Marriage Defines the State (Not Vice Versa)

There exist a number of simple ways to settle the marriage debate. Let's start with the marriage vows exchanged by partners on the wedding day:

Till death do us part.

Oftentimes, homosexuals part ways long before death, or they die long before expected, because the lifestyle is not that at all. There is no life when two men or two women are sleeping together. No stable relationship, no family, nothing.

Then one can consider the final pronouncement of the witness, judge, or religious official at the ceremony:

By the power vested in me.

Power vested speaks of authority, and authority means recognizing that certain institutions decide issues, outcomes, and arrangements, regardless of the thoughts, feelings, or inclinations of individual participants or critics. Yet gay marriage proponents are resisting authority on every level to redefine this institution. How then can the pledges of loyalty and respect carry any significance or salience? If two men can get married because of populist pressure, what's to prevent them from dissolving that marriage just as quickly, apart from legal strictures?

Most importantly, marriage is an institution, not just of tradition. Foundational principles based on truth, cannot be brushed aside because of political activism, no matter how loud, incessant, or insistent.

The Biblical Account could not be clearer:

"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. " (Genesis 1: 26-27)

Man was created by God to have dominion. This dominion originates in a greater authority conferring this honor to a lesser  power.

The account of the first marriage follows in the second chapter:

"3And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

24Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. 25And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed." (Genesis 2: 23-25)



Adam and EVE

There was marriage between one man and one woman before there was government, before there was even a city. We read about cities afterwards:

 

"17And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch." (Genesis 4: 17)

 

Cities are based on families, and families are based on marriage, the joining of one man and one woman.

 

There is no running away from this revelation: the city, government of communities, came after marriage. Marriage is the preeminent institution, and the state has no business defining or redefining it.

 

Now, for those who reject the Biblical account, regardless of their reasons, even logic forces individuals to accept that there had to be families before networks of legal governance and restraint. Even the most remote of tribes did not emerge out of nothing, but rather the cooperation of families.

 

Families come from the couplings of one man and one woman to love and procreate.

 

No matter one's worldview (Biblical, secular, evolutionary, revolutionary), marriage came before government, the state, and thus before politics, and therefore marriage is preeminent, not subject to submission or transformation.

 

People who want to make the state preeminent are dedicated to subduing then redefining marriage. No one should be surprised that the illiberal counter-cultural elements invested in gay marriage, polyamory, and other illicit couplings focus such aggressive energy toward this "progressive" agenda. Because marriage came before the state, our governments must change to accommodate true marriage, not the other way around.

 

For those who believe that marriage should be redefined, they may speak now and forever, but will ultimately have to hold his peace. Before there was government, there was family, and before the family, there is marriage. Marriage comes before the state, and therefore no government has the right, authority, or power to redefine marriage beyond one man and one woman.