Our society is truly in crisis, an existential, unprecedented, and potentially cataclysmic crisis that goes unreported and unnoticed. The crisis has to do with marriage, with redefining marriage as nothing more than a vehicle for self-fulfillment, as opposed to the fundamental institution of society and civilization.
Gay marriage is just the latest symptom of the problem, but it will be cause for more problems if it continues to gain societal and legal acceptance.
Admittedly, I am against gay marriage for a variety of reasons. Foremost for me as a father is that as gay marriage becomes legal, it will become increasingly common to have same-sex lifestyles and couples presented in schools as acceptable, for that which is legal is also considered moral.
Now I will have to explain why I think my daughters’ school, TV programs, books, etc., are wrong when they tell our kids that being gay is good. When we see gay couples in the grocery store, holding hands and/or kissing, it will make my kids wonder why there is this huge disconnect between what their parents and church say is right, and what everyone else says is right.
And what does it say about the notion that ideally a child ought to have a father and a mother to provide that sort of yin and yang of perspectives?
No one questions that a daughter benefits from the modeling of her mother, and that a son from his father (in fact, we know about the havoc that fatherless households has wrought in poor neighborhoods). We also know that daughters have a special affection for their fathers and sons for their mothers. Having both a father and a mother parent children gives them the best chance, in general (of course there are always exceptions!), have developing healthy attitudes towards members of both sexes.
I’m not prepared to jettison the idea just yet, but that’s exactly what legalizing gay marriage does.
However, as Terry Garlock said in his column, that’s just my hang-up. No big deal. After all, I’d probably just be writing this same letter 40 years ago about interracial couples since it’s the same thing, basically.
But here’s the thing. It is different. In man-woman interracial marriage, the fundamental purpose of marriage can still be fulfilled: namely, the procreation and nurturing of children.
In same-sex marriage, that’s physically impossible in the natural order. Their bodies are not complementary to one another, but rather like two magnets with the same charge. The unnaturalness of whatever physical union they may achieve (is that going to be taught in schools, too?) is manifested by the lack of new life that results from it. (Conversely, the naturalness, and the essential goodness, of heterosexual union is confirmed by its ability to generate new life.)
But I digress. The real problem with same-sex marriage is that it furthers us down the road of civilizational decay and destruction. Sound melodramatic? Let me explain.
For society to persist and even have a chance of being successful, it needs children, at least 2.2 per couple just to maintain population, and more than that to grow. I know. People these days believe population growth is a bad thing, but actually growth is absolutely necessary from an economic standpoint. You need to have three or four people working for each retired person to support pensions, taxes, healthcare, etc.
As marriage, and having more than two children, become ever more just one of many “lifestyle choices,” the number of children we produce as a society will be insufficient to maintain our society.
This problem is already very acute in Europe, where the birthrate is a dismal 1.3 children per couple. Their generous social welfare systems, based on having a growing population, are straining near bankruptcy already and will collapse completely in a decade or two.
We in the U.S. fare a bit better because our birth rate hovers right around the magic 2.2 level (our growth is due primarily to immigration), but we all know that even that will not be enough in the near future.
Anyone who does the math knows that we’re going to start running out of money for Social Security and other government entitlement programs very soon. We also all know that our insurance premiums keep skyrocketing upwards as the pool of those paying into the system shrinks in relation to the pool of those receiving services from the system.
Gay marriage exacerbates this problem because it further separates marriage from its primary function as a facilitator of procreation and child nurturing. This will likely result in the continuation of the trends mentioned above, and our society, our civilization will simply not have enough money to fund itself. Chaos is the inevitable result.
So, opinions about the morality of homosexuality aside, we have to acknowledge that gay marriage does change our notion of what marriage is, and I believe that that change will be harmful to us all in the end.
I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt I am.
Trey Hoffman
Peachtree City, Ga.