The current push for same-sex marriage is relentless, with the militant homosexual activists making up for a lack of numbers with loudness of voice. And they are being given a dream run by the mainstream media. Papers like the Melbourne Age are pushing this agenda basically on a daily basis.
It is very difficult to get an alternative view on this topic in the MSM. And when it is allowed, it is mercilessly shot down. As just one example, a few days ago a major Melbourne radio station “interviewed” me on the topic. It wasn’t really an interview, but a pro-same-sex marriage rant.
Indeed, even before I was allowed to speak, the radio host went on a three-minute diatribe, seeking to portray anyone who dared to question the homosexual agenda as being irrational, ignorant and homophobic. And when I finally had a chance to make my case, I was basically shouted down by the irate host.
He made the foolish claim for example that just as people of different races could not marry in the past, so too homosexuals today are being “discriminated against”. I calmly pointed out that this was simply mixing apples and oranges, and that the one has absolutely nothing to do with the other. This simply got the host even more upset.
Given that he would not allow me to finish making my case on this particular point, let me do so here. The truth is, this whole comparison is simply fallacious. There is no comparison between racist laws and defending heterosexual marriage.
Even black activists have rejected such a disingenuous analogy. For example, Jesse Jackson told a group of Harvard Law School students in 2004 that “gays were never called three-fifths human in the Constitution, and they did not require the Voting Rights Act to have the right to vote.”
Apartheid and laws banning inter-racial marriage were about keeping races apart. Marriage is about bringing the sexes together. Heterosexual marriage has been around for millennia. Talk of same-sex marriage has been around for a few short decades. Marriage was thus not created to discriminate against anyone, as apartheid was.
Laws banning interracial marriages were unjust, and overturning them did not mean a redefinition of marriage but an affirmation of it. Men and women should be allowed to marry regardless of skin colour, as this does nothing to alter the one man, one woman aspect of marriage. Same-sex marriage however is completely different, and it is a redefinition of marriage.
As Greg Koukl notes, “Same-sex marriage and interracial marriage have nothing in common. There is no difference between a black and a white human being because skin color is morally trivial. There is an enormous difference, however, between a man and a woman. Ethnicity has no bearing on marriage. Sex is fundamental to marriage.”
Francis Beckwith makes clear these distinctions. He is worth quoting at length. He argues that anti-miscegenation laws “were attempts to eradicate the legal status of real marriages by injecting a condition – sameness of race – that had no precedent in common law. For in the common law, a necessary condition for a legitimate marriage was male-female complementarity, a condition on which race has no bearing.
“It is clear then that the miscegenation/same-sex analogy does not work. For if the purpose of anti-miscegenation laws was racial purity, such a purpose only makes sense if people of different races have the ability by nature to marry each other. And given the fact that such marriages were a common law liberty, the anti-miscegenation laws presuppose this truth. But opponents of same-sex marriage ground their viewpoint in precisely the opposite belief: people of the same gender do not have the ability by nature to marry each other since gender complementarity is a necessary condition for marriage. Supporters of anti-miscegenation laws believed in their cause precisely because they understood that when male and female are joined in matrimony they may beget racially-mixed progeny, and these children, along with their parents, will participate in civil society and influence its cultural trajectory.
“In other words, the fact that a man and a woman from different races were biologically and metaphysically capable of marrying each other, building families, and living among the general population is precisely why the race purists wanted to forbid such unions by the force of law. And because this view of marriage and its gender-complementary nature was firmly in place and the only understanding found in common law, the Supreme Court in Loving knew that racial identity was not relevant to what marriage requires of its two opposite-gender members. By injecting race into the equation, anti-miscegenation supporters were very much like contemporary same-sex marriage proponents, for in both cases they introduced a criterion other than male-female complementarity in order to promote the goals of a utopian social movement: race purity or sexual egalitarianism.”
Racial segregation is wrong, and is an example of unjust discrimination. But the colour of one’s skin is far different than sexual behaviour. Societies have good reasons not to embrace any and all types of sexual activity. While skin colour is a benign and unalterable condition, this is not true of various sexual behaviours. No black person can cease being black, but plenty of homosexuals have ceased being homosexual.
The truth is, a society can get along without same-sex sexual relationships if need be. But no society can get along without heterosexual marriage and family. As two family researchers put it, “There is no research saying biracial parents are developmentally harmful to children. But there are thousands of definitive studies showing motherless and fatherless families limit every important measure of children’s physical, psychological, emotional and intellectual development.”
Had my excessively intolerant and bigoted radio interviewer allowed me a few minutes to speak, the above material is the sort of stuff I would have made use of to respond to his specious analogy. But of course the MSM is seldom interested in fair debates. It seems far more interested in pushing radical agendas.
That is why – in part – this website exists.
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