The Forgotten Case for Traditional Marriage

There has been an enormous amount of talk about “marriage” in the last couple years in California with the State Supreme Court’s decision to allow same-sex couples to wed due to the State Constitution not explicitly stating otherwise followed by the passage of Proposition 8 (2008). However, there is a major misconception of “marriage” embedded in American society, and I am not just talking about sexual orientation.

The degradation of marriage began not with the debate about same-sex unions, but during the era of sexual liberation in the 1960s. Then Republican Governor Ronald Reagan signed into law the Family Law Act of 1969, which abolished the long-standing tradition of requiring proof of fault by one spouse in order to dissolve the marital status of both spouses. The idea that two people can get married without much thought, because they can get out of it without much thought, has led to the idea that marriage is a right. Why wouldn’t it be a right if it were not a big deal? As long as two consenting adults want to enter into a contract, which needs no reason to be abolished, why should the government stand in their way? The right to marriage encourages the false sense that couples also have the right to a divorce, thereby the right to dismantle the foundation of society. It is no coincidence that since the era of sexual liberation, we have seen the social fabric coming undone with the legalization of abortion, increasing poverty among female-headed households, and a preoccupation on defining one’s worth by material goods instead of each person having intrinsic worth as a human being.

People have lost sight of the basic fact of marriage, which is that it cannot be undone. There are those who will now want to argue that annulments effectively undoes a marriage, but that is erroneous thinking, because an annulment merely recognizes that some marriages are putative, meaning that it did not exist in the first place. Therefore, you cannot disband something that was never in existence. Annulments and putative marriages are another topic altogether, so I will not be discussing it much further in this essay. Society seems to have lost sight of the permanence of marriage due to its misguided notions of love. “Marriage is about love,” people often say. Even Captain and Tenille sing that “love will keep us together.” It would be foolish to argue that love is not an important aspect of marriage, but it would be equally foolish to argue that love is what marriage is about. If two people truly loved each other, they would not need a piece of paper and legal benefits to prove it. Unfortunately, the fading of love between two people is exactly what leads to “irreconcilable differences,” meaning that after the love has gone, so has the marriage.

The idea that marriage is a right combined with the idea that marriage is about love brings us (backwards) to the 21st Century. There is a lot of unnecessary discussion right now about the constitutionality regarding the legalization of “same-sex marriages.” However, how can society even think it has the authority to discuss these unions when we have utterly failed at defining traditional marriage correctly? There are those who love to quote the Scriptures regarding homosexuals, but fail to read what Jesus says Himself about divorce. The Gospel according to St. Mark explicitly states:

“…from the beginning of creation, 'God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother (and be joined to his wife), and the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate." In the house the disciples again questioned him about this. He said to them, "Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery."

The irony is that the same verse from Genesis that Jesus quotes to condemn divorce is one of the same verses opponents of “same-sex marriages” use to oppose “same-sex marriages.” California, let us re-examine how we have strayed so far off the path of what traditional marriage ought to be and correct this egregious error before we talk about whether or not to expand the definition of marriage to non-heterosexual couples.