Time magazine's cover story this week, even amidst the mass hysteria about Michael Jackson, was about marriage ("Is There Hope for the American Marriage" by Caitlin Flanagan). Very well written, it argues that the destruction of marriage is having a brutal impact economically and socially on culture at large. Of course, we need only look across the Atlantic to see how the degradation of marriage is turning out to be the suicide of Europe.
What is most interesting is that Flanagan traces the marriage crisis to the core definition of marriage itself, concluding that marriage can only survive if it is not about meeting our personal needs for sex or love but if it is about producing and preserving the next generation. Further, Flanagan cites extensive evidence, as well as quotes from our last four Presidents (including Obama, ironically), that the next generation is always cared for best when both parents are in the home!
What makes the article most astounding, however, is not what it says but what it does not say. As Flanagan attacks the pop-narcissism of easy divorce and sexual infidelity as resulting from a fundamentally bad definition of marriage, it also point by point destroys, albeit indirectly, each of the major arguments for same-sex marriage! Of course, this elephant in the room is not addressed directly in the article.
It is well worth the read, and you can find the article here. But, don't stop there.
Also this week, Christianity Today offered an feature article on the same-sex marriage issue ("Is the Gay Marriage Debate Over?" by Mark Galli). Read this with the Time article and you will see how the arguments made in the Time article apply to same-sex marriage, too.
The most helpful thing about Galli's article is that he reminds us that gay marriage is not what will kill marriage. It is a symptom of what is already killing marriage. He writes:
We cannot very well argue for the sanc tity of marriage as a crucial social institu tion while we blithely go about divorcing and approving of remarriage at a rate that destabilizes marriage. We cannot say that an institution, like the state, has a perfect right to insist on certain values and behavior from its citizens while we refuse to submit to denominational or local church author ity. We cannot tell gay couples that mar riage is about something much larger than self-fulfillment when we, like the rest of heterosexual culture, delay marriage until we can experience life, and delay having children until we can enjoy each other for a few years.
In short, we have been perfect hypocrites on this issue. Until we admit that and take steps to amend our ways, our cries of alarm about gay marriage will echo off into oblivion.
This does not mean we should stop fighting initiatives that would legalize gay marriage. Gay marriage is simply a bad idea, whether one is religious or not. But it's bad not only because of what it will do to the social fabric, but because of what it signals has already hap pened to our social fabric. We are a culture of radical individualists, and gay marriage does nothing but put an exclamation point on that fact. We should fight it, because it will only make a bad situation worse.
Galli's article has been posted by a blogger here.
