Civil rights are again in the news. A month after Charlotte, North Carolina passed an LGBT anti-discrimination measure, the state general assembly convened a special session for the first time in 35 years just to pass a law that blocks such measures. That LGBT rights continue to be debated provides an opportunity to revisit a prediction about the frightful consequences of same-sex marriage.
The prediction
Conservatives claimed that same-sex marriage is a slippery slope. Once we legalize this change, what will come next? Will people demand to marry their children or pets or sex toys?
Many traditionalists back in the sixties had their own version of this: “Once black folks can marry white folks, who knows what’ll come next?”
The sky didn’t fall after Loving v. Virginia eliminated laws against mixed-race marriage in 1967, and it didn’t when the Netherlands became the first country to grant same-sex marriages in 2001 or when Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize them in 2004.
And despite what conservatives said a year ago, the sky didn’t fall when the United States legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015 with the Obergefell decision.
Don’t open that Pandora’s Box labeled “same-sex marriage”!
It hasn’t been quite a year since Obergefell, but it’s easy to forget the hysteria that surrounded it. For example, fellow Patheos blogger Dwight Longenecker didn’t wonder what would come after same-sex marriage. He knew: the U.S. would become a police state.
Hold your arms out for balance, and let’s step through the prediction made two years before Obergefell. First, he points to an article titled “Legalize Polygamy!” Written by a woman, it argues that a pro-woman attitude should allow women the freedom to enter into polygamous marriages. She argues that marriage is plastic—that it can be molded to take on new shapes.
America has dramatically rejected many of the marriage customs decreed in the Bible, so, yeah, marriage is plastic. But have you considered the consequences? Longenecker has.
Marriage is only plastic … because everything else is too. In other words, there is no such thing as Truth.
This big-T Truth presumably means objective or absolute truth. And here again I agree with Longenecker’s antagonist—I see no evidence for objective truth in issues that affect society such as morality or the definition of marriage. But Longenecker wails and rends his garments:
For the Catholic everything is connected. If marriage is plastic … then everything is plastic … Everything is up for grabs, there is no certainty and if no certainty, then no security.
Changing the definition of marriage pulls the thread that unravels the entire fabric of your reality? I guess it sucks to be you then, since we’ve already resoundingly rejected many of the Bible’s conceptions of the male/female relationship.
The Bible’s nutty interpretation of marriage
- “Do not intermarry with [those in the Canaanite tribes]” (Deut. 7:3).
- King Solomon famously had 300 concubines (1 Kings 11:3).
- A raped woman must marry her rapist (Deut. 22:28–9).
- “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” (Num. 31:17–18)
- God said to David, “I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more.” (2 Sam. 12:8). God has his complaints about David, but polygamy isn’t one of them.
- Paul said, “Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I am. But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry” (1 Cor. 7:8–9). Marriage is clearly the second best option. Celibacy is what we should actually strive for.
- Paul also rejects divorce (1 Cor. 7:10–11).
The Bible isn’t much of a marriage manual.
The sky is falling!
Longenecker again:
In a society where anything goes everything goes…downhill fast. Where moral disintegration exists societal disintegration soon follows. Everything starts to come apart at the seams. Societal chaos threatens.
I missed how we conclude “anything goes” from expanding one institution of society to include a disenfranchised minority.
When there is no certainty in a society–no moral absolutes and no reason and no rules …
As for no moral absolutes … well, yeah. Why? Do you have any evidence of moral absolutes besides some vague feeling? And here again, the only one who imagines no reason and no rules is Longenecker himself.
And now the punch line:
When there is no certainty in a society–no moral absolutes and no reason and no rules, then something must be done. People demand security. As disorder and chaos increase people demand order and control.
But, of course, this dystopia that’s around the corner won’t seek out Longenecker’s Yahweh, darn it. This obvious answer will be right in front of us, but our fallen race will appeal to government, and the government’s way to provide order and control is a police state.
Thus the ultimate irony that those who wanted a society “completely free” from absolutes where everything was plastic will end up with a police state where nothing is plastic and the total control is drastic.
This breathless argument distills down to this:
- A same-sex marriage proponent is now advocating that polygamy be legalized. See? Didn’t I say this would happen?!
- (Here is where the argument teleports to Crazy Town.) A flexible definition of marriage means that everything is flexible. Absolutes of any kind and even truth itself are no more. Anything goes.
- Moral disintegration and social chaos follow.
- The public clamors for order, and government responds with a police state.
I’ve scanned Father Longenecker’s blog for posts about marriage since Obergefell. I count four of them, none of which revisits his bold prediction. And now I feel a prediction coming on: I predict we won’t see a retraction, just a closing of the ranks and an adoption of a not-so-bad reality.
The slippery slope argument is popular, but I reject it. The definition of marriage does change; that’s a simple fact of history. Instead of focusing on that, focus on the test that doesn’t change: does it cause harm?
Does polygamy cause harm? Does same-sex marriage cause harm? These are the questions to ask. As we near the anniversary of Obergefell, the answer so far is that it doesn’t.
The very being or legal existence of the woman
is suspended during the marriage,
or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband;
under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.
— Sir William Blackstone, 1765
Photo credit: Wikimedia
