Will You Go to Your Gay Child’s Wedding?

Love is in the air! Marriages everywhere. What will you do Mom & Dad? Will you go to your gay child’s wedding?

Jeremy and Elliot will marry next month. Why? They love each other. They’ve been together for ages, longer than many marriages. Now it’s legal in their own state and they can finally make it official. They can take part in one of the most traditional institutions we have to show their faithfulness, love and commitment to each other and to family.

Bring out the wedding cake, fancy clothes and well-wishers for this journey into a bright and shining future! They are in love, and they are loved. It is time to rejoice!

But Jeremy’s mother will not be attending.

No, his mother does not approve, so she will express her disapproval by staying home. This mom, this very special person in her son’s life, cannot bring herself to participate in the wedding.

Maybe she bases this on some twisted distortion of the Bible, which she thinks requires her not to go. It does NOT. Or perhaps she uses the Bible as a reason to support her own repugnance. Or perhaps she’s digging in her heels just because she can.

You may be facing this same dilemma. You may be asking yourself whether to attend your gay child’s wedding. Or others may have told you not to attend. If this is you, I implore you to reconsider.

The Bible not only does not require you not to go to the wedding, it doesn’t even give you grounds not to go. In fact, I believe the Bible rightly interpreted calls for you to stand beside your loved one in support and honor, to celebrate with those who are happy.

In your stampede to avoid even the appearance of “condoning sin,” you’ve sinned in countless other ways, trampling verse after verse!

We’re told to love our enemy, walk with an occupying soldier for more than he required, give someone our coat when they’ve just taken our shirt – and we can’t stand by our son as he marries someone he loves and someone who loves him? We can’t support their commitment to family and forever?

We have twisted and pulled this issue so that it has absolutely nothing to do with the truth and heart of the gospel!

(sigh)

Let me give you a different view. I hope that at least you want to attend the wedding, but (because of all the distortion around it) you need some kind of permission. Let me give that to you here!

You likely view gay marriage, as a sin, if going to your child’s wedding is an issue for you. We will disagree on that, but just for the sake of this discussion – what if it is a sin? So what?

*Disclaimer: I am going down this road for the sake of discussion and I’m going to sound very legalistic for a few minutes, because I’m answering the idea that you shouldn’t attend your child’s gay wedding, which comes from extreme legalism. [Legalism, in part, means to address the letter of the law instead of the spirit. Oops, already a sin…]

So you are sure gay marriage is a sin. So what?

Let’s look at other weddings you’ve attended. Have you attended a wedding where one or both parties were divorced? Where they had premarital sex? Where one was a Christian and one was not?

What about a wedding where they served wine? Oooohh, wait a minute. Now we’re opening a whole can of worms. Jesus turned water into wine at his cousin’s wedding. Apparently he condones drinking wine at weddings. But people get drunk at weddings, especially the long, drawn-out celebrations these ancient weddings were. Surely people got drunk at that very wedding… but getting drunk is listed as a sin.

As it happens, getting drunk is mentioned nearly four times as often as those 6 or 7 verses attributed to homosexuality (but which really mean idol worship, sex with slave boys, etc. Ugh, this gets crazy!)  So did Jesus condone the sin of drunkenness when he turned water into wine at the wedding?

Do you see how convoluted this can get? Do you see how there is no escape from legalism?

Then there’s the fact that we actually sin ourselves by not celebrating our child’s wedding — this is a sin all by itself. Celebrating with those who celebrate is woven into the community and a high biblical value.

You see? You cannot choose one issue – not attending the same-sex wedding – without dislodging a dozen more. Keeping the law legalistically is impossible. Not just hard, but impossible. (How could that be? Because it was never meant to be kept.)

How did this question: “Will you go to your child’s wedding?” become the polarizing question for Christian parents? We don’t ask that question of any other issue – for other disagreements we have with our children about — only the gay issue. Why? Where did we get so detoured onto this dead-end road, facing off with our beloved child, saying we won’t go?

They want to marry the person they love, to celebrate love and family and commitment – and we won’t go?

We are without justification.

Please, please, please join your child for one of the most important days of their life.

You won’t ever regret it.

[Tomorrow, a letter from a mom whose gay daughter is getting married.]