EDITORIAL
June 23, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) — Perhaps as early as Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide whether America should become the 18th nation in the world to redefine marriage. Most observers expect the Court to strike down laws defining marriage as it can only be — between a man and a woman.
However, no matter what the Court decides, marriage can never change. Furthermore — for the sake of children, other marriages, people with same-sex attractions, liberty, and society as a whole — governments have a vested interest in promoting marriage, not abandoning it.
As we head into the final days before the Court's decision comes down, here is my case for marriage.
First, the government has a vested interest in supporting relationships that propagate the human species in an environment most conducive to health and wellbeing. That environment is the freely chosen, lifelong, loving union of one man and one woman that is open to new life.
Children have the right to be conceived, raised, and cared for in the loving union of a husband and wife. Studies and simple observations show having a mother and a father is best for children, and they also show that children raised by same-sex couples suffer emotional damage. Like single parenting, this is something that governments should not promote, and, in fact, actively avoid or prevent.
The abusive practice of in vitro fertilization, too common among heterosexual couples and virtually a necessity for same-sex couples who wish to raise non-adopted children, is no answer. IVF treats a child as a commodity, producing children artificially and turning them from a gift to be embraced to a choice to be discarded at will. The child's conception, which is meant to take place in the loving embrace of committed spouses, instead comes as a result of scientific manipulation.
Second, government has a vested interest in protecting the health of all of its citizens. Many studies have demonstrated the harm of heterosexual sexual relationships outside of one man and one woman for life. The STD epidemics pale in comparison to the emotional and psychological trauma that accompanies such damaging relationships.
Those harms, both the physical and psychological, are also seen, and often more frequently, in same-sex sexual relationships. More convincing than any study, however, are words of former Canadian LGBT activist Gens Hellquist, “We have one of the poorest health statuses in this country,” Hellquist told government officials in 2009. “Health issues affecting queer Canadians include lower life expectancy than the average Canadian, suicide, higher rates of substance abuse, depression, inadequate access to care and HIV/AIDS.”
“There are all kinds of health issues that are endemic to our community,” he continued. “We have higher rates of anal cancer in the gay male community, lesbians have higher rates of breast cancer.
Speaking a few years after same-sex “marriage” was legalized in Canada, Hellquist said, “Now that we can get married everyone assumes that we don't have any issues any more. A lot of the deaths that occur in our community are hidden, we don't see them. Those of us who are working on the front lines see them, and I'm tired of watching my community die.”
Hellquist's testimony is heartbreaking — but it also reflects reality. While many LGBT activists call these scientific facts “hatred” or “bigotry,” the government can’t forsake the health of its citizens. Instead, the U.S. government and state governments should look to the CDC, which finds that people who identify as gay or lesbian make up just 1.6 percent. Nevertheless, gay men account for two-thirds of all new HIV/AIDS victims.
Laws influence society, and the U.S. government should not give its stamp of approval to the devastating harms of same-sex sexual relationships. This is especially the case given the public funding of health care. By promoting dangerous sexual practices they do double the damage: first by encouraging harm directly, and then again by depleting the public treasury of monies that will be needed to treat the ailments resulting from the dangerous behavior.
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Third, the government has a vested interest in protecting liberty. The LGBT movement used to declare that it wanted “tolerance.” However, now that the movement has achieved prominence they refuse tolerance of dissenting opinion.
It is becoming an epidemic in America, and a pandemic in Canada and other nations where children and parents are being forced to accept the redefinition of marriage or face government persecution.
In America, we can see this persecution as business owners, military and naval chaplains, and others lose their religious liberty, as well as their rights to property ownership and expression of speech, simply because they won't abide by the 'new orthodoxy' of homosexuality.
America has spent the last 50 years hearing the sermon of the Sexual Revolution, with nary a peep from the pulpits. This isn't just true for same-sex relationships; pulpits have also been virtually silent on the issues of divorce and extramarital sexual relations, among other moral evils.
Thanks to this silence, and the effective campaign run by LGBT activists, many Americans consider support for real marriage as equivalent to racism. However, the truth is that only those who dare oppose same-sex “marriage” care enough about those with same-sex attraction to let them know that their sexual behavior is physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually damaging.
If the Supreme Court acts as most expect, and undermines the familial structure created by God and evidenced by nature, it will fall to religious leaders to prepare for the coming persecution, and to take the stand for truth and justice past generations have abandoned.