely and politically ignore. AIDS? HIV? The cost to society has been enormous, not only in health care costs, but also in terms of liberty through things like HIPA, the main arguments for which was to protect those with socially transmitted diseases from public embarrassment.
Why is the state involved in marriage? Why isn’t it strictly a religious sacrament? Because of children and the fact that having children puts women at a disadvantage, hence the responsible male ought to be legally responsible for her — matrimony. What has the cost been to society of loosening maternity from marriage? What’s good about that? And what has any of that got to do with homosexuality? As long as there are children, the state will be involved in marriage.
You beg the question that homosexuality does not harm society. Back to my original argument that homosexuality was proscribed because it was known that it was not good for society. Don’t you consider all the legal and economic implications of breaking marriage and reforming it into a personal choice? In years to come, that may or may not be about love. Consider that marriage will be a way to have access to another person’s government benefits and pensions. There will be a cost to Social Security and in the states where same-sex marriage is legal, there are already lawsuits about that. What is the state’s interest in love? How will the state judge what is love and what is not?
I wish I could say that we should not break what is not broken. Actually, marriage for most of us is not broken, but for some of society it is badly broken. That is a pity, but not an excuse to break it more.
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