the greatest threat to marriage

I don't think that gay marriage is as big a threat to 'real marriage' as some of my fellow Christians would make it out to be.


One of my favorite bloggers in the whole wide earth went through a hard divorce a few years ago. I remember reading one of her posts years ago, probably from around the LAST time Cali dabbled in the gay marriage finger paints. And in it, she wrote something that punctured my self-constructed evangelical bubble of 'protection' and set my opinions a-changing.


She said that the biggest threat to marriage isn't homosexuality, it's divorce.


It's not like we straight people have mastered the art of marriage, and the numbers and other cultural forces indicate that we won't, any time soon. So why are we so scared that more people want to play in our sandbox? We're all still going to get sand in our ears and our eyes and our underpants, and there will always be that weird kid who EATS the sand, and that other weird kid who poops in the sand, and most of us will try to play nicely for a while and some of us will even build magnificant castles and towns and moats. Gay, straight, plural, what-have-you, there will still be some marriages that work and lots that fail.


Why are we fighting so fiercely to 'defend' something against homosexuals, when we aren't even taking very good care of it ourselves?


As a Christian, I know the bible says something about homosexuality being bad. I also know that this is what the King James translation SAYS the bible says. I don't know what the ancient texts say, and even if I did know, I wouldn't know what kind of real meaning they had back in their day. That's to say, I DON'T KNOW what the bible says about gay relationships. I personally think there's something maybe not-quite-right about them - we're designed to procreate after all - but I do also think that creation is not perfect and that things go wrong.


Is being homosexual genetic? I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me. Were we designed to be gay? No, probably not, but however many hundreds and thousands of years later, our genes may have landed us there. (The subtext from those two sentences is that I'm behind the intelligent design theory and don't *necessarily* think evolution is right, or wrong.)


Do I think homosexuality "wrong" for lack of a better word? Probably. Do I think it's against "God's plan" for us? Yes...but look around and note the distinct lack of Utopia. Humanity today is clearly not in line with God's plan for us. Imagine how things would be - the Garden of Eden forever. Would we even be here, or would a sinless Adam and Eve have sufficed? Things change. We're on plan b now, or maybe plan c. As such, the original plan and our physical reality today are different. I don't know how homosexuality plays into this worldview yet. This is all purely my opinions (and lack of them) and not a political stance.


Do I think gay marriage is something the government needs to have its nose in? NO. I don't think ANY marriage is something the government should have its nose in. I don't think the personal lives of citizens is something the government should be worried about. Give me an army, some roads, a mail service, a justice system, and a few other critical things, and then leave me alone. I haven't figured out how to let my true political opinions inform my pragmatic stance on anything.


Lots of people seem to think that it's appropriate to enforce their own opinions into law. This is true across the board, and not just in the' right wing conservative' groups that people are so fond of bashing. I don't think lawmaking should be about opinion - it should be about safety and protecting the citizenry, and that's pretty much it. Just being 'not ok' with something doesn't give me the right to demand that it be criminalized; simiarly, liking or agreeing with something shouldn't give me free reign to make it a requirement of everyone.