Is it Time to Strip the Word “Marriage” Out of the Civil Code?

Lead by example, yes; lead by self-sacrificing love, yes;
lead by apartheid, no! 

In a recently-released Gallop Poll, 57% of Americans now
believe that homosexuality should be sanctioned as an acceptable lifestyle…59%
believe that homosexual relations should be legal http://www.christianpost.com/pages/print.htm?aid=27674. 

For the first time in the 21^st
Century, a majority of Americans (51%) believe such relations are morally
acceptable…

There are a number of points to be made concerning this
poll that deserve comment from both a secular and a Christian perspective…

Secular America has traditionally confused righteousness
with morality…The Christian Right has now become mired in confusing morality
with righteousness…Morality goes to behavior; righteousness, for the Christian
believer, goes to condition…One has to do with the ability to appear righteous
in the eyes of oneself or one's neighbor; the other has to do with one's
standing before God…

While morality can be a by-product of righteousness, it
also can be a veneer of respectability that has no connection to righteousness
but rather to self-preservation…What moral behavior says about the humanist is
that he or she either has respect for others or understands that if you want to
get something done, it is wise to live and let live and keep your opinions to
yourself…What morality says about the Christian, however, is that at best it is
the product of divine intervention; at worst, it is the lingering effects of
self-righteous rebellion against God…

Equal rights for gays or any other minority group is a
moral issue that speaks to the provisions and protections in our Constitutional Republic…It is reflective of an attitude
that confirms the biblical purpose of civil government – to enforce and
maintain order and civility among citizens…It is a harbinger of respectability
for the secularist…

For the Christian believer, however, equal rights for
minorities strikes at the heart of his or her belief system, forcing an
examination of core Christian doctrines as to what constitutes righteous
standing before God…

In Jesus' day, adultery and divorce were rampant within the
church, as both are today…Notice, however, that He never made faithfulness in
marriage the standard for righteousness…Instead, He made it the standard for
self-righteousness – that adultery (both in thought and in deed) stood in the
way of the ability of all of us to lead lives acceptable to a righteous and
holy God…

As to sanctioning homosexuality as an "acceptable
alternative lifestyle," the Christian has to separate Church from State…We can
live in peace with our peaceful neighbor – indeed, want for our neighbor the
best of what we want for ourselves – without accepting his or her lifestyle as
righteous…We must, however, understand that whatever our neighbor's lifestyle,
it is no more moral or immoral under the biblical standard of righteousness than
is that of the committed Christian…

Indeed, the very objection that the Christian Right voices
to legalizing homosexual unions – that gays and lesbians insist that their
unions are sinless because God made them that way – applies to heterosexual
unions of the Christian Right…To insist that because I am heterosexual I am
living in accordance with God's intention for Creation is to ignore how much I
have polluted that intention with my own thoughts and actions…While I may
appear more moral to my peers, God alone only knows what evil lies beneath the
surface…

For anyone who professes belief in the Bible, everything we
do is morally wrong in the sense that we pollute it with our own self-interests
("There is none righteous, not even one…" [Romans 2:9])…How, then, can we be
heard to condemn what we may consider to be another's immorality by stripping
that person of his or her constitutional rights – a form of apartheid? 

The institution of marriage is not a sacrament of the
State; it is a sacrament of the Church…The State, in fact, has hijacked the
word "marriage" as a vehicle for census and maintaining legal order in matters
of inheritance and social responsibility – totally different objectives from
the Church…A worthy effort by the Christian church might be to strip the word
"marriage" out of the civil code and replace it with something else and then
get back to the business of distinguishing righteousness from morality…

Lead by example, yes; lead by self-sacrificing love, yes;
lead by apartheid, no! 

Stan Moody is the author of "Crisis in Evangelical Scholarship" and
"McChurched: 300 Million Served and Still Hungry