Defining Marriage

by David Warren - March 24, 2008

Reprinted with permission.

"And God created man in His own image; in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them." I cite the Masoretic text of this famous passage from the first chapter in Genesis, for it is the more poetic, and it conveys something of the dance of complementary opposites – the dance from the beginning of the world. It is the passage of which Christ says, "Have ye not read?" in Matthew 19. This in the moment He explains to the Pharisees the Christian doctrine of marriage, "flesh of one flesh." And of divorce, concluding with: "What therefore God hath joined together, let no man put asunder."

And to the Pharisee attempt to lure Him into a legalistic trap: "For the hardness of your hearts, Moses suffered you to put away your wives. But from the beginning, it was not so."

You are lucky, down there in the United States, for you can still discuss such things. Up where I am writing in Canada, we now have laws criminalizing open discussion of the institution of marriage, designed to prevent the worst thing that the liberal mind is capable of imagining: namely, hurt feelings.

Yet with or without your First Amendment, you will soon have such laws stateside, too, as the inevitable concomitant to "gay marriage." This struck me when I was listening to Barack Obama, obfuscating on the issue during the Democrat primaries. As rhetorician, he could recognize a verbal minefield, and so made clear to his audience that he supported every aspect of "marriage" between persons of the same sex, except the word.

It was to clear this minefield that Canadian Liberal and left politicians, in the course of ratifying "gay marriage" in our Parliament (after it had been legislated by an Ontario provincial court), created "hate" laws, which they then embedded in the "genocide" provisions of our Criminal Code that they had previously created – to make journalists and others extremely wary of criticizing what the government had done. Canadian "human rights" tribunals have meanwhile established that merely quoting the Bible publicly on the topic of homosexuality, without any further comment, is actionable, and may be successfully prosecuted through those tribunals, wherein due process is denied to the defendant, along with every other protection of the old common law, and conviction rates are 100 percent.

Obama further delivered himself of the opinion that, as a Christian, he preferred to read the "tolerant" discourse of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, instead of isolated, negative sayings by St. Paul. Quite apart from exposing his ignorance of Scripture – for the Sermon on the Mount is the opposite of "tolerant," and instead declares a standard of perfection for all human moral striving – he conceded the strength of the position he was opposing.

The Christian view of marriage is strong because it is not founded on the denial of this or that aspect of reality. Rather, it builds upon an insuperable positive: stating, as I was quoting above, the plain fact of nature and man. "Male and female created He them." The spiritual identity of man, created "in the image of God," is tied in from the beginning with the distinction between the sexes, and through that with the reproduction of our species. Our higher and lower nature is conjoined in our persons; and male and female are conjoined in monogamous marriage.

So that while it is true that Jesus nowhere expressly states, "I am against gay marriage," it is unnecessary for Him to do so, for He states a positive view of marriage in which such a thing is inconceivable. And in which, incidentally, though divorce is conceivable, it is judged counter to God's will, and therefore plainly wrong.

In Canada, thanks largely to the jackboot of new laws suppressing free speech, we have been unable to mount even a rearguard action against the "same sex" onslaught on the Christian underpinnings of our society. In the United States, there is still a chance of preventing the worst from happening. But let me advise you, from the Great White North, that if you are going to win that battle, you had better start to accentuate the positive. You must re-establish what marriage is, before you can hope to establish what marriage is not.

David Warren is a Canadian journalist who writes mostly on international affairs. His Web site is www.davidwarrenonline.com.