"Scare quotes" are the newest form of ad hominem. They are an instant de-legitimation of a term; a source not to show someone that you are using the term differently, but that the term itself has no meaning. This is what the term gay marriage has become. It is a pejorative phrase that distracts people from the source of marriage itself which is love. I want us to go back to the source. The issue is not marriage, it is same gender love.
Perhaps we need to suspend the discourse about sexual intercourse, anal sex, what "the bible says" (see how de-legitimation works by the way?), and marriage for just long enough to get at the root of the issue. This is not about sex. This is about love. This is about when two people who happen to be the same gender want what the vast majority of normal functioning humans crave, to be with a partner; a partner with whom we can be vulnerable, desired, honored, served, and for whom to give ourselves completely. It is about the desire to seek that which is not us in order to be more whole, more complete, and more fulfilled.
Western (or Northern) societies have marriage not as some arbitrary social contract in order to reproduce the population. Perhaps that is what it once was, but it is not that way anymore. As God loves us not because of our ability to procreate, but by the mere fact that we exist, so we seek the love of another human being for a physical embodiment of the love by which human beings were created. Either this kind of love, that absolutely does occur and is desired to be seen as legitimate by those attracted to the same gender, is a legitimate love – or it is not.
Here is another way to ask the question: Is love a gendered faculty of human existence if love does not exist for the sole purpose of pro-creation? The problem is that we continue to root the notion of love in anachronistic and unnecessary proscriptions of gender without once asking if this kind of love is possible without reference to gender. Those who oppose same gender marriages cannot ask these questions because the answers betray their ideological commitments which are abosolute and necessary.
This is where the flaw is exposed. Ideological commitments rooted in anachronistic assumptions without present warrant overrule the fundamental premises of the nature and object of human love and desire. Either love is gendered, or it is not. By Gods grace alone, all of us in the Christian community should address the latter in the affirmative, lest the ideological assumptions of human creation overrule that which give breath, live, and the gift of reason to human beings.
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